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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

Might as well say the same thing here that I said on Twitter: this is a waste of government resources for the sake of being mean. ICE has a charter - to investigate and infiltrate border-crossing crime groups. Drugs, human trafficking, money laundering, that kind of thing. This particular op had no chance of finding anything like that. It was targeted at people who posed no harm to anybody. Yes, maybe it could have caught a few of the people ICE is supposed to be looking for, but almost by accident. The price in both dollars and in liberty was too high for that to be a strategy, and there's no way that was even in the minds of the people who planned or implemented it.

ICE as it exists should be abolished. Even some ICE old-timers who were doing its real work say so. A new agency with ICE's original charter would be a reasonable thing to have, but there's no way to get that under the current structure.

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Well said. I wish they would actually go after the fraudulent diploma mills and sham universities that exist only for visas. Why not run sting ops against them by posing as students instead of against fricking students trying to maintain immigration status?

I lost it at this:

>The Department of Homeland Security’s list of certified schools where international students can enroll includes the University of Farmington.

I don't know the specifics but can someone explain why this is not entrapment?

What next, leave warm blankets near the homeless saying they're free to take and then arrest them for theft?

Also DHS's list of certified schools just lost all its meaning and legitimacy. If MIT is on that list it might as well be a fraudulent university for all we know.

This kind of shenanigans will just further plummet the already lower university enrollment.

Enrolling in the school ostensibly isn't illegal per se.

Can there be civil suits against the government for time and money wasted in enrolling into fake universities that are fraudulently certified as legit?

I am struggling to find a good analogy here. Like a fake cop that is certified as legit by the police department? Wouldn't that make him a real cop as far as the law is concerned? How is this a fake univ if it's certified as legit by ICE?

> why this is not entrapment

because they are charging the recruiters too! Hahaha this is hysterically bad, so because government agents werent the ones getting people to do what they wouldnt have otherwise done

And because deportation isnt a criminal charge

All necessary elements for an entrapment defense

But The recruiters might have a defense and do face criminal charges

> And because deportation isnt a criminal charge

but isn't it entrapment of the recruiters?

I don't know, it may be legal but it's not ethical.

Yes there is a possible argument

> so because government agents werent the ones getting people to do what they wouldnt have otherwise done

If the recruiters were acting on the government agents' instructions, it still counts as entrapment.

Presumably they're not being charged with attending a phony university. They weren't "entraped" to be here without a visa.

How is the university phony if it's certified by the federal government as legit?

Presumably there is a process that needs to be followed by the DHS before a school is certified as legit.

They transferred their valid visas from a legit university to this "phony" university. How can that result in 'no visa' if the university is certified by the govt as eligible to grant visas to international students?

If you are setting up a sting, wouldn't you want it to look legit as possible? ICE is part of DHS so it makes sense they would add it to their own list if the goal was to catch people attempting to exploit the program. If a student enrolled in this institution, it wouldn't have taken long for them to realize this was a sham and transfer out if they were truly seeking education. I believe it wasn't entrapment because ICE only set up the fake university, they didn't actually recruit people to it. That was other "students/recruiters" who were enrolled and helping others out to join (hence the indictments of the 8 recruiters). Also in there was this in the article: >Khaalid Walls, a spokesman for ICE in Detroit, told local news station WXYZ that the students had entered the United States legally on F-1 visas after being accepted to legitimate schools and had later transferred to the University of Farmington.

If they were accepted to legit schools and then transferred to this one it seems likely that they weren't seeking education, but a means to stay here, which would be in violation of the visa.

Complaining about the executive branch enforcing the law is like complaining to an umpire about the rules of baseball. Want to change the law? That's what legislators are for! The laws in question were put in place long before the current administration took the executive seat.

The best way to change a law that reasonable people disagree with, is to enforce it effectively.

Executive branch makes decisions about priorities all the time. They certainly don't enforce all the laws all the time with the same effort.

