To be clear - you're advocating for non-Americans intending to cross the American border and claim asylum to fire upon the American national guard to ensure they make their way into the country?
Other things aside, the biggest practical problem with your suggestion is that they're not armed at all right now. Would you like to arm them? Or are people who are unable to afford guns, tanks, and drones unworthy of being free?
this is obviously false, what point are you trying to make with such a blind eye to the countless number of armed resistances and revolutions throughout human history?
Armed against the government? Maybe in the past that was true, but not any more, the government has far bigger guns than you ever will. If you got into a true shooting match, they can destroy your house or car from a helicopter miles away, you literally won't even see it coming.
You should probably tell the US military, they've spent 20 years and 6 trillion dollars trying to stop some goat herders with 70s era Soviet gear with no success.
And how is that going for the goat herders? The US may not be "winning" in Afghanistan, but they certainly aren't losing as much as the Afghan people are. Their nation has been utterly decimated.
The idea that the American people could make an armed stand in conflict with the US military is about as foolish of a notion as can be dreamt up.
Through a great number of sacrifices and many different weapons, all resisted pacification to varying degrees by a much better armed government. Being able to purchase the weapons individually is irrelevant to the idea of asymmetrical resistance.
That's why Mao pioneered modern guerilla warfare using William Wallace as his primary subject of study. Mao's theory of guerilla warfare was designed for dealing with an enemy with bigger numbers, better supplies, and better weapons.
There are 100 million gun owners in the United States. The US military has tried and failed for years to snuff out the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that group is literally 1,000 to 10,000 times smaller than the number of gun owners in the United States.
An armed uprising in the United States would be a terrible, horrible outcome for all involved, but it certainly would not be easily crushed.
You're missing the point. The government of the US is still beholden to public opinion on issues where the public is mostly in agreement and power is distributed among enough different entities with competing interests that you can't just make a unilateral decision to use military force internally and at scale.
The point of being armed is not to rise up against the government, it's to make government abuse on a small level more difficult, risky and costly for the government than just not acting like jerks in the first place. By greatly occasional abuse it's much harder for abuse to become more normalized.
The Waco Siege is a good example. If those people hadn't shot back there would never have been a standoff, the media would never have shown up and the public would never have been able to scrutinize the government's actions.
Another example is police no-knock warrant abuse. In places where many people have the capacity to shoot at you if you kick down their door in the middle of the night the police generally don't abuse no-knock warrants because everyone knows that if you hand them out like candy you'll eventually get a dead cop and public scrutiny. In places where the vast majority of people cannot shoot back you see all sorts of sloppy behavior (e.g. swat team kicks down a door based on a driver's license address without even checking with the landlord if that tenant is still renting that unit) because the risk of abusing people like that is low.
After having my own child, the gravity of stories like this, as well as those in the current news, are as alien to my understanding as reading about the seemingly vicious behavior of, for example, prides of lions and their interactions with their young [0].
I wish for a better human race. We still live in primitive times.
Both of those phrases in that order are a coincidence? The sentence even seems off: "Sessions of this and similar trials". The previous paragraph didn't even describe a session of any sort. Anyway, the viewpoints of the author are clear from the body of the text, the order of first words was most definitely intended, he's not trying to hide his viewpoints. Let's not pretend its a coincidence. You missed a /s tag.
Honestly, I think this detracts from the post overall. Points like he's making in the writing should be self-evidently applicable to the larger situation without needing this level of pointed commentary. There's something to be said for subtlety.
This is actually US policy for anyone who goes to jail for any reason, not just people whose specific crimes are illegally crossing the border. If you go to jail, and you have a dependent child with no other care giver - the child will go into the custody of the state.
Also, keep in mind that it isn't all asylum applicants who get separated. If you show up at a valid port of entry into the US and request asylum, then no crime has been committed and no one is separated from their families. Only people who sneak across the border illegally(which is a crime) are processed from their criminal behavior.
