"If you are 18 or older, you do have to carry your green card with you. Section 264(e) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (I.N.A.) requires all lawful permanent residents (LPRs) to have “at all times” official evidence of LPR status."
Depends on the state - many (most? all?) states let people on temporary visas get a drivers license, and don't tie the period of validity together. But more importantly, since there is no system to revoke a drivers license if your immigration status is revoked, a drivers license can only be used as proof that you were able to show legal status in the past, not that you have it now.
Not exactly. It's more like, your email account at work doesn't automatically deactivate when you die. They're totally separate systems with different requirements.
If it's a Real ID, then the federal government has a database with the documents you used to get it so they can quickly see your US or foreign citizenship and easily find your record from there.
If you're on a visa, you should download the PDF of your I-94 (they've been all electronic since 2013) from the CBP's website.
Either print and carry the I-94 around with you, or save the PDF of it to your phone (and hope you have battery life if you ever get stopped by these people).
If you're a citizen, my understanding is that you only have to show some form of ID (e.g. a driver's license).
so did you read it? his mom is illegal his brother is illegal and another riding in the same car is illegal. they crossed the border and got questioned. they tried verifying his info but his mom put a false name on his birth certificate, claimed he was born in mexico before and got him a visitors visa from mexico to the US when he was a minor.
so it sucks he stayed there so long but are you gonna say this is normal? can you find any case where a legal person with no false papers or illegal family members while crossing the border got detained?
It's not illegal to not have ID as a citizen, but several states and federal cases have upheld requirements that you must identify yourself when necessary, which is effectively the same thing.
The point is that you must have clear legal status and documentation, whether that's physically on you as a person (for green card holders) or available to be looked up (for everyone).
They look up your information. This is done millions of times every day by law enforcement. The physical ID just speeds up the process. It's not a "judgement call" to believe you or not when it comes to identification.
There have been reports of people with green cards and even naturalized citizens having trouble lately. There have even been press reports of naturalizations being challenged or native born Americans being told their birth certificates are fake.
Then of course there was the widely reported fact that the travel ban initially intentionally affected people with valid visas, green cards, and dual citizenship.
The short version is if you are legally in this country (either by visa, green card, naturalization or native birth) but have any reason to think somebody would ever believe you might not be (perhaps due to accent, skin color, name), it is very understandable that you may be concerned with everything going around in the headlines.
There are also examples of veterans and immigrants married to US citizens having their residency challenged and/or revoked, when in the past that usually meant you were left alone unless you committed particularly egregious crime.
A few headlines is not a signal of mass happenings or a serious cause of concern for the vast majority of legal immigrants.
News is designed to sell the worst possible outcome. It's why people think terrorism is a big deal when you're 100x more likely to die of heart disease.
Well, the Trump administration has been pretty systematic about some of this. People in cages and whatnot. "Fuck green cards" being a pretty much official edict of the travel ban v1.0. Or the story I cited about one day you try to renew your passport after many decades and they challenge you. You think that happened by mistake?
But ignoring that, it's all a bunch of isolated incidents until it happens to you. And it is happening to people. A lot of people would not like to take chances with their civil liberties.
That's true, but the app was still not made with them in mind.
From the FAQ:
Who is the intended audience for Notifica?
A: Primarily, young people and family members of undocumented immigrants (a group estimated to be at least 16 million people). Secondary, attorneys and advocates that want to ensure their clients have an efficient and safe way to make contact prior to a deportation event.
The app is to notify your family and legal counsel that you've been taken into custody, not to actively prevent you from being taken into custody (how would that even work?).
It's not any more "help you break the law" than an app that helps you find or communicate with defense lawyers, IMO. It's significantly less useful for breaking the law than Signal or even Safari.
It sounds to me like it's just as much about notifying people that you need a lawyer...
But even for that purpose, flashing your lights on the highway to inform oncoming drivers of speedtraps has been found to be free speech (iirc), I don't see how this is different.
It's essentially no different, but some would argue the weight of the 'crime' is different. I haven't given my personal opinion on this btw, I was just saying who the likely target audience is, as legal residents aren't likely living worried about being deported any day now (I'm one).
Hell, I don't even know if actual illegals living on the low over here would even be able to find this and know what to do with it lol. Are there illegals browsing HN? Genuinely curious.
AIUI there are several forms of unauthorized presence in the US that are not crimes (and, like most traffic law violations, are just misdemeanors), e.g., overstaying a visa, losing an asylum claim, etc.
Also the moral culpability of people brought to the US illegally as a child is approximately the moral culpability of a passenger in a child seat in a speeding car IMO. Continued presence in the US without authorization is (again AIUI) not a crime. My understanding is there are quite a few "dreamers" in tech.
You have 100% given your opinion: it's dehumanising to call people "illegals".
People who are in this situation speak to other people and share good resources - if this app is useful and trustworthy (which is unclear), then it will get used.
That's you projecting what I mean by "illegals", while I'm just using official terminology. I do not have an opinion one way or the other regarding the app's existence and motives.
Legal is an acceptable term right? No one bats an eye at "Legal Resident". What's the opposite of legal? Illegal. As far as I think, these are just states and do not imply anything about the person in question. They are terms I assume used pretty ubiquitously in most places of the world with a government in different forms.
Again, as far as I think, being somewhere illegally doesn't make you any lesser of a human than I am. But they are still here illegally. I could call them undocumented too, but they're still here illegally.
