ICE Will Use AI to Surveil Social Media
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/26/ice-detains-...
Has anyone thought about their position for 5 seconds? There is NO islamic country with a right to free speech. Zero. Not even countries like Morocco or Turkey have anything remotely like free speech, and they're the most open Islamic countries imaginable. There are dozens of islamic countries with death penalties for criticism of islam or government (and even Morocco and Turkey have prison sentences for that). CAIR is representing these countries' interests in the US, and they are arguing for free speech protection ... in the US. Not in the over 200 countries where muslims use state violence to control speech. In the US. They are making zero efforts to protect free speech anywhere else.
Obviously no sane person can reasonably consider these people to be either engaging in free speech or protecting free speech, can they?
I, too, love taking someones papers and removing them from the country over their speech. I cheer on the army of government agents scanning social media for wrongthink so that we can rid the country of anti-Israel sentiment.
Saying you hate $NATION and that you want it destroyed is definitely saying you don't want to be there and it's probably a good idea not to have you there.
What is being argued is that the government doing this goes against our values as Americans. It's interesting to observe the same side (right-wingers, libertarians) hold water for these actions while they were painting social media bans as censorship and a violation of their First Amendment rights.
Maybe you didn't do that, but your comment certainly reads like a "well, technically their visa can be revoked" argument which is true, but misses the spirit of the First Amendment.
EDIT: there might be legal issues too depending on the reason for revocation but I'm not a legal expert. Most things in our constitution apply to people and not just citizens so someone visiting the US also has free speech rights.
It also depends on the severity of what someone is doing... there's a difference between speech and action. Saying you disagree with the administration, vs taking hostages and seizing part of a school are different things. Saying you would like to see amnesty for those who entered illegally is different than defrauding the govt, flaunting it on social media and trying to ram a car into a federal agent.
> If someone came into my home, told me they hate me, my way of life, want me dead and starts setting fires in my living room
This analogy doesn't hold up because it's your house, of course you have the right to keep whatever company you like. Same for social media companies. You're not the government.
It's called an analogy. As a citizen, this nation IS my home.
"The president shall not cancel anyone's health insurance while they're in an ambulance on the way to hospital". The constitution does not say that either. It doesn't go into that level of detail.
It doesn't even say that when the government issues a permit (a building permit, visa to travel, a driving license, whatever) then the president can't revoke it on a whim.
I think most people would want government to be trustworthy, reliable etc., though. If you get a license to operate a business or permission to return home from a conference, you should be able to rely on having that.
Yet they really care about free speech ... in America. THAT is where the free speech problem is according to them. Am I really the only one having trouble believing that this is a genuine attitude? Oh and they only defend their version of free speech, with limits on "hate speech" (but not Sami Hamdi's kind of hate speech of course), limits on criticism of religion, and limits on criticizing middle eastern governments. You know, THAT kind of free speech. CAIR, in the US, is really arguing for limits on free speech, "against hate speech", against "islamophobia", against criticism of middle eastern governments, you know limits on the very thing free speech was created for (ie. to protect all criticism of religion and governments, especially foreign ones, but all governments, including the US one)
And who do they invite? Sami Hamdi.
Please go read his twitter stream and tell me if you believe people who hire this guy have any problem with hate speech. Oh and maybe it's just one issue, so filter out the Gaza conflict, and ... nope still hate speech, mostly about the UK. Okay, filter out the UK too. He's defending people who went "on a Jew hunt" in the Netherlands ... This guy is not a moderate in any way shape or form.
Here's the link: https://x.com/SALHACHIMI
I'm sure he'll have made 5 new posts by the time this is read and they'll be another 5 posts inciting at the very least more hatred of Israeli. You may hate Trump, but let's be blunt here: this guy is thankfully powerless, but is easily a LOT worse than Trump.
If you take CAIR's attitude at face value, limits on free speech against hate speech, they'd help deport Sami Hamdi. But clearly this kind of hate speech they don't just want to allow, but protect and nurture.
What I mean is, CAIR really make themselves look really bad here. Really, really, really bad.
That's why this shift is so frustrating and disappointing to so many Americans. It would be like if the Vatican became protestant, or the UK suddenly stopped drinking tea.
If another resident is constantly talking shit about all the rest and saying he thinks they should be shot and go fuck themselves and their moms should die etc etc etc but they immediately call the police on me for telling them to fuck off, saying they felt "threatened" and "unsafe" just because I was the most recent one to move in, I'd also probably say "What the fuck?" about the double standard.
It's like having a bunch of frat bros getting rowdy at a party while the host's wife is having a mental breakdown and waving a gun around. Like the frat bro's aren't great and probably wouldn't be getting that rowdy but are they really what's ruining the vibe?
This isn't to say you can't or shouldn't speak out against anything only that when you participate in political activism, especially when accompanying those decrying a hatred or wishing destruction of the nation you are in, there can and often will be negative repercussions.
On the global scale, the U.S. is one of the less restrictive nations on this issue. Many countries will absolutely block you at the border, imprison you for years then deport you.
As to CAIR, there are a lot of groups in the US that I think are antithetical to a free society as a whole. If it were up to me, the communist groups, antifa, neo-nazi orgs, CAIR and several other groups wouldn't exist in the US in the first place. As it stands, we have freedom of speech and that protects speech you don't like... speech you agree with doesn't need protecting. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but far more in favor of the open discussion than not, the light of day is the best disinfectant. This does not include violent acts, terrorism, or the advocation thereof.
So, ah, not freedom of speech, then?
(ICE's lack of transparency is a valid, but separate, concern, and The Guardian could have at least attempted to contact them before publishing speculation.)