It makes sense to complain, criticise or defend those decisions.

The executive's ability to be flexible with the law is supposed to be used expeditiously when it's urgent. For example, it would be appropriate to suspend ICE operations temporarily during a national emergency. The executive isn't supposed to just unilaterally decide that some law is "too mean" and then stop enforcing that law indefinitely. It's shocking that people so hostile to the executive body seem to wish for the executive body to gain implicit legislative power!

>It's shocking that people so hostile to the executive body seem to wish for the executive body to gain implicit legislative power!

The executive body already has implicit legislative power. There are 2 arguments. How they use that power, and whether they should have it in the first place.

You can have both of those arguments simultaneously.

That shocking thing is part of justice system in USA, explicitely. (In contrast, in Germany cops+prosecutors are indeed legaly obligated to prosecure all crimes they know of, but in USA they don't. )

"We won't prosecute this or that crime" is even sometimes announced.

GP said that the executive does exercise such discretion all the time, which is true. Talking about how it should use that discretion judiciously (not expeditiously BTW) is a non sequitur.

That's not how our system works for better or worse. The executive branch has co-opted much of congress's authority over the years, so we now have a system where the executive branch is also a legislative branch.

You can complain about the long term problem, and the short term problem at the same time.

Executive branch or legislative branch, not a huge difference, they both serve at the will of those who put up the money to get them elected. Elections are where the people decide which capitalists get to use the government to advance their financial interests. That is the long-term problem.

This isn't about the fact that they're enforcing the law. It's about how. Even if I loved the way the law is, I'd still object to enforcing it in a way that takes resources away from catching serious criminals and uses them instead to go after people who pose little to no threat.

According to the article, the university wasn't really teaching classes and it didn't have a real campus: the resources used for this sting are not that high.

Speculating here, but what if the 8 recruiters who were charged are people who make a business out of finding people with expiring visas, and counseling them about ways to stay in the country, while charging them a fee? "Hey, I heard you have visa troubles. You give me $1,000 plus expenses, and I make those visa troubles disappear." If it's something like that, then heck yeah resources should be devoted to catching those guys!

> the resources used for this sting are not that high.

How would you like to pay for it out of your own pocket then? Even if it cost no more than several ICE agents' time, it's still a much more significant waste than you're trying to portray. Let's try to keep this factual, OK?

The fact that you say "those guys" is telling. The focus should be on efficiency and effectiveness relative to ICE's mission, not on making sure that "we're hurting the right people" (as the unintentionally-honest meme goes).

When I said "those guys", that was clearly referring to hypothetical criminals in the immediately preceding three sentences. Has HN really sunk to the level now where we attack people for uttering forbidden noun-phrases like "those guys", without even examining the context in which they're uttered?

>hurting the right people

No-one wants to hurt people just for fun. I speculated about a situation in which the charged recruiters would unambiguously be harming society and it would be imperative for the state to protect society from them. I don't know if that situation is what's really going on, there isn't enough info. The point is it's not necessarily a case of Disney-villain ICE agents pulling wings off of flies for giggles (which is how a lot of commenters are treating it).

>How would you like to pay for it out of your own pocket then?

I do, it's called taxes, and I'm fine with that.

Yeah, the alt-righters have gotten pretty good at the whole "I'm being unfairly attacked for saying something completely innocent" after they say something that supports that agenda. Yawn

The cruelty is the point.

> The cruelty is the point.

No, it isn't. If you took any time to talk to any of the tremendous number of reasonable, empathic people working at ICE, you could not say that with a straight face.

The mandate of ICE is to enforce immigration and customs laws, not to "be cruel to foreigners" or some such. Making a dehumanizing moral caricature of people you disagree with is not helpful to anyone who needs help.

Cruelty is the point. ICE is not on the right side of history.

ICE impersonates the LAPD, making their jobs more difficult. The LAPD has requested they stop doing this.

Homeland wants to be separated from ICE because ICE is hurting the broader org’s reputation and making it harder to keep the country safe.

