There have been quips for many years about the dragnets of intelligence services and that "Stasi couldn't even dream about having such vast data" and similar.
But now we aren't talking about intelligence services anymore. ICE truly is Stasi for America, employing tactics such as "isolating them, depriving them of sleep and using psychological tricks such as threatening to arrest relatives." (From Wikipedia about Stasi.)
This year ICE will also become the "armed wing of the Party" thanks to fresh funding.
Grandchild: "Grandpa, what was it like back then, when ICE was snatching innocent people off the streets and the President was putting some them in dictator prisons without trial? Before the super bad stuff started?"
Grandpa: "It was a very controversial time, yes. Lots of people doing what they believed was best."
Grandchild: "Did ICE ever go after you?"
Grandpa: "I worked for the--it was only office--I mean, I was unemployed then. Yes, that's right! Tricky economy, don't you know. Only odd-jobs. I lived in a place where those things weren't happening. In fact, most of us didn't really know about it until it was all over. You remember that, right dear?"
Mother: <frustrated death-glare> "...Come along, let's wash your hands before dinner."
That's if they ever face a "truth and reconciliation" commision like after Apartheid South Africa.
If not, and if you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch. The director said "It was like I went to Germany 40 years after WW2 and found out the Nazis had won".
There was an "anti-communist" massacre in Indonesia in 1965. The killers were sanctioned by the government who remained in power/are still very powerful nowadays. (When a reformist president said "maybe we can look at this part of the country's past", the rumour was, the army was going to let protesters (who are still gung-ho communist-hating) protest near the presidential palace, and not intervene if/when they invade it.
This documentary follows one old killer and his "journey" from being able to talk about it casually until he ends up meeting his conscience.
Same in former east Germany. Poland did did much better though, they kicked most of the bastards out but it was a dime on its side for a while, a lot of Polish pensioners were yearning back to the good old days and even today there is still a remnant of this.
Arnold Schwarzenegger had a very heartfelt story about his childhood. It went more or less as you describe, except it was his dad, not his granddad and there was a lot of alcohol and abuse involved as well.
We're well past the point that they should be, I would be more concerned their descendants won't be, based on, let's say the last 250 years of this national experiment.
The irony about that is that a lot of the Confederate flag-flyers (ironically enough, overlapping with the Don't Tread on Me crowd) seriously hate the government.
The administration's kept them on side with culture wars red meat so far...
But the further ICE / police militarization goes, the more awkward the situation with right-wing militia types is going to get.
They hate the "government" which is an abstract evil entity. They love Trump, the police, and ICE.
MAGA was chanting "president of peace" only a few months ago, and did anyone complain about Venezuela? Not a peep. They thrive on logical contradictions.
I don't think Stasi is the most apt comparison, rather the Gestapo, where the "Geheime" did not refer to their existence being secret, rather their standards of operation, chain of command, and general accountability being beyond oversight from the electorate.
>ICE will also become the "armed wing of the Party"
interesting that the ICE is performing that hallmark of 20th century - mass removal of "undesirable" people from society and placement them into the camps without criminal charge and judicial oversight, etc. thus totally undermining the main contract between government and society - due process.
The difference for me is that the Stasi seemingly had more competent people and more people that actually believed in what they were doing and thought it effective. With none of that, these are the actions of an organization that is failing and full of incompetence. It is even more alarming how effective they could be if anyone actually believed in them, including their own leadership or if the cause actually attracted worthwhile participants.
Such competent participants flock to these terror organisations only after it has proven itself a viable career path. Compare the chaos and mayhem of the brownshirts in Germany before the war, vs the Gestapo later. Very chaotic evil vs lawful evil.
At this point in time, it's not apparent if the current regime will prevail. Thus, it's time for brownshirt tactics. When Presidential/King/Dictatorial power is fully consolidated, States' Rights are just a memory, and all nonloyal judges are fired, it's time for the disciplined Career Bureaucrats to join ICE.
You're not wrong that that's the intent, I'm just not even seeing stupid bigots that are happy with it and they also don't seem to care about that either. So, once they lose even the hateful for not being hateful enough they're just as likely to be embarrassed by all of this or fracture amongst themselves with various no true bigot fallacy infighting. This has been the more recent mini patterns at least.
We're still in 1932. Night of the long knives was in 1934 after the Nazis had consolidated power. In 1932 they were still a party of block-headed street thugs with the SA terrorizing people. One of the reasons why they had all their rallies at night (the torchlight marches) is so people couldn't see that the SA were a bunch of meatheads who did not look good in Hugo Boss.
I don't know if you're right or not, but a lot of people who would otherwise be fans of meatheaded thugs are laughing at these people. I do worry the spectre of some unstoppable idiocy is myth. People at the time weren't used to mass media at all, and there were many other dynamics that may not sum up to a succinct conclusion. Perhaps people saying they were like the new Hun or whatever made people less likely to laugh at them, but, I know these people today are also pretty hilariously inept. Like for instance they all think facial recognition doesn't work with your lower face covered, and they don't realize that they actually don't have good discipline on their mask usage, and the tools they use on their phones to try to id people aren't nearly as good as the tools regular people use to track them.
The iron curtain wasn't so iron from the beginning. The Berlin wall was built in 1961, that is 12 years after the east German republic was founded. 16 years worth of able workers draining from the soviet-occupied part to Western Germany.
Shall we put a reminder in our calendars to talk again in 2037?
It's a question of incentives. From what I've heard: ICE agents are incentivized to the tune of $5000 for every immigrant deported. So they go after the low-hanging fruits: the immigrants coming in for their periodic immigration court hearings, the Home Depot parking lots, etc.
This is why you hear about old grannies being arrested and deported and random immigrant workers with no criminal history being nabbed.
Basically, ICE is a group of bounty hunters and they have no qualms about breaking the law if it leads to a nice payday.
Interesting ; Do you have any official or investigative links regarding incentives per deportation?
I understand their recruitment incentives are out of this world, but have not found reliable source for per-deportation incentives, and want to make sure I argue with 100% factually supported data.
I do not, unfortunately. It's just something I heard; though it would explain why ICE is going after law-abiding immigrants instead of criminals as originally intended.
They go after immigrants without a legal basis to be there, which by definition of the word and law means they are in fact not law-abiding and _illegal_immigrants.
Just because you don't like a law doesn't mean it's not lawful to enforce it.
That is a lot less binary than angry evil people would like to portray.
If we say there are ~~11 million under documented immigrants, there are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions that e.g. Were legal until the orange orangutan decided otherwise. There are people under ambiguous laws and people in tricky cases.
This is the equivalent to saying everybody who went 57mph in 55mph zone is a criminal and should be executed.
Not always, and this another reason why terms like "illegal immigrants" are so harmful. Someone who is late in renewing their work visa, for example, has committed a civil offense and could be deported by ICE, but they still aren't a criminal in the way someone who crossed the border illegally or used a fraudulent visa would be.
That would certainly explain the lack of publicized confrontation. If they were mostly deporting actual criminals / gang members, one would expect more stories akin to the events today.
It sounds like you’re unfamiliar with January 6th. Many of the people active in J6th were prosecuted. Most were pardoned by Trump. I understand the GP is saying these same people have joined ICE. I’ve seen a picture of one ICE officer(?) with an SS tattoo below their ear. That should bar employment in the law enforcement but there he is.
Nowhere did I say ICE is mostly pardoned criminals. I was under the impression the administration was against criminal gangs the President isn't currently friendly with, such as newly whitewashed and perfumed ISIS leaders, former South American pardoned drug dealing ex-presidents, and such.
