I Want You to Understand Chicago
aphyr.comA news station producer was arrested by ICE and the agents peeled away ripping off someone's bumper[0][1] just for her to be released later without charges.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/14/chicago-ice-...
I would say that any U.S. citizen living in an area of focus who is even vaguely latino and/or does not speak English well should obtain a U.S. "passport card" and carry it on their person at all times, as a federally issued ID. It's $65 for the first application, and $30 at renewals. In this context, the passport card is much more valuable than a state-issued ID.
You know if your children should have them.
A real passport at home is also wise, in case these ruffians "lose" the card.
It is intolerable that U.S. citizens are detained in this way.
I get that you’re trying to help, but trying to find a bureaucratic/technical workaround through original research and proffering it as advice is not a super helpful thing to do right now. At this phase of the game, the best advice you can give people is to follow immigration lawyers and long-time activists on social media and do what they advise.
I know we’re all used to being the problem-solvers in the room, but this is a time where those of us without specific expertise need to take direction from those who do.
I get that you yourself have not researched this problem.
These are worthless?
Notice this section: "Carry with you evidence of lawful entry or current lawful status in the United States if you have it."
https://www.nilc.org/resources/know-your-rights-expedited-re...
Edit: I went to Medellín, Colombia recently, and going through immigration, I said that I was there for my birthday. The officer then asked me, "That was May xxth?" I responded, "No, my birthday is August yyth." She handed it back and waived me through.
Anyone making a mistake with details will see greater scrutiny.
Please just take the good advice you were given. This response only proves how out of your depth you are here.
We are currently trying to get my neighbor proof of citizenship so he can get out. He is a US citizen who had his passport on him when ICE took him. Now he has no passport.
This is precisely why the passport card should be carried, but the paper passport should be left at home.
Aside; If the months are correct, the birthday is very easy to guess.
ICE have the official policy that no paperwork is sufficient to prove citizenship. The only source of truth it their biometrics app
https://www.404media.co/you-cant-refuse-to-be-scanned-by-ice...
That will certainly not work for children, as their faces change.
I live in Illinois. Since Republican governor Ryan gave chauffers licenses to undocumented immigrants (resulting in fatalities), it is certain that an Illinois license is worthless.
I had hoped that an ID issued by the U.S. Department of State would be a safeguard.
Perhaps not, but wise to obtain both forms, for the judge.
> That will certainly not work for children, as their faces change.
I think that is the point.
That and they don't care. I think they are selected to be robots for the regime, and their training eventually expanded for all police work as a private army for the King. I don't believe that they are just for "ICE activities". Their budget dwarfs others like the DEA and CIA now with the "big bogus bill". Reminds me of certain other historical police force origins.
> Their budget dwarfs others like the DEA and CIA now with the "big bogus bill"
What numbers are you looking at?
For reference, FY25 budgets:
"CIA budget" (which isn't publicly split from the general IC top line authorizations): $73.4 B for NIP and $28.2 B for MIP https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10524
ICE: $28.7 B (after OBBB increase) https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/big-...
DEA: $3.3 B https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024...
>Perhaps not, but wise to obtain both forms, for the judge.
Judge? What judge? If the ICE app says you're "Illegal," your documents don't mean anything and you're subject to deportation without due process.
And that's not a mistake either. It's designed to allow these folks to disappear whoever they like, regardless of their status.
And if by some bit of luck you manage to be able to challenge such thuggery, it will just be blamed on the "false positives." Oops. "Oh, sorry. That 8th generation citizen anti-Trump activist was murdered at CECOT. We screwed up. Sorry. We'll ('pinky swear') try to avoid that in the future."
Edit: Added missing (at the end of a sentence no less!) preposition.
Quite frankly, are you so naive as to think they give a shit?
ICE is a gestapo and who they want to be illegal is illegal and can be whisked away. No consequences, no retaliation.
They now have an all-knowing oracle who tells them the ultimate truth, all evidence be damned.
Then none of these documents are worth the paper upon which they are printed, and the advice has provable negative value?
Do tell.
https://www.nilc.org/resources/know-your-rights-expedited-re...
Yes, the advice is entirely wrong. ICE have been kidnapping and detaining people who had proof of citizenship on their body at the time.
Anyone likely to be targeted by these thugs needs to be talking to local activist groups that know exactly what's happening first hand.
Offering armchair views that are clearly from a position of ignorance is yes, provable negative value.
Please just don't.
Edit: talked with a friend who's doing some activist work on this in his area. The advice is actually to avoid carrying your passport or similar, as if they detain you they'll just throw it away along with the rest of your belongings, and you'll have to go through the weeks long process of getting a new one.
And that's the happy case if they throw you in the van and let you out hours or a couple days later.
your documents will only help you in court. ICE does not care at all, and they do not care about due process or your constitutional rights. Just hope they don't ship you off to South Sudan before your relatives can get your citizenship documents if you happen to be a brown person.
The DHS and ICE just randomly changed rules to this articles "expedited" process, officially declared that no paper documents count - only their homebrew app, and are now engaging mass raids without evidence or warrants that cause damage to people and their property with no means of reconciliation; this includes targeting home-born American citizens.
This article is explicitly reactive and says so itself! None of these documents mean just about anything anymore - yesterday it was A, today it is B, tomorrow it is C. The rule of law has broken down in America.
We've seen an entire national campaign about a man deported to a prison in a country he was being protected from. The administration has been caught with numerous citizens now. While arguing they have no requirement of due process and have a right to deport anyone anywhere they please.
There's not negative value, you should still do it and hope there's still someone to stop them somewhere in the process. But believing this is simply a matter of "getting your papers in order" or explaining how "this is a bad idea" to them is nuts... as if the Nazis ever cared about the papers. If a Nazi official wanted you gone, you were gone. That's how fascism works.
And before I hear anyone say "oh, please, Nazis, don't be irrational", Greg Bovino is effectively the commander-at-large of CBP. Today he did a Nazi salute in front of a crowd of people.
And that's what America is, just 10 months in. An authoritarian police state with a Gestapo that's rapidly escalating. With no one left to stop them, it seems, what with local LEO and the NG and SCOTUS and Congress all being in on the game.
hola amigos, ca habla un americano el citizeno --- que? no hablo ingles.
~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqlJwMFtMCsPuorte o' calzone cu 'nu stemma arreto 'na cuppulella cu 'a visiera alzata. Passe scampanianno pe' Tuleto camme a 'nu guappo pe' te fa guardà! Tu vuò fa l' americano! ammericano! mmericano siente a me, chi t' ho fa fa?Translated by Australians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E9Ed9DUQoQ
When the "do you belong here? " is a non-sarcastic adaptation of the Family guy skin color meme, no amount of 'proper IDs' will do shit.
Accurate, if even a bit softer than how it really is.
I never felt unsafe in my west side Chicago community until the Black Hawks started doing daily intimidation runs. Until they abducted community members who were out working one day, gone the next.
I used to push a wagon with side pockets full of bubbles, snacks, and toys. Now there’s fewer toys to make room for gas masks for kids and adults.
Chicago is a tough town. People here are doing an amazing job restraining themselves and others. I’ve heard on more than one occasion people in crowds reminding one another to not give them reason to pull in the Guard.
This will likely not be the case forever.
More people need to see what’s happening here. This is not sustainable; generational harm is being inflicted on those directly targeted and those who seethe with anger and have to explain to kids why their friends aren’t around anymore.
> have to explain to kids why their friends aren’t around anymore.
How does that conversation go?
Honestly, not well. It’s hard to articulate to a 4 year old that people like us are hiding for fear that they’ll be taken by “army men”
The article is missing a bit about Bovino the other day. He threw a sieg heil and has been videoed doing "paper beats rock" with agents which is a white supremacist dog whistle. These people are openly racist and have unaccountable power to stomp around Chicago and destroy the community.
https://www.reddit.com/r/illinois/comments/1os2lid/greg_bovi...
*Edit: I forgot to mention, please consider (1) organizing with your neighbors now because this is probably coming to you sometime soon and (2) donating to ICIRR which is doing amazing on the ground work right now https://www.icirr.org/
And here’s him cosplaying SS: https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/1o55i0x/meet_grego...
Strip him down and I’m pretty sure you’ll find some “choice” tats.
> He threw a sieg heil
Obviously very bad. I can't understand how people can think Elon was "just waving".
> has been videoed doing "paper beats rock" with agents which is a white supremacist dog whistle.
This is woke nonsense: I was accused of bad things in the past. I did quite innocent things and was accused that my behaviour was a dog whistle for racism. I'm as racist as the next guy (I fail the white-bad black-good test) but consciously very much attempt to be less so!
Did you see the video of him doing the paper beats rock thing? Right after doing the sieg heil? It was very obviously he did it intentionally, whether to troll or not, those for who it is a dog whistle saw it and wagged their tale in joy.
It’s not new, it’s not “woke,” and it’s not subtle: https://www.adl.org/resources/article/coded-hate-extremists-...
They’ve been doing this shit since they got their asses kicked by the Allies (1488, etc.)
A large part of this lawlessness is rooted in nonnormative behavior. But! there are basic protections we could have right now if we demanded them. First and foremost: the Bivens Act; specifically, the right to bring suit in State court against Federal agents. Presidential pardons can't help these thugs in State persons.
Unfortunately the Bivens act was already heavily neutered well before this current trainwreck of a Supreme Court we have now was fully assembled (saving them the trouble of having to neuter it themselves):
Don't they all have qualified immunity nowadays?
Until the supreme court overturns that.
They already did, more or less.
The supreme court ruled that unless your case is virtually a carbon-copy of an existing Bivens case then it doesn't count. The current supreme court does not respect precedent in any meaningful way.
Bivens act, not case. The act modifies the statutes. It's been read but not voted on.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/334...
This is really sad to read!
Can folks who live in Chicago confirm/deny/comment on the extent to which this article gets it right?
(I have no reason to believe that it's an exaggeration, but I sincerely hope that it is.)
I live in Chicago, and this article doesn't even scratch the surface of how bad it is. My wife went to the beach yesterday for 10 minutes to try and rest from the chaos and a fucking black hawk helicopter buzzed by her. They literally fly over my house daily.
People, US citizens included, are literally being abducted. People have been shot and killed by masked agents. People have had their children abandoned on the side of the road after being kidnapped. Just today they raided Little Village with hundreds of masked troops. I'm in a dozen signal groups to get alerted about where things are.
What scares me the most is how few people seem to actually know what is happening here. I talk to people outside of Chicago, and watch the news, and I don't see or hear about anything that's going on here. I tell them what's happening and they are shocked.
It is impossible to convey what is happening here, how scared we all are for this country, and how much things seem to escalate every single day that this goes on.
Edit: This post has been flagged and hidden, just demonstrating how much this country wants to pretend this isn't happening. It's unflagged now, but the fact that anyone would want to hide what's happening here shows how bad things are for all of us.
The media has an existential threat of having their broadcast licenses revoked so yeah that probably has a lot to do with why there’s no coverage.
If the media had balls, they’d broadcast anyway, license or not.
There's a lot of good independent media looking at this. Some good sources:
https://bsky.app/profile/unraveledpress.com
https://bsky.app/profile/djbyrnes1.bsky.social
When the media wasn’t really a money printing machine for billionaires, this also wasn’t an issue.
Media has almost always been a money sink, including now.
Are there any good independent media also posting on X.com? I believe HN usually prefers that particular Twitter-like source.
Let the FCC enforce the removal of a license, then. That seems to be the current administration’s approach to everything.
The media also has an existential threat of being taken as seriously as Russian and Chinese media are taken by the Russian and Chinese people, respectively.
For many of us that ship sailed a few years ago.
>> What scares me the most is how few people seem to actually know what is happening here.
Submissions like this getting flagged contributes to that.
I mention that because the previous submission with this article got flagged to death.
>Visits from the ghetto birds
>Facing police brutality with no accountability
>Media blackout
We're not beating the, "Horrible things that happen to black and indigenous Americans will eventually happen to everyone else," rap.
> This post has been flagged and hidden, just demonstrating how much this country wants to pretend this isn't happening
It’s so sad to see HN taking the side of violence and oppression with their “head in the sand” approach.
I wonder how different the HN overlords would feel if their own families were being torn apart. This is Disgraceful and inexcusable. The shame.
The only reason this is not currently flagged to oblivion is because it’s the weekend crowd.
RSNA is coming up later this month and generally I always attend but I'm probably just going to skip it. Just about nobody I know is going.
Understandable, but note that decisions like that are part of the adminstration's objectives. This isn't a Chicago policy; it's a federal targeting of Chicago for political reasons.
I don't need to make whatever is going on between Chicago and Trump my personal problem.
I understand a similar rational was often used in the later days of Weimar Republic.
Totally fair.
Before I moved to Chicago I used to go to RSNA for work. If I didn't live in Chicago already I wouldn't be traveling here.
[flagged]
> Show me a case where an ICE officer has been convicted of abduction.
> Or are you just saying that because you think you get to have a veto over every arrest?
Please don't cross-examine on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I see your post and OPs just fine.
I live in Oak Park, just outside Chicago (and adjacent to Broadview, where the major regional ICE detention center is).
We have daily ICE sitings, and approximately every-other-day ICE detentions or arrests. It's a constant presence.
What it means psychologically depends. If you're someone who could visually be mistaken (perhaps in bad faith) for a Latino, it's a very big problem. ICE/DHS routinely stops people based on their visual appearance, it takes 15 minutes for them to work out that you're present legally, and throughout the whole thing you have hanging over you that they might just decide to detain you at Broadview anyways, which is a nightmare even assuming your eventual release.