Official terminology is "illegal aliens" or "illegal immigrants." As people, they are not illegal: their alien status / immigration status is.
(The law, I think, just uses the terms "illegal entry" / "unauthorized presence" / "inadmissible" / etc. and "illegal immigration" to describe the act in general. But USCIS, ICE, etc. do use the term "illegal alien.")
There is definitely a trend among US progressives to use "undocumented" instead of "illegal," even as an adjective, to avoid the connotation of illegal people. I tend to follow that personally (even though in many cases it's not technically accurate—"undocumented" folks often have regular checkins with ICE if there's no deportation order yet, while proceedings are in progress, and that process certainly generates a lot of documentation, and there's also programs like DACA) but I won't fault someone for using the official terminology in good faith.
Human rights are for humans, which means everyone.
The people who have trouble judging others over terminology are the same as the people who have think changing the terminology is important in anyway. It's the same group on different sides worried over frivolous matters that nobody in the subject group (illegal immigrants seeking asylum) even cares about. All this effort usually just cancels out into a big wasteful political battle that gets nothing done.
It would be much better to talk accurately and come up with a real solution, such as proper detainment procedures, making sure funds and aid are available, communicating with those that are seeking asylum about what can and will happen, and then investigating and solving the root causes (conflict and leadership) in the country they're coming from.
Speeding or running a red light usually (although there are cases when you really have to hurry) is a voluntary choice which puts yourself and others in danger for no good reason and you just pay a fine or get jailed for some time in worst case if you get caught.
Having no residence permission usually is a circumstance you can hardly change, there is no choice, your mere existence is outlawed, you are destined to live on the run or get thrown back to hell for the rest of your life if you get caught.
Imagine you find yourself in a pool with boiling water. Provided you can manage to get out of there, how much voluntary choice is there in choosing between getting out of there or remaining there? Once you've got out and have been told you have no legal right to remain out of it and must dive back how much voluntary choice is in choosing between abiding and jumping back into the boiling pool and running away trying to hide? I don't see much choice here, do you? There is a thing called "withdrawal reflex" - try to touch a hot pan and not to withdraw your hand once you feel it burning and you'll know how much voluntary choice you have (free hint: if you manage you probably are a kwisatz haderach). Believe me there are many places in the world which feel like this for any normal person who is not a criminal by nature and doesn't have a ton of money (you probably can just buy yourself a comfortable impenetrable bunker anywhere if you do). When my legal status was at risk I thought I will probably commit suicide if my request for residence permit renewal gets declined. Not because I want to attract attention and make drama but because I just absolutely don't want to live where I have been born (because it's brutal: high crime rate, high corruption and brutality of police, bad medical service, cheap labor, expensive low quality goods, angry dangerous closed-minded people all around - if you're not the kind you just feel you don't belong there and can't live among them), I better don't live anywhere.
Yes, there are billions of people living in poor conditions around the world. I know first-hand what it's like. I also know the solution is not unfettered immigration. There isn't a single example where just shifting a bunch of people (and we wouldn't even approach 1% of the people in need) has ever solved any serious national issues with a country that is broken.
Either way, when it comes the law, illegal entry is still a voluntary action.
It seems you think on a way too high level of abstraction: bunches of people, broken countries (nobody can and will fix them anyway), percents of people in need. What I invite you to do is to imagine yourself in the role of a particular individual facing particular circumstances. There are many kinds of situations where there is just an illusion of choice. If they give you a choice to chop your head or your hand off you may end up being officially a person who has volunteered to chop his hand off but in fact this is going to be a kind of bullshit pretty easy to recognize and equally easy to ignore when it's not about you and you don't really care much.
You may disagree but I hope you understand why I refuse to equate an person who has not left the country after their residence license expiration to a violent criminal or a crazy person speeding around risking innocent people's safety for sake of their madness.
His post seemed genuine and like an appropriate thing to ask to me. No need to get the pitchforks yet, you can try talking to the person and clearing any misunderstandings first.
What makes you think your green card will keep you safe?
You are right that you have the legal right of habeas corpus, but whether you have the practical ability to convince government agents to lead you alone is quite a different thing, and has always been that way under every government.
Is this actually "increasingly common"? Seems like a few instances posted on social media with mostly cursory descriptions of what happened.
The 2nd link is about an illegal immigrant mother who didn't want to come to the airport to pick up her children. They were released once she showed up, and the only reason they were stopped was because they were travelling with another person who had no legal status and was not admitted to the country.
The 3rd link is about preteen children who were told to "walk across the border instead" because the line was moving too slow, leading to questioning to verify the identity.
Not following the rules/law is the cause of 2 of those stories.
The plural of anecdote is not data. For example, in the Washington Post story (your last link about passport renewal issues) the only hard statistics provided in the whole story show that the type of denials they are discussing are at their lowest level since the practice started during the Bush years and continued through the Obama years.
Deportations overall are significantly lower they they were in 2010, and steady the last several years.
From the stories I’m reading (WSJ) ICE is not even able to successfully deport illegal immigrants where final deportations orders have been issued.
I was unclear about what I meant by "increasingly common," but I did not mean "during the Trump administration." It has certainly been happening well before then, too.
And multiple presidential administrations ignoring the rights of citizens absolutely doesn't make it magically okay. I have my problems with Trump, but that doesn't imply that I think everything Obama and Bush did was good and just.
