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Comment by andreygrehov | Hacker News Reader

No. According to the latest reports, while searching for ICE vehicles, the protesters are unlawfully scanning license plates, which strongly suggests they are receiving insider help.

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There is nothing unlawful about scanning license plates. You are allowed to photograph them in the same way you are allowed to stand around writing them into a notebook if that activity is your idea of fun. Where do people get these ideas?!

I think the idea was that they were getting people associated with Minnesota DPS to do lookups on the plates.

Why would that even be necessary? They are almost certainly just contributing confirmed ICE plate numbers to an Excel file and then checking against it. Low tech and simple. This “criminal insider” angle is just building a bogeyman.

I don't think it's a real thing, I'm just saying that's what the claim is.

"Unlawfully scanning license plates"? What does that even mean?

Like searching a vehicle database? That's available to all sorts of people, like auto body repair shops.

Taking a photo of a license plate? Nothing illegal about that.

You're confusing 'seeing a license plate' with 'querying restricted databases'.

Taking a photo is legal. Running plates through law-enforcement/ALPR systems is not, and auto body shops don't have that access.

Real-time identification != observation - it implies unauthorized data access.

> through law-enforcement/ALPR systems

Were they doing that? I haven't read the article, that's why I'm asking.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/minnesota-signal-gate-di...

I don’t see anything there about querying license plate databases. There is a spreadsheet of donors to some kind of organization.

https://x.com/camhigby/status/2015093635096658172

Also, what is the outrage about? This administration has deported the least number of people compared to all previous administrations. Obama deported 3.1 million people, ten times more than Trump today. Same ICE, same border patrol.

It literally say it is a crowdsourced list... a completely legal activity. If you can't figure out what the outrage is about after Alex Pretti and Renée Good then you're being intentionally obtuse.

1. The outrage had been there prior to their death.

2. Their death is the outcome of the outrage.

Their deaths are an outcome of the heavy handed immigration enforcement that has caused the outrage. The raw number of deportations is not the only metric. The enforcement tactics of the Obama admin are not the same as Trump's, this is obvious and incontrovertible.

You don't have to agree with the criticisms but to not even be able to understand why people are upset stretches believability.

Duh... You're still collapsing cause and context. The protests preceded the deaths; the deaths occurred during confrontations created by the protests. That makes them an outcome of escalation, not the original trigger.

And 'different tactics' doesn’t explain the reaction gap, as i said, under Obama there were 3.1M+ deportations and at least 56 documented deaths in ICE custody (https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/re...) with nowhere near this level of outrage. What changed is media framing and amplification, not the existence of harsh enforcement.

It doesn't have to be the original trigger, you asked "what is the outrage about?" and those deaths are part of it.

> And 'different tactics' doesn’t explain the reaction gap, as i said, under Obama there were 3.1M+ deportations and at least 56 documented deaths in ICE custody

You continuously ask this same question, get an answer, and ignore it. ICE enforcement was not the same under Obama and Trump even if Obama had high deportation numbers. The deaths in that report were from medical issues or neglect. Horrible, absolutely, but not shootings, not American citizens, and not protesters.

Maybe instead of assuming everyone is a stooge that can only do what the media tells them, consider they may actually have some legitimate grievances?

I don't know what they think they're doing there. If the most interesting thing they found was the public website leading to a fundraising platform for mutual aid a) there is literally nothing illegal there, and b) you can find that website linked to publicly by conservatively 25% of the twin cities population. It's literally the most prominent fundraising website anyone has been posting.

Wrong. The "protesters" were conducting counterintelligence to locate where ICE was operating. The plan was to disrupt the operation. Like it or not, this is against the law. Period.

I know you want to frame it a different way, but the articles you are posting don't describe anything that's illegal.

I'm not framing anything. There are screenshots of the chats where people literally say "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody, go there!". This is called interfering.

The "interfering" this are describing is your framing. You want it to be interference in a legally actionable way, but it simply isn't.