That's always the way it works with secret police. The idea of due process of law and norm following is (1) expressly designed to provide assurances in cases like this and (2) being deliberately degraded and evaded by ICE and DHS at all levels.
Trying to make the story actually about bland journalism criticism is doing their jobs for them. To borrow your framing: your critique is technically accurate, but...
Or if it did, then why this particular assumption? Why not assume that Hamdi was arrested because of his hair style or something?
Because he was arrested in the US?
Right, which is why I called you out for bringing it up. Make your bland criticism of the Guardian in a journalism forum.
If the standard for criticizing clear ICE overreach (and yes, an unexplained detainment is very clear overreach for a department who are statutorily just supposed to be checking visas) becomes "You have to be able to prove that ICE was wrong before saying anything", then that simply makes them the secret police.
It just doesn't seem to be a good faith discussion of the situation, and in particular it makes your position seem decidedly pro-secret-police.
[1] Which amounts, basically, to "Mildly sensationalist mid-tier news outfit used a sensational headline". It's boring.
... I mean it absolutely does. What on earth are you _supposed_ to do? Give the unaccountable secret police the benefit of the doubt?
Exactly. Even if this guy holds beliefs that aren't aligned with those of the US government, so what? That is not a reason to detain or refuse entry to a place that's supposed to embrace freedom of expression and of the press.
This is blatantly anti-democratic (small 'd'), capricious and just one more example of the current administration's attempts to destroy a free and open society.
Yet here you guys (@ajroos, @dlubarov, etc.) arguing about why the US government is abandoning the rule of law and trying to normalize authoritarianism and bad-faith governance. It doesn't matter why. It's wrong and evil on its face.
I refuse to accept these accusations by word-of-mouth. The White House is currently accusing former presidents of "pro-Hamas rhetoric" (which they never expressed).
It would seem to me that "pro-Hamas" is a meaningless cudgel used by the ruling party to justify mistreatment of those who oppose Israel.
https://www.memri.org/reports/british-political-commentator-...
His language is simply anti-Israel.
You cannot quote a single part of the article you listed where he argues in-favor of Hamas, because he does not mention them at all. You are casting aspersions that do not exist, much in the way the White House has to resort to defaming former presidents instead of setting a morally-consistent example.
You're making a bad-faith extrapolation that most people know is desperate. If it was applied universally, you'd be crying foul too.
We can set aside the Hamas connection if you like, but in any case he was glorifying an attack that included deliberate massacres of civilians.
Because if we apply that logic across the board, then the United States and Israel are both objectively complicit in internationally illegal war crimes. Any citizens that promote their legitimacy is trying to undermine global order, obstruct legitimate democracy and prevent criminal justice for organized terrorism.
Both sides have their faults, but I'm not willing to indict Hamdi for the same reason I don't accuse US citizens of being responsible for Abu Ghraib. It's not justice, just pugilism.
That's fine. But we can both agree that bigotry is not evidence of a crime. If we expanded this "I won't believe for a second" logic further, any number of Americans could be arrested for any reason. It's a slippery slope that you are making more slippery by making immaterial correlations. What you assume is not the same as actual rhetoric.
Violence for political aims.
So yes, that necessarily includes when some alphabet soup agency makes a big show of having some mid-tier guy's door kicked in at 6am by a bunch of fed-cops for violating some law that HN loves.
We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country. It’s just a farce.
The recent ICE shenanigans (which don’t get me wrong - are awful and badly executed) are just performative bullshit to please the voter base. In fact I’d argue they are intentionally executed badly to attract media attention so they can all say they are being tough on immigrants.
They want people to stop coming here, and the threat of being sent to some torture camp in the third world won’t deter a Haitian (whose daily life already meets that description) but it will deter people from less atrocious locations.
I don't know much about him but aren't his grand parents Belarusians who came over to the US?
pulling up the ladder behind you isn't a new concept
How'd that work out for those native americans again? Maybe I'm a little reluctant to let things play out the way it did for them.
To the extent that it is comparable we would be absolutely justified in regulating immigration because the implication would be that the same thing that we did to the native americans is going to happen to us.
Its also not in any way reasonable to use the sins of the distant ancestor to delegitimize the nation's right to self-determination. Even if i accept your premise that my ancestors are comparable to immigrants i myself am not. If the argument is that the nation has no rights to control its own borders because that would constitute some sort of "generational hypocrisy" that would also mean we have an obligation to accommodate slavery and genocide because our ancestors committed and benefitted from both of those.
> The USA can tolerate one of these two things. A system of no welfare, no social services, no socialized medicine, food or housing with open borders. OR. No open boarders and highly limited, highly controlled, assimilating immigration policy. We cannot have both. When the USA had unlimited immigration over 100 years ago, we did not have Government supporting immigrants with welfare, medical services, housing, food etc.
I don't agree with Mr. Gallo here - I'm just sharing what a popular RW response is on this.
The policy in my red state is to spend public funds to treat unliked immigrants as harshly as possible, deny social welfare to citizens in need and prioritize gov resources for admin loyalists. At least it is now that courts are sufficiently captured.
Public policy discussions always get boiled down to some simple wording that isn't strictly accurate.
These people aren't anti-immigrant because of issues with immigration. They're anti-immigrant because they're hateful.
It's truly saddening that such a stance can still work when it's likely the average citizen will not encounter an immigrant in their day to day life. a million immigrants is not threatening the jobs of 300m Japanese people.
You are correct that we do not threaten jobs either. A large majority of the foreign population is working low/unskilled jobs. Generally, the native population is not wanting those jobs.
Tourists are short-term visitors who are there exclusively to spend their money in Japan and leave it with its citizens. If the Japanese do not want that because the tourists don't come fully prepared for living in Japan, then you should just deny tourist entries to the country. It would be win-win for everyone, because there are plenty of other countries who would gladly take those tourists instead.
