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Comment by desman | Hacker News Reader

As a non-American, I wonder how effective these measures are. Way too often I hear that "ICE abducted ... an American citizen". Are these individual cases amplified by the media to attack federal government's reputation or are these a significant percentage of all arrests? In which case, why is ICE doing it, they have absolutely no way of turning such arrests into a positive for themselves? How easy is it for an American or a legal alien to produce documentation proving their legal status - can it be that the fact(?) that many legal residents don't possess the necessary documentation at all times leads to the majority of such arrests/detentions/"abductions".

I know that many here will question ICE's mandate to act even against immigrants who don't have their paperwork in order, but this is another question.

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Thoughtful observers recognize that the real issue is the lack of accountability transparent to the American public. When regular people mess up at their job, there’s a proportionate response to that mistake. When ICE / CBP murders, rapes, disappears, tortures, silences, intimidates, etc. etc. there are no consequences. There is no accountability. In fact, there is encouragement! “You’re doing a public service!” they’re told.

This is by design. You’re asking the wrong questions out of some imagined “higher tier of thinking” and it’s only beneficial to those in power.

Why would any of this be effective? They drastically reduced the duration of training ICE agents and drastically increased numbers. You should assume they are all incompetent.

It's rebounding on them, support for ICE is now negative They're going after the weak and easy targets and dont care about citizenship as Miller has set them daily targets

This is just the standard precision/ recall tradeoff with recall being prioritised at the extreme (which is usually the wrong way to go for legal field).

A standard situation of 1% positive rate and even if your diagnosis method having 90% accuracy (for both sensitivity and specificity), more than 90% of the positive detection would be false positive.

Net migration to the US is negative for the first time in 50 years [1] so seems way more effective than whatever was done before. As for arresting citizens - federal agents arrest ~100K people per year[2], if the often cited in these threads research to be believed then most of them are citizens as illegal migrants don't do nearly as much crime. Being a citizen does not make one immune to the federal law enforcement, even the Department of Education has armed agents, which arrest citizens, even if they don't go to school [3].

1. https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-1st-time-50-years-experienced-n...

2. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/fjs23.pdf

3. https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/beware...

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