18 U.S.C. § 111 - Assaulting, resisting, impeding officers (including federal agents)

18 U.S.C. § 1505 - Obstruction of Federal Officers (this includes ICE itself - obstructing or interfering with an ICE arrest is a crime)

18 U.S.C. § 118 - Obstructing, resisting, or interfering with federal protective functions

18 USC 111 does not apply here. Forcible action is an element. The action doesn’t have to be itself the use of force; it’s sufficient that a threat being some action that causes an officer to reasonably fear bodily harm. But obviously the actions we’re talking about on this subthread fall well short of that definition. If they didn't the law would be unconstitutional.

Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.

But that's not the end of the analysis. The legal line isn't 'force or nothing'; it's intent + conduct. Speech and observation are protected, but coordinated action intended to impede enforcement is not.

If "ICE vehicle has been identified, everybody go there" is followed by mobbing vehicles, blocking movement, inducing agents to disengage, or warning targets to evade arrest, that crosses from protected speech into actionable conduct.

Is that your theory, or is there case law that backs it up? From what I saw the bounds on 18 USC 111 are quite narrow indeed: I found a case where the defendant _fired at federal agents with his shotgun_, and the appeals court threw it out because the jury was incorrectly instructed that they could use the fact that he shot at them when considering he misled them afterwards. But actually, the jury was not allowed to do that. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/199...

Quote: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is "directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and (2) it is "likely to incite or produce such action."

See Brandenburg v. Ohio (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/492)

Brandenburg v. Ohio was decided in favor of the appellant. As I suspected, there are no cases of a US court interpreting your theory of the law on 18 USC 111.

Journalists doing ride alongs have already identified the system and it doesn't really on "restricted databases", they rely on observation and multiple attestation. In any case, there are indeed commercial services for looking up license plate data, and they rely on watching the notices that are published when you register your vehicle. It's the same reason why you receive all sorts of scammy warranty "notices" when you buy a car.

In fact the first clue that they look for is having Illinois Permanent plates because that is a strong indicator that they are using rental vehicles. That doesn't take a database, it's just a strong signal that can be confirmed by other evidence.

Do federal agents rent their vehicles?

The crowd sourced lists don't identify the owners of the vehicles, because that does not matter. They identify vehicles that ICE is using, and "likely a rental" is one good signal.

There is no evidence of this at all.

There is enough smoke to at least perform an investigation. As I said, this administration has deported 10x less people than the previous administrations.

You seem quite narrowly focused on the number of deportations rather than the methods being implemented. The primary criticisms of the current ICE surge in Minnesota focus on the general aggressiveness and lack of professionalism of these agents, not the deportations numbers.

If that was what you meant, you should have said that. Do you have any actual evidence this is happening, or are you just confusing possibility with probability?

I don't buy the claim that it's happening, but they were pretty clearly talking about the lookups, not the photos. They started off by mentioning "insiders".

> If that was what you meant, you should have said that.

I think the choice of the verb "scanning" indicated it clearly enough.

Perhaps for you. This word is equally applicable to visual observation.

Can you rule out the much less technically advanced explanation that this information was crowdsourced? And people are simply observing the license plates that are plainly displayed?

Frankly I don’t think it should have to come to license plate numbers. In a free society law enforcement should clearly identify themselves as such. We should not need secret police.

No, I cannot. One of the undercover journalists was in their group for days.

> Frankly I don’t think it should have to come to license plate numbers. In a free society law enforcement should clearly identify themselves as such. We should not need secret police.

None of that matters _today_, because _today_ the law is different.

What the law is, is a question for lawyers. What the law should be is a question for the people.

For example, a lot of people thought it was wrong that federal agents could cover their faces. Sacramento agreed. Now there is a law preventing it.

That law enforcement is permitted to hide their faces, drive unmarked vehicles, not display name tags, badges, or uniforms is concerning. Anyone can buy a gun, a vest, and a velcro “police” patch. There is very little that marks these agents as official law enforcement. I’m somewhat surprised that none of these agents have been shot entering a home under the mistaken perception by the homeowner that it’s a criminal home invasion.

Or alternatively, that criminals haven’t simply claimed to be ICE as an excuse to break into someone’s house.

Where was the outrage when Obama deported 3.1 million people? Why was there no media coverage? Trump has deported 300k and the MSM is turning upside down. Doesn’t make any sense to me.