They get blamed for a lot of crime; idk if that's true or not but it probably is, in part because American culture has less respect for authority, in part because American culture has more respect for individual liberties, and in part because any time you have a large enclave of foreigners (regardless of where they come from or which host nation they're in) they always end up committing more crime than the native population. They also get blamed for driving up prices in the real-estate market (this is definitely true, the US Navy owns 20% of Okinawa).
Blaming "immigrants" instead of specifically blaming the US military is also very convenient for both the US and Japanese government because both governments are largely in-favor of continuing the status quo so it's not surprising that politicians would obfuscate the source of the problem by blaming immigrants as a whole.
Not really. Her mother is Japanese and they moved back when she was one year old.
There is definitely a phenomenon of people sometimes supporting candidates on the basis that their ethnicity won't be used to criticize their policies but they're addressing a complaint that would be made otherwise. It also denies the agency of minorities by requiring them to be monolithic entities wherein all members agree with whatever you think their opinions should be. Would you really be satisfied if the entire trump administration was white Christian males over the age of 40?
One of the criticisms of the pro-life side of the abortion debate has always been that men are over-represented in the US federal government yet they're able to regulate an issue in which they are not directly effected. I don't know if you agree with this specific criticism or not but a lot of people do and I don't think it's fair to then complain about "tokenism" when somebody like Amy Coney Barrett who is immune to this argument gets appointed.
Bad people aren't limited to one race or anything. But far end politicians love propping up a minority on TV because then they can have an excuse whenever they're compared to historically bad political movements.
You're the only one bringing up white Christian males here, which kind of proves my point. You seem to think that for some reason I care if a politician is white or Christian. Extremist Islamic parties love propping up Christian minorities on TV and saying they'll defend them (they won't). Right wing western parties really, really love propping up a Jewish party member because they can say "we're not Nazis!!! All Nazis hated Jews and we love them!!!" Because the average person really thinks nazism was really only about killing Jewish people, when the reality was they only got around to that after several years of other awful stuff.
The LDP is propping up their 100% foreign born, foreign citizenship politician so they can say "see? We can't be anti-foreigner because the lady controlling this is a foreigner." The optics are transparent and it's even what they're astroturfing their message on social media as. Japanese politics are all about image. They don't pick a foreigner who illegally held dual citizenship to head anti-foreigner policies by accident.
People have been worrying about "ecofascism" well then why aren't you concerned about an administration whose policy is measles outbreaks for the misinformed of their constituency? Whose health minister is a rich environmental lawyer who just so happens to be a huge fan of letting disease rip?
The answer is the business owners are their constituents. They cannot afford to piss them off. If they lose their support the wheels will fall off this farcical performance.
I grew up in Florida, and I remember the sugar plantation “raids” they used to stage. They were a complete dog and pony show. They would announce them in advance so the plantations could hide most of their undocumented workers. Then they would round up just enough people for the photo op to prove they were being “tough on immigration.”
This is the same thing but on a grander and more dangerous scale.
Here's one that happened near me last month: https://cnycentral.com/news/local/breakdown-ice-detains-work... - and there are more happening in other places.
"That is outside the scope of this investigation." Nothing ever happened.
At Hormel, complaining about all sorts of strange diseases and health conditions, possibly from inhaling aerosolized pig brain all day long? Oh, look, another raid.
"Won't someone rid me of these meddlesome workers?"
Just a theory but it seems highly plausible in both these cases that the companies and ICE colluded... stage a big photo op, get rid of problematic undocumented workers and oh, hey, wouldn't you know, no plans to investigate the company?
This is also your friendly reminder that visa overstays are a misdemeanor, but for an employer, assisting or knowingly hiring undocumented workers is a felony. Tough on crime, indeed.
Is it (R) or (M) for MAGA.
I used to joke "Hello to the NSA analyst reading this!" when talking about "sensitive stuff" in private messages, but I guess that needs to be updated to "Hello to the LLM!"
Because immigration stuff isn't the primary purpose at this time. The primary purpose is to normalize a police state, to invoke feelings of fear in the general population and to build up a bigger infrastructure to do more authoritarian things.
"The purpose of a system is what it does", not what it claims to do. Today it looks like that purpose includes mass surveillance of social media.
For the most part, they've been targeting visa overstays by those who have been charged with and/or convicted of other crimes in the US. Not significantly different than under Obama. It's only that the visibility has been turned up to 11 along with ramped up protests and state/city sanctioned resistance in some locations.
As to the ramp-up in scale.. that's what happens when you let 5x the amount of people legally allowed entry to come into a nation in a relatively short period of time illegally. over 90% of asylum claims are invalid and fraudulent... there is almost no legitimate reason for crossing into the country outside a recognized port of entry.
I say this as someone who feels that immigration should generally be tied to "do you have a source of income and a place to stay?" at its' core... combined with a multiple of minimum wage as an income baseline with hefty employer side taxes to go along with. Arguments against doing so are very similar in my mind to having slavery... it's not okay, not good for the nation. I have similar feelings that "free trade" should only occur when similar quality of life or safety measures are in place. I'm optimistically libertarian minded, but recognize reality.
Just because the grunts are dead serious doesn't mean the initiative is dead serious.
Even then, serious doesn't equal competent. They are still trying to deport Abrego Garcia. Spending millions in legal fees and transport to deport a single man is not pratical in the slightest.
Turns out cruelty is very expensive to maintain, though. And we certainly do not have the economy to keep accommodating the narrative as real citizens starve and lose jobs. Something's going to break.