If you're not someone like that --- at least where I live --- you can mostly ignore what's happening, if that's what you want to do. People are basically living their lives. About the closest an ordinary white/Black family here gets to direct disruption is needing to make special arrangements with their landscaping people.
A big issue for people detained, even if they are citizens, is that it can take some time to be released, and when released you may not get your belongings back. That includes passport, phone, keys, cash, jewelry. The advice I am hearing is to avoid carrying around much if you are at risk.
In a way, the article understates how bad it is. I live in Chicago, and in my neighborhood every lamp post (and mailbox, and other surface) has a poster detailing your rights. “Fuck ICE” (and related) signs all over. Most businesses and a lot of houses in my neighborhood have signs explicitly stating that ICE is not welcome inside without a warrant. My coffee shop regularly has free whistles to take, so you can help alert others.
Just a few days ago I was working at a coffee shop and got a rapid response notice that ICE was about a block from me. I got a few more that day, all within a few blocks of my house.
It is incredibly stressful. I married people, have kids who are not white - they are a target. I pray every day that the next daycare raid isn’t my sons daycare, that ICE doesn’t stop my husband as he goes to work, that my mother-in-law doesn’t get snatched off the street when she walks to Target.
It’s bad.
I'm an immigrant in Chicago (fortunately not one of the racial groups they're targeting) and I follow it pretty closely - yeah it's all really happening. I saw kids get taken away in front of where I live and others just a few streets down
The abuse of power there is ridiculous
> fortunately not one of the racial groups they're targeting
…yet.
In the northern suburbs of Chicago, we often hear helicopters circling. A gardener was taken on my block. The home owner told the masked agent he didn't have permission to be on his property, and the agent pointed a gun at him.
If you suspect anything is exaggerated, you can look to dozens of videos posted online of how these people act and speak. They roll in caravans of unmarked SUVs. Last week they rolled up to an elementary school (https://www.reddit.com/user/rubinass3/comments/1ol319f/ice_d...).
[Here](https://x.com/LongTimeHistory/status/1986936912134000877) is a particularly hard to watch video of ICE tackling a nonverbal man.
Things feel bad to me in a way (I suppose I'm fortunate to be able to say) they haven't until now. I normally can see the "other side" of issues but I can't fathom how this is what anybody wants. I'm angry and I'm sad.
If there's a silver lining, the community is fired up. The mayor of Evanston talked with an awesome woman who was detained while peacefully protesting (https://danielbiss.substack.com/p/daniel-biss-talks-with-det...). It's a weird and sad time.
My kids school has started doing drills with the students in what to do when ice shows up. Like they do for tornadoes. They need to because ICE is using schools as raid locations every day.
The children might be citizens, but ICE seizes them so that the immigrant parents have to show up and claim them.
Chicago schools are reporting lower attendance as a result.
We just had a case where a daycare provider was hauled out despite having her papers in order-she was subsequently released.
Priests being shot in the head with pepper balls, intentional accidents being caused by agents. And when they do something so egregious that they might face charges, they runaway to other states with vehicles and evidence.
I look forward to everyone in these organizations facing accountability. And not just the thugs on the street but the leaders first all the way to the top.
Under the auspices of civil disobedience I refer people to Beverly Hills Cop and the bananas scene. Also, Bass Pro Shops sell liquid skunk smell. It would be a shame if it were to end up in vehicles or on the outside air vents of cars. No damage, just annoying.
> I look forward to everyone in these organizations facing accountability. And not just the thugs on the street but the leaders first all the way to the top.
Unfortunately, the chances of this happening are minuscule, even if the executive branch ever changes hands in the future. The other party is too moderate, and doesn't have the backbone or courage to see it through, nor the patience and attention to detail to get them all. They'll be tied up in subpoenas, testimonies in front of Congress, hearings, hearings about hearings... Meanwhile, the people (both in leadership and boots on the ground) who are doing this today will slink back to normal life. The ringleaders will slide into comfy roles in think tanks, corporate boards, and lobbying groups. The hired thugs will go back to working as mall security and bouncers, hoping nobody remembers the time they cosplayed as Bond villain footsoldiers.
It's all really happening. Pretty much every meeting with friends touches on what their recent sightings or stories of ICE terror have been. Everyone who hasn't seen it first hand has a second hand story.
Absolutely everyone I talk to is against ICE's actions and that is the thing giving me hope that it will be defeated by the citizenry.
Did you look at the links he posted? Have you seen the news reports he linked to? This is all actually happening right now. Please, read all he linked to an watched the videos of ICE kidnapping people violently.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/11/05/daycare-...
I think my question had exactly the effect I wanted: lots of folks chiming in to give color.
Of course I’ll read all the links! I’ve already read a lot about this!
But the first hand commentary from fellow hackers is pure gold IMO
Have you been ignoring the reports? This is a small slice of the carnage the government has unleashed. They've detained at least 170 US citizens so far for hours or days, shot numerous US citizens, killed US citizens, killed tens of people in detention, the detention center conditions are torture so people intentionally self deport, the people who are deported disappear, are never heard from again ...............
It is really bad. A glimmer of hope is a governor with a spine.
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/...
I live here, and Pritzker says the right things then does the wrong things. He sent the Illinois State Police to help protect ICE from protestors as Broadview, freeing up their resources to attack and kidnap people. In half the videos you see out there his state police as assisting ICE. We have Chicago Aldermen out in the streets and in the hospitals getting arrested and assaulted, we have candidates for congress like Kat Abughazaleh being indicted for protesting, and then Pritzker is giving speeches and going on podcasts while not even stopping his own thugs from helping ICE.
He doesn't have a spine, he has an election strategy.
Right now, I agree pretty strongly with this. In particular: Pritzker is the command in chief of the Illinois State Police. But the ISP is very conservative and fairly MAGA, and ISP has staffed protests pretty aggressively. Pritzker has in theory the ability to reorient ISP away from policing protesters and towards protecting them from DHS, and he has pointedly not done so.
Even if he's just OK, doing a replacement-level competent job of being a governor dealing with a problem he himself did not have a hand in creating, this is his opportunity to demonstrate leadership during a crisis, and he's flubbing it. He's asking (we assume) for the highest job in the land, so he doesn't get to ask to be graded on a curve this time.
(Not a fan of Kat Abu, though).
The fact that everybody has just become okay with the fact that police forces are actively far right agitators is outrageous. If cops are desperate to smash skulls because they hate brown people then we need to completely dismantle and rebuild all of the police forces from scratch because it is impossible for them to be anything but violence machines.
We have violent hate gangs staffed with military equipment, with the authority to kill, and with minimal care for the actual law.
Curious about the random Kat Abu comment at the end there? I know nothing about her background, but it certainly seems like she's using her campaign to actively help her local community directly and immediately. And in times like these, we could certainly use more political candidates who are willing to be tossed around by DHS.
What negatives am I unaware of?
She doesn't represent the district. She picked it off a map, while living in (I think?) DC, hoping to replicate what AOC had done in New York --- knocking off a geriatric institutional Dem in a safe blue district. What really got me was that she moved to Chicago to run for CD9, and didn't even move to the district --- she moved to the Gold Coast (IIRC?), far outside CD9 (which is Rogers Park, Evanston, and the near north suburbs).
There's a word for this (carpetbagging).
Then more broadly there's the question of what a Representative is for. Is it "designated protester for the district"? If so, she's the leading contender. It's my belief that "most effective on-site protester" is not in fact the job of a congressional representative.
It'd be one thing if the choice was between Kat Abu and a staid machine Democrat. But CD9 is naturally progressive, and she's up against Daniel Biss, a progressive with a real track record of getting things done (and unquestioned ties to the district). What I think she's really going to do, best case, is split the progressive vote.
No, she moved there some months after her boyfriend Ben Collins became the CEO of The Onion, which is headquartered in Chicago. This is very easy to verify, they're not secretive about their relationship.
I don't care. She had never once lived in the district before declaring her candidacy for it, and only somewhat recently moved into the district --- after starting her campaign for it. I don't care who her partner is.
Think about the message that campaign sends: nobody, in one of the most progressive districts in the country, is as qualified to faithfully represent its progressive ideals as Kat Abu, who has neither ever lived there nor ever held elective office. To me, that's a campaign of contempt for the district.
I've seen the videos of her getting shoved at Broadview. Her immigration politics seem in line with the district. My response to that is: stand on Noyes and Sheridan and throw a rock. You'll hit someone who has identical immigration politics to her.
IL CD9 gets to decide, not me (I'm in CD7). But I do have an opinion!
Good to know, thanks!
One thing to consider though - while I would normally agree with you on the job description of a congressional rep, there are some moments in history where performative-protest-as-candidate can do more good than ill. I think we're in one of those times, and I'm glad she's able to use the congressional platform to put the executive branch's policies and actions on display.
It's kind of too late for quick action. You're not going to turn the attitudes of Law Enforcement on a dime. We need a decades long effort to eliminate MAGA, White Supremacy, gangs, lawlessness and thuggery from thousands of local and state police forces nationwide. These attitudes have so thoroughly infiltrated policing for so long, it's going to take deliberate restructuring of these institutions and personnel replacement to resolve.
That attitude sounds like a really good way to be Brandon Johnson, the least popular mayor in the United States.
Pritzker can either solve the problem or he can't. It's fine if he can't. I couldn't solve it. Few could! But if he can't, he's not qualified to be President, a job that will send him harder problems than this. It's fine for him not to be President. Most people (waves at the Oval Office right now) shouldn't.
I think the reality is far scarier - he doesn’t have nearly as much power over ISP as he should.
If he doesn't, he needs to be forthright about it in his speeches and podcasts. "The ISP is disobeying my direct orders."
Until then, he bears responsibility for their actions.
The NYPD all but threatened to kill Bill de Blasio's daughter when he tried to bring them to heel. I'm limiting myself to being furious at the fucking freaks terrorizing my city instead of creating new shit to get mad about. There's plenty as is.
Sure, I don't mean this to arouse anger. I point it out for the Democratic primaries in March. https://ballotpedia.org/Illinois_gubernatorial_and_lieutenan...
ISP enjoys support from the white rascisty southern part of IL as a bulwark against the Chicago Police and all of the brown people there.
He does not. People working in public service law could have told you that long before Trump won the election. That's sort of not on him; it's its own political power center. But that's his problem to solve now.
> He sent the Illinois State Police to help protect ICE from protestors as Broadview, freeing up their resources
You're literally saying the quiet part out loud.
So many people here are complaining that ICE is arresting US citizens, but you literally admit that they're interfering. And yes, it's illegal to "forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere" with a federal officer. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/111
You can do up to 1 year in prison for minor offenses, or up to 20 for using weapons and causing injuries.
Don't put words in my mouth.
When we say they're arresting US citizens I'm referring to the brown people they're picking up off the streets purely for being brown. The lawncare guy they picked up the other day, on film and with paperwork, wasn't protesting or interfering with anything.
You're just making things up to justify this fascist take over.
worse, here's the chicago ICE commander performing a nazi salute to taunt people and then pretending he was playing rock paper scissors when he saw he was being recorded. https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/1os3ez6/greg_bovin...
It's not an exaggeration. People have been kidnapped by these armed masked idiots within two blocks of my house twice, and those are just the closest cases I know about. Go check out the /r/Illinois subreddit [0] to see what's happening.
And of course now the parent post is "flagged." Thank you, Libertarian overlords, from protecting the tech community from this dangerous content.
They unflagged it, but the pause in upvotes means it dropped off the front page and out of people's minds.
Mission accomplished for the flaggers. I don't know why HN can't/won't fix this obvious abuse mechanism.
It's a forum run by venture capital if that tells you anything. The "tech right" were one of the reasons Trump won this past election. It describes a voter bloc consisting of Libertarian/Thiel/Musk types who are very motivated by: immigration (H1B), deregulation, increasing their wealth, and gaining more power.
I gotchu fam, I’m snapping Full page screenshots of all the commentary here.
It would not be good to allow malcontents to spread disharmony.
<our benefactors have entered the chat>
They aren't libertarians. They are fascists.
I am rapidly becoming convinced that large portions of the SV ecosystem are just anti-human as a base ideology.
Every bit of it is true and there's more that he doesn't mention, probably because it's not as well documented yet.
I live in the Chicago area and can confirm. Landscapers are afraid to work because they keep getting abducted off people's lawns. Out in the suburbs, a roofing crew was abducted mid-roof replacement, ICE left a hole in someone's house trying to abduct people working for a living.
Not at all exaggerated. The agents are lying about anything and everything even when there's evidence. One of them threw tear gas out of the window of their SUV because they were pissed to be stuck in traffic. They'll hit and run parked cars and flee the scene.
It gets it all right. We're being terrorized. If you don't care fuck you.
I live in Chicago and it is a BIG city. I've seen, in real life, none of this. But the online reports are legion. I think, like a lot of things, you can choose what reality you want to inhabit and find anecdata online to support any of it. During the Obama adminstration the right wing whackos came up with theories about black helicopters and UN camps and the rest. This may be _slightly_ more factual as the Orange Troll is more purposefully playing a media game, but I'd still take these reports with a grain of salt.
> you can choose what reality you want to inhabit
Thank you for outing yourself as willfully ignorant. I also appreciate the unintended admission of privilege.
I’m so glad that Kyle wrote this.
I’m so sad that he had to.
Pay attention to what’s going on and vote.
The problem is how many people enthusiastically voted for this madness, lawlessness and cruelty, and are still cheering it on.
You can say "vote, vote, vote," and maybe it will work in 2026 or 2028, or 2030 or whenever, but the root problem is not going away: you are still surrounded by people all over the country who want this.