Got it, thanks for the clarification. I'm surprised the President of the US is friendly with criminal gangs to be honest - this forum has always said that the US espouses justice with a stern, firm hand.
No, the woman tried to murder an ICE agent with her car and failed. She drove, an agent was hit, and he defended himself, such that the shot was after she accelerated and before she lost consciousness and control of the car.
this is not true. why is this upvoted? first of all, ICE is federal. second, they were acting as part of "federal official" duties. it will be trivial to move any state prosecution to federal court.
Federal officers aren't immune from state prosecution just because they're federal officers, or because they're doing their federal duties at the moment. They also have to be acting in accord with their federal duties. See, e.g., https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/are-federal-officials-i... (although that's not in response to the current incident).
They will certainly attempt to dismiss any charges, but they are far from guaranteed that they will be successful.
That doesn't matter. It's not enough that they were doing their job beforehand, their actions at stake have to comport with their actual duties.
So is it part of their official duties to walk in front of a car of someone who is trying to leave the scene, alter their path when the car turns out of the way to ensure they remain in their way, and then shoot the driver? Or is that merely the kind of excessive force that's in contravention of their training and not part of their job role?
That may be the case, I am not an expert in law. I hope there is some type of repercussion for the cop that point-blanks a random driver.
I just don't hold much faith in the separation of power between state and federal government, it sounds like there has been a massive erosion of this barrier since the civil war and the abuse of the commerce clause and all that.
Okay so you agree she was trying to drive away and not trying to hit an officer. You think the correct response is immediate extrajudicial murder? You can’t be serious.
I watched the video too. Not sure what a 33 min Asmongold stream(your link) has to do with it. Does he add some valuable analysis? What's his authority or expertise on the matter?
There's a lot going on so it can be difficult to keep track of, but the Supreme court made Trump call the NG back from the states he had deployed them in.
shot and killed - they haven't even been charged, let alone arraigned for murder yet (they would definitely get not guilty for that - manslaughter at worst given the cirumstances).
they can be charged with anything, but there's no way this guy is convicted of murder.
anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been paying attention to the hundreds of analogous situations that have been happening to blacks.
literally just look it up, the exact scenario has already played out before. cop gets off. and I mean literally exact scenario - with two cops, one in front, one to the side, driver (black) tries to drive off, front cop shoots and kills the black guy, is convicted, and acquitted. seriously, look it up.
George Zimmerman stalked Treyvon Martin, shot and killed him and was still acquitted. you think this guy is going to be convicted really?
? the chauvin case wasn't the same at all. he choked flyod needlessly for 10 minutes. completely unnecessary and good that chauvin was convicted. I follow these cases since I'm part of a police justice group - I've never seen a case similar to what happened here where the officer was convicted. there's just too much precedent that if a car is going towards you the officer is justified in shooting
if you have an example of a similar situation where the cop is convicted I am very very interested.
Trying to stop a moving vehicle by standing in front of it is a) dumb, b) not what law enforcement is trained to do. It will be argued that it's not the case the officer had no better choice.
Yes, our justice system is outright broken since the Supreme Council handed obscene amounts of power to a wannabe dictator, putting him and his Stasi above the law. But that doesn't mean We The People cannot call it like it is - murder.
No. The Constitution is the law, and everyone working for this regime is an anti-American traitor. I'm pretty sure the terror squads are wearing masks because if we could identify them, we would see most have been drawn from so-called "patriot" militias [0] and let loose to attack American cities under the color of law (which apparently now includes executing citizens).
[0] the naming of which also turned out to be another lie, surprise surprise
I am an American, I just don't believe this idea that the law has anything to do with principles or a hard code of rules. That just isn't what I observe in practice, unless the enforcers of the law happen to be totally neutral to the conflict at hand.
The law is enforced based on the general feelings of the people in power, and they will bend principles to punish/reward those that they perceive to be "bad" and "good" accordingly, based on their prejudices.
The idea that "might makes right" is sort of a tautology. What you consider to be right is based on a historical precedent set by the mighty.
Lol, no. NATO stopped the Genocide from Serbia, helps protect Ukraine against Genocide from Ruzzia and protected Europe from russian invasion and loss of human freedoms for many decades. NATO is a net positive for all of Humanity.
> ICE is specifically the enforcement arm of the U.S. immigration apparatus.
If you add up the budgets of all the various "police" forces in the US, how much money is spent each year keeping the domestic population in line?
I'm interested, as it seems that lots of groups in the US have their own overlapping police force rather than relying on "the" police. Apart from the total budget, it would be interesting to see a list of all the various police type forces at work in the US.
Even if masked, unidentified armed men are trying to shoot you? That sounds an awful lot like self defence. Or it might have been nothing but an attempt to flee.
But perhaps fleeing is also punishable by Death by our new Stasi/Judge Dread balaclava wearing hybrids.
There was a time when police were banned from putting a tracker on people's cars without a court order.
The argument was, yes it's legal to put a tail on a person when they're out in public because that's just a cop observing a person of interest out in public. But electronic trackers are something quantifiable different due to the ease of tracking many people without having to use manpower to do it. It's the thin-edge of mass, casual surveillance of the population.
In other words, putting a tail on someone should be manpower intensive because that's a check on police power, they have to really want to track someone to invest potentially several officers' time to it full time, whereas sticking a bug on a car is something they can do to dozens of cars per day per officer.
Of course now they don't even have to do that because our police state has normalized centralized cctv camera databases, license plate trackers that continuously track the movement of every vehicle in a city into a database. Now they're doing the same with facial recognition.
Now it's even a felony in Florida to do anything to block license plate trackers from tagging your vehicle (so you can't obscure your plate in a way that leaves it readable to humans but not to the automatic tracking software). No doubt we'll have such laws for facial recognition software soon as well.
In general I agree, but thinking of counter-arguments -- criminals are not playing by the same rules and use every manpower-reducing technologies. So if police to keep to their traditional methods, then criminals will have upper hand, and more so with technological advances.
If "criminals" are now are the mass population then we need to think about how we're defining "criminal."
Police were always allowed to bug a vehicle with a court order. They weren't allowed to just casually bug random people's cars because that's mass-surveillance. Now mass-surveillance is completely normalized. Every citizen is treated as a potential criminal and surveilled into a database.
You could say the same thing about all those pesky rules police have to follow around probable cause, evidence collection, letting people have lawyers, etc. Criminals don’t have to do any of that.
On January 7th, 2026, fuck the average Republican. They're currently rallying around the murderers of an American mother. Anybody with morals or a spine left or was forced out of that corrupt party years ago. No matter how tight you hold your nose, it can no longer mask their America-hating shit stink.
(for context this is not partisan - I consider myself a libertarian, but at least the Democrats don't hate my country)
A good friend of mine who also works on tech is utterly disconnected from current events. Whenever I offer a discussion or say “hey did you hear about X?” his response is always skepticism that such a thing could occur. He has a newborn and now he’s even more disconnected (somewhat more understandable given the child).
It seems like a lot of people in tech are like that, or increasingly like that. I have a diverse stable of publications, journalists, subject matter current events podcasters, and other sources in my feed readers and my circle. Sitting between these things, it seems like there is a widening gulf.
by that logic it is perfectly legal for AMZN to openly publish the whole vast-vast trove of Ring videos. I do think it is legal, just wondering what would government do it if AMZN actually does it. I also think the governments at all levels should publish all the license plate readers data because it was collected/bought on the public dime and thus a public property.
lets suppose you collect those feeds and do image recognition and integration of data across those multiple feeds, add cross-referencing with other public data of photos, names, addresses, etc. - would it be legal? would it be legal to publish the results in the open?
there are already sites where again you can put it anyone's name and it will show you where they live, where they lived, people they've lived with, and no I will not link them because they're already too widespread and I don't want more to know about them, but someone on here can trivially find one
Remember how people used to say "Why did the vast majority of people, non-Nazis, just go along? Why did nobody do anything about the Nazis?". We're seeing it right now. ICE is now an organization acting with violence outside of its jurisdiction, like the SA were for the Nazis.