But you're in denial if you really think certain driven individuals in all three branches of the us government aren't dead ass serious about taking this stuff to misanthropic ends.
But their message isn't directly saying "spend 1 trillion dollars to be bigoted"
Silver linings…
I've seen some conspiracy theories that RFK, Jr, et al, want to start labor camps for autistic kids and just about anyone else his bunch can get tagged as defective or deficient or whatever, but I don't think that's going to work out like someone hopes it will.
Turns out Americans don't want to move out to rural areas to be paid minimum wage to do hard farm labor. Who knew?
That's the only real upside to this gig economy. Their competition isn't just flipping burgers, but anyone who has a car that can sign up to an app to make some quick cash.
A Reuters poll on the White House demolitions had a 63% approval for one question and a 40% approval rating for another question - from Republican voters.
As long as there exists a content economy on the right that does’t have to pay their dues to reality, you will not stop a political machine which is based upon fantasy.
The only thing that will cut through the noise is a recession, because that cannot be spun. Even then - that would just be a speed bump; eventually the recession will pass.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251008104110/https://prospect....
It has a chilling effect on what people say and do.
You'll notice the same effect in other states that have armed people who turn up unexpectedly to make people disappear.
I’ve seen more people realize this since his Trump started beefing with Massie, but they still glaze him so hard as to not offend, that it’s basically meaningless.
You can't solve the problem at the "just regulate the employers" level because it invariably turns into a tighter regulatory capture further enriching the incumbents. Any reform will necessarily increase the competitive advantage of the current winners because they are the ones in a position to shape it.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-will-allow-south-kor...
> South Korean companies have been mostly relying on short-term visas or a visa waiver program called the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, to send workers needed to launch manufacturing sites and handle other setup tasks, a practice that had been largely tolerated for years.
It sounds to me like they had relied on a grey area. The most obvious conclusion is that pressure from the top down in ICE caused their agents to "hunt around" and look for "big arrests." When political pressure from South Korea mounted they had to reverse themselves.
Either way, if these were actually workers in the country temporarily and in good faith to set up manufacturing, then it would neither seem to be a particularly good crackdown on illegal immigration nor encouraging manufacturing to be set up in the US.
The entire article you posted just referenced short term visas after the raid and said nothing other than the nationals who were arrested were flown home. The article spent less than a sentence with what OP posted:
The announcement came weeks after South Korea flew home more than 300 of its nationals who had been detained in a massive immigration raid at a battery factory being built on Hyundai’s sprawling auto plant campus near Savannah, Georgia.
From September when the raid happened:
"This was not an immigration operation where agents went into the premises, rounded up folks and put them on buses," Steve Schrank, the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Atlanta, said at a news conference on Friday.
"This has been a multi-month criminal investigation where we have developed evidence, conducted interviews gathered documents and presented that evidence... in order to obtain a judicial search warrant," Schrank added.
He said it was "the largest single-site enforcement operation in the history of homeland security investigations".
"These [workers] are people that came through with Biden. They came through illegally."
Some 475 people who were in the country illegally or working unlawfully were detained in the operation, immigration officials said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xe5d6103o
>> frozen water gang
>> the current admin and the frozen water gang
Why do you have a problem using the term ICE??
>The statement was consistent with earlier remarks by South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, who, after traveling to Washington to negotiate the workers’ release, said that U.S. officials had agreed to allow them to return later to complete their work.
You dont suddenly allow to return someone who was justifiably deported, regardless of what the agent in charge said in the immediate aftermath at a press conference.
How do you imagine such an enforcement effort would proceed? Paint me a picture please. Illustrate a hypothetical example, just one company. What would really happen is that you'd check these businesses, and all the paperwork's in order. Social security numbers for everyone (even if those aren't their own). Without probable cause though, wouldn't even get that far, would they? They'd need that for the search warrants... not that judges are very agreeable to signing those, not when they tend to help illegals flee out the back door of the courthouse so that ICE won't wait at the front door grab and deport them.
>We are not fixing the root cause here even if you believe that immigration is bad for the country.
Sometimes all you can do is treat the symptoms.
It would fix the "problem" of all American workers who fear their job can be taken away by someone who doesn't speak the language, possibly has little education, because a large company thinks it's more profitable to hire them illegally. Nobody actually cares if someone hires their cousin at the family owned restaurant that sends money back home to his family.
But the goal actually is to have a section of society scared to report employer abuses and willing to work below minimum wage. The farmers in Iowa want the cruelty in Chicago. There was a tiny bit of deportation raids in red states at the beginning because of racism, but that was shut down quick.
You explain how to punish them, not how to determine that they deserve punishment. This fixes absolutely nothing. "Social security" won't find anything, because everyone working for those businesses has a social security number (even if it's not their own). To determine those are fake or misused, the government would have to get access to the deep HR paperwork, which would require search warrants and subpoenas, in other words, it would require "probable cause". That isn't going to happen.
>But the goal actually is to have a section of society scared to report employer abuse
Yeh, probably. But nothing you've described could help to change that circumstance.
E-verify has existed for more than a decade. Social security card + your name on another form of official identification like a license or passport. It comes back whether they are valid and match. Its literally a plot point in Superstore. You're describing a problem that only exist when the employer willingly bypasses the system, like in Superstore.
If the DMV has issued a driver's license with the fake name thats the problem of another agency and someone there has committed a fireable offense or crime since there has been large pushes across the country since the 9/11 hijackers to lock that down.
How does this make sense when cities and states have openly declared themselves "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants?
How does this work when so many of the prisons are already overflowing? So much so, judges and prosecutors are not capable of sending more people to prisons and instead use diversion programs, down charging, or dismissing more serious crimes to charge these people with lesser crimes specifically in order to avoid jail time? What about states like Minnesota that continually deviate from sentencing guidelines and allow people convicted of crimes to spend the majority of their sentence out of prison? Minnesota isn't the only state that does this either, its just in the top five who do this.