Margin of victory was ~2M votes, about how many voters 55+ die in a year. Hopefully enough voters have aged out or learned their lesson next time around (considering election results we've seen in the last week or so [1]). You're never going to convince unsavory voters to vote with empathy, the subject brain structure does not support it (anterior insular cortex, primarily), you can only hope they're aging out of the electorate at a reasonable pace (and not being replaced).
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Planck's Principle [2] applied to voting)
It's comforting that maybe this mentality is correcting itself one funeral at a time.
But what really makes me sad is how this mentality so quickly swept into the country to begin with. 30 years ago, the vast majority of Americans would be horrified at the thought of people being assaulted on the street in broad daylight, black-bagged, kidnapped and disappeared forever by masked, non-identifying thugs. Fast forward 30 years, and (chances are) my neighbors want this and are absolutely giddy at the thought of it happening here!
Regardless of who votes for what, how did my country turn into this?
> how did my country turn into this?
There are two components to this answer.
First, your country has been divided since at least the mid-19th century. Every war has a winning and losing side, but the losers don't simply vanish. Their mentality persists throughout generations, even if it remains in the background, and is ignored by the other side.
Secondly, all this technology you've built and allowed the world to use can and has been exploited by your enemies to your own detriment. The same systems you've built that allow manipulating people into buying things are also ideal channels for spreading propaganda and disinformation. Information warfare is not new, but modern technology has made it more effective than ever at manipulating groups of people, sowing dissent, and generally causing chaos and confusion within a nation.
So, putting those two together, it's not difficult to see how acts of information warfare could be used to fuel the deeply rooted social divide, directly causing or strongly contributing to the internal sociopolitical instability you've been experiencing for the past decade.
Meanwhile, your enemies can sit back and enjoy the show of an imploding nation. They know that you're untouchable via traditional warfare, which is why these tactics are so perfect. They do require a long time to come into effect, but they're highly effective, very cheap to deploy, and the best part is that they're completely untraceable to the attacker. It's still debatable whether there was Russian interference in your elections, and how effective it actually was, even though there is evidence for it. It's still debatable whether Chinese-operated social media platforms are a national security threat or not. Were J6 protesters rioters or patriots? And so on about every controversial sociopolitical topic.
This confusion is exactly the intended effect. Your regular checks and balances, your laws, ideals and values, make no difference if your communication channels are corrupted.
I don't see how you can get out of this mess, and I expect things will get much worse before they get better. Not just for you, but globally. These same tactics are also deployed in other countries, by the US as well. Though, ironically, countries that are cut off from the global internet have an upper hand in this conflict.
Tribalism, identity politics, low education and lack of respect for education and intellectualism, and late stage capitalism. A cautionary tale, for sure. People are angry, rightfully so, but at the wrong people. Thank Reagan (economics) and Gingrich (politics) for a lot of this we’re facing.
Deepfriedchokes is right; we need stronger, more robust systems to protect humans from other humans, because we cannot trust the human (broadly speaking).
The Biden admin (no idea if Biden himself was involved) literally sued Texas to stop Texas from enforcing border law. This same admin also essentially redefined "asylum" to be economic asylum rather than "I'm afraid that if I go back to my country I'll be killed" which is how people typically thought of asylum.
You can absolutely think that what's happening now is an overreaction, un-American, gross, illegal, and morally wrong.
But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
If you just want to see the people who voted for this as "the enemy" and "evil" you're basically doing the same tribal "othering" that's lead to these outcomes you don't like.
Is that ugly and uncomfortable? Yes, absolutely. Will things get better by ignoring it? Absolutely not.
>If you just want to see the people who voted for this as "the enemy" and "evil" you're basically doing the same tribal "othering" that's lead to these outcomes you don't like.
"If you point out problems, you yourself are actually the problem. I am very rational."
Incredible logic.
It is incredible, because a lot of people dismiss it so eagerly.
Let me try to phrase it differently: ostracization rarely yields positive results, and is more likely to lead to opposite of desired course of action through future radicalization.
In other words, saying that bad people are bad is - as paradoxical as it might be - less likely to making anyone better than make bad people even worse.
>It is incredible, because a lot of people dismiss it so eagerly.
Because it's wishful thinking, and it only serves one purpose and only benefits one group.
You can't say it wasn't tried. Far from it.
It didn't work out. Plain and simple.
Sorry, I absolutely appreciate the explanation instead of a snark remark, but I don’t understand.
What was tired or supposed to work out? Not ostracizing is not exactly a solution (grandparent comment haven’t made suggestions as to what to do instead), and alternatives aren’t one possible approach but a giant spectrum of possible reactions. Instead of saying “you’re a bad person” a lot of different things can be done, right?
Or do you possibly mean that we collectively tried everything and nothing ever worked out, so we’re fairly positive this is wishful thinking? Or am I misunderstanding something, or falling to some fallacy here?
Okay so what's the solution then that doesn't involve having to disappear the half of the country that you don't agree with? I'm super open to better solutions. I just rarely hear any other than magical thinking. "All these evil shitbags will get reeducated and agree with me now" if it's not that, what is it?
the solution that doesn't involve having to disappear the half of the country that you don't agree with?
You can't form a country with people who want half the country to disappear. There's only three possible outcomes here:
- civil war
- secession
- remove all people that want other people to disappear
I think you're missing the fourth option which is rediscovering civility, agreeing to disagree, etc.
Are the Republicans doing that right now? Probably not. Are the Democrats doing that right now? Also probably not.
"Are the people doing the humane and civil things the same as the people actively supporting and promoting evil and hate? I guess so!"
If you're not being disingenuous you're being incredibly infantile.
Take a big, long think.
>agreeing to disagree,
Disagreement about what exactly? Please, spell it out.
> But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
Anyone who's read about the history of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s should understand how it's possible. We can still feel disappointed and helpless that the same mentality is rearing its head again, especially in a country that itself sent people overseas to fight it 100 years ago.
Off and on throughout my life as an American, I thought my fellow Americans could be sometimes be described as arrogant, sometimes uninformed, sometimes overconfident, sometimes over-patriotic, sometimes selfish. But never needlessly cruel and cold-blooded like millions are today. This is new and terrible. It's absolutely sickening to walk outside in my neighborhood, look at 10 houses and think maybe 3 or 4 of them are homes to people who are OK with what is happening.
>But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
Actually it was more like 25% of those eligible to vote, not "over half the country."
Which lawsuit are you referring to?
Probably this one: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/03/politics/texas-immigration-la...
We shouldn’t need to count on voters dying to avoid outcomes like this. Our institutions are broken if they can’t protect the public from a mentally ill public official on a power trip.
The point is that we are not talking about protecting the public from a few mentally ill public officials. These officials didn't just appear out of the ether, they were voted for by tens of millions of voters who want this. Even if the officials go away, those voters are not.
I'm not sure this is the correct perspective on voting. Voters are often passionate about one or two key issues - crime, Israel v Palestine, cost of living, immigration policy, coal towns, Ukraine, military spending, or whatever is most important to them.
If they voted for Trump it doesn't mean they agree with him on immigration and crime. They just have to think it's less important than the positions they do agree with. An effective argument to win over those voters isn't "you're evil and should have better opinions," it's "immigration policy is important too and this one is really bad, plus Trump is doing a bad job on your pet issues."
You’re expecting rationality where it will not be found. The do not care about effective arguments, they are vibes and emotion driven.
You can make a vibes- and emotion-based argument that isn't "you are evil."
I disagree. Can you talk someone out of their religion? Their identity? Their belief system? In most cases, you cannot. Exceptions exist, certainly, but are not the norm in this regard. This could include those who are proudly racist, proudly misogynist, or take joy or satisfaction in the harm or pain of others. Are they evil? I think that distinction is a waste of time to be honest. All that matters is: “can you convince these people to vote differently?” If not, any time or effort you spend on them is wasted, and the evidence is robust a lot of these people will keep voting as they have, regardless of argument made.
This isn't true.
Swing voters exist. Moderates exist. Single-issue voters exist. Occasional voters exist. These are observable facts about the world.
The four groups exist in large enough numbers that they decide elections. Die-hard party loyalists exist, committed non-voters who'll never ever vote exist, but they're fixed quantities and are practically irrelevant.
I agree with the statement that what really matters is whether you can convince someone to vote differently - but, yes, of course you can! Trump has run three times and only won twice. Obviously there's something that can convince people not to vote for Donald Trump, because it has already happened.
The replacement voters are currently teenagers. They haven't "learned their lesson", they aren't old enough to have experienced politics at all. They were 6 years old when Trump was elected the first time. This is their reality and we can't expect that the electorate gets more sensible because old people rotate out.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-support-among-men-eroding-108...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-absolutely-craters...
Young women are also most liberal than ever, and who carried recent election wins. I expect this trend to continue.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/gallup-analysis-finds-yo...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men...
I was told here CharlieXcX would deliver the election.
The votes move in cycles
Additional citation:
The 2024 Trump "realignment" is already over - https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trumps-winning-2024-coaliti... - November 7th, 2025
Complete hopium. I remember twenty years ago as we witnessed the second term of W and the talks about the republican party's base dying out and losing their support with it. Yet 21 years later they are going stronger than ever with just mayhem and chaos to show for it. Nothing constructive accomplished in two decades. They either obstructed when out of power or favoured the billionaire class when in power. Yet they rebranded themselves as the "revolutionary" party and suckered enough idiots to vote for them enthusiastically.
You are fucked, American friends. And we're all fucked with you and because of you. When you sneeze the rest of the world catches a Covid sized cold so you're taking down the rest of us with you.
Sadly GenX seems to be getting on board as quickly as the boomers are dying off
Gen X are approaching retirement age.
We must always vote. Our voter turnout for elections in the US is approximately shit.
We must also do other things, too: Voting isn't the end-all, be-all solution to everything. (And that's OK; we can do more than one thing at a time.)
But the absolute necessity of actually-voting is a constant, and I'm equipped with a profound amount of intolerance towards any idea that may suggest otherwise.
Yeah, the people who suggest voting doesn’t matter are either suffering from some nihilistic delusion or they’re spreading a self-serving lie.
Or, they live in one of the 40-something states where the election margins are large enough that it doesn't matter whether they vote.
My state hasn't voted Democrat since 1964. The only two elections with less than a 10-point spread since then were in 1976 (7.5% spread) and 1992 (5% spread due to Perot stealing votes from Bush Sr.).
I moved to this state in 1993.
I have three general questions:
---
1. So it's about odds?
By what mechanism do you think that refusing to vote will improve your favored diminutive party's odds in your state?
---
2. Or maybe it's about cost, instead?
What does it cost to vote in your state? How much time, and how much money, does a voter need to put forth in order to cast a vote in [wherever you are]?
---
3. Are you a masochist? (Are you sure about that?)
Local government and utility commissioners are very important too.
Hmm. Possibly.
I predict that California will “go blue” in the presidential elections for at least the rest of my lifetime. Someone who “votes red” in California can say that their vote doesn’t matter, and a reasonable person would understand why they feel that way.
You don’t seem like a reasonable person, or you’re also suffering from some nihilistic delusion, possibly.
The most sure method any of us can individually enact to help to ensure that our favored candidate is not elected is to declare that it doesn't matter, and then just give up and not vote.
This method is literally an example of nihilism.
So are you saying that, in this instance, understanding your vote doesn’t matters is delusional, or not? You never addressed that.
You latched onto the nihilistic part, which I suppose isn’t surprising.
Your vote always matters. Your vote gets tallied up along with all of the other votes, each of which individually have exactly equal weight compared to your own vote.
By extension: Any suggestion to the contrary is delusional.
I reject your premise.
Your vote doesn't always matter.
The vote that is never cast is absolutely worthless. You're correct.
(I vote every single time unless my ballot would simply be empty. I'd like to say "I'll see you at the polls!" but that is seemingly a lost cause -- it's apparent that only one of us has any chance at all of imparting any change at this level, and that this person is not you.
But you do you. The folks who aren't nihilists will do what we can to steer the ship without your help.)
Ah, I also vote in every election I can. Thanks for the assumption though!
I don't think this framing is very helpful. Whatever you believe about the people who pulled the lever for Trump, which included an unprecedented number of Latino and Black voters, they exist, and they're not persuaded by your disapproval. I think a really big problem we have on my side of the aisle is the belief that there's a celestial referee who will call offsides on the Republicans if we can just find the right argument at the right amplitude.
What led into our current circumstances was several years of uncontrolled, chaotic immigration, caused in large part by specific articulable decisions Biden's administration made. People felt like the situation had gotten out of control, and they weren't wrong. Every day I'd commute into my office and pass multiple corners and Ike off-ramps(!) staffed by a woman and several of her tiny children, out in the cold, trying to sell bottles of water.
My reaction to that wasn't "deport them". I'm a liberal Democrat. But we're kidding ourselves if we think a natural reaction to that situation was "this is fine".
The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability. It was not: people fucking hate inflation. By a large factor inflation was the most important issue in the 2024 election. But the second-most important issue was immigration (like it has been throughout Europe over the past 10 years) and then after that the issues sharply trail off in importance.
Could you please qualify both: the several years of chaotic annd uncontrolled immigration as well as Biden betting on employment vs inflation with the policies that you are referencing?
For example, while I’m aware that the Biden admin ended title 42, it had only been policy for a few years, ending this policy simply removes us to the Obama era. Although I certainly don’t intend to strawman what you are saying, Obama immigration certainly wasn’t chaotic and uncontrolled. These statements don’t comport with my reading of the facts, as well as inflation, since I understand this to be a global phenomenon. I am genuinely interested
> The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability.
There is credible theory (shared by a very balanced labor economist I follow) that the immigration crisis helped tame the inflation crisis, besides boosting the economy enough for a soft landing:
https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy...
Also some studies for and against this theory:
- https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2025/01/10/Imm... (Finds inflation lowered.)