Going to a valid port of entry also happens to be a much cheaper and safer way of getting to America, considering it doesn't require the use of human mules, paying exorbitant fees and coordinating with drug cartels, and performing dangerous desert crossings where you may get abandoned if your mule gets spooked.
edit: alasdair_, I can't comment on your post thanks to HN aggressively preventing a poster responding to numerous comments on a post, but I would imagine the reason that she couldn't file an asylum claim is right in the article: Because she lied about being a US citizen in the past, and that bars you from presenting for asylum. And finally, the father separated himself from his children before he even entered the US, because he knew he couldn't enter the US because he was already deported from the US in the past.
> Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials say Maria made a false claim of US citizenship in 1999 and served a 75-day sentence in a federal prison before being deported back to Guatemala at that time. In a statement provided to CNN, ICE says that lying about citizenship status "results in a permanent bar from being able to legally enter the United States."
I wonder how long we have had what is politely being called a "tent city"[1] for children in Texas. I mean, they aren't gassing them, but last year our esteemed president had a cow about the psychological damage that Kathy Griffin was doing to all of his children, not just his actually still-a-child offspring, but including his adult offspring in his assessment that she had gone too far and was sick.
Yet, somehow, having what is essentially a concentration camp of kids isn't the president going too far and being sick.
There is in my mind zero justification for the current state of things and I don't care what argument is used to try to claim there is.
I don't plan to participate further in this discussion. I think I have made all the comments I can make while complying with HN guidelines. This situation is just beyond the pale for me.
When did I try to argue that? My point was that 'separating families' is the norm for all people in the US when they go to jail, not just some extra punishment that is tacked on for people who illegally cross the border.
> 'separating families' is the norm for all people in the US when they go to jail
However, arresting and prosecuting every single person who crosses the border in a nominally illegal way[1] is not a norm, and neither is deporting parents while their children are still being held in the US.
[1]: "Nominally" because many of the current cases involve asylum seekers who have been cut off from actually seeking asylum.
It was never argued it was a felony, and even misdemeanors can land you in jail. For illegal entry, that can be up 6 months in jail(or, 2 years if you've done it more than once).
What does low percentage of successful asylum claims have to do with anything? I would imagine that is because most people don't have valid asylum claims. You can't just say 'I want a better life for my children', or 'the economy sucks in my home country' and expect that you will get a successful asylum application. There are very specific rules for who gets granted asylum and in what circumstances.
I'm guessing the downvotes are coming because you are defending a policy which is objectively cruel. To say "this is official policy" doesn't stop the reality of the cruelty.
Generally people don't support this. Therefore, downvotes.
I didn't read his comment to be a defense so much as a pointing out of the hypocrisy of only being outraged about this now, when it applies to illegal immigrants, but not when it applies to the US's own citizens.
Then why aren't people up in arms about the orders of magnitude more people who are separated from their children during normal (non-illegal-immigration) police or judicial events?
This only works if valid ports of entry are open. In practice they haven't been for a while. I mean, there are places where refugees are supposed to apply but they haven't been taking any applications recently - always saying "come back tomorrow". If it were me I might very well give up eventually and cross the border if I was in these refugees shoes.
Sneaking across the border is a crime but its a misdemeanor like driving without a seatbelt or ignoring a "No Trespassing" sign. It's very rare for people to be thrown in jail while awaiting trials for misdemeanors and generally the consequence of committing a single one isn't jail time.
So US policy at the border, while legal, is horribly unreasonable and maliciously cruel.
Laws have been used for thousands of years to enshrine in legal codes the prejudice and bias of superior classes. Ancient Mesopotomians in the Code of Hammurabi assigned silver shekel values of fines for killing a slave woman, killing a slave woman with child, killing a superior woman with child, killing a superior man, etc. etc. This legalistic attack of aliens/others/immigrants is another in a long string of bureaucratic masks for base human instincts.
I love your point about sneaking across the border. Those supporters of the current regime's policy, some 25-30% of the polled US population, will often simply state that these are law-breakers and criminals for breaking our laws. And yet, is the same opprobrium applied to those who speed, shoot off fireworks illegally, or dodge taxes (like many of the rich today)? If they were truly about law and order, rather than about an othering/discriminatory scheme, surely they would decry these other violations of the law?