The evidence would overwhelming appear to directly contradict this theory.
A) They're building more prisons specifically to fill with immigrants
B) Sentencing trends don't really affect immigrants who are denied due process.
Correction: They're building more prisons specifically to fill with ILLEGAL immigrants. The vast majority of whom have committed crimes while here.
If you have a problem with criminals being put in jail then you have a much bigger problem with your moral compass.
Why are you advocating breaking the law by treating non-criminals like criminals?
Isn't that role of ICE? To police and enforce immigration? Doesn't ICE stand for "Immigration & Customs Enforcement"?
What am I missing here?
There is no need for a "secret police" when that is the intended, declared and funded function of their organization.
In America, immigration enforcement is not a criminal issue but a civil issue. So the proper (as in, according to the laws and norms of the last many decades) and appropriate channels through which the enforcement of immigration is meant to be resolved is the courts. The current usage of ICE as a gestapo is literally illegal (it deprives "suspects" of due process and civil/human rights), in violation of Geneva conventions, and so on.
Furthermore even if we accept the blatantly immoral and illegal idea that federal agents should be able to break and enter into homes and kidnap, traumatize, and traffic people without the slightest pretense of legal justfiability (warrants etc), the fact is that they are not even attempting to choose people by any discernable metric other than their skin color. So it is objectively not about the enforcement of the law, it is about stochastic terrorism and ethnic cleansing, as that is the only thing their actions consistently demonstrate.
It's exactly because this is not a criminal issue, the due process in immigration does not require court hearing, bails etc. The immigration court is not an Article 3 court, it could as well be named "immigration adjudication department" because it's an Executive office. If you believe you had been wronged in the immigration process then you can try to sue the government for the damages in an actual civil court, but the law does not require the government to sue you in order to enforce the immigration laws.
Your bad-faith argument does not merit a lengthy reply so I will simply say that the way this has been handled for DECADES has been to do so by sending formal notice, having court hearings to determine whether someone should be deported, THEN deporting them. The way things are being done now is the gestapo simply identify people with brown skin (now "legal" in a technical sense due to a corrupt SCOTUS ruling but ACTUALLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL and IMMORAL in reality) and shipping them to concentration camps and/or countries they have no relation to, to be used as slave labor in quid-pro-quo arrangements with foreign entities. No due process in all of that equates to cruel and unusual extrajudicial punishment and in some cases, death. NOTE that the lack of due process or even warrants or reasonable search requirements means that this CAN HAPPEN and IS HAPPENING to US citizens - to whom immigration enforcement should never even apply. NOTE that the lack of guardrails granted by SCOTUS that empowers ICE (the "E" stands for enforcement) to act as in lieu of an actual JUDICIAL process.
Next time, try not to be a nazi. All people are equally deserving of basic human rights, and that includes not being racially profiled and rounded up like slave meat for the grinder just because of the color of their skin.
So transparent.
When a domestic law enforcement agency is spending 600% more year-over-year on weapons to point at people in frog costumes it's reasonable to wonder if that may reflect a de facto change in that organization.
So ICE, is in fact being shaped into a secret police that can be used to punish anyone speaking against the regime, under the guise of being a brutal anti-immigration force.
"A secret police force" there means "a direct enforcement tool for whatever the oligarchy wants to do, legal or not".
It was a bit weird for corrections to be arresting people in DC but a lot less weird for ICE to do it.
This is where reporting and raid events from ICE come into play. That said, I'd like to see plenty of organizations actually have their leadership held accountable. The East Palestine, Ohio train derailment for example should have seen corporate executives and board members find their personal finances at risk because of the damage caused for example. The US has a very poor history of ever holding company executives accountable in general. "Too big to fail."
instead of assuming we want to stop illegal immigration and then asking why we don't do the obvious thing that would accomplish that goal (eliminating the incentive to hire illegally by punishing companies that do it such that it's not worth it on the balance sheet), look at what the situation actually is and ask yourself why people would want that. The situation right now is that there's a near-endless supply of labor that is 100% exempt from any and all labor protections by dint of if they complain the boss can just call immigration, who will disappear the laborers but not punish the company in any way. The occasional disruption due to unanticipated ice intervention is well worth the cost of being able to pay your laborers sub-minimum wage and not being responsible for workplace injuries or human rights violations.
The ultimate goal of Christian nationalists (a large part of the Republican Party) is to turn the United States into a single-party theocracy and implement their version of Sharira law. They probably don’t fully realize this is what they’re doing.
glob·al·ist /ˈɡlōbəlist/ noun 1.) a person who advocates the administering or planning of a political strategy, economic system, etc. on a global rather than a national basis.
“[Right-libertarian populists] are unapologetically anti-globalist while at the same championing free trade and a realist foreign policy.”[1]
Both parties have furthered the advancement of global rule, one world government, top-down planning. In different ways, to be sure. Repubs for example voted in JD Vance, a man who was led by Peter Thiel, who as you know is advancing the surveillance state with Palantir. Peter made him who he is, and certainly has his ear. And Dems marched in lock-step with other globalists around the world in 2021-2024.
Global free trade, where individuals and not politicians decide who to trade with, as I understand it, is the _opposite_ of the dictionary’s definition of globalism. It is the smaller government that Republicans ostensibly stand for and then don’t provide.
Get government out of the way and let people be people.
[1] https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/right-libertarian...
"They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
There’s a book that makes an incredibly compelling case called Freedom’s Dominion, highly recommended.