(In any case, even one US citizen unlawfully detained, let alone deported, seriously concerns me as a citizen. Either the rights of citizenship are guaranteed, or they're not. They can't be mostly guaranteed.)
The issue of verifying citizenship is as old as the existence of citizenship in the first place.
While there’s no doubt these stories are magnified more than ever, I’m wondering if there’s any reason to believe this is actually an issue that is statistically becoming more common over the last 4-, 8-, 12- years, or if in fact, many of these practices are actually becoming less common but they are also becoming more widely discussed?
Two unaccompanied kids walk across the border near Tijuana carrying US passports, one with a picture from many years before which makes her hard to identify and are detained. The brother signs papers (under duress) “admitting” the sister is actually his cousin and not a citizen. The girl is held for 36 hours before being released.
A bad situation all around. Is it more common, or do we just hear about it now?
To be fair, this is deportations, not deportations + detentions. Detentions seem to be at an all-time high and calculating the amount of deportations becomes trickier when it could possibly take years for a case to go through.
There's also the issue of this data coming from ICE itself (if it's the same dataset I think you're referring to), which is sort of like asking wolves to tell the farmer how many sheep they've ate over the last month. With how little accountability and data ICE. But that's the best data we have, unfortunately.
This is a biased source, but seems to have some decent overview of some of the statistics ICE has released [1]
If I were a spook, it's definitely a technique I'd try (the FBI has run honeypots before). But other commenters have mentioned that it's run by a reputable group, so it's probably not a massive concern (then again we know that intelligence sharing occurs between the NSA and other agencies -- if I were ICE I'd ask the NSA to get information about the users of the app).
I do imagine there is some legal red tape to get around if you actually want to use it as evidence in immigration investigations. Then again, you don't need to use it as evidence -- all you need is a lead and you can get all the evidence necessary when you detain them.
The app is from United We Dream, which is well-known to not be on ICE's side.
Of course, that doesn't account for possibilities like United We Dream being an elaborate ICE front (a la 1984's Brotherhood), the app developers being compromised by / secretly working for ICE, the app or its servers being compromised by ICE, etc.
Does United we dream have the security chops to understand all of the risks of using hosting/cloud services from companies that have to comply with US government secret court warrants?
If this thing used anything like GCE or AWS that would be pretty negligent.
ICE can't apply for a FISA warrant or issue a National Security Letter and I'm pretty sure the intelligence agencies are not going to waste their time tracking down removable immigrants.
Judging the app/website itself, it annoys me. You can see the first iMessage bubble for a few seconds but then it gets pushed out of view by the second message and the top part gets cut off.
Based on the website, it looks like they are trying to appeal to young people at a cafe in leisure rather than at-risk people on the run from government agencies lol. It doesn't look like anything I would put my trust in if I were in that situation.
Where are persons in the US with smartphones and service being sent to the border detention centers?
Also how are they concentration camps? The whole premise is that you are free not to enter them, by staying where you're welcome. Nobody's dragging central Americans out of Mexico to put them in the extremely expensive detention centers at the border.
They do make mistakes, like any LEO, but you can generally predict whether you'll be detained by whether you have committed an offense.
> Also they are concentration camps by any reasonable definition of the term
Here's a reasonable definition [0]:
A camp where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners, prisoners of war, refugees etc., are detained for the purpose of confining them in one place, typically with inadequate or inhumane facilities. [from 19th c.]
Yes, large numbers of people are being detained, but no, the purpose of the detention is not to confine them.
The camps are a confinement only for the impracticality of detaining large numbers of people in small buildings, in the same way as jails.
And again like jails, the people are being detained because they (or their only companion, in the case of dependents) were caught in the commission of a crime.
They are jails at most, and as far as I can tell, you can leave at basically any time.
We're detaining asylum seekers in these concentration camps, which by definition are people who don't really have a place where they're welcome. How does your argument apply to those seeking asylum?
Innocent people are not being dragged out of their homes and thrown into camps for their political beliefs or nationality.
Illegal immigrants seeking asylum are willingly coming here and are provided with shelter, provisions and aid while their cases are processed. They have to stay somewhere, but since their specific crime is that they cannot be in the country legally, they are detained in government facilities.
They are also free to leave at any time if they choose to no longer pursue their asylum claim. There is also legal entry (like obtaining a visa) which does not incur detainment.
In an earlier argument in this same thread, you complained about people fussing over terminology. Now you're doing the exact same thing you complained about, which is fussing over people calling these camps concentration camps, which fits the historical and dictionary definition to a tee.
Yes, they can choose to no longer pursue their asylum claim, but what you're arguing for is for them to commit suicide. They would be deported back to regimes which would likely kill them. Just because they have that 'option' does not mean the squalid conditions they are held in is somehow a good or just thing.
I'm using official and accurate language like detainment centers. My complaint is against changing the terms for sensationalism.
How is voluntary ingress into aid shelters the same as a concentration camp? Do you consider every refugee camp the same thing then? More importantly I fail to see how this helps when it actually causes more delays in aid and funding due to political infighting and media hysterics. It's yet another case of terminology being a trivial distraction from the actual issue, and in this case hurting the people involved.
Not seeking asylum is not the same as committing suicide. That's a completely disingenuous and emotional argument. Asylum is when you are not safe anywhere in your country, which is not the reality for most of these migrants who are fleeing poor economic and government conditions. This is reflected in number of asylum cases that are actually accepted.