- https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0708 (No effect on inflation, but yes on GPD growth.)
Now, I'm not saying this was always Biden's plan, but the economics are not as straightforward as "employments vs inflation."
Right, so, I'm not making a normative claim about the right about of immigration. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call myself an "open borders" person, but I'm very pro-immigration. Pro-immigration in the sense of believing we benefit from the mix of new Americans we get over our southern border, not in the weird doublespeak sense of appreciating skilled immigration from Europe.
But from 2021-2023, we experienced a destabilizing sudden amount of immigration. We'd had immigrant-friendly policy during Obama, but I don't recall many dozens of Venezuelan refugees on the doorstep of our Village Hall. Obviously, that happened in large part because southern governors bussed people (often without their informed consent) to northern states. But so what? All that says is that we were experiencing something the southern states had been experiencing all along.
My big point here is just: it's not enough to say how strongly you feel about immigration in 2021-2024. Enough people hated it that it motivated a materially important bloc of voters. I disagree with those voters. But I also disagree with people upset about inflation, and I feel like we generally understand that those of us on my side of the employment/inflation question were just, you know, wrong. In an electoral sense.
I was looking at yearly immigration numbers and there is variation in the reporting, which is to be expected, but from what I can see, the census bureau sees a fairly stable number of immigrants (undocumented and otherwise) year over year from 2010-2025, and many sources agree, although CATO intstitute indicates a rather large increase (around %40) in this time period.
Can you please share some information as to why you feel the 21-3 numbers to be destabilizing?
The reason for increasing Venezuelan immigration is most likely the TPS act from 2019 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela_TPS_Act_of_2019 )
I am an internet person, but I am aware of your general career and hold some personal respect for you which is why I am asking you fairly directly for your information. Correcting my knowledge is truly my goal and to be very blunt, I am sensitive to the issues of immigration (all types). Personally, my main concern with my country's treatment of this issue lies in the preservation of due process for these people who are seeking to become my countrymen. It doesn't surprise me that they might desire freedom and self-determination, which is something that I readily empathize with. It is important to me to treat people fairly and with dignity in civil society and especially regarding our government, and this includes citizens who are troubled by it. As such I am very interested in realizing an accurate portrayal.
My take (from the sibling comment): the actual immigration problem was not as bad as the perception of it. And possibly that perception was deliberately cultivated across the masses.
For several northern metros, the actual immigration problem was distinctively worse than anything that occurred under Obama. If we can't talk about it without lapsing into cope, we don't have much of a chance to persuade the people voting against the perception you're talking about.
Well I asked about this and now you're saying "It was actually worse" and invoking cope. If I promise to have zero follow up questions can you tell me why you think this?
I do live in a northern municipality and we have a number of Venezuelan people here, which is why I mentioned the TPS Act. I became more closely aware of the TPS when I talked to one of the guys about his country. This was a couple of years ago, but I still see his car (he has a Toyota with a "Venezuela" badge on the rear over the "TOYOTA" he ripped off of it, which is how I figured he was Venezuelan)
But I was wrong about the time frame of the bill which apparently did come into effect during Biden admin, giving them rights to work. Sorry about that inaccuracy, it never mattered to me who did it since it seemed like we were helping these people out quite a lot, and I liked him.
At no point did mismanaged immigration during the Obama administration cause a crisis in my local municipality or force us to reallocate funds or scramble to find housing for over 100 people that were otherwise living in makeshift tents outside a police station. I think you'll find it pretty easy to pull up news stories; October 2023 was the peak of it in Chicagoland but you'll see stories running all the way into the middle of the next year.
(I liked Biden too and am directionally supportive of TPS; especially for Haitians, but broadly for everyone. My belief in the fundamental moral rightness of that program makes me less tolerant of the ineptitude with which the programs were managed, not more so: Biden's mishandling of this will probably set similar efforts back for the next 20 years.)
Thanks, I was editing the comment but I will stop to prevent any wiggle over here.
We have some number of immigrants where I am in a rather conservative small town in a large greater metro area. We have a local history of missionary and aid work, sponsoring people from terrible places like Sudan during the Save Darfur movement, and even farther back to bring Christian european people into the country. I sometimes see people in my daily life like (as you mentioned) a Haitian man who works in an industrial facility, people from Guatemala and Honduras live very close to me, some have bought into businesses and such.
From my perspective its the working rights that do the most to help people out, since amnesty applicants are prohibited from working for a waiting period and have to rely on whatever charities or aid is available, which varies.
I think over the long and even the median term, we benefit from arbitrarily-skilled migration over the southern border. I'm to the left of the median Democrat on immigration. But in the short term of 2023 and 2024, we had chaos and direct costs. Black voters in the west side of Chicago noticed that services for their neighborhoods, and for Black homeless people in particular, we underfunded, while large allocations for housing and wraparound services for migrants were expedited on an emergency basis.
We could have taken in an integer multiple more migrants than we did in 2023. But we'd have to have the programs in place to do it. Instead, they built a clownfire clusterfuck of policy and procedure all while sending gravely mixed signals about the likelihood of success for economic migrants, which were (quite reasonably, and, in fact, correctly) interpreted by those people --- people smart and tenacious enough to cross the Darien Gap on foot! --- as a flashing green light.
It's not that the country doesn't have the capacity for those people. It does. But only if the mechanisms are in place to on-board them --- sufficient immigration judges, temporary housing, routing throughout the country, tracking. We had absolutely none of that, and the southern governors knew it and called the bluff.
I think people who care about Democratic party electoral success should be extremely wary of self-soothing explanations about how we did everything right and it was Republican misrepresentation and sabotage that got us here. I don't agree with conservatives on immigration and don't think the institutional Republican party is a good-faith actor on this issue, but that doesn't matter --- the only thing that matters is what the median voter thinks the next Democratic president will do on immigration. If they believe it's the same thing Biden did, that's going to cost us.
Oh as someone going through my own personal (legal) immigration-related crisis in the '21 - '24 timeframe, I totally don't think any party on any side of aisle was or is doing immigration right :-)
"Look at what you're going through doing it the legal way while illegals are getting put up in 5-star hotels on your tax dollars" was a line I heard a few times. I was very aware of the havoc due to immigrants being bussed across states. At the time I chalked it up to increased border crossings like everybody else.
But also for this reason I had looked into it and realized that the Biden admin's hands were tied by the laws as they existed. And when both parties finally managed to reach an agreement to fix some of the laws, it was torpedoed by a specific party to support a "campaign premise."
I realize I implied upthread that it was "only perceptions", which was incorrect. But if the immigration data does not support the events that transpired, something somewhere is screwy. And its not a stretch to imagine, given the torpedoing above, that it was deliberately managed.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to address this with me, I do appreciate it and I think I've a clearer view on perspectives. The language and rhetoric is harmful to society all while we are achieving the worst outcomes. We are doing a bad job. I can see that there is something grievously wrong with our country. For what its worth, I'm writing here as I would to a close friend in case you feel a question about my sincerity.
I hear what you're saying, I also agree and think you're very correct that it matters what the median voter thinks. Infrastructure and process to manage people we are bringing here is a requirement. Personally, I very firmly want to afford people due process and dignity, both of which they deserve. I'm frustrated by the lack of real information and constant opportunistic black-and-white rhetoric. It can't be that either "You're racist" or pulling up the ladder or conversely "Illegals are rapists and bring crime" and so forth. This has become a convenient wedge issue and it is disheartening, since we are toying with people's lives.
A lot of perceptions of immigration are fueled by (political) media attention and the situation on the ground varies depending on where you are. I clearly recall media stories about a New York City's Roosevelt Hotel used for asylum housing, this is part of the mechanisms like temporary housing and it was then weaponized by disingenuous trolls and politics. I feel like even when the public or individuals do provide the needed parts, we still get bad results. Even if corporations use E-Verify, we still get identity theft and fraud. There was even a Police officer in Maine this year who was deported after DHS' E-Verify cleared him for work status. The only way around that I can see would be a national biometric ID and that might not even do the trick or without considerable downside.
In 2025, We have a militarized terror campaign when the same people controlling the government could have repealed the 1980 Asylum Act, deployed satellites over the southern border amd deployed drones with thermal vision to monitor and intercept crossings, border agents, better background checks for employees, or whatever else for the same cost and effort of what we're doing right now. Last year, Democrats negotiated to fund border security, immigration judges, ICE funding and increased staffing, Asylum reform, surveillance towers on the border (the wall I guess?) and more in a 2024 National Security Emergency Appropriations act in exchange for supporting Ukraine's war against invasion, but Donald Trump convinced the Republicans to kill it. It seemed like everything they had demanded and more.
Right now the USS Gerald Ford is sailing towards Venezuela and I'm no mind reader but it seems not unlikely that we're going to blow up another country, creating a different kind of chaos and destabilizing the region before washing our hands as soon as next week. I honestly don't think that anything less than Blackhawks in the sky across America would be deemed acceptable and I don't think it ends there. They're saying we're demanding gender mutilation and free healthcare for illegal immigrants on USDA.gov right now.
If you're interested, I would be grateful to know whatever ideas you have. You've worked with adversaries, sometimes you have to shut off and disconnect compromised systems. Are we really in the place that (it seems to me) we need to deport all non-citizens and halt all immigration or else they scare people into worse?
I think it's also possible for the party to maintain marginally unpopular positions to support their principles --- that's what the GOP does on reproductive health care --- but when you do that you have to be cognizant that you're paying a price and you have to make that cost up somewhere else. And then, you have some control over how painful that cost is.
I don't think there's a set of policies that puts our shared principles on immigration "into the black" (so to speak) with the median US voter. Immigration is unpopular worldwide right now, and some of that unpopularity is just human nature, some of the same forces that drive NIMBYism. But you can minimize the costs by changing up how you communicate on these issues, and I think the best way to do that is to empathize (even as you disagree) with the beliefs of the people who disagree with you.
There are lots of places where conservatives disagree with me where I have zero empathy and zero fucks to give about how they feel. But when we're on the wrong side of an issue electorally, when the margins are as slim as they are, and when the issue is as salient as it is (it was the 2nd highest polled issue in weighted exits in 2024), it behooves us to be more careful.
That makes sense, and I agree with your assessments about the voting population's priorities. But maybe the inflation / immigration aspects were much more intertwined than we realized.
Maybe (being very generous to him) Biden didn't do a tradeoff between inflation vs employment... maybe the gamble was that increased immigration would boost the economy enough that citizens were not as bothered by the immigrants.
In other words, the very valid "its' the economy stupid" theory would imply that if people can comfortable provide for themselves and their families, they'd be less bothered by what they saw as competition for jobs.
Unfortunately time was not on their side, and inflation did not drop fast enough.
But there might be another angle. An interesting aspect of the economic sentiment and inflation hysteria preceding the election was that data showed that the majority of Americans thought they themselves were doing well, but other Americans were suffering. So the statistical reality was much better than the statistical perception.
This is one reason that led to the term "vibecession" -- data belied the sentiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibecession
Many have credibly attributed this phenomenon to all the algorithm-driven ragebait content on social media, and certain news media channels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibecession#Media_influence_an...)
But maybe we still underestimate the size of that effect: it exploited a critical flaw in an otherwise successful economic strategy -- its reliance on "the outsiders." During the time things were improving but still painful, the perception of these outsiders could be exploited to distract from the improvements happening and foment a backlash.
Note it could very well have just happened by accident, but if not... that shows the power of mass perception. The events happening with media platforms leading up to the election may have been (and still are) much more consequential than we realize.
> Maybe (being very generous to him) Biden didn't do a tradeoff between inflation vs employment... maybe the gamble was that increased immigration would boost the economy enough that citizens were not as bothered by the immigrants.
> In other words, the very valid "its' the economy stupid" theory would imply that if people can comfortable provide for themselves and their families, they'd be less bothered by what they saw as competition for jobs.
Have you not looked at Canada recently? They've done exactly what you're suggesting, and the result is a country that is now completely unaffordable for Canadians, with the median home price now over $800k. Is that the kind of future you want for Americans?
I'm not actually recommending anything. (Edited to add: I can totally see how unchecked immigration can be disruptive.) I'm saying that looking back, there is a credible theory along with evidence that increased immigration helped boost the US economy and maybe even manage inflation. That seems to be an insufficiently discussed aspect.
I'm not at all familiar with Canada, but a Google AI overview for "canada housing affordability crisis due to immigration" suggests that immigration is one of the smaller factors (11%?) in driving house prices up. The citations include these:
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
https://www.torontomu.ca/diversity/news-events/2025/07/immig... (Probably the study referenced above.)
As an aside, as a resident of the Bay Area where the housing market is probably the most twisted of them all, I would kill to find a $800K home!!
The conservative message machine is determinative, and they would find something to effectively raise a storm about: immigration, inflation, etc. If Biden cut inflation, they would have demonized him regarding employment. Or just make something up - they can say anything at this point, and the Dems and others have made themselves helpless. They will always find something - Biden and Dems were being called pedophiles in 2000, the election was stolen, etc.
Remember that the GOP stopped immigration reform in Congress for many years, including killing the agreed-upon bipartisan immigration reform bill at Trump's behest during the election. If your theory is correct, that would have disqualified the GOP among those voters.
>bipartisan immigration reform
The bill that wasn't required for deportation?
I don't think that's true. It was easy to call in Trumps first loss, i remember telling my dad: Economy goes bad, he'll be right back. Immigration may have mattered enough, and likewise Bidens cognitive decline. Lastly people didn't like Kamala in the primary, and they dont like candidates forced on them. That was many things stacked against a dem victory, and it was still close.