No one is upset about the number of deportations. No one is complaining about the number of deportations. If you don't listen to what the complaints are about to start with, you can't argue that they are hypocritical.

Ok. What are people upset about, and why are they only upset in one city?

> What are people upset about,

A wide array of policy issues related to the targeting and manner of execution of Trump’s mass deportation program, not the number of deportations.

Also, a number of specific instances of violence by the federal government during what is (at least notionally) the execution of immigration enforcement.

> why are they only upset in one city?

People are very clearly not “only upset in one city”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_mass_deportat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ren%C3%A9e_Good_protes...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/24/protests-ale...

When talking to someone at-risk of deportation earlier in the year, they asked me, "Why should I do anything differently? Obama and Biden did the same exact shit."

And there's a lot of truth to that which a lot of people need to reconcile with.

The fact that we don't have DACA solidified into a path towards citizenship by now is just sad.

And I agree with you, but that's not what I'm questioning. Given the 10x larger scale of deportations during the Obama's term, why were there no protests?

During Obama's term the practice of warrentless entry into actual citizens homes wasn't widespread.

During Obama's term the leaders of DHS / ICE were not blatently lying about events captured on film and evading legitmate investigations into deaths at the hands of officers.

During Obamas term people with no criminal record were not being offshored to hell-hole prison camps with serious abuses of human rights.

Give me a break - https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/border-patrol-wa...

Can you link to the tweet in which Obama defended the agents right to threaten a child with rape?

From your linked article:

  If the abuses were this bad under Obama when the Border Patrol described itself as constrained, imagine how it must be now under Trump, who vowed to unleash the agents to do their jobs.

There's your difference. Thank you for playing.

The core issue is the media. I worked at a large news company in New York during the Obama’s term. There was a training for our reporters: anything negative about Obama was strictly prohibited. Ad revenue.

As many others have pointed out, the deeper issue is the size of the boot, the disregard for citizens rights, the extremes of the offshore gulags, the fevor with which the upper levels embrace the brutality.

I am unable to assist further with your stated struggle for comprehension.

Not to add fuel to the fire, but a lot of what you're saying is hard to take seriously when Obama himself's been known to brag about how good at killing he is.

You're right that things are significantly worse now, but it's important to recognize that what came before was still bad and in many ways is the foundation for where we are.

https://slate.com/business/2013/11/double-down-obama-said-he...

Thanks for the response, I'm happy to engage, although I almost missed this as you're well over the fold in my comment history and I have no mechanism for alerting me to replies (nor, I might add, am I looking for one).

With the preamble that I'm not a US citizen, have never thought to apply to be one, have been in and out of the US and many other countries a number of times, and don't play favourites with POTUS(n) on the basis of their asserted party ticket; ...

The upstream question and context here concerns differences between administrations wrt home soil immigration policy, to which I've been focused.

As points of note:

* Allegations of POTUS(X) boasting behind doors are a difference of behaviour from that of POTUS(Y) coming right out and stating they can freely kill in Times Square and get away with while glorifying the deaths of citizens in public and promising perpertrators they'll get away with it and have immunity.

* I'm no fan of remote double tap kills. Full stop. That said;

* POTUS(X) authorising kills in an "inherited" known and ongoing "war zone" known to all is distinct from POTUS(Y) authorising double tap kills from unmarked airframes of civilians in international waters prior to any declaration of war (via Congress or not).

* Regardless, the offshore behaviour of any POTUS is distinct from their behaviour toward their own citizens within their country.

In the arc of all the shitty behaviour by post WW POTUS(n) candidates, the current incumbent has significantly levelled up to achieve Kissinger level disregard for human life on home soil for purely political gain .. and played that hand badly.

That aside, I'm not a Communist - but I do admire Ash Sarkar's shut down of idiotic Obama / Trump faux dichotomy posings by a pompous right wing media pundit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD7Ol0gz11k

I equally admire our PM's "off the cuff" (approximately 15 mins rough note prep time) strip down of an opposition one time PM attempting to pin a third parties bad behaviour on the sitting government on the basis of them making no comment until after a Court case had completed (as per the law here) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCNuPcf8L00

It's not relevant to immigration policy, but it is a good example of off the cuff professional level political debate in sitting government.

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