What regimes are you talking specifically? Do you mean the socialist governments? The failure of those is always inevitable and can only be fixed by new leadership, not by importing the populace into another country.
"His client, a Brazilian national who had been ordered deported before she married a U.S. citizen, understood the risks as well, but ultimately decided that she wanted to keep the appointment"
This is not close to anything other than enforcement of the law. They are in the country illegally.
There is a legal process to immigration. I've been through it. Nowhere are you allowed to just come into the country without permission because you might eventually apply for a green card.
Sure, but the stated purpose of the organization behind this app is to protect undocumented (i.e. illegal) immigrants: https://unitedwedream.org/about/
edit: can you show an example of a legal immigrant being deported?
As a legal resident, that's basically why I feel pretty confident in my green card. What the fuck kind of priorities does ICE have if they are messing with people who actually have documents and are here rightfully while there's actual illegals roaming around?
Also, the fact that I live in SoCal, makes me feel pretty safe somehow. :)
Visibility, for one. Legal aliens are likely more confident in their chances to not be deported (and in the past, for rightful reasons), which makes them low hanging fruit for ICE which generally has zero accountability [1].
This can be for reasons like having a conviction within the past few decades or for more nebulous reasons. Even if you successfully fight deportation, you're still dealing with potentially being jailed and taken away from your life for no reason [2].
I mean this in all seriousness, and it's unfortunate that it's such a flamey argument, but you can see them doing things like questioning the birth certificates of people just on the Texas side of the border that, as you argue, make no sense if your goal is simply to go after people you already know beyond a doubt are here illegally, of which there is no shortage.
(Apparently one of the things they look at is baptismal records, on the grounds that there are allegedly people who live on the Mexico side of the border who get a false birth certificate from the US somehow. As a US-born child of Indian immigrants, who was baptized in India so my extended family could be there, this actually has me personally worried a little bit. I don't know how I could prove my citizenship if they questioned the validity of my birth certificate and therefore my passport....)
To your question of how many, https://jacquelinestevens.org/US-Unlawfully-Detaining.Steven... says, "Recent data suggests that in 2010 well over 4,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens, raising the total since 2003 to more than 20,000." (And that's well before Trump, for the record!)
"Documented immigrants can now be deported from the United States if they break the rules of federal and state programs that offer public benefits to immigrants."
Yes, criminal convictions can cause you to lose your immigration status, whether that's a visa or green card. Every legal immigrant knows this and it's been the law forever. This is not an example of surprise deportation of a legal resident.
Here's a case of a citizen held for more than three years in ICE detention. He's not eligible for compensation, because they held him long enough that the statute of limitations expired.
> There is no right to a court-appointed attorney in immigration court. Watson, who was 23 and didn't have a high school diploma when he entered ICE custody, didn't have a lawyer of his own. So he hand-wrote a letter to immigration officers, attaching his father's naturalization certificate, and kept repeating his status to anyone who would listen.
> Still, Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept Watson imprisoned as a deportable alien for nearly 3 1/2 years. Then it released Watson, who was from New York, in rural Alabama with no money and no explanation. Deportation proceedings continued for another year.
> Watson was correct all along: He was a U.S. citizen. After he was released, he filed a complaint. Last year, a district judge in New York awarded him $82,500 in damages, citing "regrettable failures of the government."
> On Monday, an appeals court ruled that Watson, now 32, is not eligible for any of that money — because while his case is "disturbing," the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer.
Yes this is very unfortunate and he definitely deserves damages, just like anyone who's innocent but gets convicted and sentenced to prison. Although he did serve 1 year in prison for selling drugs and that's where the mistake happened.
I don't see it being an indication that the average legal resident needs to suddenly be more cautious though.
No, it's a single example of an extreme situation. There are also innocent people on death row, struck by lightning, eaten by bears, or a multitude of other unfortunate scenarios which are all exceedingly rare for the majority population.
In this case, not going to prison would've prevented this chain of events from ever occurring for this person.
It's important to assess the actual risk. I'm a naturalized citizen as well and feel perfectly safe.
“Documented immigrants can now be deported from the United States if they break the rules of federal and state programs that offer public benefits to immigrants.
New guidelines implemented last week by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services say that immigrants who abuse “any program related to the reception of public benefits” will be summoned to appear before an immigration court.”
Basically... By misrepresenting themselves in order to steal services to which they are not entitled. This seems to me like something that either is already, or ought to be, a crime.
There are, however, some more egregious errors on the part of ICE (rather than CIS, mentioned in the article). I just can't trust people to be honest with the details here.
Yea I replied to that. It's always been a crime. I'm a naturalized citizen. We all are made to understand that until we gain citizenship, any criminal actions can stop the process or even lead to cancellation and deportation. It's not a surprise at all.
The app is closed source? Hard pass. Unless you know the data is being securely encrypted client-side, there is no way someone in a sensitive targeted group should make it known that they have this app, let alone upload personal contact information to a server somewhere.
The organization behind it looks legit enough, but that doesn't stop one guy with a USB stick from exfiltrating the whole database.
Even if the app encrypts everything client-side and does everything over Tor, just having the app installed on your phone (which both Google Play and the Apple App Store track) is sufficient to make you look suspicious from that point of view.