Given the comparison was already made, what do you think of the Nuremberg laws, then? They were laws that, in as many words, made being a jew illegal in Germany and stripped them of their own citizenship status. That is just "the law being carried out", too, I guess.
ICE carried out it's mission without all the theatrics before, and deported more people in previous years. The theatrics, and the collateral damage to American citizens or those with actual temporary rights to be here, is the point with this current administration. A fair and apt comparison.
I have no skin in the game (being neither American nor immigrant), but you do realize how much of a stretch you've just made? Comparing Nuremburg to a sovereign country preventing illegal immigration (literally a crime everywhere on earth)? Are you serious!?
Deportation isn't prevention. It's inherently reactive. Securing a border has to be done at a border (as opposed to, for instance, at people's homes, churches, and schools).
So why isn't ICE carrying out its mission without all the theatrics, and why so poorly? Obama was able to deport 470,000, whereas Trump did somewhere around 600,000.
The laws are a pretense for action. The goal is racial fear-mongering by any means. Citizens are getting caught up in this and the administration doesn't care.
OP's comment was "why did no one stop the Nazi's". Because it didn't start with the gas chambers. It ended there. We can always make slippery slope arguments. But when that slope starts to look steep....OP's original question kind of answers itself.
People rationalize it, they downplay the atrocities, they don't care for the victims, "it's just the law", any excuse. Current citizens and illegal immigrants are thrown in overly packed cages, starved, no water, and unhygenic. I mean, how close to the gas chambers do we have to get? When they actually start stripping them of their possessions and clothes and wealth? When they start the labor camps?
OP's question is salient. Most people don't act, because it is never bad enough. It never will be. Until one day it finally is. That's why the Nazi's got so far.
Trump isn't going to gas immigrants. No, I don't think that will happen. But the slope looks steep.
Fair enough, but then it's the atrocious execution of enforcement that is to blame - not the laws themselves. Conversely to your own argument, you can't just do away with immigration laws as an option to stop ICE antics, that would be absurd.
Again, the Nuremberg Laws were just that, laws on the books in Germany.
Immigration laws I am fine with, some I disagree with, but that's the nature of government.
Interesting how all the laws ICE breaks aren't part of the discussion. Just the ones immigrants break. Should we engage in overly violent reactions to minor infractions by ICE? Why aren't we?
You see the asymmetry of application of the laws? Obviously, if this were about "law and order", this would be done in an orderly fashion, and disorderly application of the law would be punished in a lawful and orderly way.
But it isn't. Because, obviously. The laws do not matter to this administration. They are a post hoc justification for action. It's why Trump just does whatever and then waits for court challenges. It's why he stiffed his own contractors for decades. He doesn't care for the law.
This focus on "what the law says" for immigrants is bizarre, given Trump obviously does not care what the law says. Trump unilaterally re-allocated funds to ICE to engage in his witch hunt.
When will we stop navel-gazing about "the immigration laws" and start seriously asking "why does Trump continue to find innovative ways to shatter every legal separation of powers"?
Seriously, compared to that, immigration is a far-gone minor issue. And that is precisely how you get to Nazi Germany. So much ink spilled on minor infractions by people with no power, but nothing said about those in the highest positions of power abusing and breaking it daily.
The immigration laws of this country still require, on the paper that most of trusted until not so long ago, due process, which ICE are flagrantly violating, to include "arresting"(kidnapping) people following the written law to gain citizenship and cancelling the programs that people have been living under for decades that granted them legal non-citizenship status.
You can call that "enforcing the law" once you admit that the "law" is, at this point, the whim of a despot and his cronies
For those lacking context, ICE shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis today. An agent standing beside a car shot a driver through a car window, killing her and causing the car to lose control and crash into other parked cars.
Allegedly, the agent shot in self defense, but the shot was taken after the car started moving away from the agent.
The woman was identified as a 37 year old US citizen. She was not part of any ICE protest groups.
It's a poor video, taken from far away at a high angle, one that misses the wide angle and intial context.
That video doesn't show the officer that shot, that you say was hit, reaching for and unholstering his weapon as she was reversing and then stepping into the turn cicle in front of the car to fire at her.
If he got hit then it was as a result of placing himself there in order to shoot the driver.
I think the officer moved to go towards the driver-side window, the driver then turned the wheel (past the officer, you can see the wheels turn to avoid him) to escape, the officer drew his weapon and shot her as she was leaving.
It's very clear from the video that she had no intention of running him over, he shoots after the car is past him.
There are several videos floating about the internet, it seems inescapable that soon enough there will be more and some of those will have been generated or altered.
The few that I've seen so far appear authenic, cover a few angles, and show three ICE agents about the car
* one that approached from the side and attempted to open the door causing the woman to back up, turn and leave,
* another that approached from the front and drew to fire when it became clear the car was going to leave,
* a third that stood back a little doing very little.
Did we watch the same video? That officer intentionally put himself infront of the car, was NOT hit by it, and shot the woman after he was clear from the danger and the car was pointed away from him.
> Well, i saw the video of her hitting the cop with her car
No, you didn't. And the fact that you're consistently lying about the sequence of events in said video does not help your case. Again, what do you get from lying about this?
A man approaches her car and tries to pull the door open. She attempts to drive away. It seems clear to me that the woman is trying to escape. Watch the clip yourself. Note the direction the front wheels are pointing, both before and after the agent attempts to pull open the door.
It's a tragic event, but I would wait a few days until the dust settles before making conclusions.
Notice that the bullet hole is in the windshield, so it is very unlikely that the car was moving away from the agent, unless it was going in reverse. In order to hit the driver, he would have been standing at the front of the car off-center.
To be fair, I didn't read the news article, nor do I want to.
> it is very unlikely that the car was moving away from the agent
It was.
> In order to hit the driver, he would have been standing at the front of the car off-center.
He was.
Vehicle was moving forward, in a right hand turn, moving past the officer, but not towards/at the officer. The car did make it past the officer, without harm to the officer.
On the contrary — the timing is perfect. Yesterday, that statement could've been described as hyperbole or a far-fetched hypothetical. Today, it's a different story.
What witnesses are desribing in Minniapolis is a public exicution, by ordering a woman to drive away, but there was no room to turn around, and he ran up to the car and shot her 3 times in the face as she was trying to manouver and follow orders.
The authorities are trying to call him a hero.
On topic, for the life of me I realy cant imagine ICE possesing the capability for surveillance no matter what they buy, and it is clear that government and media company
are providing direction ,or sometimes specific actions, other than just go fuck some people up in this area code.
They didn't order her to drive away, they tried to detain her then she drove directly at a federal agent and struck him with her car. Every American has the right to self defense in this country, if you take an action that attempts to cause great bodily harm, you shouldn't be surprised when it's met with deadly force.
I wish people would be honest with themselves and the rest of us when they go on about ICE.
"Abolish ICE" sounds like you think once you get a few miles past the border, no one should be able to apprehend you. Sounds like you just want open borders.
Even if you think they should use different methods, or be more careful, it's still stupid to say "abolish ICE" or "we should dox and harass all ICE officers and interfere with them." That's just as dumb as saying that because several people die every day from medical malpractice we need to abolish doctors and hospitals.