> the child will go into the custody of the state.
The child will end up in a temporary foster home or similar housing. They will not be kept in locked chain-link areas for weeks on end.
>Also, keep in mind that it isn't all asylum applicants who get separated. If you show up at a valid port of entry into the US and request asylum, then no crime has been committed and no one is separated from their families.
"After the rest of the family took their chances by presenting themselves to US immigration authorities, the possibility of forced separation became reality. The 20-year-old son was sent to a detention center in San Diego. Maria and her three youngest children were shipped to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas -- about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio."
"The two youngest members of the Villatoro family are now at a detention center in New York state while their mom remains detained in Texas."
> They knew that what they were doing was immoral on some level but it was framed in a way where an individual who struggled with what they had to do and did it anyway was perceived as a "real man" because he would put the good of the people's community over his own feelings. Hence, when Himmler describes the Holocaust in his Posen speech, he highlights that despite the hard mission that had been given to them by history, they had always remained civilized (anständig). This is a particular nefarious aspect of these mechanism of ideological framing: Wherein overcoming doubt in the face of cruel acts becomes a virtue.
When Gina Haspel was nominated to be the Director of the CIA, I was struck by the inadvertent echo of this in so many defenses of her involvement in the Agency's black-site "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) program. Her defenders argued that this experience actually said positive things about her, since she only tortured people when ordered to by the President, and stopped doing so the moment those orders stopped coming. In other words, torturing people didn't turn her into the sort of person who tortures people. She remained civilized.
Putting aside the obvious objection that Nuremberg should have eliminated "she was just following orders" as a valid defense for all time, it was remarkable how willing even people like Democratic Senators were to separate the act of having tortured people from the idea of what a torturer looks like. Just having tortured people isn't enough to make you a torturer anymore.
"They were able to integrate mass killing and other horrible deeds into their perception of normality. They had been able to make these actions part of their normative orientation, their values, and what they identified as acceptable in interpersonal interactions."
As noted by a holocaust survivor's daughter:
"'Never Again' is now".
The current administration & the Russian teams working to undermine the West are not so much hacking technology, as they are hacking our sense of truth and normalcy. Fake news, conspiracy theories, and outrageous actions are all part of the hacking.
In the future, will our excuses be the same as those who were silent then - because it did not affect them?
A slow boil the frog.
Or maybe the job will get so skillfully done,unopposed and complete we will get away with it without needing to answer to history? We have now already improved on Korematsu in
leveraging infliction of family pain as a deterrent like the mob.
I write this under a throwaway, as a legal immigrant.
For each of those, these days, you could find people happily commenting on the internet to say they're glad that "they" finally came for "those people".
>The cruelty of both individuals and regimes that forcibly separate children from their parents, detain and imprison people they regard as "alien" or "unworthy" under horrible circumstances
I thought I was in for a nice long story about history but it's just someone on reddit calling the Trump administration nazis again.
No thanks, not interested. Not hacking, not news.
Not like I'm the arbiter of what makes it on this site but I don't come here for emotional bait and political... anything, really.
They aren't just coming from Mexico. My wife teaches in inner city LA--a huge majority of her students have undocumented parents and they are from extremely unstable places like El Salvador. They came here because they don't want their children murdered by street violence.
Not to mention, in Mexico specifically, it is cartel violence that people are largely escaping (assuming they aren't simply looking for better economic opportunity, which is also often the case).
"The right of asylum (sometimes called right of political asylum, from the Ancient Greek word ἄσυλον[1][2]) is an ancient juridical concept, under which a person persecuted by his own country may be protected by another sovereign authority, such as another country or church official, who in medieval times could offer sanctuary. This right was already recognized by the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Hebrews, from whom it was adopted into Western tradition."
Except America does not practice the biblical definition of asylum just like it does not practice the biblical definition of marriage.
And in the ancient days, you often had to live in a country such as Judea for three generations before being accepted as a member of the country. You couldn't seek asylum and then be voting in elections five years later.
> Purón was the 112th politician murdered in Mexico since September 2017 when the election process began, according to Etellekt, a risk analysis consultancy.
