Serious question: how did you envision "wide-scale deportations" playing out, prior to these events?
Once you actually dig in to how to accomplish something you find the devil in the details and complexity in places you didn't realized it exists. I would not believe someone is an experienced programmer unless they understand this idea in their bones.
I think so many people here, with the benefit of hindsight, are accusatory, but they've committed this very same type of error themselves.
I am vehemently against this administration, but feeling like something must be done about border violations is reasonable and thinking there is a way to do that is reasonable. I personally don't think it's the best use of resources, but I think it is reasonable to want some kind of border with meaningful enforcement.
What is not reasonable is thinking this administration would do it in good faith, rather than as a means of power grabs against the legal system, but some people aren't capable of taking heed of warnings, and must experience consequences before they understand. Some people aren't able to think through "where is the public plan that explains this" and realize that if it's not there, if there is only the concept of a plan, then that's someone vying for power, not someone attempting to solve a problem.
When people come back to reality and choose to be grounded in it, that should be celebrated rather than persecuted even if they materially caused damage by their ignorance and lack of thought. Game theory requires punishment/defection against those who don't cooperate, but it also requires forgiveness for those who repent.
When OP says "I was for wide-scale deportations until I saw people I like being deported", it's not a case of unintended consequences, it's a case of "When I voted for the leopard party I didn't think the leopards would eat the faces of people I like!"
Unintended consequences means things like "criminality increased because immigrant communities lost trust in the police".
But come on. "Families swept into jails, plain-clothes officers ambushing people on their way to work or school" is how deportations work. Being surprised by that is like being surprised that the death penalty means people get executed.
This isn't a failure of epistemology, it's a failure of empathy. OP just didn't think that the people getting deported would turn out to be people with moral value.
This isn't a good-faith interpretation of their comment.
There are plenty of illegal immigrants with a criminal record. Trump's pitch was to deport them. There was also a pitch that strongly hinted at deporting basically anyone who isn't white, and I think this appealed to the racist fifth of Americans [1], but plenty of people were messaged the first part with the second being segregated to rallies, NewsMax, Twitter, et cetera.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/poll-finds-suppo...
I keep hearing this claim, but was there ever any proof of it?
To be precise: is there any reason why criminals cannot be caught without hunting for immigrants to deport?
Because enforcing immigration policy isn’t the job of local and state police. It can be, if they choose it to be. But many haven’t for a variety of reasons ranging from moral opposition to not giving a fuck.
Furthermore, there are entire states (like Colorado) which refuse, by law, to cooperate with ICE and hold people for ICE to pick up, even when ICE has decided to step in and deport them.
Assuming that all the people who will be negatively impacted by a blanket policy will be criminals is also a failure of empathy.
Trump explicitly, repeatedly said he would deport all undocumented immigrants. That explicitly means migrants without a criminal record. Yes, he sometimes claimed that most of them were bad or criminals or eating pets, but believing that isn't a failure of epistemology! Trump didn't craft some deviously clever lie here, he just said a bunch of bullshit and people bought it because they needed a bogeyman.
As sibling comments point out, the reason these "Oh, we didn't know!" excuses from Trump voters ring hollow is that given a choice, they'd still vote for him today. They'll still vote Republican next election, the primaries will still pick the most Trump-like candidate for the party. Nothing was learned.
Because learning anything would require admitting that, yes, Trump's lies were extremely easy to see through, yes, any blanket measures against immigrants will also hurt the "good ones", and yes, Trump voters are morally responsible for the things Trump does.
Here is the thing: hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions, but you chose to put in power the people who like easy solutions. I hope it’s never late to learn a lesson.
There's actually a simple solution to illegal immigration: go after the employers. We don't because we want to have our cake and eat it too. (Same reason these raids aren't happening on farms in red states.)
The fun part is that they are allowed to work with their student Visa, and they pay the tuition fees normally, which is spicy.
So basically we have a huge gang problem right now, but instead of deporting gang criminals, we’re deporting honest Pakistani young people who are actually working legally for the country’s companies. But guess how many companies ever got in trouble for this?
It’s hard. Not complex. Simple and difficult.
Infrastructure becoming unreliable makes complexity, and undocumented immigrant labor is American infrastructure. Has been for decades.
Why? Because that's how the system was legally designed to work. You want them to stay here, because some % cases are valid (a lot surrender at ports of entry). So then you must ask yourself, what went wrong? Cartels figured out they could break the system by overwhelming it, yet we had a clear cut way to solve it.
The parties politicized the topic by not doing anything about it... and now here we are.
Question: When Obama/Biden supported legislation to hire more immigration judges to work through the backlog of cases, did you support the legislation as well?
There are for more just ways to handle this. These people are tyrant oligarchs, and need to be treated as such. Today's it's "those people", tomorrow it will be "your people".
https://immigrationimpact.com/2015/05/21/bi-partisan-house-b...
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/31/biden-immigration-courts-de...
An underdiscussed frustrating aspect of this whole era is that there is never any true retrospection. There is no adjustment in the credibility of the people who predicted exactly how things would play out or the people whose predictions ended up being incredibly wrong. If there is a lack of consequence for being wrong, it ends up meaning there won't be any consequences for maliciously lying in the moment knowing it's only a matter of time until they are proven wrong because when that day comes, they have already moved onto some other lie and the cycle continues.
The last time we made this guy president.
This isn't really a surprise [0]
[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/846/this-is-the-cake-we-bak...
The real tragedy is that immigration is probably the reason we've outpaced other OECD nations in economic growth recently, and more to the point, immigrants almost always drive wages up. TL;DR: immigration is practically all upside.
The second part of this is that immigration and border enforcement is often pretty cruel, just by nature. You're talking about turning kids back into some Central/South American social system, breaking up families, etc. You only hear about it now because the Trump admin perversely rejoices in trumpeting the cruelty, but it's only slightly more gross now than it usually is. Until Trump, the right used to leave this part out.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/how-does-immigration-affect...