Borders don't exist if you just let whoever wants to, come and stay forever and do whatever they want. And that's also why legal immigrant citizens moved to the right in recent years. They think it's messed up that they worked hard, paid a ton of money, followed all the rules, meanwhile random people from central America just hopped the fence and made up some story to claim asylum -- interesting that they crossed 4 countries before claiming asylum.
ICE has only been around for about 20 years. It is not the only mechanism of immigration enforcement. It is, at its very structure, a system of violence.
Abolish ICE. I am 100% literal and serious when I say this. The agency should be dissolved.
I mean, nothing ideally. Most countries do just fine without a secret police, splendid even. And, for basically the entire history of the United States, immigration has just been a non-issue. It's only been to our advantage.
ICE didn't exist prior to 2002, neither did CBP in it's current form, and they have done a lousy job of enforcing immigration, either at the border or internally, and primarily now exist as an internal secret police force under the personal control of the president. There is no reforming either of them, and they should both be completely disbanded and replaced with a new immigration enforcement service, ideally not under DHS which should also be disbanded. Everyone who currently works for either ICE and CBP should be fired and they can re-apply to whatever gets created to replace them after a thorough background check, if they don't get jailed.
> And that's also why legal immigrant citizens moved to the right in recent years. They think it's messed up that they worked hard, paid a ton of money, followed all the rules, meanwhile random people from central America just hopped the fence and made up some story to claim asylum -- interesting that they crossed 4 countries before claiming asylum.
Yeah, you don't speak for me.
As a legal immigrant whose immigration to the US took several years and cost in the neighborhood of $30,000, I think it's messed up that it costs that amount of money to immigrate here, that pardoned J6 rioters are paid signing bonuses of $50,000 to be "law enforcement" and $5,000 per deportation to run around playing judge, jury, and in this case executioner, answerable to no-one, unbadged, masked and unidentifiable (because "fuck brown people/libs, amirite?"), because they run under a government entity that tells other government entities "fuck you, you can't tell me what to do".
> meanwhile random people from central America just hopped the fence and made up some story to claim asylum -- interesting that they crossed 4 countries before claiming asylum.
Perhaps you should look at whether or not some of those countries have signed treaties on asylum seekers.
ICE is a corrupt agency hiring the worst of society, whom just murdered a woman for no reason other than to power trip. The state apparatus immediately leapt into action, calling her a terrorist, a criminal, that this action was justified. This is only the most recent of their numerous crimes against the American people.
If you want to believe we need some form of immigration enforcement then fine, but ICE isn't it. ICE needs to go, yesterday. And every single person who joined said agency investigated, jailed and kept away from polite society. This is non-debatable.
When the Nazis fell, the occupation forces didn’t say “you can’t abolish the Gestapo, we need police, otherwise it’s just anarchy.” They got rid of the Nazi machine and replaced it.
ICE is rotten to the core. It should be abolished and replaced. Create a new organization with new leadership. Ban anyone from a leadership position in ICE from being employed by the new organization. Maybe allow the rank-and-file to apply, but they have to start fresh and are treated like any other applicant at best.
“Abolish ICE” isn’t about immigration enforcement. It’s about bringing to heel a reckless, out of control, proto secret police. “Abolish ICE” is about immigration enforcement as much as shooting a US citizen in the face is.
Well, when the Nazis fell, the occupation forces of the Eastern part of Germany actually did say something like "you can’t abolish the Gestapo, we need police". The seed of Stasi.
Yeah, i think the memory work West Germany did is more long-lasting and better than what East germany did.
But i was responding to someone implying that East germany inherited the Stasi from the nazi power structure and personnel, which is categorically false. The US wanted to keep the power/legal structure, hence the sham Nuremberg trials, the myth about how the Wehrmacht and the German police didn't participate in the genocide or in slavery (the STO in france was just that), it was all SS and a lot of other myth deployed at this time period. The soviet on the other hand purged most of the rot, and replaced it with their own.
That's also a proof that rehabilitation is better than punishment overall for a society, even if you base it on small lies.
Currently, no comment anywhere in this discussion mentions abolishing ICE. Was something edited away? This seems like a misdirection. You have picked several inflammatory positions that nobody here is openly advocating.
I am personally concerned with the rule of law and the also extreme polarization of American society.
Keep in mind that first offense for being in the US illegally is a misdeameanor. I say this as we have a president with 34 felonies and got nothing for it. On top of that, we have ICE tactics like unreasonable searches and seizures, no due process rights, and racial profiling which are all against the law. We know this because US citizens were deported without any due process to make sure they were here illegally.
Casual reminder that the movie The Matrix is older than ICE. The country survived just fine without it before that. Abolishing ICE will not impact us negatively.
What's the connection between the movie The Matrix and ICE?
Also, did the country truly survive just fine without it before that? Are you familiar with crime stats? Could you share the data on levels of crime carried by illegal immigrants over the years?
Somehow the people that get law enforced on them are done so by a government composed of people that should be the first to have the law enforced on themselves
"These laws are supported by the vast majority of voters."
Most voters don't support ICE's gestapo tactics:
"Voters 56 - 39 percent disapprove of the way U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, is doing its job."
"Republicans (77 - 17 percent) approve of the way ICE is doing its job, while Democrats (89 - 9 percent) and independents (64 - 32 percent) disapprove of the way ICE is doing its job."
From what I've seen immigration laws are nothing more than a pretext. If police were pulling over motorists for speeding and then summarily executing them, it would be idiotic to buy an excuse that they are merely enforcing traffic laws, right?
Most of those cases occur when there is already some suspected criminality, at night, or preexisting intent to effect an arrest. Not that this makes any of those incidents okay, but this situation is an escalation beyond that in that their only "cause" to start violently aggressing in broad daylight basically boils down to perhaps a minor traffic infraction, which is well outside of their jurisdiction.
Furthermore, these abduction squads don't need to be rampaging American cities armed and creating these types of immediately-escalated conflicts in the first place. Even if you believe that immigration laws need to be strictly enforced, doing so does not require lawless paramilitary squads! Apparently part of the price of the current enforcement strategy is the killing of American mothers who are at worst blocking traffic. If this administration truly has a popular mandate to strictly enforce these laws, then they have all the time in the world to do so, right? Instead, they have framed this as some immediate emergency needing overwhelming militarized force attacking our entire society. With its price of dead Americans, this is simply impossible to justify.
They broadly probably didn't believe grocery prices would "go down", but they were also very angry about inflation. The polling reflected that economic issues topped voter motivations. Add to that the Biden administration hiding his dementia, and perceptions about illegal immigration and crime, and it wouldn't matter who the Republican candidate is.
This was part of a sweeping anti-incumbent sentiment that occurred globally. Kamala did ok with educated white voters, while black, hispanic and asian voters shifted right; do they all just hate brown people? I doubt it.
People have very little reason to be honest during polls, so I find them hard to believe. Polling data led to predictions about Hillary winning in 2016.
Even if there was a slight “shift right” in black and Asian voters, it was still kind of marginal.
According to Pew, about 83% of black voters still voted for Kamala, with 15% voting for Trump, and 60% of Asians voted for Kamala.
I can envision that much internalized racism in either of those groups, but even if that weren’t the case, there are lots of different races and they could convince themselves that “the other ones” are the bad ones, and Trump won’t hurt them. I do not think what you are saying dispels anything I said at all.