The dems main ongoing weakness as an extreme generalization, is choosing marginal hills to die on, and using hyperbole for everything.
The dems' huge screwup was abandoning the working and middle classes, instead choosing to be "The Other Party For Billionaires, But With Different Identity Politics".
I don't know, man. That is definitely true, but they didn't win by a landslide. And a lot of their edge came from the MAGA Latinx vote. This ICE/CPB action is a total self-own. That Latinx vote is going to disappear, and we've already seen the results in the 2025 elections.
I think the right will turn on itself in 2026. We could even end up with three parties, only one of them able to obtain a majority (Democrats). There's a plausible version of the future where the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs.
> I think the right will turn on itself in 2026.
If they turn on themselves it will not be over immigration. This is the one issue where they are almost all in wild agreement. A massive, overwhelming majority of Republicans agree with these cruel treatment of immigrants[1].
They might disagree on the economy or tariffs or jobs or whatever, but there's no infighting here. They fully back this cruelty.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/07/what-amer...
The biggest division right now seems to be support Israel. And if we up the attacks in Venezuela, I do think the America first folks will get louder in their divisions.
No, you're right—I don't think it will be over immigration. I think they'll lose in 2026 and tear themselves apart infighting about who's to blame.
Losing in 2026 barely matters. Existing dem leadership has no desire to end the filibuster, which means we get one bill a year that is full of technocratic approaches. The Trump administration, backed by the supreme court, is accruing more and more power to simply ignore the will of Congress. Even if the dems get some guts and defund ICE, the Trump administration has already demonstrated that it is happy to just illegally distribute or withhold funds wherever it likes.
The only way out of this is replacing dem leadership in congress with people who give a shit, winning the presidency in 2028, killing the filibuster, and then going on a serious denazification effort to restructure our institutions so that this sort of shit can't happen. Court packing. Total dismantling and rebuilding of federal law enforcement. Recreating a functional congress.
I agree, but that’s not far off from simply dissolving the country and starting over under a new name. Maybe that’s the way forward.
There is no way that the republicans split. They are 100% captured by MAGA. The only possible splitting point is with the Fuentes wing, who'd just like to murder all the jews in the country in addition to all of the latinos.
There are some who voted for Trump and do celebrate the cruelty on display in Chicago. But I also think many wanted to deport "the worst of the worst" and that is what they thought they were promised. And per the media many consume, that is what's happening. It's an open question on whether the real extent of the crackdown will break through the echo chamber, but from conversations I've had with people who consume Fox News, I really do think a lot of Trump voters will not be ok with the tactics as they are actually being carried out. For example, I just don't think that earnest religious conservatives I know would defend denying the Eucharist to people in the processing facility (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-...) and then banning prayer outside the facility altogether (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-lead...). When you lay out this (and the many events in Aphyr's post) to them clearly, they really don't like it.
Half the US cheers about this. I hope we do not get a world war to stop it.
Right.
The plan to defeat fascism can't be "never lose a single election ever for the rest of time." Political leaders did absolutely fuck all to consign Trump to the garbage bin of history in 2021 and now we've got a fascist president motivated entirely by two things: hurting as many people he hates as possible and putting up tacky gold shit in the white house.
Voting is what got us in to this. This is supported by a majority of the US. You do not live in the country you think you do.
> This is supported by a majority of the US.
The election was fairly close. The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
All that said, as an American living abroad who votes left, the use of terms like “kidnapped” and “abducted” to describe immigration-enforcement actions seems really weird to me and my expat peers. There are quite a few democratic, developed countries high on freedom-ranking lists that widely deploy law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants and visa overstayers. Sure, deplore lack of due process when actual citizens get caught in the net, but so much use of these loaded terms isn’t even about that, it’s criticizing actions against non-citizens.
> The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
There may be differing views on other topics among the party, but Republicans broadly support this vision of cruelty and these actions against immigrants[1] by huge margins. It's probably the one single vision they are united behind.
Your citation doesn't support your claim
- 74% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the Trump administration is doing the right amount to deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. Another 12% say it’s doing too little and 13% say it’s doing too much.
- Nearly nine-in-ten Republicans approve of sending additional U.S. troops to the border (88%) and increasing deportations (86%). More than six-in-ten strongly approve of these actions.
- 80% of Republicans approve of cutting federal funds to cities and states if they do not cooperate with deportations
- 72% of Republicans approve of suspending asylum applications, with 38% saying they strongly approve.
Only that first stat aligns with what you are claiming. Wanting more border / deportations is fully inline with wanting to control immigration. Likewise cutting funds to states not supporting federal law isn't fringe. And asylum applications are clearly broken.
You can want all of those things and still be against eg ice agents raiding a school. It would be more accurate if it focused exclusively on the more egregious ICE activities.
It looks like the difference in the popular vote was 2,284,967 votes towards R. Do all of those 2,284,967 voters demonstrably overlap with that 86% of the polled Republicans? If not, then claiming that a majority of Americans support every incident in the linked article based on the last election, lacks basis.
I'm not saying anything about the majority of the American population. Just that Republicans broadly support these actions. I hope we never get to the point where a majority of the overall public support this.
95% of people don't care about anything (but not always the same 95% on every issue). Revolutions are typically caused by 3% of the population outweighing the other 2%, while the 95% do nothing.
Do you not think there might be a relationship between the lack of due process and the choice of terms?
Like, maybe the defining difference between arrest and abduction is whether the action is the output of an accountable system of justice, rather than whether the people doing it are the right kind of people and the people having it done to them are the wrong kind of people.
For some years now there has been a segment of the American left, particularly visible on social media, who believes that strictly enforcing immigration laws at all is bad. This predates the current guy, as well as his administration as the former guy. So, when I read an article by someone like the writer here whose online activity has other shibboleths of a left more extreme than found in mainstream parties in many other democracies, my assumption is he is coming out of this trend and the current events, as appalled as he is by them, is not the ultimate cause of his use of that loaded language.
> The election was fairly close.
Yeah but "the totalitarian Neonazis who wanted to deploy secret police were only a slight majority" is really faint praise.
No, my point was that in a close election that depended on a party building coalitions between heterogenous groups of voters, the people in favor of any particular action taken by the elected government may be a minority of the population, not even a slight majority.
Sure, but in a healthy society, such extreme opinions should never even be close enough to a minority large enough to be elected into power. Hopefully, anyway.
Blame it on first-past-the-post. It’s just one of the many ways the Founding Fathers sowed the seeds of a politically unhealthy society.
Many of these people are documented permanent residents or US citizens being grabbed without warrants, without being read rights, without charges, and without an opportunity to present documentation.
That's kidnapping.
ICE are wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, abducting citizens and non-citizens alike. They are accusing citizens of assault and then releasing them without charging - a pretty good indication that they lied.
They are conducting warrantless searches. There is a case where they rammed the car of a U.S. citizen (clearly seen on video), promptly took her into custody, accused her of hitting them, and then released her without charging her.
They are profiling people based on race and ethnicity.
The abductions look like kidnappings. They don’t look like law enforcement actions.
Yup immigration was arguably the concrete issue of the election and these were the campaign promises. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that this is what mass deportation would look like.
We already had mass deportation under Biden, and it wasn’t conducted in this manner.
A plurality of the people who voted went for Trump not a majority. He won 49.8% of the vote. When you include everyone who is eligible to vote he only got 31.8% of the total electorate. A large percentage of the electorate doesn't vote.
If you don't vote, you agree with the majority. Plain and simple! If you want to show your protest, go vote and explicitly vote with an invalid ballot or a third party. Don't give yourself the convenient "out" of staying home and then feeling like you're such a counterculture warrior for doing it.
I recently saw a video of armed, masked ICE terrorists entering a daycare and forcibly dragging a teacher out in front of babies and toddlers.
America is sick. Republicans are sick. They condone this and have made no attempt to do anything about it.
>teacher
Citizen or legal immigrant?
Carer or teacher?
Would one of the combinations make it acceptable?
I'm looking for the appropriate description of what's going on.
Somehow I'm led to believe it's okay to move into any country and Bhutan's restrictions on visitors are a-okay in the same breath.
Canada's not far and it's not true there either.
The problem is not immigration policy — it’s using terror, illegal detainment, and negligent and excessive force to detain people. Breaking into a daycare with no warrant, no identification (they wear masks and refuse to identify themselves to avoid justice for their crimes), with guns, and dragging a woman out kicking and screaming is both completely illegal in every way and extremely traumatic for everyone - regardless of the wanton cruelty of deporting working class undocumented immigrants who have become a contributing and otherwise law-abiding part of a community.
I don't think the courts will agree.
The presence of a person without a valid visa is illegal and the person working without a working visa is another illegality. Not reporting your presence to the authorities is another level.
Otherwise doesn't erase that.
>avoid justice for their crimes
Some other fact free nonsense.
Yes the drama and force is extra, but it's not illegal, or unprecedented as I'll have you know from seeing video of immigration raids in the past, from the UK, Canada, Sweden and Australia, or pre 49 immigration raids.
There's two classes of people who support this blatant criminality. The business class who relies on legal and illegal immigration + outsourcing to force down local and market wages. And the solidarity crew who are completely pro open borders without restrictions and couch it in other excuses.
Borders are violence, they argue. While complaining about settlers and occupiers of indigenous land. It's a circle you can't square.
The state is not allowed to use unlimited force against people suspected of having broken the law. Half of the bill of rights is about the rights of criminal and civil defendants (more if we include the 9th).
The law requires that law enforcement has a specific kind of warrant in order to enter a location without permission and detain somebody. This law is regularly being broken by agents. "Oh, they are illegal so whatever" is horrifying.
I can tell it's you that down voted me.
Agents can enter buildings without warrants under limited circumstances. It's not a hard bar.
Ordinarily when any crime is in plain view or in chase of a fleeing suspect, or (dubiously) when the individual is believed to be part of a proscribed organisation.
Administrative warrants are okay when there's a specific record of an individual being there. Like if the website for the organisation posts the person as being an employee amongst other reasons.
Regardless, none of these bar the deportation of people caught up.
Horrifying is just your opinion. What's fact is all these are just objections to deportation of people not supposed to be in the country.
They can file their civil rights claims
The comment is sufficiently old and deep that I cannot downvote your post.
1983 claims have been winnowed away into basically nothing by the courts. They aren't a meaningful path to justice.
I just found out the daycare "teacher" allegedly wasn't.
Was actually a fleeing suspect.
I look forward to it being brought up as fact in the next election.
Justice isn't getting what you want. Sometimes it's going back to your country which has stricter immigration requirements than the USA. With guns showing up the day after your Visa expires.
She worked at the school and, according to her attorney, had a legal work permit. [1]
She was running from masked agents who are racially profiling people, detaining them (including US citizens), and then treating them like animals until they sign papers out of the country. They moved her out of state already to make it more difficult for her attorney. This is common practice.
"It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled."
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/07/attorney-day-care-...
That's interesting.
Look forward to the lawsuit.
This [1] is civil-war-inducing stuff, that's not "police", that's an army that attacks its own country's citizens. Crazy stuff, didn't think I'd get to see this happening in the States.
Later when things settle down, they will only do this to citizens who don’t pay the bribe.
https://archive.is/X33oQ for those in the UK.
I applaud the authors use of the word "abducted" and "kidnapped."
For some reason the media loves to just call it detained so anytime I see someone call it what it actually is deserves a gold star in my book.
How low standards have become :(
When states choose nullification as a policy to ignore federal law, it’s an overt act of escalation.
I don’t think these raids are good policy, but I won’t pretend that it’s happening in isolation. What they are doing, in large part, seems to be legal. Dressing detention up as kidnapping isn’t treating the issue in good faith.
You are familiar with the 4th Amendment? These acts are a clear violation of 4th Amendment rights, rights which extend to both citizens and non-citizens.
>When do ICE agents need a warrant to arrest immigrants?
>A judicial warrant is a legal order authorizing law enforcement’s search, seizure or arrest on private property. Judicial warrants are signed by a judge.
>Immigration agents also use administrative warrants, which carry lower legal weight. Administrative warrants are signed by federal agents such as immigration judges or officers. These warrants allow ICE agents to arrest someone in public places. However, they don’t give officers the right to enter private property.
>Although ICE agents are required to have a judicial warrant to enter a person’s home, they are not required to have a judicial warrant to arrest someone in public spaces, such as the immigration court building.
>"Lander is incorrect that a judicial warrant is required," Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant-rights advocacy group, said on X.
>An administrative warrant isn’t always required to arrest someone in public. According to immigration law, agents can arrest an immigrant without a warrant if they have "reason to believe" the immigrant is in the U.S. without authorization and "is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest."
https://api.politifact.com/article/2025/jun/18/Brad-Lander-I...
This goes on:
>Can ICE agents arrest U.S. citizens?
>ICE agents generally can’t arrest U.S. citizens, because they aren’t committing a civil immigration violation. However, an agent may arrest a U.S. citizen on the grounds that they believe the person is in the U.S. illegally. The person would be released after showing proof of citizenship.
>However, Lander wasn’t arrested on immigration grounds, said Alexandra Lopez, a Chicago-based immigration attorney. The agent accused Lander of obstruction.
>"In this scenario they are acting as federal law enforcement agents who are arresting a U.S. citizen on criminal, not immigration, grounds," Lopez said. "ICE claims they were detaining Comptroller Lander in their capacity as federal law enforcement agents, not immigration enforcement agents."
Immigration law is complicated.
I'm not some right-wing nutter. I'm just a lefty that thinks we're definitely shooting ourselves in the foot by really misunderstanding what's actually happening. Nullification of immigration laws is, in fact, a right that states can exercise, but it's overt nullification is absolutely an escalation that undermines public trust because it force the feds to send enforcement officers into a hostile area.
