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Comment by baketnk | Hacker News Reader

there's never backstory given, we're just supposed to automatically feel bad and never get to have a real story about why that decision is made.

this is less of a defense of ICE than more of a push for transparency so we don't have to deal with low information appeals to emotion.

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The backstory is that she illegally entered from mexico but CBP is in the US, Mexico won't take her back so ICE has to arrange deportation. Unsurprisingly there are no return flights from bumfuck border town to Germany so she is detained (and interrogated, her Instagram shows her giving tattoos to people in mexico) and sent to San Diego and detained until ICE arranges a flight. ICE prioritizes mass deportations so a single person likely gets put at the back of the queue.

A sane border would just block illegal entrance. But pretending that ICE should be optimized for single person expedited deportation is just stupid. While in CBP you may not be allowed to contact your lawyer the 60 days she was in ice custody was completely fair game, but she didn't for some unknown reason.

>there's never backstory given

There's no backstory that justifies indefinite detention without due process.

Sounds like due process was exactly what she got. Are you suggesting everybody gets a trial before they are deported? Or that the US has to allow you to enter if you do so legally, determined by trial? Either will result in much, much longer deportation times.

> Are you suggesting everybody gets a trial before they are deported?

Well, yes, because that's precisely what due process is?

If "everybody" doesn't get a trial before a judge, if _you_ happened to be taken by ICE[1], how would you manage not being deported?

By proving you're a legal citizen? But how do you do so if there's no due process?

[1] (for whatever reason; today it's on the suspicion to be an "illegal", based on whatever the guys smell; but tomorrow?)

Getting a trial for a visa violation is not what happens outside the US either.

Usually not a the border, no, because there it's an administrative thing, but then you are sent back to your originating country.

However, if arrested within the borders, yes, it becomes a different matter where you _are_ going through a judicial process, to assess whatever should happen, and why exactly (and to document the process).

What reason is there to think that there is any more backstory? More transparency might yield new information, but it might not. The situation might simply be exactly as it appears.

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