You've yet to provide any evidence to support your claim, so I have very little reason to entertain the idea that internalized racism motivated voters. Seems like motivated reasoning to me
Polls in aggregate are useful at sussing voter feelings, predicting actions is harder. Also, the shift was not that marginal. Certainly enough to help decide the election.
I am not entirely sure how I could provide evidence of internalized racism, so sure that’s more vibes based on my end. I am just saying that I do not think that “more POC voted for Trump so it couldn’t be racism!” is the slam dunk that you think it is.
I don’t think polls are useful at all if the questions involve anything embarrassing. If a pollster asked “why did you vote for Trump” almost no one is going to say “because I don’t like brown people”, especially when it’s trivial to come up with some contrived reasoning about the economy (even when it doesn’t make any sense).
She is a naturalized citizen and we were very sure to make sure that literally nothing on the paperwork could be considered dishonest.
That said, you're objectively wrong, and if you had read the article in discussion you'd see that. The Trump admin has been detaining natural born citizens, and they've even been given permission to racially profile in the process.
This requires about ten seconds of research to find out, so you are being dishonest by posting stuff like this, either directly or intellectually.
There is a lot of internalized racism in Latino communities, so I don't think that that is necessarily in conflict with what I said.
Just because you can find a lot of minorities signing up for ICE jobs doesn't really change anything, even if they were all Hispanic. You can always find examples of people going against their own self interest.
There are black white-nationalists [1] out there. There are women who will openly say that women shouldn't be allowed to vote [2].
No shit. I'm making an assertion as to "why", not "who". "Simply" is doing a lot of work in your statement.
Trump's entire first campaign was based around a stupid, expensive, and racist "wall", and he openly mentioned during his debate that he wants to get rid of immigrants because they're eating dogs. Unless these people were living under a rock they saw all this, and at best they were ambivalent to this, but I think more likely supported it.
You could argue that maybe during his first campaign they had plausible deniability, but when all these people voted for him again, they have lost any sense of that. They knew what they were voting for, and they knew that the person that they were voting for was a racist sack of shit.
People should grow up and own their terrible decisions.
"I didn't like the DNC so I decided to vote for someone who is an unapologetic racist sack of shit and who bragged about how he'd abuse the presidency to get revenge on his enemies" really doesn't change anything to what I said.
I'm not a huge fan of the DNC either but I think that they're being used as a scapegoat for people not to own their terrible decisions to vote for a moronic demagogue.
Fair enough but the brass tacks of the matter is more Americans liked what Trump had to offer than what the DNC was selling (stability, more of the same)
IME a lot of trump voters are in the "fuck the government" camp and voted for him purely to throw a wrench in the political machine
> Fair enough but the brass tacks of the matter is more Americans liked what Trump had to offer than what the DNC was selling (stability, more of the same)
I agree. What he had to offer was getting rid of brown people. He wasn't secretive about this. This isn't in conflict with what I said.
> IME a lot of trump voters are in the "fuck the government" camp and voted for him purely to throw a wrench in the political machine
So they voted for a guy who bragged about how he was going to use the government to go after his enemies? Yeah I don't buy that.
Spot on! If in 2012 you told me half of Trump's platform, and told me I'd be voting for Kamala Harris instead, I might have shot myself in the face. But my country called, so I swallowed my fuck-the-status-quo pride and answered the call.
Maybe Democrats didn't vote [for Harris] because of that decision.
But the idea that they instead voted for Trump, or that people who went out of their way to vote for Trump would have voted for the Democrat candidate if they had just "been better than Harris" is so fucking absurd it's actively insulting that you try to claim this.
> Most Americans, in contrast with the DNC platform, think it's gross to select candidates for a job based on their race.
Most Americans think it is gross to select candidates for a job based on how much money they've given you, how willing they are to look the other way for your crimes, or how pretty you think they look.
> hiring based on their accomplishments and skills
That you can look at the Trump administration and say this with a straight face is demonstrative of how ignorant you are.
Most Americans think it’s gross to select minority candidates based on their race. If you’re a lying, corrupt, incompetent, moronic sack of shit, but you’re a white man, they’ll elect you president.
Which says a lot about Republican voters. This is how we get Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. What stupid fucking criteria for electing a political leader.
You can thank the DNC for the appalling choices in federal elections, they decided it was best to mess around with race and gender quotas instead of putting forward genuine candidates.
That's like shooting your own foot off. He's always been this person. He was this person in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, etc. it's fucking crazy to me that anyone, ever, ever, votes for him. It's really opened my eyes to the realities of a lot of folks out there.
It’s so strange to me that anyone who knew anything about him even before he announced presidency didn’t find him to be completely insufferable and an objectively terrible businessman.
He has always been incapable of speaking without constantly trying to brag about himself or bitching about how things aren’t his fault, and even before the infamous “grab her by the pussy” tape came out it was already pretty well known that he was a perv.
I do not know how he got any traction. Except, you know, he became even more outwardly racist.
Border enforcement is only the excuse to build a paramilitary force akin to the Blackshirts or the Sturmabteilung that will do whatever violence is asked of them.
Dude, every country has borders and most take it seriously. In many countries, such as Poland, they shoot at people crossing the border illegally. A country with no enforced borders is no country at all.
If you want to revise your assessment to include the creation of this problem by having a lax border, I can agree with you somewhat. We should not require border police far away from the borders. But we do require it now, because certain malicious politicians let in a bunch of people illegally.
You're responding under the presumption that the official story about ICE's mission is accurate and sincere. I'm suggesting that it's a ruse to dupe people into accepting paramilitary enforcement of an authoritarian state. If so, arguments about border enforcement are just playing by the terms set by the propaganda.
If you read the second paragraph of the comment you just responded to, I alluded to a potential problem-reaction-solution scheme to create the situation (excessive illegal immigration through unenforced borders) to the final conclusion of expanding federal authority all over the place. It is subtle, so I don't blame you for not connecting the dots.
Despite the fact that I suspect this scheme is in play, we do actually need to get these illegals out. I believe they have let welfare leeches, common criminals, foreign military, and terrorists all through the border to make sure that we would need federal help to get them out. Rejecting federal solutions now is not the answer. The answer is to let them solve the problem and insist that things go back to normal afterward.
> Rejecting federal solutions now is not the answer. The answer is to let them solve the problem and insist that things go back to normal afterward.
If those federal solutions are not intended to solve unauthorized residency but instead to put us in a permanent authoritarian state where we don't have an afterward where we have the power to insist on things?
That's the greater threat than "illegals" at the moment IMHO.
I think it's more of a gradual creep of federal authority and insider deals for government money than an instant authoritarian state. There was a lot of money lost in the housing of illegal aliens and asylum seekers for example. Thousands were put up in LUXURY hotels for hundreds per night, for months or years. They had free everything provided by sketchy government contractors. Many government actions turn out to be fraud or grossly overpriced. Look at the billions lost in the daycare scandals. They're paying for fake daycare and Medicaid for illegals, and cutting benefits for poor US citizens such as my parents.
Federal authority is in fact required to evict people who were allowed to enter in bad faith. There's no getting around that. You either let them stay and suffer higher crime, worse job market, and worse government benefits, or you make them leave. Many Democrats have come out and said that they will not comply with federal law. Now there are Republicans at the top so maybe the law can finally be enforced.
This is another theory as to why the massive illegal and fraudulent legal immigration under pretense of asylum was allowed: https://www.conservapedia.com/Cloward_and_Piven_Strategy Another one is the mere fact that in a democracy, there is always an incentive to expand the voter rolls. There is even this motive on a state level, because seats in Congress are apportioned according to census data that includes all people residing in each district/state. It's very easy to understand that importing millions of people and trying by any means to legalize them and defeat immigration enforcement is one way to try to steal a country. It's treasonous and if we allow this threat then we will not have a country few years from now.