We should fight to win the immigration debate with persuasion, in the legislature. We need to have the law on our side, and we need to have the populace on our side. Right now, we have neither. We're operating a nullification campaign, and unlike the successes of legalizing marijuana, we're losing this one. If we want to keep doing this, that's fine, but I don't want people out there pretending that lawful detentions are kidnappings. It's dumb, it's a bad look, and it kind of doesn't care about the complexities of the predicament we're in.
This is a forum for nerds. I expect people to actually be able to google this shit.
For me, its really simple. ICE agents wouldn't need to be masked and unidentified if what they are doing is okay.
>Cities like Milwaukee require police officers to make their names or officer identification numbers visible. This ensures that if there is an allegation of wrongdoing, the officer can be identified. This also is to guard against impersonators.
>There are exceptions. For instance, Milwaukee police detectives wear "plain clothes," often a dress shirt and pants. And, of course, undercover officers dress in such a way not to be identifiable, by design.
>At the 2024 Republican National Convention, where 4,500 outside officers came to assist, the Milwaukee Police Department was clear that any visible uniform change would be deemed an escalation of force.
>Federal law enforcement, like FBI and ICE, for the most part do not have an official uniform, though during raids they typically wear body armor, windbreakers or other gear with the name of their agency emblazoned on it.
>At times, federal and local law enforcement have covered their faces during raids, most often when they involve gangs or terrorism where there is a risk of retaliation.
>In 2025, ICE officers have increasingly been wearing face coverings. ICE leaders said that's because their officers increasingly are being assaulted and harassed online.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/2025/06/30/why-are...
I agree with you that ICE agents should absolutely show their faces. That said, it's not unprecedented. I also think it's naive to think there would not be retaliation against them personally.
undercover police officers identify themselves when making an arrest.
>Governing Laws on Officer Identification
>The requirement for police officers to provide their name and badge number varies across the United States. While no federal law mandates disclosure, many states and municipalities have their own statutes aimed at enhancing transparency and accountability. These laws often require officers to identify themselves during specific interactions, such as traffic stops or arrests, to ensure citizens can hold law enforcement accountable.
https://legalclarity.org/does-a-police-officer-have-to-give-...
ICE where uniforms that say "ICE" in big letters. That's identification. Undercover police officers might identify themselves during an arrest, but only as "police." Undercover police officers aren't going to give you their name and badge number if you ask them.
>Situations Where Disclosure May Be Withheld
>While officers are generally expected to provide their name and badge number, there are situations where disclosure may justifiably be withheld. During undercover operations, revealing an officer’s identity could compromise safety and the operation’s integrity.
>In protests or crowd control situations, officers may face security concerns, such as risks of doxxing or harassment. To address this, some departments allow officers to withhold identification while still requiring visible markers, like badge numbers, to maintain accountability without endangering safety.
This stuff is trivially googlable.
>I agree with you that ICE agents should absolutely show their faces. That said, it's not unprecedented. I also think it's naive to think there would not be retaliation against them personally.
And if that occurs, whoever is responsible should be prosecuted.
You know that whole "rule of law" thing that seems to be so unfashionable, among certain masked folks and the liars who run them, these days?
I mean I completely agree with you.
You are making a legalistic argument to justify absolutely monstrous behavior and you should probably spend some time examining why you are doing that. If the law justifies an atrocity, you should not defend the law.
I'm not someone who thinks all laws should be followed blindly. When human rights are on the line, yes, we have an obligation to resist. Some people think enforcing immigration law is a violation of human rights.
I do not think it is a reasonable position to consider deportaion of folks overstaying visas as "a violation of human rights" in the vast majority of cases. Where we are breaking up families with young children is where I would draw my line, and that is certainly happening, but again my concern here is with the escalation that is nullification.
I simply think that if I were to go to, say, the UK and decided to not board a flight home and make a life for myself that I could be forcibly deported... and the Labour Gov't in the UK does forcible deportations:
https://londondaily.com/uk-government-reports-record-deporta...
I think the ideal solution is to create a system where overstaying a visa is practically impossible. This way people could not find them in a situation where they've established a life that would make leaving especially painful. However, since it has proven to be too practically difficult to negotiate comprehensive immigration reform for various reasons, the American left -- a left that I consider myself a part of -- has gone in the complete opposite direction for most of my lifetime. We have established an overt nullification policy that effectively facilitates folks ignoring immigration law. Now we have to deal with immigration enforcement we don't like, and it will be very difficult for us to protect young children losing a parent because we've decided that we want to effectively facilitate all folks here illegally, not just those who have found themselves with young families.
> I do not think it is a reasonable position to consider deportaion of folks overstaying visas as "a violation of human rights" in the vast majority of cases.
This is a motte/bailey. Deporting people is not inherently a violation of human rights. However, when judges have to clarify that "detainees" must be provided water and toilets[0], I think it's pretty clear that their human rights are being violated. The significant objection is to that, not to any semblance of immigration enforcement.
> I think the ideal solution is to create a system where overstaying a visa is practically impossible.
I can assure you that you do not want this, it is predicated on a level of government invasiveness that would be unpalatable to both citizens and legal immigrants. Some abuse is the cost of many well functioning systems.
> However, since it has proven to be too practically difficult to negotiate comprehensive immigration reform for various reasons, the American left -- a left that I consider myself a part of -- has gone in the complete opposite direction for most of my lifetime. We have established an overt nullification policy that effectively facilitates folks ignoring immigration law.
It is somewhere between deeply misinformed and rhetorical malpractice to say this, pretending that the American right bears no responsibility for preventing progress on immigration reform and that there haven't been multiple attempts by the left to improve things here that were blocked by the right (including multiple iterations of DREAM and various attempts at asylum reform).
[0]: https://www.scribd.com/document/943713376/Broadview-TRO
I mean, I disagree with you on all counts. I think it’s always fair to care about treatment of detainees… we don’t use the repeated inflammatory “kidnappings” of our concern is merely detainees treatment.
Other states, such as the UK, make it obscenely difficult to exist without documentation. They certainly do not tacitly endorse it. To suggest “I wouldn’t like” policies that plenty of western countries engage in seems naive.
Finally, the Republicans temperament on legal immigration is horrific, but they are in the position to ignore attempts to change the law because the law is on their side… like any issue in democracy, that means the Democrats are the party that needs to change minds.
> we don’t use the repeated inflammatory “kidnappings” of our concern is merely detainees treatment.
No, but we do use it for otherwise unlawful stops without probable cause that lead to people being put in detention facilities that don't have water or food.
> like any issue in democracy, that means the Democrats are the party that needs to change minds.
This is not the argument you just made. You were (and are) arguing for collaboration. That's not "changing minds". In my opinion, being loud and not collaborating with federal forces, to make them engage in violence themselves is very effective at changing minds, as we see with cratering public support for these kinds of things.
I admit I can't quite follow what your philosophy seems to be here, at best I could summarize what I've seen as "Republican immigration policy is bad and has grown more unconscionable but I actively support it because Democrats didn't fix it already", but that seems weird.
> You were (and are) arguing for collaboration.
I wouldn’t put it in those terms, but I think I understand you point and yes, the general point is that I think we should enforce laws we don’t like unless they directly run up against what we see as a serious violation of human rights. I think that is generally a good idea, because it preserves a governmental structure we all generally agree with: something approximating one person one vote for representation, with a few caveats thrown in.
Democracy falls apart rapidly if your strategy is to only enforce laws you endorse. Democracies that fall apart are typically replaced with undemocratic systems. On top of that, civil conflict is horrible for human flourishing, so shit needs to get really, really bad before that discussion happens. I see this as a very strange sword for the American left to fall on.
The counterargument to this is pretty straightforward: what is being done in Midway blitz isn't democratic and is bordering on autocratic. We have a responsibility not to normalize and acquiesce to a transition to an undemocratic system.
Keep in mind these laws weren't enforced in this way for the past 50 years. It's difficult to accept that this was just democratic party disinterest in enforcing them. It really seems like no one wanted to.
>what is being done in Midway blitz isn't democratic and is bordering on autocratic
I mean, we're talking about a democratically elected government enforcing democratically decided laws. I understand your sentiment, and generally agree with you that it "feels" that way, but I think there is zero substance to that claim considering the entire process of how we got here is democratic. I don't like it, but here we are.
>Keep in mind these laws weren't enforced in this way for the past 50 years.
I mean this is demonstrably false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_from_the_United_St...
We're obviously not going to see eye to eye on this. Illegal immigration is very obviously a major concern for a huge portion of the electorate, and because of the significant polarization on the subject, nullification here is going to lead to conflict as long as the federal electorate wants to enforce those laws. I obviously think this situation is unfortunate. I'm incredibly supportive of massively expanding American immigration, but it's difficult for me to get on board with nullification.
> I mean this is demonstrably false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_from_the_United_St...
You're doing a motte and bailey again. I, at least, don't object to some level of immigration enforcement.
What people do seem to object to, and what is unprecedented, is the aggression of enforcement, with roving packs of CBP officials going on snatch-and-grabs in random cities and detaining anyone who is latino-looking, including some citizens. That isn't how immigration law has been enforced over the past 5 decades. It's new. It wasn't policy under Bush or Obama or Biden or even under Trump the first time. The laws were not enforced like this since WWII.
The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked was during WWII. Its use this year was only lawful if you agree with the interpretation that certain Presidential determinations are wholly unreviewable by courts, an interpretation that so far, courts (including SCOTUS) have been unwilling to agree to.
There is significant controversy over whether much of this is even legal at all. And yet you seem to be of the opinion that state and local governments have some kind of responsibility to assist with actions they believe are illegal overreach. Because you're framing a lack of active participation as "nullification". You at least see why that's odd, right?
I've said over and over that nullification is the right of states and municipalities. My entire point is that it's inherently an escalation. When the feds choose to enforce a law is areas that are actively trying to prevent that law from being enforced, almost by definition requires a heightened level of conflict in how that enforcement is done.
I agree with you that this is "novel" but the idea is that this isn't a pendulum that swings back an forth. It's a cascade where the dam is breaking, and when it does, creates a wildly different paradigm than existed previously.
I don't like what is happening. I can just see why it's happening, and understand and appreciated the justifications for it.
Two this, first, I want to jump back to something you said earlier:
> Nullification of immigration laws is, in fact, a right that states can exercise, but it's overt nullification is absolutely an escalation that undermines public trust because it force the feds to send enforcement officers into a hostile area.
Do you see why this might actually be seen as increasing public trust in local LEOs who aren't participating in human rights abuses?
> We should fight to win the immigration debate with persuasion, in the legislature. We need to have the law on our side, and we need to have the populace on our side.
And can you see why not condoning those abuses gets the populace on "our" side?
Second, you have asserted something like
> When the feds choose to enforce a law is areas that are actively trying to prevent that law from being enforced
a few times now. And I'd like you to clarify: in January 2025, what actions was Chicago taking that were "actively preventing [immigration] law from being enforced"? And what actions do you see municipalities engaging in today that are "actively trying to prevent [immigration] law from being enforced"?
And if you were in charge, what would you do instead? Keep in mind, as a mayor or police captain or whatever, you cannot tell Greg Bovino what to do. You can assist him, but his use of force policies are different than yours, and you cannot make him or his officers follow your directives.
>Do you see why this might actually be seen as increasing public trust in local LEOs who aren't participating in human rights abuses?
> And can you see why not condoning those abuses gets the populace on "our" side?
I’m not sure how this is relevant. I’ve repeatedly noted my concerns with some of the enforcement. My only point is that nullification — effectively by definition — raises the stakes for potential conflicts.
> in January 2025, what actions was Chicago taking that were "actively preventing [immigration] law from being enforced"? And what actions do you see municipalities engaging in today that are "actively trying to prevent [immigration] law from being enforced"?
I mean, I think sanctuary city laws are clearly problematic. I obviously appreciate the benefits that accrue in the short term, and it’s an odd equation when approaching the problem from a shot vs long term perspective when it comes to harm reduction, but we’ve clearly gotten to the point where the general population wants something done that is incompatible with maintaining those policies. Yes, there are trade offs. We very rarely offer the same luxury to other violations.
> And if you were in charge, what would you do instead? Keep in mind, as a mayor or police captain or whatever, you cannot tell Greg Bovino what to do. You can assist him, but his use of force policies are different than yours, and you cannot make him or his officers follow your directives.
If I were in charge, I would have been voted out of office long ago. The fundamental problem here is two political sovereigns in a fistfight.
But suppose I were somehow in charge of the state govt, the first thing I would do is what Scott wiener did in CA, and pass state laws requiring all law enforcement to show their faces in my state. The feds have authority on immigration, but they don’t have immunity to state laws where the 10th amendment applies.
If I were the mayor, yes, I would be asking the police to assist in enforcement wherever they can, with their cameras on, recording everything.
> I mean, we're talking about a democratically elected government enforcing democratically decided laws.
No, we are talking about a government repeatedly, flagrantly, breaking the law, and then lying about it and repeatedly getting caught, by courts, by video, etc.
That’s a very important concern that is not directly relevant to whether or not the laws being enforced are democratic or whether the person who is enforcing those laws is a democratically elected representative.
I’ve repeatedly noted my concerns and problems with many of the actual enforcement. That said, there is an ocean of difference between having unjust laws and unjust policing.
> That’s a very important concern that is not directly relevant to whether or not the laws being enforced
Well, no, its relevant to whether what is happening is arbitrary and unlawful use of force or enforcement of the law, and if it is the former, then the whole question of "whether or not the laws being enforced are democratic" is misguided, because the shared premise assumed by both options presented is false.