Now when I hear “states’ rights” I complete the thought with, “…to do bad things to people we don’t really like”
Republicans don’t need to crow about states’ rights right now because they have an even bigger stick with which to oppress minorities.
They brandish the "don't tread on me flag" while cheering on Trump sending the national guard to blue cities (when the most violent cities in America are all red). They are supposedly against handouts, but watch Trump bail out the farmers and none of MAGA have anything to say about it. Because a majority of farmers vote red.
They wouldn't have any issue with actual socialism, as long as it only benefitted republican voters.
Ice Agents: "Is <name> here illegally?" AI prompt: "you're absolutely right!"
I hear that lazy LEOs now use AI to write police reports. Noice. And the AI can trivially show up for hearings.
Just like other ML and big data LEO projects in the past, assume the use of AI is to greenlight what they already want to do and would like a fig leaf of justification for from a computer.
>You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
– George Orwell, 1984
:(
No. Either stand by your opinion or don't waste our time on it.
It depends _why_ you did it. This is the precise reason why we have courts and juries. Jury nullification exists for a reason. Laws are not meant to be a rote set of rules and punishments to dole out mechanically.
The concept of perfectly, uniformly and constantly emotion every law in the books is completely absurd. We need to figure out how to deal with that.
This is the danger of surveillance tech: you install it for purportedly good reasons, but once the power to monitor everyone to this level exists, it becomes very easy to start pushing towards more control, both legally and illegally.
For instance 1984 also is very clear about how this system is engineered for the survival of the inner party, effectively immortal.
Intention of the law > letter of the law.
Assume you live in a country 50/50 red and blue people. Red wins the election and the new leader cracks down on the blues hard for how they look. Replace this with any arbitrary law that benefits one group at the expense of another for no purpose.
Assuming one of the arbitrary rules is not to destroy the elections (yet), and blue manages to gain back control, the same arbitrary power now falls into blue hands. You will rarely see power being returned (the root cause of rot), and now blue is free to make arbitrary rules and persecute any color they wish. In effect, red voted against their interests long-term, for short-term advantage.
At the moment we have masked and license plate tampering hit squads (with no accountability, they can claim even a daylight bank robbery wasn’t ICE.. try to prove or fight it).
Imagine the next president is a man like Putin, with not just the intelligence, but the will to seize permanent control. We’re handing keys to our jailers over overblown online rhetoric and fear. Now we’re targeting specific groups, profiling based on if they look “illegal”. Where have we seen this happen before and leading to a second war?
STOP giving the government power people. It doesn’t end well. Of the people and for the people only works when don’t give deity-like power to our stewards.
I don't see any benefit to not determining everyone who is in an area at a specific time a citizen or eligible for citizenship.
Right?
You pay tax direct as us residents, or as tariff if you are in rest of world.
Tariffs on goods coming into the US are paid by US residents. (Just had to pay customs to clear a shipment from the UK - I had to pay the tariffs, not the seller.)
The most memorable thing from that talk was the given definition of "intercepted communication," which to their definition simply meant that a HUMAN agent had catalogued some piece of information.
The official story I was told, still pre-Snowden — while working a contract electrician gig for a state three-letter agency data center — was that it would simply be impossible to retain that much data [and I would then walk in to 100k-sqft+ floor with petabytes of storage].
In those days metadata was among the fancier data-gathering tools (ahh... simpler times!), and now we have machines which effectively think/schizoid-out on infinite amounts of data —— all non-human [so therefore non-intercepted] data.
Add me to this list, too, clanker.
Happy surfing.
[FLAG] 'HIZONNER' CAT3-SDA-HN: DISSIDENT DEPORTATION ALERT
Why is it surprising if another law enforcement agency like ICE uses it?
I think the nuance is how they'll use the information: less random pick-ups (and associated crowds), versus more targetted swoops.
They are thugs that see themselves as above the law.
And the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democracy :)
I'm very anti-surveillance, this shouldn't be allowed, but I feel like a lot of articles are being disingenuous by means of this omission. Is this a problem that only affects immigrants? It doesn't seem that way to me, but by presenting it that way they knowingly divide people and thus make it less likely that a group will prevent or reverse this action. These are the types of articles I'd write if I wanted this issue to drop off the radar of a large portion of the voting population.
Feel free to get your undies in a bundle over my "I'm on a MF-in' boat" FourSquare check-in.
Rule #1 of staying off the radar: Don't deliberately put yourself on the radar.
Barack Obama was called out by the ACLU for his use of ICE. He was called a monster.
If people condemn Trump and Obama both, then I respect their thinking. But if they applaud Obama and condemn Trump, I don’t believe they are showing integrity.
Bonus: You can also use these accounts to undermine the Online Safety Act at the same time!
Yeah, that would just about cover the cost of a pizza party in the AI world. You also can look at "Zignal Labs". The website looks like 100% snakeoil.
I have no doubt that ICE would love to have some AI-based software to detect illegal immigrants, but I doubt it's more effective than just regular datamining.
Take that, apply it to here, and it's clear that effectiveness would actually be counterproductive.
What has changed is the “messaging” around the topic. This is very common with the Trump administration. When all is said and done, when exceptions are made/bought, and the courts and others get involved, it ends up not being much of a needle move. BUT, what is different every time is the messaging. And I have come to believe, that is what the actual goal is to some degree. The real goal is to send a message to people who are immigrants OR (and this is important) look like immigrants. It’s a message of “remember your place” and “be grateful you get to be here”. It’s the same type of tactics that gets sent to Asian communities, black communities, women, etc.
I am white. I am a male. I am 55. I oscillate between despondently sad and disgusted.