But now we aren't talking about intelligence services anymore. ICE truly is Stasi for America, employing tactics such as "isolating them, depriving them of sleep and using psychological tricks such as threatening to arrest relatives." (From Wikipedia about Stasi.)
This year ICE will also become the "armed wing of the Party" thanks to fresh funding.
Grandpa: "It was a very controversial time, yes. Lots of people doing what they believed was best."
Grandchild: "Did ICE ever go after you?"
Grandpa: "I worked for the--it was only office--I mean, I was unemployed then. Yes, that's right! Tricky economy, don't you know. Only odd-jobs. I lived in a place where those things weren't happening. In fact, most of us didn't really know about it until it was all over. You remember that, right dear?"
Mother: <frustrated death-glare> "...Come along, let's wash your hands before dinner."
If not, and if you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch. The director said "It was like I went to Germany 40 years after WW2 and found out the Nazis had won".
There was an "anti-communist" massacre in Indonesia in 1965. The killers were sanctioned by the government who remained in power/are still very powerful nowadays. (When a reformist president said "maybe we can look at this part of the country's past", the rumour was, the army was going to let protesters (who are still gung-ho communist-hating) protest near the presidential palace, and not intervene if/when they invade it.
This documentary follows one old killer and his "journey" from being able to talk about it casually until he ends up meeting his conscience.
Here he is in the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZqEzIEWzPk
And the full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46487147
literally what are you talking about
-- Norm MacDonald
The administration's kept them on side with culture wars red meat so far...
But the further ICE / police militarization goes, the more awkward the situation with right-wing militia types is going to get.
MAGA was chanting "president of peace" only a few months ago, and did anyone complain about Venezuela? Not a peep. They thrive on logical contradictions.
It might not be the right door, but that doesn't matter to them.
Apples and oranges, though, and it's all fruit.
interesting that the ICE is performing that hallmark of 20th century - mass removal of "undesirable" people from society and placement them into the camps without criminal charge and judicial oversight, etc. thus totally undermining the main contract between government and society - due process.
At this point in time, it's not apparent if the current regime will prevail. Thus, it's time for brownshirt tactics. When Presidential/King/Dictatorial power is fully consolidated, States' Rights are just a memory, and all nonloyal judges are fired, it's time for the disciplined Career Bureaucrats to join ICE.
Shall we put a reminder in our calendars to talk again in 2037?
This is why you hear about old grannies being arrested and deported and random immigrant workers with no criminal history being nabbed.
Basically, ICE is a group of bounty hunters and they have no qualms about breaking the law if it leads to a nice payday.
I understand their recruitment incentives are out of this world, but have not found reliable source for per-deportation incentives, and want to make sure I argue with 100% factually supported data.
They go after immigrants without a legal basis to be there, which by definition of the word and law means they are in fact not law-abiding and _illegal_immigrants.
Just because you don't like a law doesn't mean it's not lawful to enforce it.
If we say there are ~~11 million under documented immigrants, there are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions that e.g. Were legal until the orange orangutan decided otherwise. There are people under ambiguous laws and people in tricky cases.
This is the equivalent to saying everybody who went 57mph in 55mph zone is a criminal and should be executed.
Life has nuance.
They will certainly attempt to dismiss any charges, but they are far from guaranteed that they will be successful.
So is it part of their official duties to walk in front of a car of someone who is trying to leave the scene, alter their path when the car turns out of the way to ensure they remain in their way, and then shoot the driver? Or is that merely the kind of excessive force that's in contravention of their training and not part of their job role?
I just don't hold much faith in the separation of power between state and federal government, it sounds like there has been a massive erosion of this barrier since the civil war and the abuse of the commerce clause and all that.
1. Prosecution. US wont because of trump. State might not because of some threat from trump.
2. Proof beyond reasonable doubt. Video can make case for self defence so bar is high.
3. No presidential pardon.
2. We'll let the jury decide but ICE is specifically trained not to shoot at moving vehicles and not to approach them from the front.
3. The president can't pardon someone convicted of murder in a state court, he can only pardon people convicted of federal crimes.
"Minnesota officials say FBI blocked their access to ICE shooting probe"
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKj1KijpoY
1. https://x.com/kirscheverstahl/status/2009079585783337210
note: edit to add clip instead of reply because rate-limited.
anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been paying attention to the hundreds of analogous situations that have been happening to blacks.
literally just look it up, the exact scenario has already played out before. cop gets off. and I mean literally exact scenario - with two cops, one in front, one to the side, driver (black) tries to drive off, front cop shoots and kills the black guy, is convicted, and acquitted. seriously, look it up.
George Zimmerman stalked Treyvon Martin, shot and killed him and was still acquitted. you think this guy is going to be convicted really?
I wouldn't put the chance of a conviction here at 100%, but it's certainly well above 0%.
if you have an example of a similar situation where the cop is convicted I am very very interested.
[0] the naming of which also turned out to be another lie, surprise surprise
The law is enforced based on the general feelings of the people in power, and they will bend principles to punish/reward those that they perceive to be "bad" and "good" accordingly, based on their prejudices.
The idea that "might makes right" is sort of a tautology. What you consider to be right is based on a historical precedent set by the mighty.
And my country (unfortunately) isnt even in NATO.
If you add up the budgets of all the various "police" forces in the US, how much money is spent each year keeping the domestic population in line?
I'm interested, as it seems that lots of groups in the US have their own overlapping police force rather than relying on "the" police. Apart from the total budget, it would be interesting to see a list of all the various police type forces at work in the US.
Check out Indeed.com and search for IT gigs in Northern VA or MD or DC, or a couple other federal-ish locations.
Lots of "180k for 6 month contract supporting DHS client deploying next gen cameras"
— Sent from my Palantir employee device
(Satire, if not obvious.)
But perhaps fleeing is also punishable by Death by our new Stasi/Judge Dread balaclava wearing hybrids.
The argument was, yes it's legal to put a tail on a person when they're out in public because that's just a cop observing a person of interest out in public. But electronic trackers are something quantifiable different due to the ease of tracking many people without having to use manpower to do it. It's the thin-edge of mass, casual surveillance of the population.
In other words, putting a tail on someone should be manpower intensive because that's a check on police power, they have to really want to track someone to invest potentially several officers' time to it full time, whereas sticking a bug on a car is something they can do to dozens of cars per day per officer.
Of course now they don't even have to do that because our police state has normalized centralized cctv camera databases, license plate trackers that continuously track the movement of every vehicle in a city into a database. Now they're doing the same with facial recognition.
Now it's even a felony in Florida to do anything to block license plate trackers from tagging your vehicle (so you can't obscure your plate in a way that leaves it readable to humans but not to the automatic tracking software). No doubt we'll have such laws for facial recognition software soon as well.
Police were always allowed to bug a vehicle with a court order. They weren't allowed to just casually bug random people's cars because that's mass-surveillance. Now mass-surveillance is completely normalized. Every citizen is treated as a potential criminal and surveilled into a database.
(for context this is not partisan - I consider myself a libertarian, but at least the Democrats don't hate my country)
A good friend of mine who also works on tech is utterly disconnected from current events. Whenever I offer a discussion or say “hey did you hear about X?” his response is always skepticism that such a thing could occur. He has a newborn and now he’s even more disconnected (somewhat more understandable given the child).
It seems like a lot of people in tech are like that, or increasingly like that. I have a diverse stable of publications, journalists, subject matter current events podcasters, and other sources in my feed readers and my circle. Sitting between these things, it seems like there is a widening gulf.