Really, what you'd need is a very popular app to add a feature like this so that the percentage of users of the app that are potentially undocumented immigrants is the same as their proportion of the population. Then you do all the other crypto and hopefully don't store whether individual users have the feature enabled.
I also feel like "contact these 5 people in case I get detained" is a more general use case that could dilute the "target pool" more. Journalists, sex workers, hackers, etc.
The scrollwheel does not work on this webpage in Firefox. It's quite rare to see a site with issues in FF, but having the scrollwheel completely broken is a first.
I can still drag the scrollbar to scroll, but on many systems there has been a move to having the scrollbars hidden by default.
> but on many systems there has been a move to having the scrollbars hidden by default
Which is terrible for those of us without scroll wheels. The user agent can implement scrollbars in unpredictable ways to accommodate local needs. Reimplementing scrolling will always have compatibility and accessibility issues.
(scrollwheels were a major source of my RSI issues, so I have to disable the scrollwheel. I sometimes have it mapped to thumb buttons 8 & 9, but that isn't practical for scrolling long pages)
> scrollwheels were a major source of my RSI issues
You might be interested in trying a touch-scroll mouse—it's somewhat like touchpad scroll, only needs a gentle sweep of the finger and a bit easier to scroll continuously a desired distance.
Personally, I'd particularly like to try Logitech Zone Touch T400 (https://i.imgur.com/cjmP0tc.jpg), but it disappeared from the local market so I'm using a meh Genius mouse instead, which is still better than a scrollwheel.
Is there anything stopping ICE from requesting the details and locations of everyone who has signed up for the app? I'm sure there's one judge in the country willing to sign off on the order.
Probably that such an order could still be too broad; even though the two main purposes of such an app are lawbreaking (and counsel to marginally-valid residents) and maybe some strange form of voyeurism.
The app doesn't facilitate lawbreaking. The app facilitates notifying people that you are entering custody of law enforcement, for a law that has (perhaps) been broken in the past.
It's basically a warrant canary. The purpose of a warrant canary is not to refuse to comply with the law: on the contrary, it only communicates something nontrivial if you intend to comply with the law!
Yeah, I misread the copy initially maybe. It's meant to notify third parties that you have.. already been detained? Still seems like it's meant at least somewhat to help people evade lawful detention.
At best, though, it seems like it could aid a lawful purpose. I don't have a particular problem with it if that is even a fifth of the intended use case.
It doesn't help the person being detained, but it might help others.
It's right in the example message being sent (from the front page):
> "This is Julia’s last known location. Do not go there now."
The idea being that the person being detained, is being detained, but the can warn their friends and loved ones to stay away from the area so they are not caught as well.
I think we are supposed to read between the lines.
Of course, if they intend to be able to keep the app running they can't say "this is to notify others to avoid the area so they are not caught" and they have to present it as a "notify my lawyers" kind of app.
But then why erase the contacts when message is sent if it is to notify lawyers? Is the identity of the attorney secret, how are they supposed to file on behalf of the client?
The example of message on the front page also kind of indicates the usage:
> "This is Julia’s last known location. Do not go there now."
Why emphasize the last known location in the app, but then admonish recipients to not go there.
It might be better if it is re-framed as an emergency location group broadcast app without focusing on immigration and lawyers. Maybe re-use the wording that those "life alert" systems use and then spread the app name through the word of mouth or other channels.
One issue is that not everyone who signs up may in fact be removable. Someone might sign up who has legal status but is still worried about being detained, for example.
False positives probably aren't a blocking issue. American citizens are already picked up in some sweeps, and even mistakenly deported on some occasions.
That said, they could just seed their system with a ton of fake users to make it more useless for ICE purposes.
That's only really an issue for the courts because, in practice, everyone is removable in one form or another. Maybe you are "illegal" or maybe the president just inspires some nut to remove you from mortality with a not-so-coy "if you don't like it here, get out"
Off-topic, but this reminds me of a crazy idea I had and never worked on (like a lot of ideas): Time-locked device encryption for when you're traveling through borders that are known to search your electronic devices and/or install malware.
Basically, ransomware, but the good kind that encrypts all the data on your device and holds the key until:
Interestingly enough, Julian Assange (among others) conducted research into encrypted filesystems that relied upon deniable encryption [0]. Depending upon which key you fed it, it would reveal different files.
If you had a robust solution to time-locked encryption, that in itself would be worth a lot! (Anybody keeping up to tabs on that stuff know about whether or not its achievable / what the SOTA is?)
They can, it'd be a waiting game at that point. But as I mentioned elsewhere, you could also add more safeguards like a friend vouching that you're safe, as well.
Well if you claim to not be able to unlock it they will probably just give you the option of either: waiting until you can, sending you back, or leaving your device with them at the border.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] thread[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/do-i-really-need-car...
So, I'd just show my green card instead of pulling out an app.
That seems... foolish? Like allowing a root/intermediate CA to sign leaf certs to be valid after their own expiration.
Either print and carry the I-94 around with you, or save the PDF of it to your phone (and hope you have battery life if you ever get stopped by these people).
If you're a citizen, my understanding is that you only have to show some form of ID (e.g. a driver's license).
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/immigration/2019/07/22/dalla...
so it sucks he stayed there so long but are you gonna say this is normal? can you find any case where a legal person with no false papers or illegal family members while crossing the border got detained?
