US unveils new app for 'self-deportations' | Hacker News Reader

US unveils new app for 'self-deportations'

bbc.com

16 pointsFriedPickles8 comments

The next step is they will try to somehow make failure to self-report a felony, and then leverage that into claiming that "only felons" are being deported.

The article alludes to it at the end:

> In late February, the administration said it would create a national registry for undocumented migrants and those failing to sign up could possibly face criminal prosecution.

This is significant because most undocumented immigrants arrived normally and then overstayed a visa, which is not a felony nor misdemeanor, but an even lower category of "civil infraction"--like a parking ticket.

But how can the Federal government access that data re: parking tickets etc.? Given that (if I understand the USA right) such things would be held at a municipal or state level at best?

Does this foreshadow a massive Federal government data hoovering? Which, sigh, I'm sure DOGE will feed into an LLM.

> such things would be held at a municipal or state level at best?

Correct, the immigration laws (and databases) involved are all federal. However there are are shared legal conventions, such as the spectrum of trivial-to-major and how things are named. (Kind of like how logging levels are often INFO, WARN, ERROR, etc. across many pieces of software.)

Here I'm discussing the trivial end of the (shared) spectrum, but I'm using a non-federal example because it's something more people will recognize and relate-to. The majority of laws an individual American encounters are state-level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classes_of_offenses_under_Unit...

> Does this foreshadow a massive Federal government data hoovering?

The federal government can't compel states to "do their work for them", so getting special access to non-public state databases will probably depend on whether the state leadership decides to help make it happen.

Two contrasting examples:

* https://www.courthousenews.com/washington-sues-county-for-he...

* https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/03/10/despite-profiling-c...

So, if you're in a Republican state, you're far more likely to get caught up in this due to a compliant state government, I guess?

Or the Federal govt can strongarm your state into compliance by withholding Federal money?

I imagine California is in a position to tell them to jog on, but sheesh.

Spending a ton of money to potentially jail a lot of people who otherwise were doing better things than sitting in jail…

CoreCivic, the large publicly traded prison company, had their share price almost double after the election https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CXW/

Ah, America, the land of the free (enterprise prisons).

So they want to waste resources in courts and keep them in jails to feed them?

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