Your concern is with the executive powers, that's an issue for the judicial branch. Our discussion is about the legislative branch and the electoral process. That's how we create law. This discussion is about the consequences of nullification of law that we don't like that does not violate some inherent human right (and no, I think it's fairly absurd to suggest that overstaying a visa is some human right, and I also think it's even difficult to suggest that seeking asylum in one nation specifically, and not a neutral third-party nation is some human right).
You're talking about the specific day-to-day of enforcement, which I've repeatedly said I don't like, and is probably a problem in many cases. That is important, it's also worth discussing, it's just very much NOT relevant to a discussion of the risks and consequences of states going down a path of nullification of a law that is popular on the federal level.
You keep saying “nullification”. Can you explain precisely what you mean by that?
Because as far as I’m aware, immigration law is not a concern of the state, and what folks typically mean when they say “nullification” in this context is “the state isn’t doing the fed’s job for them.”
You also brought up warrants to enter private property. What do you make of the incident a few days ago where an agent hopped a fence to arrest someone, without a warrant? Should we just ignore those violations of our rights?
>Because as far as I’m aware, immigration law is not a concern of the state, and what folks typically mean when they say “nullification” in this context is “the state isn’t doing the fed’s job for them.”
It's not just immigration law, it's any federal law. States have the right to ignore federal law if they like. This is called nullification. However, it very, very rarely happens because its inherently undemocratic. It especially rarely happens to the extent that cities and states pass explicit laws that order state law enforcement to ignore federal laws, and even work against the federal government's interests.
It's happened recently with marijuana legalization, with success. Where the federal government did some raids, but marijuana legalization is politically popular, so they backed off... and there has even been talk in some years of ending the illegality of marijuana federally.
State nullification has been somewhat unsuccessful with illegal immigration. These raids are the result of the federal government going its own way to enforce the law without cooperation of the states. The last time we saw this level of federal enforcement against state objection is after Brown v Board of Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
I good comparison to the seriousness of nullification as an act that is inherently an escalation is gun control laws. Suppose some red states wanted to just nullify the National Firearms Act -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act -- The are perfectly in their rights to ignore federal laws and allow firearms dealers to sell unregistered, suppressed, machine guns to felons. The only way neighboring blues states -- obviously outraged that this is happening -- can do anything about this is by seeking federal enforcement, again, which would include raids, arrests, etc.
>You also brought up warrants to enter private property. What do you make of the incident a few days ago where an agent hopped a fence to arrest someone, without a warrant? Should we just ignore those violations of our rights?
I'm very much not saying ICE is always acting within the law. Like any other policing force, they're going to make mistakes (intentional or otherwise). We should be very angry about those things, especially if they're happening in bad faith. The problem I see is that when we're yelling about actually -- and unfortunately -- legal things then those serious issues are just going to look like background noise. The other serious problem is that all this crying wold literally makes the left look undemocratic. You don't like the law? Fight to change it. Don't just take the ball and go home, and then cry when the neighbors come to your house to get the ball back.
There is a world of difference between “passing a state law that directly contradicts federal law” and “declining to proactively enforce federal laws in ways that are not required by those laws.”
To drive the point home: federal immigration laws are already enforced by federal agencies. Here in IL, state and local officials cooperate to the extent required by law. There are no federal laws on the books requiring them to do the job of the federal government for them (they could pass one, but they haven’t).
Calling that “nullification” is intellectually dishonest. As you said - “if you don’t like the law, fight to change it.” Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not.
>Here in IL, state and local officials cooperate to the extent required by law.
This is clearly false in regards to most federal laws. To illustrate this, I'll take an exceptional example. If there where a serial killer who was living in IL, but had only killed anyone in other states, I suspect that IL government would likely go out of their way to assist the Feds in apprehending this killer, even though this is not required by state law.
IL would likely do the same for many, if not most, federal laws. The point of nullification is exactly when the state does not help when asked, still there are reasons for practical resources there, but it becomes very obvious nullification when the state passes laws preventing individuals who would LIKE to help, like local policed departments, from helping even if they wanted to. And this is exactly what has happened in many blue states.
Pretending that's not overt nullification is unserious.
You're doing a selective quoting thing.
Not assisting with enforcement acts you don't feel are worthwhile is not nullification. I'm not engaging in "nullification" when I don't call the police on a jaywalker. Or I mean maybe you think this is, but then police engage in wildcat strikes all the time, or change enforcement priorities, or whatever you want to frame it as. Calling a difference in prioritization "nullification" wrong, especially if local police in immigrant communities want to maintain good relationships with those communities. I think it's laudable that some police forces show an interest in serving their communities interests, as opposed to yearning to be fashy.
> but it becomes very obvious nullification when the state passes laws preventing individuals who would LIKE to help, like local policed departments, from helping even if they wanted to. And this is exactly what has happened in many blue states.
Can you give examples?
Keep in mind, "sanctuary city" policies are usually actually supported by local police forces, because while they may look not tough on crime (and for this reason sometimes police forces halfheartedly lobby against them), they actually make on-the-ground local policing easier, because they engender trust between the local police force and immigrant communities who otherwise might not report crimes at all.
I’m not going to engage with you if you’re going to get in multiple threads and refer to things as “fashy.”
It’s difficult enough to engage in a heterodox view in good faith. I don’t need to deal with slapdash bullshit.
>I’m not going to engage with you if you’re going to get in multiple threads and refer to things as “fashy.”
>It’s difficult enough to engage in a heterodox view in good faith. I don’t need to deal with slapdash bullshit.
I see we've reached the point in the discussion where you 'abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating...that the time for argument is over.'
Good fascist! Nice fascist! Late for a Bund meeting, are we?
Source: “Never believe that anti-Semites [or in this case, fascist apologists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre[0]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-...
> I see we've reached the point in the discussion where you 'abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating...that the time for argument is over.'
I literally continued the discussion with this user in the other thread he was posting in… geez try and keep up my guy.
I am sorry but you're delusional if you think any of that is happening and they're acting in a legal manner. A small sample of the links in that post show ICE are actively violating constitutional rights and flaunting the rule of law. This same organization is actively ignoring a federal judge's orders to not use crowd control weapons on people who pose no threat.
You got a law degree? I don’t. I could be wrong.
wtf are you talking about? they've shot us citizens, they continually beat an kidnap us citizens for no reason. care to explain any of the actions in this blog post? are you aware of the attack they carried out on an apartment building where they took everyone, mostly US citizens into custody in the middle of the night? kidnapping is the best way to describe it. it's 100% accurate. there's no way to distinguish these terrorists as they drive unmarked cars and refuse to identify themselves. anyone could dress up like them and kidnap people.
Because detained and arrested is not the same as kidnapping. It’s just not even close.
How do you know whether you're getting detained or kidnapped? The video I saw... it was just some guys with a gun dragging a woman out of her car after crashing into her on purpose. They looked like bandits to me.
I mean I agree. I think it’s very bad policy to use masking and not immediately identifiable uniforms. Still, this is a hard problem for all law enforcement. It’s trivial for anyone to impersonate police.. especially undercover officers.
KIDNAP: To abduct or confine (a person) forcibly, by threat of force, or by deceit, without the authority of law.
Care to explain the distinction? They have authority of law?? haha It's terrorism. No crime, no warrant, no due process. Obviously it's not kidnapping by law, because no law applies to ICE.
The apartment building scene was a mass kidnapping of US citizens. They've shot US citizens for recording their actions with live bullets, pepper balls, and gas grenade launchers. They tear gassed kids on the playground, attacked a Halloween parade, the horrors are endless.
>without the authority of law
The ICE "agents" often refuse to show any form of identification. There's no way to distinguish it from a kidnapping.
I mean I agree. I think it’s very bad policy to use masking and not immediately identifiable uniforms. Still, this is a hard problem for all law enforcement. It’s trivial for anyone to impersonate police.. especially undercover officers.
What's really insane is GOP literally sent all these immigrants on buses and planes to places like Chicago. Now they've hired all the proud boys, patriot front, etc, paid them during shutdown, gave them camo and military gear, and authorized them to terrorize everyone. There's no legal path to justice. It's an impossible situation constructed by people who hate their neighbors and want to literally kill them. It's so much worse than this blog post can capture or any comment. This shit is heinous.
if you reddit, follow r/chicago it's truly heartbreaking.
Not an American. At this point, I'm beyond surprised there still isn't a resistance movement that doesn't play by the rules, because the ICE sure are not playing by the rules.
can't access due to UK online safety act
I'm in the UK too. So I read the article courtesy of archive.is.
Well, technically, it's likely because he has decided to block UK IPs (or similar).
A form of protest I assume, assuming he runs no business in the UK and no other reason to think the UK Gov has any interest in policing an .com blog run by someone who doesn't live there nor hosts the website there.
(I'm not against that form of protest per se, but let's be clear about who's doing the blocking)
His rationale is here https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-...
His website links to bdsm (and hosts some very mild art). He has very real concerns and has talked to lawyers about them. I would not call it a protest rather a protective measure.
Thanks for the context. It still very much reads like activism however, rather than protecting themselves from a real and possible threat regarding aphyr.com.
I wonder if he has consulted with lawyers and authorities from all other 193 countries in the world regarding their laws?
> A form of protest I assume,
Or to avoid the fines and/or to avoid integrating some age verification service.
Maybe symbolic since it unlikely the site would be prosecuted, even if they were in violation in some minor form. It is easy to be in violation to my understanding since it does not need to what is posted by the site owner as part of the blog but could be in the comments.
This shit is so fucked up. And at a certain level I’m disappointed that we are still trying to fix it peaceably when every day of delay, there is irreparable harm to physical wellness, mental health and rights as citizens or residents. Also science in America is fucked for the next decade.
Violent resolution of the situation would almost certainly result in a society with even fewer freedoms. That is the historical lesson. Violent resistance to authoritarian takeovers gives them an air of legitimacy they need. That is the whole point of chicago and the attempt in Portland. They want violent resistance to justify crack downs. Instead they look like storm troopers. I am in awe of the restraint of those living in Chicago. Ice hasn't done half as much in Texas and they are getting ambushed with assault rifles. That doesn't work with their narrative of lawless blue states though. The ability of Chicagoans to resist peacefully, endure, and document these events may well be what gives the US another chance at being a democracy.
I do not advocate violence, but I do often think back to this quote:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if... We didn’t love freedom enough." --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
If I thought violence would fix this I would certainly advocate for it, I am not a pacifist, or anything approaching one. But all the historical examples I have looked at indicate that a domestic authoritarian takeover in a polarized society cannot be violently overthrown without the overthrowers becoming roughly as autocratic if not more so. Trump is not that popular by the standard pf authoritarian takeovers. General strikes and mass nonviolent protests worked better in these situations. Though the number of times it worked is disturbingly low.
Republicans are controlled by big business and billionaires. I agree that violence isn't the solution, because to these guys, money talks.
What we need is a general strike. Shut the entire country down, teachers, warehouse workers, supermarket employees truckers. Everyone on the streets, refusing to make money for their billionaire bosses. When it hurts their profits, they will relent.
That has never worked well in America.
I didn’t realize how many scientists crossed the border without papers, claimed asylum, and became professors at research universities
lol. It’s that the immigration policies currently being attempted plus the university grant shenanigans are destroying the stem training / research pipeline
Strange, I know a ton of post docs and there is a lack of opportunities for them right now, both in academia and private sector
Next generation. You saw that Harvard cut grad admissions by 75% - even in STEM
Unfortunately, violent reactions is what Trump would love, because it would allow a much bigger, probably definitive, escalation
I think Americans should first do everything possible to bring to sanity the supporters of Trump
> I think Americans should first do everything possible to bring to sanity the supporters of Trump
It seems that ship left the port last november. There is barely any noticable resistance whatsoever to Trump. All this talk about freedom and when the time comes americans just fold over like lawnchairs.
Polling numbers and recent elections suggest there has been some shift.
When this is all over and Trump has been consigned to history's dustbin, at the very least the public deserves to know the names of the individual federal agents and entire chain of command responsible for these atrocities. The people responsible for this wanton cruelty need to be charged and tried criminally for their actions. Nobody is going to forget this and I think a lot of Americans will demand justice and accountability once all is said and done.
The best solution I can think of is for Illinois or any other place where ICE terrorists are deployed, should mobilize the National Guard to protect the people. They've done the opposite having the cops beat and arrest US citizens demanding justice.
Thought of CSNY's Chicago when I saw the headline. And, actually, it's pertinent. Except that things are probably worse now as there's no media scrutiny on what's going down.
Banana republic
I have family in the US but there's no way I'm visiting them for the foreseeable future.
The US is quickly sliding into the thing they claim to despise: a dictatorship with a populace cowering for their safety and lacking general human rights.
Good luck, America.
What causes ICE actions in Chicago to be worse than ICE actions other US cities?
The President of the United States has a personal hatred of the city, and he has chosen specifically to target it in ways above and beyond others.
Currently as a Canadian there are probably only four or five countries I really do not want to travel to. In no particular order: North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States.
Totally get it.
My parents (Canadian) won’t visit, and haven’t since Trump’s first term.
Keep in mind these are people who were educated in the US (Cornell, RPI, Florida State), and as kids, we used to spend at least a month a year in the US on vacation with their college friends. So not historically haters.
Hell, I just remembered as a kid I spent a whole summer in Chicago. IIRC We stayed in student housing while my dad finished his book (https://archive.org/details/Inside_Commodore_Dos_1984_Datamo...).
Hottest summer of my life and no AC anywhere to be seen.
What is your main source of information about Iran?
I don’t have any problem with Iranians. If you’re meaning to defend the regime you’re on the wrong side of History my friend.
Why, exactly?
Unpredictable, inconsistent, arbitrary and/or capricious law and border enforcement.