The point is that you must have clear legal status and documentation, whether that's physically on you as a person (for green card holders) or available to be looked up (for everyone).
All of this relies on a judgement call by ICE, and many people do not trust their judgements. Not unjustifiably.
Here are a few that came up in a search.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/30/643218390/report-u-s-denies-p...
https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/396923-trump-adminis... -- opinion piece citing this: http://apnews.com/1da389a535684a5f9d0da74081c242f3
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/17/686188335/ice-tried-to-deport...
Then of course there was the widely reported fact that the travel ban initially intentionally affected people with valid visas, green cards, and dual citizenship.
The short version is if you are legally in this country (either by visa, green card, naturalization or native birth) but have any reason to think somebody would ever believe you might not be (perhaps due to accent, skin color, name), it is very understandable that you may be concerned with everything going around in the headlines.
News is designed to sell the worst possible outcome. It's why people think terrorism is a big deal when you're 100x more likely to die of heart disease.
But ignoring that, it's all a bunch of isolated incidents until it happens to you. And it is happening to people. A lot of people would not like to take chances with their civil liberties.
From the FAQ:
Who is the intended audience for Notifica? A: Primarily, young people and family members of undocumented immigrants (a group estimated to be at least 16 million people). Secondary, attorneys and advocates that want to ensure their clients have an efficient and safe way to make contact prior to a deportation event.
It's not any more "help you break the law" than an app that helps you find or communicate with defense lawyers, IMO. It's significantly less useful for breaking the law than Signal or even Safari.
But even for that purpose, flashing your lights on the highway to inform oncoming drivers of speedtraps has been found to be free speech (iirc), I don't see how this is different.
Hell, I don't even know if actual illegals living on the low over here would even be able to find this and know what to do with it lol. Are there illegals browsing HN? Genuinely curious.
Also the moral culpability of people brought to the US illegally as a child is approximately the moral culpability of a passenger in a child seat in a speeding car IMO. Continued presence in the US without authorization is (again AIUI) not a crime. My understanding is there are quite a few "dreamers" in tech.
People who are in this situation speak to other people and share good resources - if this app is useful and trustworthy (which is unclear), then it will get used.
Again, as far as I think, being somewhere illegally doesn't make you any lesser of a human than I am. But they are still here illegally. I could call them undocumented too, but they're still here illegally.
I bet it's none, because you don't see that as a defining characteristic of yourself.
(The law, I think, just uses the terms "illegal entry" / "unauthorized presence" / "inadmissible" / etc. and "illegal immigration" to describe the act in general. But USCIS, ICE, etc. do use the term "illegal alien.")
This fuss over the terminology is a trivial matter and completely inconsequential to the lives of these people.
Describing people in this way puts them into a category of 'other'. It defines people by their immigration status, diminishing their value as people.
This allows people to justify a belief that people perceived to be in this category do not require or deserve basic human rights.
Recognising that people are in a vulnerable situation is important, I agree. Happy to hear what positive action would be useful :)
The people who have trouble judging others over terminology are the same as the people who have think changing the terminology is important in anyway. It's the same group on different sides worried over frivolous matters that nobody in the subject group (illegal immigrants seeking asylum) even cares about. All this effort usually just cancels out into a big wasteful political battle that gets nothing done.
It would be much better to talk accurately and come up with a real solution, such as proper detainment procedures, making sure funds and aid are available, communicating with those that are seeking asylum about what can and will happen, and then investigating and solving the root causes (conflict and leadership) in the country they're coming from.
I don't like helping others drive extra fast. But I like the app and I hope the immigrants can stay.
Having no residence permission usually is a circumstance you can hardly change, there is no choice, your mere existence is outlawed, you are destined to live on the run or get thrown back to hell for the rest of your life if you get caught.
Either way, when it comes the law, illegal entry is still a voluntary action.
You may disagree but I hope you understand why I refuse to equate an person who has not left the country after their residence license expiration to a violent criminal or a crazy person speeding around risking innocent people's safety for sake of their madness.
Green card holders are obviously not the intended audience of this app. I'm not sure how you missed that.
Also, considering how extraordinarily difficult[2] it is to get to a green card, your comment came off as a bit condescending.
[1] See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19857878
https://www.thedailybeast.com/1488-us-citizens-mistakenly-ar...
See 18 U.S. Code § 911
Detention of US citizens with passports has become increasingly common:
https://twitter.com/repbarragan/status/1152359133330444288 (citizen daughter taken into custody along with undocumented parent, released after congressperson intervened)
https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/ohare-standoff-border-p... (citizen children detained at airport for 12+ hours on arrival to US, CBP insisted on only releasing them to their undocumented mother)
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Young-US-Citizen-Deta... (citizen 9-year-old in possession of her passport detained for 32 hours with no coherent reason provided)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-deny... (passport applicants with valid US birth certificates who were born near the Mexican border placed in deportation proceedings)
What makes you think your green card will keep you safe?
You are right that you have the legal right of habeas corpus, but whether you have the practical ability to convince government agents to lead you alone is quite a different thing, and has always been that way under every government.
The 2nd link is about an illegal immigrant mother who didn't want to come to the airport to pick up her children. They were released once she showed up, and the only reason they were stopped was because they were travelling with another person who had no legal status and was not admitted to the country.
The 3rd link is about preteen children who were told to "walk across the border instead" because the line was moving too slow, leading to questioning to verify the identity.