ICE carried out it's mission without all the theatrics before, and deported more people in previous years. The theatrics, and the collateral damage to American citizens or those with actual temporary rights to be here, is the point with this current administration. A fair and apt comparison.
I guess Nazi came to power because of ignorance and stupidity of the people around them.
The laws are a pretense for action. The goal is racial fear-mongering by any means. Citizens are getting caught up in this and the administration doesn't care.
OP's comment was "why did no one stop the Nazi's". Because it didn't start with the gas chambers. It ended there. We can always make slippery slope arguments. But when that slope starts to look steep....OP's original question kind of answers itself.
People rationalize it, they downplay the atrocities, they don't care for the victims, "it's just the law", any excuse. Current citizens and illegal immigrants are thrown in overly packed cages, starved, no water, and unhygenic. I mean, how close to the gas chambers do we have to get? When they actually start stripping them of their possessions and clothes and wealth? When they start the labor camps?
OP's question is salient. Most people don't act, because it is never bad enough. It never will be. Until one day it finally is. That's why the Nazi's got so far.
Trump isn't going to gas immigrants. No, I don't think that will happen. But the slope looks steep.
Immigration laws I am fine with, some I disagree with, but that's the nature of government.
Interesting how all the laws ICE breaks aren't part of the discussion. Just the ones immigrants break. Should we engage in overly violent reactions to minor infractions by ICE? Why aren't we?
You see the asymmetry of application of the laws? Obviously, if this were about "law and order", this would be done in an orderly fashion, and disorderly application of the law would be punished in a lawful and orderly way.
But it isn't. Because, obviously. The laws do not matter to this administration. They are a post hoc justification for action. It's why Trump just does whatever and then waits for court challenges. It's why he stiffed his own contractors for decades. He doesn't care for the law.
This focus on "what the law says" for immigrants is bizarre, given Trump obviously does not care what the law says. Trump unilaterally re-allocated funds to ICE to engage in his witch hunt.
When will we stop navel-gazing about "the immigration laws" and start seriously asking "why does Trump continue to find innovative ways to shatter every legal separation of powers"?
Seriously, compared to that, immigration is a far-gone minor issue. And that is precisely how you get to Nazi Germany. So much ink spilled on minor infractions by people with no power, but nothing said about those in the highest positions of power abusing and breaking it daily.
What a farcical debate.
You can call that "enforcing the law" once you admit that the "law" is, at this point, the whim of a despot and his cronies
Unfortunate timing of this article going live... Some of that seems quaint now.
Allegedly, the agent shot in self defense, but the shot was taken after the car started moving away from the agent.
The woman was identified as a 37 year old US citizen. She was not part of any ICE protest groups.
That video doesn't show the officer that shot, that you say was hit, reaching for and unholstering his weapon as she was reversing and then stepping into the turn cicle in front of the car to fire at her.
If he got hit then it was as a result of placing himself there in order to shoot the driver.
Legally, this is clear unjustified use of force.
The driver backed up, turned wheel prior to moving forward, and drove forward to leave.
During this, the ICE officer advanced, drawing his weapon, stepped into the turn circle of the vehicle, fired, and then jumped out of the way.
It's unclear whether he was hit, it is clear that he moved in front of the vehicle to fire with the intent of then moving out of danger.
At worst he skimmed across the rounded corner of the bonnet as a result of his own actions.
It's very clear from the video that she had no intention of running him over, he shoots after the car is past him.
The few that I've seen so far appear authenic, cover a few angles, and show three ICE agents about the car
* one that approached from the side and attempted to open the door causing the woman to back up, turn and leave,
* another that approached from the front and drew to fire when it became clear the car was going to leave,
* a third that stood back a little doing very little.
(I don't necessarily mean the Minneapolis case - for example, consider the Shaver shooting)
It is certainly not. Nor is shooting someone in the face. Only one of those things actually happened.
It's possible to believe this woman was an asshole and an agitator and that her death was needless and intentional.
Hey, any thoughts on this short NYT video analysis?
No, you didn't. And the fact that you're consistently lying about the sequence of events in said video does not help your case. Again, what do you get from lying about this?
A man approaches her car and tries to pull the door open. She attempts to drive away. It seems clear to me that the woman is trying to escape. Watch the clip yourself. Note the direction the front wheels are pointing, both before and after the agent attempts to pull open the door.
It was.
> In order to hit the driver, he would have been standing at the front of the car off-center.
He was.
Vehicle was moving forward, in a right hand turn, moving past the officer, but not towards/at the officer. The car did make it past the officer, without harm to the officer.
That's not self-defense, that's murder.
And ICE does not have the authority to detain a citizen for a traffic violation, any more than I do.
"Abolish ICE" sounds like you think once you get a few miles past the border, no one should be able to apprehend you. Sounds like you just want open borders.
Even if you think they should use different methods, or be more careful, it's still stupid to say "abolish ICE" or "we should dox and harass all ICE officers and interfere with them." That's just as dumb as saying that because several people die every day from medical malpractice we need to abolish doctors and hospitals.
Borders don't exist if you just let whoever wants to, come and stay forever and do whatever they want. And that's also why legal immigrant citizens moved to the right in recent years. They think it's messed up that they worked hard, paid a ton of money, followed all the rules, meanwhile random people from central America just hopped the fence and made up some story to claim asylum -- interesting that they crossed 4 countries before claiming asylum.
Abolish ICE. I am 100% literal and serious when I say this. The agency should be dissolved.
Arrest all the bad actors, they'll stop showing up.
Yeah, you don't speak for me.
As a legal immigrant whose immigration to the US took several years and cost in the neighborhood of $30,000, I think it's messed up that it costs that amount of money to immigrate here, that pardoned J6 rioters are paid signing bonuses of $50,000 to be "law enforcement" and $5,000 per deportation to run around playing judge, jury, and in this case executioner, answerable to no-one, unbadged, masked and unidentifiable (because "fuck brown people/libs, amirite?"), because they run under a government entity that tells other government entities "fuck you, you can't tell me what to do".
> meanwhile random people from central America just hopped the fence and made up some story to claim asylum -- interesting that they crossed 4 countries before claiming asylum.
Perhaps you should look at whether or not some of those countries have signed treaties on asylum seekers.
If you want to believe we need some form of immigration enforcement then fine, but ICE isn't it. ICE needs to go, yesterday. And every single person who joined said agency investigated, jailed and kept away from polite society. This is non-debatable.
ICE is rotten to the core. It should be abolished and replaced. Create a new organization with new leadership. Ban anyone from a leadership position in ICE from being employed by the new organization. Maybe allow the rank-and-file to apply, but they have to start fresh and are treated like any other applicant at best.
“Abolish ICE” isn’t about immigration enforcement. It’s about bringing to heel a reckless, out of control, proto secret police. “Abolish ICE” is about immigration enforcement as much as shooting a US citizen in the face is.
But i was responding to someone implying that East germany inherited the Stasi from the nazi power structure and personnel, which is categorically false. The US wanted to keep the power/legal structure, hence the sham Nuremberg trials, the myth about how the Wehrmacht and the German police didn't participate in the genocide or in slavery (the STO in france was just that), it was all SS and a lot of other myth deployed at this time period. The soviet on the other hand purged most of the rot, and replaced it with their own.
That's also a proof that rehabilitation is better than punishment overall for a society, even if you base it on small lies.
Currently, no comment anywhere in this discussion mentions abolishing ICE. Was something edited away? This seems like a misdirection. You have picked several inflammatory positions that nobody here is openly advocating.