ICE is so far off the rails, it is indefensible.

Please link me to the tremendous number of reasonable, empathic people working at ICE who are speaking out against the injustices committed by their organization. I'll wait.

Nice strawman, barely anyone is accusing the rank and file of ICE of cruelty, there might be a few bad apples here and there though. But the cruelty is coming from higher up political appointees like Stephen Miller.

Which results in ridiculous bullshit like this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-u...

Can you tell me how the above situation is not cruel?

> https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-u...
USCIS is not ICE. When USCIS refers people to ICE (the topic of this article), ICE has their own procedures which have more to do with carrying out immigration and customs law than "cruelty".

The orders are coming from the same people on top. It's a distinction without a difference at this point.

Just enforcing the law doesn't make their actions not cruel. When the political heads of those agencies in charge of the agencies are talking about "deterrence", "self deportation", or enforcing the law in the most maximalist way (e.g.: family separation). Their mandate is to enforce those laws but they're going about it in a way designed to hurt.

>A new agency with ICE's original charter would be a reasonable thing to have, but there's no way to get that under the current structure.
One of the strong points of the current president is kicking out illegals, so it could be argued that abolishing the ICE would be simply antidemocratic.

Illegals? You mean undocumented residents?
Personally I don’t think the president has any strong points other than being a racist, misogenoist, pathological liar, and narcissist.

If you're committing visa fraud you're no longer undocumented and you are indeed there illegally.

If your visa expires, wouldn't that mean that you're here without valid documentation, ie, undocumented? You were formerly documented, and you have been undocumented.

Few of them are undocumented. There’s plenty of documentation on them - in schools, emergency rooms, police reports. As you well know, your term “undocumented” is designed to trivialize the border and deprecate the very concept of American citizenship.
At a minimum, refer to them as unauthorized immigrants, since that is the distinguishing factor from a public policy perspective.

Labeling people as illegals is merely meant to dehumanize them. I wasn’t trivializing the border and so your response is no more than a straw man.

No it's not. They are humans who are breaking the law and who shouldn't be in the US. Nobody is saying they are not humans. Just that they don't get to stay in the US without following the process.

This is a political talking point to scare poor and uneducated white people. It’s why we are willing to penalize folks who were brought to this country as children and use this future for political gains.

> Labeling people as illegals is merely meant to dehumanize them.
No more than labelling those who commit crimes as criminals.
Subjects of foreign states — i.e. aliens — who are present illegally are illegal aliens. That's what they are (in addition, of course, to being human beings, with parents and rights and hopes and dreams and all the rest).
Labelling them 'undocumented immigrants' is a bit too cute, since many of them do retain the identifying documentation issued by their states. It's also begging the question of whether they should be immigrating at all.
For myself, I philosophically tend towards completely open borders, but I do wonder about the practical implications, and I dislike the blatant dishonesty & appeals to emotion common on both sides of the issue.

"Undocumented resident" is an even worse euphemism - it's not like these are people who simply lost their papers, or people who were entitled to those papers and just forgot them.
These are people who are inside the US in violation of immigration law.

I don’t think it’s a worse euphemism. The people who I see angry about “illegals” are the same ones who think blacks are all criminals and it would be great if we could to to the good old days when blacks were segregated, women didn’t have the right to vote, and white men ruled supreme.

Now who’s dehumanizing people?

> A new agency with ICE's original charter would be a reasonable thing to have, but there's no way to get that under the current structure.
It seems to me that you can run ICE without necessarily having figures like Joe Arpaio or Donald Trump as ideological sponsors while accomplishing the same job.
I've read on a few occasions that immigration was even more strictly enforced under Obama's administration, but it was done without xenophobic rhetoric, which seems ideal.

> ...but it was done without xenophobic rhetoric, which seems ideal.
To anyone who is listening rather than assuming, it seems that the Trump administration has done it without xenophobic rhetoric as well.

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