One of my favorite parts in Catch-22 was when the chaplain lied and it was good:
> The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy
technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into
truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy,
thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into
justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
69 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadThere's only one way that's going to end.
If they could afford the guns and armaments needed to overrun an ICE checkpoint, they wouldn't have needed to leave their country in the first place.
Other things aside, the biggest practical problem with your suggestion is that they're not armed at all right now. Would you like to arm them? Or are people who are unable to afford guns, tanks, and drones unworthy of being free?
No argument whatsoever.
The idea that the American people could make an armed stand in conflict with the US military is about as foolish of a notion as can be dreamt up.
Please refer to Vietnam and Afghanistan.
An armed uprising in the United States would be a terrible, horrible outcome for all involved, but it certainly would not be easily crushed.
The point of being armed is not to rise up against the government, it's to make government abuse on a small level more difficult, risky and costly for the government than just not acting like jerks in the first place. By greatly occasional abuse it's much harder for abuse to become more normalized.
The Waco Siege is a good example. If those people hadn't shot back there would never have been a standoff, the media would never have shown up and the public would never have been able to scrutinize the government's actions.
Another example is police no-knock warrant abuse. In places where many people have the capacity to shoot at you if you kick down their door in the middle of the night the police generally don't abuse no-knock warrants because everyone knows that if you hand them out like candy you'll eventually get a dead cop and public scrutiny. In places where the vast majority of people cannot shoot back you see all sorts of sloppy behavior (e.g. swat team kicks down a door based on a driver's license address without even checking with the landlord if that tenant is still renting that unit) because the risk of abusing people like that is low.
I wish for a better human race. We still live in primitive times.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/41572-male-lion-survival.html
Welcome The Sessions Is A Nazi Abolish Ice In Despite In His From The Welzer The It It That Similarly Hence
The organization also says that in some cases, the children were taken away under the pretense that they would be getting a bath.
From an article about the current US practice of separating children, including infants, from their parents at the border:
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621065383/what-we-know-family...
Also, keep in mind that it isn't all asylum applicants who get separated. If you show up at a valid port of entry into the US and request asylum, then no crime has been committed and no one is separated from their families. Only people who sneak across the border illegally(which is a crime) are processed from their criminal behavior.
Going to a valid port of entry also happens to be a much cheaper and safer way of getting to America, considering it doesn't require the use of human mules, paying exorbitant fees and coordinating with drug cartels, and performing dangerous desert crossings where you may get abandoned if your mule gets spooked.
edit: alasdair_, I can't comment on your post thanks to HN aggressively preventing a poster responding to numerous comments on a post, but I would imagine the reason that she couldn't file an asylum claim is right in the article: Because she lied about being a US citizen in the past, and that bars you from presenting for asylum. And finally, the father separated himself from his children before he even entered the US, because he knew he couldn't enter the US because he was already deported from the US in the past.
> Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials say Maria made a false claim of US citizenship in 1999 and served a 75-day sentence in a federal prison before being deported back to Guatemala at that time. In a statement provided to CNN, ICE says that lying about citizenship status "results in a permanent bar from being able to legally enter the United States."
Yet, somehow, having what is essentially a concentration camp of kids isn't the president going too far and being sick.
There is in my mind zero justification for the current state of things and I don't care what argument is used to try to claim there is.
I don't plan to participate further in this discussion. I think I have made all the comments I can make while complying with HN guidelines. This situation is just beyond the pale for me.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/06/photos-a-tent-city...
However, arresting and prosecuting every single person who crosses the border in a nominally illegal way[1] is not a norm, and neither is deporting parents while their children are still being held in the US.
[1]: "Nominally" because many of the current cases involve asylum seekers who have been cut off from actually seeking asylum.
Besides, ethics are more important than laws.
Source: http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/us-immigration/crime-ent...
Generally people don't support this. Therefore, downvotes.
Sneaking across the border is a crime but its a misdemeanor like driving without a seatbelt or ignoring a "No Trespassing" sign. It's very rare for people to be thrown in jail while awaiting trials for misdemeanors and generally the consequence of committing a single one isn't jail time.