I am personally concerned with the rule of law and the also extreme polarization of American society.
>ICE should be disbanded and most of its leadership jailed for their crimes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46535404
>The number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States reached an all-time high of 14 million in 2023
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...
There are millions living in California alone.
ICE is the only Federal immigration enforcement agency.
Abolishing ICE is abolishing borders.
Right after the election, huh? Kinda weird timing.
Fuck ICE, a nuremberg trial for every one of them.
Also, did the country truly survive just fine without it before that? Are you familiar with crime stats? Could you share the data on levels of crime carried by illegal immigrants over the years?
I am against open borders, but I am also against some of ICE's tactics.
Even, the suspect is executed summarily on the spot.
Odd, the suspect is made citizen and gets a MAGA hat.
ICE is being nice, perhaps too much.
They seem tolerant of those disrupting their operations, which only empowers them to do it more.
It would be better to round these activists up and put them somewhere where they cannot further disrupt their operations.
Most voters don't support ICE's gestapo tactics:
"Voters 56 - 39 percent disapprove of the way U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, is doing its job."
"Republicans (77 - 17 percent) approve of the way ICE is doing its job, while Democrats (89 - 9 percent) and independents (64 - 32 percent) disapprove of the way ICE is doing its job."
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3926
"New Report: Majority of Americans Disapprove of President Trump’s Immigration Policies"
https://prri.org/press-release/new-report-majority-of-americ...
What might be unclear from these numbers: Many disapprove because they believe ICE isn't doing enough.
If you haven't noticed, they've been shooting motorists who move their cars in this fashion for years/decades.
Not saying it's right...
Furthermore, these abduction squads don't need to be rampaging American cities armed and creating these types of immediately-escalated conflicts in the first place. Even if you believe that immigration laws need to be strictly enforced, doing so does not require lawless paramilitary squads! Apparently part of the price of the current enforcement strategy is the killing of American mothers who are at worst blocking traffic. If this administration truly has a popular mandate to strictly enforce these laws, then they have all the time in the world to do so, right? Instead, they have framed this as some immediate emergency needing overwhelming militarized force attacking our entire society. With its price of dead Americans, this is simply impossible to justify.
This was part of a sweeping anti-incumbent sentiment that occurred globally. Kamala did ok with educated white voters, while black, hispanic and asian voters shifted right; do they all just hate brown people? I doubt it.
Even if there was a slight “shift right” in black and Asian voters, it was still kind of marginal.
According to Pew, about 83% of black voters still voted for Kamala, with 15% voting for Trump, and 60% of Asians voted for Kamala.
I can envision that much internalized racism in either of those groups, but even if that weren’t the case, there are lots of different races and they could convince themselves that “the other ones” are the bad ones, and Trump won’t hurt them. I do not think what you are saying dispels anything I said at all.
Polls in aggregate are useful at sussing voter feelings, predicting actions is harder. Also, the shift was not that marginal. Certainly enough to help decide the election.
I don’t think polls are useful at all if the questions involve anything embarrassing. If a pollster asked “why did you vote for Trump” almost no one is going to say “because I don’t like brown people”, especially when it’s trivial to come up with some contrived reasoning about the economy (even when it doesn’t make any sense).
That said, you're objectively wrong, and if you had read the article in discussion you'd see that. The Trump admin has been detaining natural born citizens, and they've even been given permission to racially profile in the process.
This requires about ten seconds of research to find out, so you are being dishonest by posting stuff like this, either directly or intellectually.
Any actual Americans should be looking at the events of today in horror.
Just because you can find a lot of minorities signing up for ICE jobs doesn't really change anything, even if they were all Hispanic. You can always find examples of people going against their own self interest.
There are black white-nationalists [1] out there. There are women who will openly say that women shouldn't be allowed to vote [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Lee_Peterson
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-reconsiders-womens-righ...
Trump's entire first campaign was based around a stupid, expensive, and racist "wall", and he openly mentioned during his debate that he wants to get rid of immigrants because they're eating dogs. Unless these people were living under a rock they saw all this, and at best they were ambivalent to this, but I think more likely supported it.
You could argue that maybe during his first campaign they had plausible deniability, but when all these people voted for him again, they have lost any sense of that. They knew what they were voting for, and they knew that the person that they were voting for was a racist sack of shit.
People should grow up and own their terrible decisions.
I'm not a huge fan of the DNC either but I think that they're being used as a scapegoat for people not to own their terrible decisions to vote for a moronic demagogue.
IME a lot of trump voters are in the "fuck the government" camp and voted for him purely to throw a wrench in the political machine
I agree. What he had to offer was getting rid of brown people. He wasn't secretive about this. This isn't in conflict with what I said.
> IME a lot of trump voters are in the "fuck the government" camp and voted for him purely to throw a wrench in the political machine
So they voted for a guy who bragged about how he was going to use the government to go after his enemies? Yeah I don't buy that.
Maybe Democrats didn't vote [for Harris] because of that decision.
But the idea that they instead voted for Trump, or that people who went out of their way to vote for Trump would have voted for the Democrat candidate if they had just "been better than Harris" is so fucking absurd it's actively insulting that you try to claim this.
> Most Americans, in contrast with the DNC platform, think it's gross to select candidates for a job based on their race.
Most Americans think it is gross to select candidates for a job based on how much money they've given you, how willing they are to look the other way for your crimes, or how pretty you think they look.
> hiring based on their accomplishments and skills
That you can look at the Trump administration and say this with a straight face is demonstrative of how ignorant you are.
That's like shooting your own foot off. He's always been this person. He was this person in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, etc. it's fucking crazy to me that anyone, ever, ever, votes for him. It's really opened my eyes to the realities of a lot of folks out there.
It’s so strange to me that anyone who knew anything about him even before he announced presidency didn’t find him to be completely insufferable and an objectively terrible businessman.
He has always been incapable of speaking without constantly trying to brag about himself or bitching about how things aren’t his fault, and even before the infamous “grab her by the pussy” tape came out it was already pretty well known that he was a perv.
I do not know how he got any traction. Except, you know, he became even more outwardly racist.
If you want to revise your assessment to include the creation of this problem by having a lax border, I can agree with you somewhat. We should not require border police far away from the borders. But we do require it now, because certain malicious politicians let in a bunch of people illegally.
Despite the fact that I suspect this scheme is in play, we do actually need to get these illegals out. I believe they have let welfare leeches, common criminals, foreign military, and terrorists all through the border to make sure that we would need federal help to get them out. Rejecting federal solutions now is not the answer. The answer is to let them solve the problem and insist that things go back to normal afterward.
If those federal solutions are not intended to solve unauthorized residency but instead to put us in a permanent authoritarian state where we don't have an afterward where we have the power to insist on things?
That's the greater threat than "illegals" at the moment IMHO.
Federal authority is in fact required to evict people who were allowed to enter in bad faith. There's no getting around that. You either let them stay and suffer higher crime, worse job market, and worse government benefits, or you make them leave. Many Democrats have come out and said that they will not comply with federal law. Now there are Republicans at the top so maybe the law can finally be enforced.
This is another theory as to why the massive illegal and fraudulent legal immigration under pretense of asylum was allowed: https://www.conservapedia.com/Cloward_and_Piven_Strategy Another one is the mere fact that in a democracy, there is always an incentive to expand the voter rolls. There is even this motive on a state level, because seats in Congress are apportioned according to census data that includes all people residing in each district/state. It's very easy to understand that importing millions of people and trying by any means to legalize them and defeat immigration enforcement is one way to try to steal a country. It's treasonous and if we allow this threat then we will not have a country few years from now.