Wife of ICEBlock app founder speaks out after DOJ fires her

This administration sucks, but being a shareholder isn’t the same as your spouse just working on a project. She should have resigned a long time ago.

the app is protected by free speech so using it isn't illegal

"ICEBlock is a free speech protected app that illegal immigrants in the US use to evade capture"

would be more precise and still objective

would explain why the government used questionable (and actual illegal) roundabout ways to "punish" the creator instead of normal legal actions

there is no problem with saying illegal immigrants are illegal immigrants, the problem is with removing the human factor, by calling them aliens, or by pretending all are supper criminal gang members etc.

that ICE also goes after people with legal status is another problem

and the argument of "it's aliens because they are foreigner non residents" also falls apart because many illegal immigrants have become residents. Not citizens, and not always with legal status. But they are 1) civilians 2) long term residing in the US so residents anyway. What ICE does here beside hypocritically pretending alien doesn't has de-humanizing connotations is expanding the term from "foreigners trying to illegally enter the US" to people living in the US for years and often are also in the process to try to get legal status even through they entered illegally.

anyway illigal immigrants are still illegally so no need to reduce it to just people

like the KKK

or the non-negligible amount of people which wanted to join the Nazis instead of fight them (until the Nazis sunk a larger US civilian chip by accident)

or the endless amount of laws regulations tweaked in ways to systematically discriminate against (mainly) black people as enough with power didn't really want to fully let go of slavery

or the various variations of christian churches, which by US standards are sometimes just that, but by EU standards would be classified as cult (to be clear not all of them at all!!!, just some but still a surprising large amount), which not seldomly teach "conservative" values which often happen to have a large overlap with fascism

and the US had been very hands of about that, KKK crimes or that there where not few people which initially wanted to if join only on the Nazi side is mostly put under the rug to be forgotten. Similar the long trend of lynching of black people, including some gruesome mass murder is also is also mostly no thought in school or any state controlled sources, and the list goes one and one

yes not new language, but that doesn't make it wrong racist and de-humizing and pretending that "aliens" doesn't has such connotation (by administration/government) is IMHO just hypocrisy

the problem is less that ICE has always used it but how its becoming increasingly more normalized in common language and paired up with other new dehumanizing language, and more calls for more law enforcement violence and in general treating all the elements of society which are seen as harmful increasingly less as humans

and that should have you worried, as that in combination with other stuff (high polarization, quite dysfunctional government having trouble passing laws due having way to far apart world views, and the list goes one) are frighteningly very similar dynamics as you had in Germany which allowed the Nazis to size power

and it would be VERY absurd to say the US becomes another Hitler Germany, but it also is very worrisome anyway

I was over and over thought how the catastrophe of Hiterl Germany happened, what dynamics allowed the Nazis to size power, what dynamics allowed them to commit absurd crimes without the population raising up against it large scale etc. And I'm looking to the US and seeing the exact same kinds of dynamic and people being obvious and downplaying it and then I look at some always conservative but moderat-ish streamers I sometimes watched and see how this whole movement affect them how their language slowly and subtly morphs becoming increasingly more filled with dehumanizing aspects and normalization/acceptance of law enforcement violence. How again and again react to videos which pretend to be "centrist, purely objective" but are highly manipulative and dishonest but also _very_ good at it and every time more and more "Verrohung" (~brutalization, dehumanization, call for more policing with a iron fist etc.) seeps into their language. And you try to reach them and point out how they get manipulated in situations where they could see it just by closely looking at the actual video content, but you don't reach anyone anymore because the person which once was open for many honest discussions is now filled up by a righteous indignation instilled by constantly agitating them with propagandize which very clearly (from a external POV) in conflict with the US having a rule of law and non-make-pretense democracy).

And that frightens me, because that is exactly the dynamics Nazis used to size power and normalize putting Jews in Labor Camps (and later death camps, but the labor camps also used calculated mal nutrition to slowly kill them while extracting money through forced labor). And again not saying they will turn into a new Nazi country, this are different times, people, goals, discrimination, even the racism is different. BUT it's still very dangerous anyway.

And the US has a tendency to try to export force their current ideology/shit onto other western nations. Which is why people outside of the US should have all reason to worry even through they don't really have any right to get involved into US inner politics.

calling humans aliens is NEVER normal, this has always been racist discriminatory, de-humizing language.

and yes ICE has used such languages for a while, and they also have done things for a while which by international law (mainly the parts conveniently not recognized by the US) are crimes, some very heavy crimes, too (like when they split very young children of illegal immigrants from their parents and sold them to orphanages)

no it's not and never was

tourist aren't alias they are foreigners not aliens

illegal immigrants are immigrants even if they come in illegally

this always has been racist de-humanizing language used to make people not thing about this groups as humans which then is used to facilitate more extrem and violent actions against such groups

And yes you will probably find it in some laws, like especially from around the time the KKK had been big int he US. US problems with right wing extremism in forms looking quite similar to fascism predate the rise of fascism in Europe which lead to Nazis and WW2. (And lets also not forget there where quite a bunch of people in the US who wanted to join the Nazis not fight them and some companies have supplied Nazis Germany with resources (e.g. Oil) quite long into the war far beyond the "we didn't know better" point).

This kind of approach of tweaking language is btw. one of the major *parts* about how the Nazis managed to first put all Jews in Germany in Labor Camps and then later build Death Camps in Poland without it leading to a internal civil war, they used constant dehumanizing language to make people not think about Jews as humans and as such remove sympathy, pity and so on. This is also why you find stories of leading KZ personal saving some Jewish child or similar, because somehow they ended up seeing that individual child as human again and in turn started having feeling of sympathy, pity and in general "killing them being wrong". But only to that specific individual not the group of prisoner in general.

To be clear, that isn't supposed to say MEGA is Nazis, they probably are not. But this doesn't mean you can't compare things which have similarity, like MEGA leaning propaganda using increasingly more dehumanizing language and brutal/rule by force arguments, and MEGA associated politicians mostly just going "thumps up seems fine" wrt. this propaganda, or even repeat it them self. And that should still have you very worried. You don't need to go to Nazi level bs to have a very bad situation.

> Japan

1-to-1 translating words out of context tends to not work, as it loses suitability. Like you could translate "Fremder" to "alien" and then claim German is using that language, too. But it still would be wrong as in the given context the right translation would be "stranger" or "foreigner", and alien as close to never the right translation.

> Maxico

inmigrante ilegal, extraño, extranjero. And yes extranjero can be translated as alien _or foreigner_, but this again is where subtilities of languages and languages in general not having a perfectly 1-to-1 mapping words come in. Also the translation of illegal immigrant is still inmigrante ilegal, not extranjero ilegal. Also putting all that aside when was the last time mass murder wasn't quite frequent in Mexico? Like there is a good reason why people flee this country and try to immigrate into the US even today even if it's illegal and means being abused for cheap labor for the rest of your live.

Anyway in English Alien has a VERY different connotation then foreigner, immigrant etc. and administration pretending to not know that and that it's just a normal word for people-not-from-here is just hypocrisy.