So US policy at the border, while legal, is horribly unreasonable and maliciously cruel.
I love your point about sneaking across the border. Those supporters of the current regime's policy, some 25-30% of the polled US population, will often simply state that these are law-breakers and criminals for breaking our laws. And yet, is the same opprobrium applied to those who speed, shoot off fireworks illegally, or dodge taxes (like many of the rich today)? If they were truly about law and order, rather than about an othering/discriminatory scheme, surely they would decry these other violations of the law?
The child will end up in a temporary foster home or similar housing. They will not be kept in locked chain-link areas for weeks on end.
>Also, keep in mind that it isn't all asylum applicants who get separated. If you show up at a valid port of entry into the US and request asylum, then no crime has been committed and no one is separated from their families.
This is flat out wrong.
See (for example - there are many other documented cases) https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/05/us/guatemalan-immigrant-famil...
"After the rest of the family took their chances by presenting themselves to US immigration authorities, the possibility of forced separation became reality. The 20-year-old son was sent to a detention center in San Diego. Maria and her three youngest children were shipped to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas -- about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio."
"The two youngest members of the Villatoro family are now at a detention center in New York state while their mom remains detained in Texas."
When Gina Haspel was nominated to be the Director of the CIA, I was struck by the inadvertent echo of this in so many defenses of her involvement in the Agency's black-site "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) program. Her defenders argued that this experience actually said positive things about her, since she only tortured people when ordered to by the President, and stopped doing so the moment those orders stopped coming. In other words, torturing people didn't turn her into the sort of person who tortures people. She remained civilized.
Putting aside the obvious objection that Nuremberg should have eliminated "she was just following orders" as a valid defense for all time, it was remarkable how willing even people like Democratic Senators were to separate the act of having tortured people from the idea of what a torturer looks like. Just having tortured people isn't enough to make you a torturer anymore.
"They were able to integrate mass killing and other horrible deeds into their perception of normality. They had been able to make these actions part of their normative orientation, their values, and what they identified as acceptable in interpersonal interactions."
As noted by a holocaust survivor's daughter: "'Never Again' is now".
The current administration & the Russian teams working to undermine the West are not so much hacking technology, as they are hacking our sense of truth and normalcy. Fake news, conspiracy theories, and outrageous actions are all part of the hacking.
A slow boil the frog.
Or maybe the job will get so skillfully done,unopposed and complete we will get away with it without needing to answer to history? We have now already improved on Korematsu in leveraging infliction of family pain as a deterrent like the mob.
I write this under a throwaway, as a legal immigrant.
Now, give your silence too.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
I thought I was in for a nice long story about history but it's just someone on reddit calling the Trump administration nazis again.
No thanks, not interested. Not hacking, not news.
Not like I'm the arbiter of what makes it on this site but I don't come here for emotional bait and political... anything, really.
We hear that these people are all asylum-seekers, but asylum from what exactly? I was unaware that Mexico has mass political repression.
Not to mention, in Mexico specifically, it is cartel violence that people are largely escaping (assuming they aren't simply looking for better economic opportunity, which is also often the case).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_asylum
Asylum seekers do not have to be fleeing political persecution but violence or persecution in general.
Furthermore, many of the people crossing at our southern border are not Mexicans. Many are central- and south-Americans fleeing horrible civil strife.
And in the ancient days, you often had to live in a country such as Judea for three generations before being accepted as a member of the country. You couldn't seek asylum and then be voting in elections five years later.
They're generally from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, fleeing through Mexico, which isn't a particularly safe place for them either.
Interesting, then you should really read almost any basic summary of Mexico's current government.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/23/obama-pena-nieto-mexico-...
Not to mention asylum in the US isn't only limited to political asylum
>an applicant must establish that the government is either involved in the persecution, or unable to control the conduct of private actors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_in_the_United_States
You haven't been paying attention to the news.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/12/mexico-electio...
> Purón was the 112th politician murdered in Mexico since September 2017 when the election process began, according to Etellekt, a risk analysis consultancy.
> The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
In the right frame, any action can be justified.