An 'administrative error' sent a Maryland man to an El Salvador prison

It’s like civil trespass. You don’t need a trial to kick someone off your property. And when the police remove them, they’re not being punished.

Deportation is not an “extreme sanction” if it’s proven that someone is not a U.S. citizen. Non-citizens have no right to remain on U.S. soil except what the government chooses to extend.

Let’s say I do get a tourist visa, get admitted at the border, and the second I cross it, I begin openly violating the terms of the tourist visa. Can the government deport me right there and then, or am I entitled to a full jury trial that decides my deportation?

Finally, let’s say that I violate my tourist visa covertly instead of overtly, so that the government finds out only 3 years later. You seem to be claiming in your comment that at that point, I am certainly entitled to a jury trial. If you answered “no, you’re not entitled to trial” in the previous scenarios, what exactly do you think has changed that makes me entitled to it now?

So the scope of what’s at issue here is compliance with whatever “protection from deportation” might exist where someone has been found to be deportable due to gang ties, and found to lack a valid asylum claim. What possible justification could there be, and are we going to let all the 22 million illegal aliens in the country invoke such third-string justifications?

I believe the people sent to a gulag would dislike more people not eschewing the sanctity of a internet forum, than someone 'trivializing' their suffering by using them for argument about how their situation should be discussed in said forum.

The value is that right now a HN user on a visa could be disappeared in to dungeon for months for political speech if Marco Rubio's goons notice him.

You may be familiar with the layer structure of communications: Internetwork layer,below that transport, below that link layer, and at the bottom the physical layer. The physical layer is where it gets really messy: noise, interference, reflections,whatever.

In human interaction, at the bottom layer is the simple fact that at any time, any human can just not follow the rules. That's not necessarily wrong. Maybe the rule just isn't important, and everyone recognises that. Or maybe some deep moral principle should override it. But at that point, other people have to make a moral call - do they ignore this breach of the rules? Do they object? Do they assess the moral principle as overriding?

The military have some usefully neutral terms for behaviors, one of which is 'revisionist'. A revisionist power wants to change the rules, a status quo power wants to keep them. It's fairly clear that the US government is presently a revisionist one. That means that pretty much everyone has now to make the call as to whether what they see is allowable or, given the scale and power of the US federal government, a five-alarm fire. And they will often want to take that to places where they have some kind of trust in the intelligence or good will of the other people there. For a lot of engineers, that's right here. If this were a workplace or uni, there would be break rooms and water-coolers where this kind of discussion could go. But HN has none of that - there's only one category of discussion. So if you flag every such discussion, you're denying them the opportunity to do that. And that's not keeping politics out of HN - that's a political act itself.

If you think you can bury your head and ignore politics for any amount of time, you are mistaken. Your purchases, comments, and actions are all political and strategic, whether you want to believe them to be or not.

As the person who you responded to noted, you don't know why other people flagged a thread. None of us do. That you believe it's due to tribal battles is your own projection.

What's not a projection is that many people chose to have a discussion on a topic despite the flag, and that's interesting, so maybe worth discussing.

However there is a large difference in mindset between the following:

1. I don't like the topic or the conversation, so I'm closing the tab or leaving.

2. I'm going to shit on the people who are talking, and force THEM to leave.

That's what flagging does.

And I'm arguing that flagging a post with 150+ comments where people are having spirited discussions is a terrible poisonous thing for a community.

This community DOES generally have a higher level of discourse than other parts of the internet and I don't believe that is wholly because we avoid contentious topics. (thus my vim vs emacs example)