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Comment by paulintrognon | Hacker News Reader

I have trouble understanding from this article what the problem is with ICE (I'm from outside the US). The developpers disagree with the whole purpose of ICE, because they trakc refugees, so they don't want github to have anything to do with them, is that correct?

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"Track" is a bit of an oversimplification: they also imprison US citizens who they suspect might be foreign, along with the actual foreigners, of course.

ICE releases teen US citizen wrongfully detained for over 3 weeks:

https://nypost.com/2019/07/24/ice-releases-us-citizen-18-wro...

ICE wrongly arrested over 1,000 US citizens in recent years:

https://thehill.com/latino/385261-ice-wrongly-arrested-over-...

U.S. Citizen Who Was Held By ICE For 3 Years Denied Compensation By Appeals Court:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/01/540903038...

How ICE Works to Strip Citizenship from Naturalized Americans:

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/ice-denaturalization-nat...

U.S. Citizens Targeted by ICE: U.S. Citizens Targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas:

https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-polic...

And that's not touching upon some of their more grievous ethical violations.

ICE is effectively a way for the executive branch to do away with due process.

"Track refugees" is an extremely charitable summary. I'd recommend reading the open letter [1] on GitHub and following some of the links. A short excerpt (with lots of links in the letter):

> ICE conducts random violent raids throughout the United States, invades communities and workplaces with military equipment, detains busses and trains, and arrests people solely on the basis of their perceived nationality, skin color, or native language. Their agents lurk outside of schools in order to abduct the children of immigrants and force their families to surrender themselves into custody. ICE imprisons people in deplorable and unsanitary conditions and denies them medical care.

[1] https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0

I think you forgot to include the actual link to the GitHub repo: https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0

Whoops, yes I did. Updated! Thanks.

I’m also non-American, but my ex is an American who campaigns against ICE. Her memes state that the problems with ICE are the conditions that refugees are held in, and that they separate children from their families. She also states that ICE target people based on skin colour even when their targets are e.g. citizens of the USA.

She is also of the opinion that the cause of the refugees seeking refuge is the bad behaviour of the Americans government, and she fundamentally opposes borders.

As I’m neither American nor a resident of America, I cannot vouch for how accurate her beliefs are, only that those are her beliefs.

Edit:

Just remembered, she went to one of the child detention facilities as part of her campaign support efforts in… I think it was the most recent California governor’s election? So she’s probably quite justified in her beliefs.

That is the extreme liberal belief, yes.

In reality ICE has a tough job of having to enforce borders when the extreme liberals have a belief of "no borders".

Unfortunately countries can't operate without borders.

All the other "evil" things listed in this thread can be torn apart one by one, it's a thin spin and morally it all falls apart when you realize that the main atrocities are the girls being raped (33% according to doctors w/o borders) that are dragged across the desert.

Blame the people dragging kids over, not the people giving them shelter.

To the "lock" comment below:

Child-locks on car doors are locks on the outside. It's for protection.

And they aren't dragging their kids, it's usually "a" kid.

They're doing it because they have incentive. Yes everyone wants a better life, but we can't support the world's population.

Every country has quotas, if you say otherwise you're living in a fairy tale.

Ever wonder why people drag themselves — never mind their kids — over a desert?

And “shelter” is what people like my ex want to provide. Shelters have the locks on the inside, though, and the detention centres have the locks on the outside.

> Ever wonder why people drag themselves — never mind their kids — over a desert?

Because life sucks in many parts of the world. Ever wonder how the borderless utopia your ex supports is actually supposed to scale?

> And “shelter” is what people like my ex want to provide.

She wants to provide it, or she wants others to provide it? How many people is she personally willing to host in her home and materially support?

> She wants to provide it, or she wants others to provide it? How many people is she personally willing to host in her home and materially support?

She wants to provide. And she’d break herself to support as many as possible at her own expense if she could.

If everyone like her was allowed to, there wouldn’t be any cost to anyone else.

Why doesn't she spend her time & money to build housing in Mexico? Surely it (the housing and the cost of living there) would be way cheaper than in the US...

No idea, never discussed it.

Out of interest, why not let the migrants build their own houses? It’s not like houses are a finite resource.

You can, but you need to do proper zoning and follow building codes. Otherwise shanty towns happen, then a hurricane rolls through and everyone dies.

It’s often not actually their kids. Using kids to take advantage of the system was and is a well known cartel tactic for getting across the border, and addressing this was the genesis of the child separation policy that began under the Obama administration. It is indeed terrible, but so is leaving kids with so-obviously-not their parents - especially girls, who have to endure a horrific rate of sexual abuse on the way to the US.

The people who are overly compassionate here are contributing to a human trafficking apparatus that is truly ghastly in its scale.

Irrelevant.

No, she doesn't want to provide them shelter. She wants to make them citizens, by the millions, with no plan for how our economy and society will integrate them.

If she's really being honest, she'll admit that she's looking to import individuals who will be dependent on the state for support, thus securing a large new voting block for her political party.

Regarding “can’t support the world’s population” — neither can Rhode Island support the entirely of the USA’s population.

I’ve never understood the attitude that a USA-internal-state border is really more important than an international border. I get the benefit of stopping smuggling and dealing with different sales taxes, but that applies to both.

The disparity in quality of life, economy, freedom, etc, between the 50 states is not nearly as great as it is between the United States and many Central and South American countries. There is no material reason, economic incentive, or political driver for an unsustainable mass of people to stream into Rhode Island. There are many such reasons for folks to try to enter the United States.

Essentially. Although illegal immigration is but one of the many responsibilities of ICE they are heavily criticized and often demonized for their... interesting way of handling certain situations (such as the detention camps on our southern border)

The dislike of ICE appears much more prominent in more left-leaning areas such as the coastal cities. As with any topic there are many moderates on either side with their own opinions and also more vocal, radical, opinions as well.

I think it has to with the human rights issues that are supposedly being violated by ICE at the moment. Human rights issue such as: Separating families, criminalizing asylum seeking, concentrating people of certain ethnicity in camps, etc.

The issues are that people are put into ICE detention centers until their legal status can be determined. There have been multiple policies in regards to kids. Either keep them with the parents or separate them.

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