ICE under the current administration has been “enforcing the law” using excessive force and intimidation tactics.

People have died in our detention centers due to unsanitary conditions.

They arrested a five year old and sent him to one of these detention centers without his parents.

They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.

I favor responsible immigration enforcement. This is not that.

First off, there is a difference between “I come from a decent country and therefor have no real reason to take the risk of illegally immigrating somewhere” and "My country is very, very bad (possibly in not small part due to country X), and moving to country X illegally is less risky for my life and family than staying here". We tend to have at least some empathy for people in the second scenario.

But even never minding that, you could say a lot of things : The U.S.A is a country literally built by immigrants. The native-american are a minority in their own land. So is it surprising that a lot of people in an immigrant country support immigrant ? Then, there is the dirty economic secret that illegal immigration fill the low-wages jobs that citizen don't have to lower themselves too. A lot of ties, rule of law, etc. Of all country, it is weird that the U.S is turning anti-immigration.

Agreed completely, I’d never illegally migrate to Japan and expect them to do anything besides arrest and deport me. It’s only western countries that get this weird illogical hate for not opening the borders to literally anyone and actually enforcing immigration law.

The 15 people charged in the case this story is about were not overstaying their visa; they were protesting ICE after ICE killed a US citizen in Minnesota.

Would you expect to be detained and deported from those other countries while trying to attend a court hearing to resolve your immigration status?

Do you expect to be murdered? Repeatedly tortured and gang raped in custody while it's filmed? Disappeared to some other country?

Also, any of this can happen to you even if you're a lawful citizen.

The situation in the USA is dire and it's going to get, much, much worse.

Some people are indeed upset about the way ICE is enforcing immigration law, but that's not remotely what this article is about. The article is about the government co-opting ICE (and other resources) to crack down on ideological dissent by US citizens.

Ah, the just following orders person, always at least one in a discussion.

I think missing from your context is the racial and religious motivations of people that back ICE's current actions. They don't care about the law or reasonable expectations on visa policies.

For a couple of reasons.

One is that America is exceptional. It's a huge country with massive wealth, resources, and land. It fundamentally lacks the back-pressures that some other countries have against immigration - in fact, it currently has a declining birthrate amongst its native populace and needs labor-age people to backstop an economic inversion.

The other, regarding ICE specifically, is simple trust. People know that the executive branch is, at this time, extremely white-supremacist-adjacent if not just actual white supremacists (Stephen Miller is currently the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy), so any claimed purpose for immigration crackdowns is fighting an uphill battle against the presumption that (a) the actual reason is racial segregation (you'll note a disproportionate enforcement on Latinos as opposed to native Germans or Italians or Slovakians) and (b) this administration will not treat people in its care humanely (because they don't follow rules as a general principle).

(a) is the larger "national identity" issue that makes it difficult to build a coherent national immigration policy (because even some good ideas meet an uphill battle against "Does that stop us from serving as the keepers of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?"). But what you're likely observing is (b); American intelligentsia is looking at current events out their window and hearing the echoes of clergy in Europe before and during World War II reading from the book of Exodus and asking their congregation "Who are today's midwives?"

Hum... It can be your assumption, but most countries do not fulfill it.

Detention in particular is a violation of human rights, with an exception to strictly for the time it takes for the next flight to take off.

Even ignoring the fact that ICE is a rogue agency that behaves thuggishly and routinely lies to judges, the United States has spent a long time having a tacit policy of only partially enforcing its immigration laws. Suddenly enforcing them as written would fundamentally not work. It would be cruel, since the people you've effectively let live here for decades are now parents of American citizens who have the right to live here. It would also be self-destructive, because large parts of the country function because of the labor of those individuals. Despite the fact that Trump's administration is full of people who advocate remigration (ethnic cleansing), the pro-business parts of his administration have made a lot of concessions to avoid deporting so many people that they'll disrupt farming (though there's been a lot more than 0 disruption).

This is downstream of the fact that the US government just doesn't work well. Problems fester, and are unsolved. Immigration policy hasn't made sense for longer than I've been alive (and I'm 40+).

Imagine that you find that the water supply in your town was built illegally, because the former mayors prohibited the building that was necessary. You may think that is a travesty, you may want to enforce the law strictly in the future, and force the issue, rather than working around it. But what you will not do is tear up the water system and leave the city without water.

It is not so simple. Here is some information: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/we-documented-12...

The Wired article is not about people who violated travel visa. Not at all.

ICE is not enforcing the law, they are in fact regularly breaking the law. Judges said so, repeatedly. And ICE threw middle finger. Breaking the law is the literal intentional strategy of ICE. They also mistreat people who are in the country legally, who are citizens and committed no crimes.

Also, in normal countries, if you break the law, arbitrary abuse is still not the expected behavior of the police.

Because some people have to have their opinions on things be reaffirmed by how it maps to coordinates on the cultural battle map.

Today being anti-h1b is deemed racist although no other than Bernie Sanders was outspoken against it for decades until very recently. Never mind.

Never mind that some people deemed anti Covid measures racist (ie hugged people in Chinatown for PR stunts, or licking handles in public transit for online clout) and unscientific (masks are bad) until Trump did a 180 (ie. masks are mandatory now). Or how many ppl said they would never have the „trump-vax“ injected and yet after Trump lost the election 2019 were gluttonous about the restrictions to be implemented against the unvaxxed.

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ChatGPT can you take the sentiment “Why haven’t immigrants just tried not being poor? Are they stupid?” and dress it up as intellectual so I can get upvotes on Hacker News? Make it personal and anecdotal. Thanks.

You won't get much traction with the "shouldn't people follow the law" angle. The far left is running rampant with the idea that laws only apply to them if they agree with them.

You should look up the two guys who viciously attacked armed police officers in Manchester Airport in the UK, all on video. Incredibly they were out almost immediately, police officers were up for firing and the trial dragged out for months ending in a pretty lenient sentence. In that case the new UK "two tier" justice kicked in where thanks to crazy far-left thinking, there is now consideration of race in whether something was illegal and what the punishment should be.

Without a doubt this direction will be the downfall of the west. Which is probably the idea from those financing all this "grass roots" protesting and law breaking.

Because seemingly only in the U.S. the legislature hasn’t meaningfully passed significant new legislation, making the immigration law out of date. A lot of intelligent people voted for Obama, and Obama created DACA, which says overstaying your visa as a child is fine and results in “deferred” deportation. Hence a lot of leftists think visa rules in the U.S. are so outdated that violating them is fine. IMO Obama made a careful calculation to degrade the sanctity of immigration laws to avoid hardship on a million people; it was a good idea on humanitarian grounds but it did open a large can of worms.

As for why ICE are the bad guys, well that’s a completely different question. The way they enforce laws is thug-like and have resulted in multiple innocent deaths. Regardless of if it is ICE or a normal police department if enforcing laws causes death you bet there will be a large pushback.