Not following the rules/law is the cause of 2 of those stories.
A child crossing the border alone might make any country worried about them.
Deportations overall are significantly lower they they were in 2010, and steady the last several years.
From the stories I’m reading (WSJ) ICE is not even able to successfully deport illegal immigrants where final deportations orders have been issued.
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/immigration-enforcement-raids-b...
And multiple presidential administrations ignoring the rights of citizens absolutely doesn't make it magically okay. I have my problems with Trump, but that doesn't imply that I think everything Obama and Bush did was good and just.
(In any case, even one US citizen unlawfully detained, let alone deported, seriously concerns me as a citizen. Either the rights of citizenship are guaranteed, or they're not. They can't be mostly guaranteed.)
While there’s no doubt these stories are magnified more than ever, I’m wondering if there’s any reason to believe this is actually an issue that is statistically becoming more common over the last 4-, 8-, 12- years, or if in fact, many of these practices are actually becoming less common but they are also becoming more widely discussed?
Two unaccompanied kids walk across the border near Tijuana carrying US passports, one with a picture from many years before which makes her hard to identify and are detained. The brother signs papers (under duress) “admitting” the sister is actually his cousin and not a citizen. The girl is held for 36 hours before being released.
A bad situation all around. Is it more common, or do we just hear about it now?
There's also the issue of this data coming from ICE itself (if it's the same dataset I think you're referring to), which is sort of like asking wolves to tell the farmer how many sheep they've ate over the last month. With how little accountability and data ICE. But that's the best data we have, unfortunately.
This is a biased source, but seems to have some decent overview of some of the statistics ICE has released [1]
[1] https://immigrantjustice.org/staff/blog/ice-released-its-mos...
In the most cynical case, sharing your contacts and location via this app could make ICE's job much easier.
How can people tell which it is?
I do imagine there is some legal red tape to get around if you actually want to use it as evidence in immigration investigations. Then again, you don't need to use it as evidence -- all you need is a lead and you can get all the evidence necessary when you detain them.
Of course, that doesn't account for possibilities like United We Dream being an elaborate ICE front (a la 1984's Brotherhood), the app developers being compromised by / secretly working for ICE, the app or its servers being compromised by ICE, etc.
If this thing used anything like GCE or AWS that would be pretty negligent.
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illega...
Based on the website, it looks like they are trying to appeal to young people at a cafe in leisure rather than at-risk people on the run from government agencies lol. It doesn't look like anything I would put my trust in if I were in that situation.
Also how are they concentration camps? The whole premise is that you are free not to enter them, by staying where you're welcome. Nobody's dragging central Americans out of Mexico to put them in the extremely expensive detention centers at the border.
They do make mistakes, like any LEO, but you can generally predict whether you'll be detained by whether you have committed an offense.
Nowhere yet. That's what I'm questioning, whether this is legit or just a way to end up on a watch list.
Also they are concentration camps by any reasonable definition of the term: https://www.wordnik.com/words/concentration%20camp
Here's a reasonable definition [0]:
A camp where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners, prisoners of war, refugees etc., are detained for the purpose of confining them in one place, typically with inadequate or inhumane facilities. [from 19th c.]
Yes, large numbers of people are being detained, but no, the purpose of the detention is not to confine them.
The camps are a confinement only for the impracticality of detaining large numbers of people in small buildings, in the same way as jails.
And again like jails, the people are being detained because they (or their only companion, in the case of dependents) were caught in the commission of a crime.
They are jails at most, and as far as I can tell, you can leave at basically any time.
[0]: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/concentration_camp
Illegal immigrants seeking asylum are willingly coming here and are provided with shelter, provisions and aid while their cases are processed. They have to stay somewhere, but since their specific crime is that they cannot be in the country legally, they are detained in government facilities.
They are also free to leave at any time if they choose to no longer pursue their asylum claim. There is also legal entry (like obtaining a visa) which does not incur detainment.
Yes, they can choose to no longer pursue their asylum claim, but what you're arguing for is for them to commit suicide. They would be deported back to regimes which would likely kill them. Just because they have that 'option' does not mean the squalid conditions they are held in is somehow a good or just thing.
How is voluntary ingress into aid shelters the same as a concentration camp? Do you consider every refugee camp the same thing then? More importantly I fail to see how this helps when it actually causes more delays in aid and funding due to political infighting and media hysterics. It's yet another case of terminology being a trivial distraction from the actual issue, and in this case hurting the people involved.
Not seeking asylum is not the same as committing suicide. That's a completely disingenuous and emotional argument. Asylum is when you are not safe anywhere in your country, which is not the reality for most of these migrants who are fleeing poor economic and government conditions. This is reflected in number of asylum cases that are actually accepted.
What regimes are you talking specifically? Do you mean the socialist governments? The failure of those is always inevitable and can only be fixed by new leadership, not by importing the populace into another country.
We're damn close: https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/03/30/green-card-ice-arrests-...
This is not close to anything other than enforcement of the law. They are in the country illegally.
There is a legal process to immigration. I've been through it. Nowhere are you allowed to just come into the country without permission because you might eventually apply for a green card.
edit: can you show an example of a legal immigrant being deported?
How does a legal alien get deported when there are literally millions of illegal aliens? Mistaken identity?
Do you know how many wrongful deportations there are?