Not even a little bit. No one is taking jobs away from citizens or legal immigrants (locals don't want those jobs, either at all, or at the wages offered), rampant "migrant crime" is a myth created and perpetuated by the right (immigrants commit crime at lower rates than citizens), and to top it off, the American economy depends on many of these migrant workers in order to function (often in exploitative ways; explicitly allowing and supporting this type of migration would make things safer for everyone).
It's othering and racism, plain and simple.
I'm not saying we should just open the floodgates and let anyone and everyone in, and I'm not saying we shouldn't deport non-citizens who commit violent crime, but the "crisis" is entirely manufactured.
It sure is, the US government has been underfunding the judicial body responsible for adjudicating asylum claims for years and years. As a result there are indeed people here in status limbo.
Wether or not they should be granted some kind of residency is kind of irrelevant, politicians are happy for this to be a problem they can use.
Even now, they aren’t increasing the rate of process, they’re just blowing the cash on mass surveillance.
I would appreciate a job in construction or at a restaurant for example. Teenagers would benefit from such jobs as well. Not available.
Your absolute assertions are myopic at best.
Doesn't seem to be a problem with any motivated person I know.
There are other reasonings (prevailing wage, location, etc.), but likewise, your "absolute assertion" that undocumented workers have been taking job opportunities from you is also not entirely ... absolute.
Of course, this doesn't mean that allowing 0 immigration in is the right solution, or preventing immigrants from working. And I should also point out that, generally, US leaders have the least amount of problem with this aspect of immigration - even now, Trump has instructed ICE not to go for deporting agricultural and tourism workers in any mass numbers.
Sorry but i absolutely despise this argument as someone who did the job that "locals don't want" and knew others that did. It's cheap and very right wing classism by the privileged. Essentially only the last bit is true and the last bit is true because there is a cheap alternative that doesn't involve much unionization either.
Mind you I'm in western europe and the other arguments don't hold up either here but that first one is universally shit.
That’s really what happened. The population doubled in 15 years and people moved (people always move). It’s just more people now. So naturally you’ll see more immigrants.
Every argument that starts like this ends up defending a pyramid scheme.
So either you increase the retirement age significantly or you have to expand the base.
And all of this to serve dying generations when those younger than me starting out get ever increasingly shafted.
Here in Belgium pension plans existed that did not work like that. Then the socialist raided these funds and the future generations were going to pay for those pensions. My family's criticism was that they could only do that once and they were right.
I don't tie this issue to socialists tho. 2 decades ago the liberals(european, right wing) did the same to the railways who had a separate pension fund and more recently yet another party suggested doing the same for a 3rd pillar of selfemployed people.
I like my cultured friends. USA is a melting pot, not a white-man-country. This is all xenophobia.
> poor finances
sounds right for asylum seekers
> nation's resources, infrastructure, housing shortages, burdens public services like healthcare, and contributes to economic friction[??] amid existing downturns,
sounds like policy problems; and these are the priorities of the people i vote for too, none of this has to do with immigrants.
> Countries are not homeless shelters or free handouts
no, this is exactly what i expect my country (government) to handle
> Uncontrolled influx of millions
this is pretty tightly controlled, you can find the data from the census and see that the population is not at all fluctuating and very linear. Should be trivial to plan ahead about how many people are in the country. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
> This is why sovereign states implement rigorous and dynamic immigration controls and capacity limits based on the nation's ability at the time. There has to be sustainable absorption. vet whoever comes into your house
this is true, and I dont believe its not happening. i was asking what is happening that's a crisis. Trump's policies are _mass deportation_. They are extreme. Legal immigrants, are having visas revoked without reason, and even green card holders are being arrested without cause. Violations of the 4th amendment. Immigrants are arrested at court houses, where the vetting takes place, you know, by _judges_.
> they are the result of blood and tears of the patriots who fought and died to create, defend, and build that nation.
like my immigrant grandpop, achieved the american dream
No, I'm a legal, darker-skinned immigrant with lots of culture. Btw, I respect and admire the white race more than any other, even my own.
> mass migration is tightly controlled
Because of Trump. I remember months when Biden wouldn't bat an eye at 7-8 million who entered illegally in a single month.
> poor asylum seekers...
I'm an actual asylum seeker because the Venezuelan government contracted kidnappers to try to take out my family (I'm not getting into details). My family has integrity, works hard, was a good match for the country, and we were accepted. The US was NOT responsible for taking us in. I am thankful, not entitled.
> immigrant grandpa.
Good, and I'm sure he wouldn't have agreed to let strangers into the country without vetting.
oh thanks for clarifying which type of scum you are
The type that is cultured, educated, honors parents, and builds a traditional family unit, rooted in truth, logic, nature, God, and common sense. The type that admires the renaissance and western civilization. The type that has no problems being thankful for great civilizations, like Israel, Rome, Greece, and the amazing USA.
In other words, everything you hate.
You might not think that, but have you ever complained about housing prices? That food at the grocery store costs more than it did a few years ago? The price of consumer goods in general?
Well, you're not buying those things. You're bidding on them. And the more people there are, here, the higher those prices will be bid upwards.
> the more people there are, here, the higher those prices will be bid upwards
Who do you think is picking most of that food? And if the wages for those jobs went up to an American living wage, what do you think would happen to the price of food even with a bit lower demand?
I know it's all too easy and comforting to throw out knee-jerk comments cheerleading for government power, but at least try applying some basic analysis to what you write.
Your mistake is in believing that even if I answered this question with the answer you consider correct, that this would change my position.
>And if the wages for those jobs went up to an American living wage, what do you think would happen to the price of food even with a bit lower demand?
"I like to exploit immigrants and underpay them, because my out-of-season fruit will be too high for my smoothy frappucinos!" Silly things leftists say, haha.
