Hacker News Reader

Comment by WatchDog | Hacker News Reader

I'm not American, thus I had no vote in the election, nor do I like Trump for a number of reasons.

However, enforcement of immigration laws has been one of the biggest parts of his election platform, if not the central part(build the wall, etc).

I imagine his voters are happy to see some action being taken.

The protestors could really do with some better optics, destroying property and waving foreign flags is just going to increase approval for military action.

If the protestors had instead marched peacefully with American flags, it would have been a much better PR win.

View on HN

> However, enforcement of immigration laws has been one of the biggest parts of his election platform, if not the central part(build the wall, etc).

If you pay attention, you will notice that immigration policies have nothing to do with what's happening in the US, and at most they are a pretext.

The Trump administration is rounding up and transfering people, including US citizens, to prisons in third world countries they have no connection with. They are doing this without due process or legal basis. They have attacked and threatened judges who can and did opposed these actions. Lately the Trump administration is even threatening elected officials, including governors, with imprisonment.

Now you are witnessing the Trump administration illegally mobilizing both a state's national guard and the armed forces against its own citizens.

At one point anyone has to ask themselves if this is really about immigration at all.

> However, enforcement of immigration laws has been one of the biggest parts of his election platform

Then this would be a great time for him to start following them.

Many of his actions this year have been in violation of immigration laws. Incredibly brazen violation of them, in fact.

I'm so tired of hearing this type of thing. "If the protesters would simply protest correctly, then I would respect them."

News flash. The opposition is always going to say something like this to set an impossible bar for the protestors. This type of thinking undermines all protests, protects the status quo, and basically boils down to victim blaming.

Not to mention you can always have false flag operatives undermining a movement.

Do you really think MLK Jr. didn't want to punch those cops in the face that were beating people at his marches? But he had emotional IQ, discipline, and effective organization. The current crop lacks all of that and the results are showing it.

Go look at news coverage from the period, he was denounced as an agent of chaos and blamed for riots all the time. Read history, not the anodyne postcard version of it.

His behavior at his marches is well documented. He wasn't setting anything on fire or throwing rocks at police. One way brings the American center to your side, the other pushes them away. Those who ignore this do so at the peril of their own causes.

Yes, the parent's point is that despite being restrained as you describe, the establishment still tried to paint MLK as a provocateur. Which speaks to my point that the status quo faction is always going to frame protestors this way in order to undermine them.

Yes and the videos of his peaceful marches and the brutality of the police ended up discrediting the establishment propaganda against him and bringing the American center to his side. It's the most historically successful strategy in activist history, but no one wants to do that because it doesn't feel good in the moment.

And yet, we can all choose what kinds of protests we do and don't support and respect.

It's true that the opposition will say that even the best most peaceful protest is bad. But sometimes people broadly will agree with them, and other times they won't, and that depends on what's actually going on.

“I mean, they’re fine to express their protest as long as I don’t have to hear about it.”

What good is a "PR win"? Nobody would have even heard about it if they'd marched peacefully, and if they had it would have changed nobodies minds, and otherwise changed nothing. The issues for which a simple march can have any influence at all on are the ones for which the powers that be don't have strong feelings on, where they can be swayed by seeing public support for the issue. Trump has well past dug in his heels on illegal immigration, and has a large base that backs him on it (as you recognize); a fully peaceful protest would have accomplished absolutely nothing.

There are issues worth rioting over. Maybe you don't feel that illegal immigration is one of them, but you should at least understand the logic of a protest, and why sometimes becoming violent is necessary to accomplish anything.

It's relevant to mention that the trigger for these riots was federal agents administratively detaining people who are in the country illegally. These are not new federal immigration laws that Trump has passed; in fact, they were enforced thoroughly by the Obama administration, as well.

Trump is purposely manufacturing a crisis because he knows his opposition is taking a losing position. Polls have been very clear that voters want the government to enforce immigration laws. Maybe not in Los Angeles, but nationally, the left is taking the losing side of this issue.

How does a raid only target people who are here illegally? How do agents determine the identity and status of the person they're grabbing in a factory or school?

The idea is absolutely farcical. Plus, we know for sure that these raids have taken people mistakenly.

It's extra bad when the government's official position is that they can't get someone back from the foreign prison they're sent to. The threat to all citizens is clear; that's why they're resisting. "The left" may lose in the mainstream media but it's clearly the correct side of history.

Not to mention, that in most of the videos I’ve seen about detention of “illegals” - “ICE agents” look like a bunch of thugs. Facemasks, no identification features, they never introduce themselves, etc.

It’s clear since the election - Trump administration will use violence without any due process. Sort of Catch-22.

If you resist the indiscriminate purge of what Trump considers “illegal immigrants”[0] - military will be called to suppress the protests with some sort of never ending “emergency situation” established giving him full dictatorial powers.

Or he will just do the purges without resistance and achieve same goals.

“Protest voters” and democratic leadership have a lot to think about right now.

[0] lets not forget that you can be a US citizen and you can still be purged

> How does a raid only target people who are here illegally? How do agents determine the identity and status of the person they're grabbing in a factory or school?

This has been done for decades and has very established standard operating procedures. Do you think immigration raids started with Trump? This has been going on since the 1950s and there is established legal basis and agency procedures specifying exactly what the agents can and can't do, along with repeatable methods for verifying identity and legal status.

We're not talking about the same type of thing. Street corners and parking lots? You believe they know exactly who they are targeting?

Was this incident following an established procedure?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKyFzVfJZTY

Reply on news.ycombinator.com