It’s already sketchy enough going through borders when you have very little rights. When what rights people have are not respected, it makes it even scarier.
Did you read the article? Not wanting to visit countries where secret police are rounding people up, regardless of citizenship, seems like a reasonable opinion.
Thank you for sharing this valuable information.
How can this be flagged? It’s documentary.
This should not be flagged. This is the truth of what's happening here right now.
I disagree with the premise that illegal immigration is OK
How do you feel about legal immigration?
I don't agree with all the methods used by ICE in Chicago, but I understand the problem they are trying to fix. Most of the comments on HN don't seem to think there is a problem, but that could largely be due to our limited memories and selective hearing.
Back in 2022, the Biden administration was flying immigrant family and children secretly at night to places like Chicago. I have a friend who worked at an airlines hired for this and it is reported in the news. However, no one seemed to care. https://nypost.com/2022/04/15/biden-administration-resumes-m...
It seems it's much easier to secretly bring people in than publicly try to remove them after it's done. Not surprising or shocking. The solution to "right" the situation could be amnesty, but that doesn't restore or build respect for the laws already on the books.
I genuinely don’t follow.
Had the immigrants not been moved to Chicago proper enforcement would be easier? Something about Chicago terrain or climate requires the enforcement to be this way?
It's really hard to understand Chicago from this article, if you dont know all the referenced incidents already. Who are the kidnappers? Why are agents chasing a teacher? And so on...
Immigration enforcement agents suddenly aren't required to show any sort of ID, reveal their faces, or produce any documentation about instances when they enforce immigration law, so "Who are the kidnappers" is actually a pretty good question.
If it looks like secret police, it probably is secret police.
I guess that's a reason to call the cops and report an abduction. Sorry, I'm a stupid European, that how we would handle such a situation.
Think Stasi, not conventional security forces. You do not call the cops on the secret police, if you're living under the sort of regime that's really keen on secret police.
as a european then you really should know since a lot of us had dictatorships and secret police. the gestapo wasnt that long ago and most european communist states had the same issues good luck calling the police
I've never lived in a dictatorship, but I know a lot of people who did, and told me their stories.
But from reading this article I couldn't tell if there is a massive crime surge in Chicago, or if it's police brutality, or both. Which is funny, because the article claims to explain ("I want you to understand").
It's not particularly a "surge" in crime, as the issue (illegal immigrants) has built up over time.
However, in years past, everybody just kind of overlooks it--and on the local level, it's basically not a problem beyond the normal folks being mad at demographics changing. Most all of the immigrants are working and participating in the economy--ironically, making them more vulnerable to the .gov than if they were just criminals!--and that's fine for the cities.
But, now, the federal .gov (under the direction of Trump et al) is deciding to finally enforce the law and doing so in the most cartoonishly thuggish and evil way possible.
"Fears about immigration" are bullshit inevitably most pushed by people who don't even live in areas with immigrants (legal or not).
Eh, they're not, though, and you disregard them at your peril--just look at where we are now.
It's not for no reason this particular issue has been used so effectively. I'm not saying you have to agree with them, and I'm not saying that you have to believe their belief is coherent or sensical, but if you don't recognize that those beliefs are held honestly and widely you're in for a rude surprise...as we saw in the 2024 election (and before that, the 2016 election).
If the Native Americans had been slightly more fearful of immigrants we might be having this conversation in Cherokee.
I hate to invoke the comparison, and not to diminish the Holocaust at all, but to give you a better idea of what's happening in the US right now: what's happening could be compared to the Gestapo rounding up the Jews.
Innocent people are being rounded up by a faceless secret police, violently, in a terrorising manner, and taken to detention centres, with their human rights abused at every stage, with no due process and their fate unknown. This is beyond reporting to the local police department.
It seems to me exactly the same.
An arbitrary group has been selected as being an enemy, they are used to present justifications for breaking law and due process, you then develop a large organization (Gestapo/ICE) accustomed to following orders and ignoring the law - if you're going to subvert the political system, you need to possess the means to force you will on the population. You need a large group of men who will perform violence when ordered to do so, regardless of law and due process.
I mean we all know where this is going. There are not going to be free and fair elections again. This isn't a blip, it's a plan.
It's not exactly the same, there are some similarities. There are still free elections happening in the US, there are still courts that rule against the government. And as far as I know those arrested people don't get killed. It's not the same, but it could move into the same direction.
> An arbitrary group has been selected as being an enemy
It is not an arbitrary group, it’s a group of people who are residing in the United States illegally.
> Gestapo/ICE
If Mexico is so awful that being deported there is tantamount to the Holocaust, why would you ever be in favor of allowing Mexicans to enter the United States without going through the legal channels to ensure that the people who come here are not creating the problems that make deportation to Mexico comparable to being sent to Auschwitz?
It's all the same people. If you really don't know, a few of the incidents are here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c6299nrj76yo
I suspected that it's about immigration agents. But it's just really funny how the article claims to explain the issues, without actually explaining it.
Why do they use weapons extensively? Are they chasing violent people who shot at them earlier, or just for fun? It just raises more questions, and doesn't help understanding the situation at all.
They use weapons extensively because they're overwhelmingly barely physically capable of the role (https://www.newsweek.com/dhs-responds-report-ice-recruits-fa...) and get 8 weeks of training with no military or law enforcement experience required (https://old.reddit.com/r/ICE_Raids/comments/1mrdh6r/fyi_ice_...).
You can read any mainstream source to find out the general contours of the situation. The "want you to understand" is in the context of there being too many people in outright denial about the naked autocratic fascism that has descended upon our country - eg see all the comments in this very thread trying to justify any of this as being about "the law" or "illegal immigration".
The article links to oodles of incidents.
I lived in Chicago before this and experienced shootings in my neighborhood every month and carjackings and drug addicts just roaming the streets and wigging out.
It makes no sense that habitual criminals are protected and not deported by the local government. I think if the local government worked with ICE to deport criminals, this probably wouldn’t be happening the way that it was.
I think the City of Chicago is totally ineffective at many many things like closing murder cases, keeping habitual criminals locked up, etc etc.
It’s sad that this has become a political discussion instead of an effort to fix all the horrible problems in the city.
> It’s sad that this has become a political discussion instead of an effort to fix all the horrible problems in the city.
Every American citizen deserves due process and a fair punishment. This is outlined in the constitution and its amendments, and is not up for negotiation.
If you live in the US and don't believe in these values, I don't see how any other citizen of the US could people like you as anything other than a dangerous and existential threat.
> Every American citizen deserves due process
Every human being, but yes.
Anyone on US soil - regardless of citizenship status - has a constitutional right to due process.
Whether or not they deserve could be a matter of opinion that has no significance.
Every human being indeed does, but knowing this site someone would invariably "well akshully" this point.
Says a lot about the audience of this site, I suppose.
I don’t understand how you got from what I wrote to what you wrote. I didn’t write that at all.
>It makes no sense that habitual criminals are protected and not deported by the local government.
Deportation[0]?
How does that apply to citizens born in the US? Who make up the vast majority of "habitual criminals." All the data shows that immigrants (legal or otherwise) are significantly less likely to commit serious crimes than citizens.: an act or instance of deporting especially : the removal from a country by an executive government agency of a foreign-born noncitizen (such as one whose presence violates immigration laws or is ruled detrimental to the public welfare)Or are you claiming that the 14th Amendment[1] doesn't apply to everyone?
>It’s sad that this has become a political discussion instead of an effort to fix all the horrible problems in the city.
What does Border Patrol and Customs Enforcement have to do with municipal issues? What business is it of the Federal government, anyway?
The people of Chicago elect their own representatives to run their city. While there have been significant issues there, they are improving without any help (and I'd say ICE/CPB/National guard from other states just makes things much, much worse) from the Federal government.
What's more, Obama deported more folks than Trump in his first term -- without masked thugs. And Biden deported more folks than Obama and Trump combined, also without masked thugs shooting citizens.
You're making the wrong argument here. Not because I don't agree with that argument, but because the facts don't support it.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deportation
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
You've never been to Chicago.
The only question for OP and other chicagonians: why don't you organize and push back?
It seems like the overwhelming majority of city population including local police doesn't support this, so go ahead and do something instead of crying on HN.
There are protests everyday you walnut and the administration is using that as a pretense to move in honest to god military troops.
Nearly everyone I know (including my 80 year old neighbor) has been to a protest. You can go to an organizing meeting any day of the week in any neighborhood in the city. We are all walking around with whistles for signaling when ice comes and kids are making them on 3d printers in the library.
Americans protest by writing witty signs and taking pictures for the ‘gram. No wonder they never work.
You have no idea what we are doing or what it is like to do it.
I do have no idea what you are doing.
Exactly.
> Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works
The agents actually attempted to pull over Ms. Galeano’s vehicle, but the male driver (with Galeano in the passenger seat) refused to stop despite the sirens and lights. The agents pursued the car, which sped into a shopping center, and Ms. Galeano fled the vehicle and ran into a daycare, attempting to barricade herself inside. She didn’t get all the way in and was arrested inside the vestibule. None of the kids witnessed the arrest.
Regardless of your thoughts on immigration and ICE, if a cop tries to pull you over, and instead you decide to speed off and barricade yourself inside a daycare, you’re probably going to get arrested.
Witnesses on the scene and the video evidence that has been released contradicts basically all of that. Perhaps we may one day know the real story if the government were ever to take any of this to trial. But given they are already in trouble for actively lying in court perhaps not.
But you are actually wrong about what most police organizations would have done about enforcing an non-violent arrest warrant. If they were worried about the activities getting too close to a school they would specifically not follow the subject there. They would wait to get the person at a time and place that was safer. But this isn’t about public safety, as they are grabbing people from schools daily, its about intimidation and incompetence.
And the sheer joy of agents laughing at the job. Some of them really love what they do for a living.
> Regardless of your thoughts on immigration and ICE, if a cop tries to pull you over, and instead you decide to speed off and barricade yourself inside a daycare, you’re probably going to get arrested.
I view ICE as wholly illegitimate. If I were on the jury in this case, I would vote to acquit Ms. Galeano no matter what the prosecution said, and many people out there who have not said this online would do the same.
There’s no need to be so fatalistic.
> I view ICE as wholly illegitimate
Though you may find this surprising, your personal opinion on the legitimacy of an organization doesn’t actually have legal standing.
> legal standing
To paraphrase a show TFA’s author introduced me to:
What are laws? We just don’t know.
Immigration Enforcement is illegitimate apparently.
> Immigration Enforcement
You make it sound so reasonable when you say it like that. But here’s the thing: If you’re gonna die on the hill that “simply enforcing immigration laws” requires invading cities and detaining people without due process, everyday people are going to come to the conclusion that it might not be worth it. It’s wild how far you guys thought you could get with that phrasing.
Like at this point, y’all have done the Abolish ICE people a huge favor. It was much easier to call them anarchist weirdos when many people had never even seen an ICE officer much less had their lives affected by their activities. But now… well, unless conservatives do in fact succeed in ending elections (which I rank unlikely) I give it a >50% chance that ICE is abolished within 10 years.
My argument here is that there's people opposed to any immigration enforcement period.
Both parties promised me last election was the last.
> if a cop tries to pull you over
But it was not a cop but rather some masked lynch posse, right? If I am being chased by a gang of lawless terrorists, you can be sure as shit that not stopping is going to be a high priority. At least until I figure out a better plan.
Right, it seems reasonable to run away when people wearing masks and holding guns, with no police ID in sight, are chasing you. In the moment, how can you be sure these people are really federal law enforcement?
Even Trump's FBI is warning that people impersonating ICE agents are running around causing havoc: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-11-06/fbi-aler...
A plumber working on my pipes is upset, his wages are suppressed by competition from illegals getting paid under the table, while his rent has skyrocketed, and his taxes are paying for his illegal competitors food and rent and healthcare.
I'm not from the US, so forgive me for what is probably a dumb question, but how is an illegal receiving money for food, rent, and healthcare? Don't you need documents (aka be legal in the country) for that?
In many instances, no. And that's where a lot of the anger and blow back stems from.
This is just factually false.
You're right, no one is getting benefits without paperwork, because that's what the rules say, and no one would break rules.
It would be interesting to see how that works. Even here in Europe where we usually have a strong(er) social net, the state wouldn't give me a benefit without going through a process requiring documents to prove who I am, my nationality, etc.
There are food banks and stuff like that, but that's usually from charities.
They are not receiving any benefits. They are not legal literally. Work for cash. No safety net except peers who are often abusive. There are lot of this in EU, just not this visible.
Parent comment is talking about working “under the table”, receiving cash off the books for work done. Not government benefits.
I don't think "illegals" means "people receiving money under the table", especially in the context of this thread. It sounds like they're referring to people living illegally in the country. Hence my question about "illegals" receiving benefits when usually we need to have documents to receive any state/government benefit.
I was referring to the same people. The reason I said that is that employing someone who’s undocumented exposes the employer to enforcement risk, so many choose to keep the relationship hidden.
That’s how most undocumented people in the country survive: by working for employers who are breaking the law.
In terms of undocumented individuals benefits, that’s a common and almost entirely false claim.
While it is a complicated space (because of State vs Federal), the vast majority of “Illegals” are not eligible for the vast majority of benefits in the United States, with the exception of some emergency services.
There are some exceptions for victims of human trafficking and there like.
If you want to dig in: https://www.nilc.org/resources/overview-immeligfedprograms/
tell your plumber he's an idiot because his taxes are not paying for that, and his rent is not skyrocketing because of "illegals" (other than the illegal collusion of rental prices via price algorithm fixing).
> and his rent is not skyrocketing because of "illegals"
Why is it skyrocketing?
Definitely sounds like a real story