So you're saying 2 previous presidents were more successful without using a campaign of threats and violence? And they didn't have to ignore court orders either? Makes you wonder...
Yea, that is worth looking in to. It could be that individual ICE agents are just not doing their job in order to sandbag the president. Or it could be that far, far fewer illegal immigrants crossed the border <https://x.com/RealTomHoman/status/1940156659084796257> during Trump’s terms than Biden’s or Obama’s; it’s currently about 60× lower than the average during Biden’s term. There’s also the million people who signed up to self–deport in order to avoid being arrested by ICE. Perhaps the removal numbers will rise as they actually leave.
But have any of Trump’s executive orders told ICE to be more violent? I haven’t noticed any that said that, but maybe you could link to it.
"But it could be this, or it could be that." Just look at the facts without trying to reframe everything. Your comments come across as deceitful.
Listen to the words of this President, and the people in his administration compared to previous Presidents. Not to mention deploying the national guard and USMC against civilians to assist ICE, because ICE's methods have changed.
Then ask yourself why does ICE need a budget of $75 billion in the bill Trump is pushing, when ICE was apparently more successful with magnitudes less in previous administrations?
You might want to link to a specific bill, because I don’t know for sure what you’re referring to otherwise. Do you mean the recent budget bill? There's no way I’m reading that for an internet comment, but if that’s the one you mean then I’ll quote a news article about it:
> The GOP bill allocates $46.5 billion toward completing Trump's border wall. It also puts $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities and $10 billion to be used for border security more broadly. The bill sets aside $4.1 billion to hire and retain more agents and officers, and invests in upgraded technology for screenings and surveillance of U.S. borders.
It doesn’t say anything about ICE specifically, so it’s not very helpful. ICE wouldn't be doing construction, and they wouldn’t be running CBP facilities, but maybe they’ll be getting more agents or officers or both. They also don’t screen travelers or surveil the border. Overall it doesn’t sound like ICE is getting $75 billion.
Anyway, the budget is not very relevant to my question. If removals are down to a third (well, two fifths I guess) of what they were during Biden’s term, how is it that we are suddenly in a police state? If ICE makes us a police state, then weren’t we in a police state then?
No, these are very clearly confounding factors. When there are fewer people walking across the deserts, for example, then there are both fewer deaths from exposure and fewer people to put on a bus and immediately return to Mexico. That makes ICE’s numbers go down. Pointing out confounding factors is not an attempt to reframe the issue; deliberately ignoring confounding factors is actually one of the easiest ways to lie with statistics.
Do you honestly think (being mean to perps at their place of work, church, or while voluntarily attending a court case) needs to be written down? %waving hands at everything% This is the hill you want to (literally or figuratively) die on?
The comment you responded to with this asked a completely legitimate question and even looked up the hard numbers to back up their doubts, only to be flagged. The bratty man-children on this site who flag such comments because "me no like" truly should learn a thing or two about reasoning like a thinking adult.
Nope, it was a legitimate question that does touch upon a number of debatable subjects about narrative, media focus, definitions of deportations and so forth. Either way, flagging comments into literal non-existence just so you can completely shut down whatever opinion you don't want to read is simply childish, and fundamentally moronic.
Because border security is extremely expensive. The point isn't just removals, it's also deterrence & denial of entry (of people and contraband) in the first place.
The security worry isn't extra laborers driving down wages, it's terrorists coming across the border and blowing up Mardi Gras (secondarily, serial rapists or murderers or what have you coming here to ply their trade). Prevention of entry is the only defense there, because presumably those bad actors aren't here for the long haul, economic gain, etc.
I haven't seen a budget breakdown so I can't speak to how defensible the budget is, just that it seems clear that removal metrics don't tell a useful story on their own.
You're essentially peddling the poisoned M&M fallacy. Do we need capable, rational border security? Yes. Do we need unaccountable masked men armed in our city streets, forcefully detaining anyone who looks like they might be [insert bogeyman caricature]? Absolutely fucking not.
When did I defend authoritarian masked men? Perimeter defense is an expensive endeavor, and if you read the words I wrote that's clearly what I was talking about. At first glance, the new budget includes over 50 billion (!) dollars for increasing our perimeter defense. That sounds like capable, rational border security to me.
Please stop accusing people of peddling the straw man you want to tear down. It's Reddit-tier, not worthy of HN.
Then why are they spending so much effort deporting everyday people? This talking point is tired, it's the equivalent of "for the children!". Something that everyone can get behind but isn't anywhere near the level of problem it's made out to be.
Parent is clearly not interested in that kind of statistic. Instead their framing implies that even 1 terrorist/rapist/murderer/etc that makes it across the border is a problem worth solving via authoritarianism. The only successful response is to draw this out and make it clearer for everyone else.
