"Systems marketed for "solving crimes" get used for immigration enforcement"
What immigration enforcement are you speaking of here? Legal? Illegal? If the latter, wouldn't this system be solving crime?
What immigration enforcement are you speaking of here? Legal? Illegal? If the latter, wouldn't this system be solving crime?
1. they can get away with it, or 2. they don't agree with it.
This isn't a question of ideals; it's addressing the uptick in illegal actions by immigration officials during the current US administration. It's addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas.
Yes, some immigration enforcement is legal. Congratulations.
Does selectively not enforcing immigration law further liberal agendas?
- House seats (and therefore electoral votes) are determined by census - which includes illegal immigrant populations.
- If you can waddle across the border at 8.5 months pregnant, you can birth a citizen with no further requirements.
Ergo, "sanctuary cities" and other intentional lack of enforcement allow states to pump up their representation in Congress and increase government handouts.
However, I would suggest others consider what an evil leftist, for example, could do with the same technology.
What are some things that could they do?
Right-leaning policy in 2025 typically leans towards enforcing the laws as written: in this case, immigration law is being bolstered by surveillance technology.
Which laws are liberals going to theoretically now start radically enforcing that conservatives were turning a blind eye to? Flock cameras don't exactly help the IRS make the rich "pay their fair share."
If you want specific examples, I'd point to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The left wants to throw people in prison for years for protesting while the right wants to pretend it doesn't exist and allow women seeking abortions to be intimidated. I'd also point to the levels of technology deployed to catch the January 6 perpetrators. I live in DC and have a hard time doing a both-sides here since the experience of living in a city under attack is still rather raw; whatever your views, you can't describe the right's response as "enforcing the laws as written."
Sure, the House is almost evenly split, so a few seats here or there would have an impact. But the net result would probably be further mitigated by gerrymandering, other population shifts, and so on.
One other thing I appreciated from this article is how it touches on comments about simply following the law. Just because something is legal, does not make it morally questionable (at best). From the article:
> The apportionment of seats in Congress is required by the U.S. Constitution, which says that the census will be used to divide the House of Representatives “among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State,” except for enslaved people, who, until the late 1800s, were counted as three-fifths of a person, and certain American Indians.