>I know it's all too easy and comforting to throw out knee-jerk comments cheerleading for government power,
I'm not especially a big fan of government power. But I live in a country being held hostage by lunatic ideologues who think non-citizens should have the absolute right to live here, but only because they hope to stack the vote against their political opponents. So there's not really that many options left. Things will have to get far worse before they can get any better.
I'm not asking you to change your position, but rather to be honest about the effects of it.
> "I like to exploit immigrants and underpay them, because my out-of-season fruit will be too high for my smoothy frappucinos!"
I did not say anything of the sort, rather I acknowledged the current reality. One can also say "I want farm workers to be system legible, primarily Americans, and paid a living wage, even though it will make grocery prices go up". That's a consistent position. We can have honest discussions about those things. I don't think anybody actually likes the status quo.
> Silly things leftists say, haha
I know fascists have defined everything short of gushing praise for Dear Leader as the rAdIcAl lEfT, but I'm actually a libertarian.
> I live in a country being held hostage by lunatic ideologues who think non-citizens should have the absolute right to live here
Please explain how it's being "held hostage" when the party in power is enacting the exact opposite.
> So there's not really that many options left. Things will have to get far worse before they can get any better.
Sorry no, there are plenty of other options to institute the immigration policy you want here - which wouldn't require adding to the surveillance pantopticon, further empowering a domestic military, or trampling the Constitution and our natural rights.
So what we've actually got is a second issue of how those things are being carried out, supposedly in the name of doing something about immigration. But given how wholly anti-liberty and anti-American those actions are, and how there are already policy floaters on relaxing the hardline stance for "critical" industries reliant on cheap illegal labor, it begs the question of whether the immigration topic is even the main thrust here - or whether it's simply a pretext for autocratic authoritarian power for power's sake.
> I'm not especially a big fan of government power
Sorry, but yes you are. You're shunning the entire idea of limited constitutional government and inalienable constitutional/natural rights, seemingly because you like these particular results of crass authoritarianism. That's statism 101.
High housing prices is a complex mix of underbuilding due to zoning laws, companies buying up housing stock to rent, and (a few years ago) very low interest rates. One thing that is _not_ a factor is immigrants, because they are at the bottom of the social pile and usually can't get mortgages to buy houses.
It very much is how all goods work, unfortunately. Food (except grain) doesn't travel or store well. If 100 million people left North America tomorrow, North America wouldn't start shipping the food for 100 million people to them whereever they went. Pretending otherwise might help you maintain faith in whatever religion you have that demands it be true, I suppose, but it's economically illiterate to claim otherwise.
>High housing prices is a complex mix of underbuilding
Or it's a simple answer of over-immigrating.
>because they are at the bottom of the social pile and usually can't get mortgages to buy houses.
Are they sleeping in ditches? No. They live somewhere. Because they live in those places, those places aren't available for non-immigrants to live in. It's really simple. They rent apartments, do they not? When demand outstrips supply, prices rise. When demand for apartments rise, even the price of houses goes up, because these things can substitute for one another to some degree.
They did not "leave" the US, they were deported without due process.
> though NSA and google have been doing it for years
That does not make it less dismal
> less scope for this to be abused against american citizens unlike in the UK
There are agencies in the US that do as they please without needing to cooperate with anyone. Not sure how you arrived in that conclusion.
Here's reality: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-...
I reject that. There is a steadily worsening crisis, even the current labour government have acknowledged that pledging to take lots of action against it, both now and during the election campaign. Specifically small boat crossings, of which more then 43,000 have already arrived this year. There is not a single politician in this country who doesn't admit that there is a serious problem.
This is a skill issue.
1. Conditions in the UK might not be good enough, so we should prevent people from immigrating, for their own good, and 2. Fixing problems that create refugees is more important and therefore another reason we should prevent people from immigrating.
To which I say
1. That's a reason we should clean our own house, so we create a safe environment for people looking to come to the UK, and 2. That's a non sequitur at best, and honestly callous; you should try fleeing from war and persecution, and then see how you would feel about returning home to wait for a few more years while 'things get sorted out back home'.
Again, correct me if I have misrepresented your implied argument.
I think more governments around the world are catching on to the idea that your majority population can excuse a large amount of economic mismanagement and bad geopolitical strategy if you blame foreigners who arrived after your decline started.
If a satisfactory amount of foreigners are removed, the technology will still be there and the defense contractors will still need contracts. If there are no viable foreign adversaries at that point, then another domestic target will be needed.
Why would anyone believe this? It's such a strange thing to say, and one would have to be an absolute fool to believe it.
Multiple of them believe this. One mentioned it, after she left I turned to my other coworker to say "that was some crazy stuff she was saying" only to be met with, "Hey, it's happening. A lot of federal money goes missing and this is exactly where it's going."
It's a complete disconnect from reality that's malleable to any form desired.
The Trump administration loves gaudy numbers like this. Common sense tells you that's a lot of movement in too short of time. Until they release evidence of these numbers, please do not spread this misinformation.
> A recent study from the United Nations reported that President Trump’s immigration policies led to a 97% reduction in illegal aliens heading northbound to the U.S. from Central America.
And you find that the document they link does not support their assertion, and in face the "97%" refers to:
> The migrants who returned during the period were primarily Venezuelan nationals, accounting for 97% of the documented southward flow, with most heading to neighboring Colombia.
It's comically bad deception, only people who continuously traffic in lies all day long would even publish something like this.
Like, say we assume it's true: There are 340 million people in the US. That's less than 1% of the current population leaving. I really doubt anybody would notice much of a difference.
According to the current administration, who have a ... not exactly sterling ... reputation for accuracy and honesty in reporting.