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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

How do they justify Immigration and Customs enforcement working domestic flights and departures in general? Isn't ICE's scope supposed to be limited to what/who is coming into the country from foreign countries?

Of course, that's a rhetorical question. When you're an autocrat, you do not need to justify your actions.

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ICE’s scope isn’t who is coming into the country — that’s CBP’s scope. ICE’s scope is supposed to be those committing immigration offences who have already entered the country (either because the CBP failed to catch them, or because they were admitted but never left).

The only difficulty justifying this is ICE’s power to stop and question people, and an airport is no different to a random street from that point of view. Do they have probable cause? What suffices as probable cause?

And once you have probable cause, you run into the problem 8 USC 1304(e) creates: someone who doesn’t have documentation proving their legal immigration status falls into one of two categories, they’re either a citizen, or they’re an immigrant violating that section.

(And this is looking at it from a simple legalistic point of view, ignoring any questions about ICE’s behaviour or powers!)

> And once you have probable cause, you run into the problem 8 USC 1304(e) creates: someone who doesn’t have documentation proving their legal immigration status falls into one of two categories, they’re either a citizen, or they’re an immigrant violating that section.

So hopefully if you are tourist from abroad, CBP will give you stamp into your passport, otherwise you have entered "illegally". They are not always stamping passports.

Isn’t the stamp necessary?

Under what circumstances would they not?

CBP is doing it electronically for quite some time, as they can see your date of entry in the system and they are not controlling your date of leave against passport when you are leaving USA (you won't even meet CBP at that stage), but it is all checked electronically.

Last time I got stamped. But it seems like an exception than a rule.

https://www.swlaw.com/publication/immigration-alert-cbp-elim...

I can already see myself arguing with ICE officer that CBP is not stamping passport for years.

A lot of countries don’t stamp passports — if you can guarantee the entry is immediately recorded in your central database, and you can reliably look up the latest entry for a given passport, a stamp doesn’t really gain much.

ICE has a lot of funding, more than some branches of the military.

This demonstrates they see ICE as their fix all police force, and that they are willing to deploy ICE to do whatever they think needs to be done.

ICE is $11B.

Coast Guard is $14B.

Virtually all commercial passenger flights are to international airports.

At least in the large airports, the international flights come in to a separate terminal. Will ICE limit their involvement to that terminal only, and only inbound flights? Immigration and Customs have no business on the outbound side or with domestic passengers.

Some international flights arrive in to domestic US terminals. These are from a limited set of countries where passengers have cleared US immigration in the departure country.

Canada, Ireland and the UAE are the major three, plus Aruba, Barbados and Bermuda.

Since they will support tsa operations, I’m going to assume they will be at the outbound security checkpoints. Both domestic and international.

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