It's right there in your framing. The most charitable take available is that you're approaching the problem like a software engineer, and accepting that framing as defensible. It is not. One of the most important facts to remember at the level of government is that while we must abstract human problems in order to solve for them, humans themselves are not abstractions. When perfect becomes the enemy of the good (enough), human suffering increases.
All that aside, feel free to walk your framing back and I'll change mine accordingly.
No, that’s simply incorrect. ICE is following exactly the same process that has been in place since 1996. It can’t be due process under Biden but then suddenly unconstitutional under Trump.
ICE is not “kidnapping” anybody, and is not “trafficking” them. They are federal police officers who arrest criminals and deport them according the legal process defined by Congress in 1996.
I didn't realize Biden was instructing ICE to grab people off the street and deport them to a gulag in a country they aren't from before they can have a hearing or make any appeals. Would you please provide references for this?
I think the key difference is the usage of face masks and plainclothes - as far as I can tell, from various different news articles - ICE agents weren't concealing their identities en masse using face masks under Biden and Obama.
Based on historical examples of secret police, plainclothes and face masks on Federal Agents by default could definitely make people think that we are "approaching a police state".
I’m not sure exactly what you mean. It’s an objective fact that ICE was removing almost 3× as many people per month this time last year, but that nobody cared at the time. If it’s all about perceptions rather than the objective reality then that makes some sense.
All the president has to do is to make a few speeches about how tough on illegal immigration his administration is going to be and people’s perceptions will shift enough that they suddenly care. Now that someone cares enough to start making threats against federal officers, the officers start wearing masks and bullet–proof vests. This apparently causes perceptions to shift even more and people start thinking we live in a police state.
But the reality is that they’re doing ⅓rd of the work. They’re literally arresting fewer people. If anything, that makes it _less_ of a police state than before. And the law that ICE is upholding was passed last amended in by Congress in 1996, so it’s not like Trump has suddenly given them a new job to do.
So yea, I would say that it’s a misperception. The perception doesn't appear to agree with the objective facts.
I should probably have said “removed” rather than “arrested”, since not every person removed gets arrested. I am using the DHS’s own statistics <https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2022/table3...> which cover every year from 1892 to 2022. For Biden’s term and Trump’s current term I used estimates found in news reports though I don’t have the links in front of me. The estimate for Trump’s current term was just for the first four months of the year.
I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?
But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people? I also remember when that psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem tweeted "suck it" when a group of people who were trying to use legal means to not get deported got deported. Fuck her.
You say it's a misperception, but I think we are all perceiving it exactly as they want us to. They are going to do whatever they can get away with by any means necessary and fuck you if you try to get in the way. Some people just think that's bad.
You might have confused two different things. There's been a bit of a fight over whether the President can intervene in Iran and Yemen recently, since Congress hasn’t declared a war. But that has nothing to do with immigration.
> psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem
If you want anyone to take you seriously then don’t call people names. State your claim without ad hominem attacks or other obvious fallacies.
> I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?
Because the Obama and Biden administrations were not going out of their way (which the Trump administration both is and is publicly flaunting that it is) to avoid providing due process under the terms of existing case law, defying "you must not deport person A to country X" orders of courts.
> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them.
"Alien Enemies Act", the War Powers Act is much newer and unrelated, but not all of the controversial deportations are attached to that.
> Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?
The Alien Enemies Act provides a pretext for deportations with less process than traditional deportation process under regular immigration law (in fact, until the courts ruled otherwise, the Trump Administration was claiming, and treating it as if, it allowed no process at all once the act was invoked and the executive branch designated the target as an alien enemy.)
Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang, not every single illegal alien from every country. So a few dozen or a hundred people, not 35k people per month. If people conflate the two and think that every single illegal alien has been declared an “Enemy Alien” according to that act then that could explain why nobody cared last year. But if that’s true then it is also another case of a gross misperception of reality on the part of the people who suddenly care enough to protest and/or send death threats to federal officers.
> Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang
There is virtually no evidence for many of the people targeted that they were members of that or any other gang, and the standarss used for that designation were laughable.
Had the courts not quickly shut down the Administration contention that expulsions under the act were not subject to challenge, it obviously would have been used much more extensively as a way to sweep up anyone the Administration wishes to deport.
While that is a valid complaint, don’t move the goalposts. The original comment was:
> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?
In other words, this guy thinks that Trump is using this act to boost the number of deportations. But the gang doesn’t have enough members to make a dent in the statistics. 35k illegals are being removed from the country every month and no gang has 35k members, or even 3k. They might have three dozen.
And I’ll reiterate that if lots of people are angry at Trump because they think that he’s using some ancient obscure law against _every_ illegal immigrant then they are suffering a misperception of what has actually been going on. If this is the reason for the sudden protests against ICE then it is a very bad reason indeed.
