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Comment by wbronitsky | Hacker News Reader

Who said "you can't arrest people who cross the border illegally"? I will not discuss this with you while you continue to whip out Straw Man arguments, nor will I engage with your aggressive manner.

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Not OP but what confuses me that I don’t know how it’s possible to arrest families without separating them. In a hypothetical situation where a family of four (mom, dad and two kids) cross illegally and ICE catches them. They are arrested.

What is the desired outcome? The options I can think of are: 1) Let them go 2) Don’t arrest them at all 3) Arrest one parent, let the other parent free in the US with kids 4) arrest both parents, set the kids free alone 5) arrest both parents, let kids stay with citizens 6) arrest both parents, let kids stay with non-citizens 7) arrest all four, keep kids in jail 8) arrest parents, detain kids in non-prison weird foster care thing

All of these seem to suck for me and make me confused.

Are there other options that I’m missing? I’m against separating families and putting kids in cages and want to solve it. What are the options that we can do?

Until relatively recent history, "let them go" with an order to appear in court at a later date was the SOP for anyone without a criminal history. I'm not sure what the official name for this policy was, but political operatives sometimes use the pejorative "catch and release" to describe it.

Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor. Unless we start separating and detaining families indefinitely for speeding and public intoxication, we should probably stop doing it for crossing illegally.

Otherwise, we should change the laws regarding illegal crossing to make the procedures and penalties more explicit. As it stands now, locking up non-violent offenders for illegal crossing is a totally arbitrary policy dictated by the whichever administration is in power. There's nothing in the laws that say families have to be detained (and thus separated.)

That’s a good point, so that would be 9) arrest both parents, charge with misdemeanor, release on zero dollar bail. If amnesty granted then wipe arrest. If amnesty not granted, deport.

I support the idea of release on zero dollar bail for all nonviolent misdemeanors for first or maybe even second time offenders.

It seems like the penalty for this crime is max jail time six months [0] so definitely should at least be releasing people who have been detained longer than this.

Public intoxication varies by state (in Florida it’s max 90 days [1]) and it’s not a federal crime. Speeding is really not a comparable misdemeanor as to get to jail time you have to get to reckless driving or something, a crime that would definitely get you arrested if you had two kids in the backseat.

I don’t know of an appropriate misdemeanor comparison that is respectful as using petty theft or prostitution or trespassing may have similar penalties but leave a bad taste in my mouth because don’t seem appropriate comparing to a family trying to enter the US. Maybe failure to pay child support [2] would be equivalent if somehow both parents got charged with it at the same time. They would be subject to a misdemeanor and six months in jail.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325 [1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/florida-publ... [2] https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/criminal-penalties-for-fai...

The problem with comparing "catch and release" with letting someone out on bail/with a citation for public intoxication is that for the latter, we have a positive identification for the person in question, we know where they live, and generally they have a lot to lose from failing to show.

This isn't really the case for people crossing the border illegally. Almost by definition they won't have a permanent address or a life to be uprooted from (or if they do, they're already uprooted from it - that's why they're crossing the border), and if they're set free they most likely won't have legal ways to support themselves. (No green card == no legal employment prospects)

I'd love to see historical rates of people showing up for their court hearings in illegal immigration cases like you describe, though - maybe I'm wrong!

And yet, until the early 2000s (I wonder what happened right around then...) that was exactly our policy.

Even today, +80% of families released show up to their immigration court hearings after being released[1]. (edit) Here's data going back to 2001 showing +90% appearance rate[2]

The idea that we have to hold them indefinitely (and thus split children apart from parents) or else they might slip away and get lost in the system is based on an assumption that the people we're detaining don't want to do the right thing. The vast majority of them do. The reason they're crossing illegally is usually because they are fleeing a time-sensitive problem (domestic violence, gangs, etc.) that they can't wait for our immigration bureaucracy to sort out and let them in "the right way." Once they're here, they seem very willing to be in the system if it means getting a chance to stay.

[1] https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/ [2] https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/fact-check-asylum-...

Thanks for the info!

9) toss the entire family back across the border (immediately) 10) arrest parents, toss kids back across the border 11) keep kids, toss parents back across the border

(I think those are even worse, for the record)

5/8 are what we do for other crimes, though. And that's part of the reason this is such a good scissor - a lot of people see others saying "you can't break up illegal immigrant families!" and wonder why that doesn't apply to the families of US citizens, too.

Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor on par with reckless driving. We do not arrest entire families because their father was reckless driving.

I had a single parent friend who had ver kids put into foster care because ve was arrested for reckless driving.

I don’t think illegal entry is the same as reckless driving, but I think in a situation where both parents were driving a car 120mph with two kids in the back seat, the cops would try to find family to take the kids or put them in foster care.

I think in this situation, the problem is compounded because likely friends and family are less likely to come to jail for fear of being arrested due to status.

I think a worthy cause would be some sort of big foster care movement where children are kept in super nice homes while parents are arrested and detained.

Do we arrest children who are caught reckless driving, though? I bet we do.

Unless you're saying that after the father crosses illegally into the US, ICE invades his home country and kidnaps his family?

You’re saying that a 3 year old is breaking the law. Don’t be stupid.

I mean, mechanically... They kinda are? We don't prosecute most toddlers lawbreaking, but that's more due to mental requirements for culpability than 'it's not a crime if a toddler does it' or other such shit.

Also, back to the drunk/reckless driving analogy - I wonder what the police do when someone gets arrested doing that with their kids in the back?

"Don't separate families" is equivalent to "don't arrest people who say they're a family" - in effect if not in intention.

Again, you throw around a Straw Man to service your point of view. I'm not here for this. Good day.

You said "that's a straw man". I attempted to show how it wasn't - specifically that there wasn't a gap between the thing you called a straw man and the beliefs you thought the code author had. You then continued to call it a straw man without elaborating how.

I'm not sure that I'm the person refusing to engage here.

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