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Comment by antonymoose | Hacker News Reader

I agree while also disagreeing. It feels to me like the Democrats seemingly always get their way while in power while Republican presidents with a congressional majority get little to nothing done.

To me they have the classic problem as with non-profits: “If we solve the problem we cease to have a cause to exist.”

Taking a look at what’s been accomplished this past year, it’s a lot of token Executive Orders on renaming things, a token deportation effort, no material change on mass legal immigration, nothing happening on the voter ID front.

It’s just theater until they lose out in the midterms and they to rally their base again in 2028 to “Save America” or “Keep It Great” or whatever hokum.

Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.

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First, republicans blocked everything including formarly own proposals when Obama adopted it ... ever since Obama. It is other way round, the republican party is getting what it worked for, because democrats are weak opposition.

> Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.

It is impossible. Will they give reparations to blue cities? From what money?

Likewise institutions - it is easier to corrupt and destroy them then to build them anew.

Amd crutially, the right wing supreme court needs ro be enlarged or new constitution written for the bad precedents to be changed.

> token deportation effort,

The whole thing is bigger size then most militaries.

> no material change on mass legal immigration,

The whole classes of legal immigrants were suddenly ruled illegal and are violently mistreated.

> nothing happening on the voter ID front.

Republicans are trying to make voting for blie places harder.

On the immigration front, please note that Obama deported more or about-as-much migrants per year than Trump in 2025. I don't really get why democrats oppose this, while they cheered the same policy a decade ago.

The problem isn't deporting illegal immigrants, the problem is revoking legal status, abusing detainees, hurting people on the street, and the occasional murder.

Obama years had also the same kind of abuse and killings by the border patrol. At least 56 recorded deaths of immigrants caused by ICE and custody[0]. Some murders were settled to avoid a trial.

Protests against ICE were much smaller then (billionaires didn't fund NGOs to organise them either), so it was easier for the agency to operate as well, and it was quickly memory-holed.

[0] https://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/re...

Any preventable death in custody is a tragedy, but there’s a major difference between a death due to inadequate precautions against suicide or due to inadequate medical care, and tacking someone to the ground in the street and shooting them ten times in the back. I really hope you understand that and are just pretending not to in order to score points.

Edit: also, why is it that whenever someone makes an "Obama did bad stuff too" argument, it's always with the intent of "so you shouldn't be upset about it now," rather than "you should have been upset then like I was, and I'm still upset about what's happening now"?

Regarding deportations, it's not "also bad stuff" - it's just an application of the law.

I don't see the problem with pointing out the hypocrisy where very wealthy democrat donors fund activist organizations to disrupt the ICE/Border patrol activity, while looking away when their guy is in power. Protests evolved as well, organized by professionals with the aim to escalate and disrupt ICE's activity, which leads to such tragic events.

In France, we are accustomed to the same kind of escalation, where antifa black blocks commonly throw molotov cocktails, leading to more violence and so on. Thankfully the riot police is well trained to avoid fatal incidents, which is clearly not the case of the current-day ICE (and generally in the police forces in the US).

After all the complaining, the solution is likely either to desescalate both sides, and ask for accountability and more training - bodycams are a good tool, for instance. But I guess that "better training for ICE" isn't a very entertaining slogan ;-)

Why are you talking about deportations again? The problem is the associated abuses.

What is the purpose of telling me that the same stuff happened under Obama? Let's say just for a moment that this is true, and that the difference in reactions is driven by some hypocritical activists. What sort of change are you hoping to induce in my mind by saying this? If that really was true, then the correct reaction would be to continue to be appalled by and oppose the current administration's actions, while also being careful to watch out for such things in the future by other administrations. But I'm going to do that anyway, so there isn't even any point to that.

It really looks like you're bringing this up with the intent that I should stop change my mind about what's happening now and think it's all just fine and dandy, which is ridiculous.

I was talking about the cause of the protests, which are primarily about the deportations, and started before the abuse took place.

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

As I explained before, two movements are at play: a drastic ramping up of the ICE, with some unexperienced agents behaving unprofessionally, and at the same time, billionaires funding NGOs to organize protests, coordinate media and harass the agencies in charge of the deportation.

Things such as blowing a whistle when ICE agents are intervening, doxxing agents or following their cars aren't going to help desescalate the situation or help create a sane culture in those agencies.

Which is it, did the protests start before the abuses, or are the abuses just a continuation of the Obama years?

It's not supposed to be up to the public to deescalate. Law enforcement needs to behave professionally even when facing people who don't like them. That is literally their job. If they can't handle it without committing some murders, then the agency should be torn down.

Because it is not the same deportation policy.

Trump has to deal with the aftermath of the Biden years, where unauthorized immigrant population reached 14 million in 2023. It is also harder to expel them if they are inside the US rather than at the border.

Democrats always get their way because their way is to do nothing. They rarely roll back all the stuff the republicans do in the term before.

The Republicans this term have gotten plenty done, it's just nothing that helps average people. Their wins can't be widely celebrated and so they aren't, as much.

https://www.project2025.observer/

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