Also, the fact that I live in SoCal, makes me feel pretty safe somehow. :)
This can be for reasons like having a conviction within the past few decades or for more nebulous reasons. Even if you successfully fight deportation, you're still dealing with potentially being jailed and taken away from your life for no reason [2].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lawful-resident...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kansas-professor-who-fa...
I mean this in all seriousness, and it's unfortunate that it's such a flamey argument, but you can see them doing things like questioning the birth certificates of people just on the Texas side of the border that, as you argue, make no sense if your goal is simply to go after people you already know beyond a doubt are here illegally, of which there is no shortage.
(Apparently one of the things they look at is baptismal records, on the grounds that there are allegedly people who live on the Mexico side of the border who get a false birth certificate from the US somehow. As a US-born child of Indian immigrants, who was baptized in India so my extended family could be there, this actually has me personally worried a little bit. I don't know how I could prove my citizenship if they questioned the validity of my birth certificate and therefore my passport....)
To your question of how many, https://jacquelinestevens.org/US-Unlawfully-Detaining.Steven... says, "Recent data suggests that in 2010 well over 4,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens, raising the total since 2003 to more than 20,000." (And that's well before Trump, for the record!)
Yes, criminal convictions can cause you to lose your immigration status, whether that's a visa or green card. Every legal immigrant knows this and it's been the law forever. This is not an example of surprise deportation of a legal resident.
Here's a case of a citizen held for more than three years in ICE detention. He's not eligible for compensation, because they held him long enough that the statute of limitations expired.
> There is no right to a court-appointed attorney in immigration court. Watson, who was 23 and didn't have a high school diploma when he entered ICE custody, didn't have a lawyer of his own. So he hand-wrote a letter to immigration officers, attaching his father's naturalization certificate, and kept repeating his status to anyone who would listen.
> Still, Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept Watson imprisoned as a deportable alien for nearly 3 1/2 years. Then it released Watson, who was from New York, in rural Alabama with no money and no explanation. Deportation proceedings continued for another year.
> Watson was correct all along: He was a U.S. citizen. After he was released, he filed a complaint. Last year, a district judge in New York awarded him $82,500 in damages, citing "regrettable failures of the government."
> On Monday, an appeals court ruled that Watson, now 32, is not eligible for any of that money — because while his case is "disturbing," the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/01/540903038...
I don't see it being an indication that the average legal resident needs to suddenly be more cautious though.
I'm a former green card holder, now naturalized. This shit is terrifying to me.
In this case, not going to prison would've prevented this chain of events from ever occurring for this person.
It's important to assess the actual risk. I'm a naturalized citizen as well and feel perfectly safe.
“Documented immigrants can now be deported from the United States if they break the rules of federal and state programs that offer public benefits to immigrants.
New guidelines implemented last week by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services say that immigrants who abuse “any program related to the reception of public benefits” will be summoned to appear before an immigration court.”
Basically... By misrepresenting themselves in order to steal services to which they are not entitled. This seems to me like something that either is already, or ought to be, a crime.
There are, however, some more egregious errors on the part of ICE (rather than CIS, mentioned in the article). I just can't trust people to be honest with the details here.
The organization behind it looks legit enough, but that doesn't stop one guy with a USB stick from exfiltrating the whole database.
Really, what you'd need is a very popular app to add a feature like this so that the percentage of users of the app that are potentially undocumented immigrants is the same as their proportion of the population. Then you do all the other crypto and hopefully don't store whether individual users have the feature enabled.
I can still drag the scrollbar to scroll, but on many systems there has been a move to having the scrollbars hidden by default.
Which is terrible for those of us without scroll wheels. The user agent can implement scrollbars in unpredictable ways to accommodate local needs. Reimplementing scrolling will always have compatibility and accessibility issues.
(scrollwheels were a major source of my RSI issues, so I have to disable the scrollwheel. I sometimes have it mapped to thumb buttons 8 & 9, but that isn't practical for scrolling long pages)
You might be interested in trying a touch-scroll mouse—it's somewhat like touchpad scroll, only needs a gentle sweep of the finger and a bit easier to scroll continuously a desired distance.
Personally, I'd particularly like to try Logitech Zone Touch T400 (https://i.imgur.com/cjmP0tc.jpg), but it disappeared from the local market so I'm using a meh Genius mouse instead, which is still better than a scrollwheel.
It's basically a warrant canary. The purpose of a warrant canary is not to refuse to comply with the law: on the contrary, it only communicates something nontrivial if you intend to comply with the law!
At best, though, it seems like it could aid a lawful purpose. I don't have a particular problem with it if that is even a fifth of the intended use case.
It doesn't help the person being detained, but it might help others.
It's right in the example message being sent (from the front page):
> "This is Julia’s last known location. Do not go there now."
The idea being that the person being detained, is being detained, but the can warn their friends and loved ones to stay away from the area so they are not caught as well.
I think we are supposed to read between the lines.
Of course, if they intend to be able to keep the app running they can't say "this is to notify others to avoid the area so they are not caught" and they have to present it as a "notify my lawyers" kind of app.
But then why erase the contacts when message is sent if it is to notify lawyers? Is the identity of the attorney secret, how are they supposed to file on behalf of the client?
The example of message on the front page also kind of indicates the usage:
> "This is Julia’s last known location. Do not go there now."
Why emphasize the last known location in the app, but then admonish recipients to not go there.
It might be better if it is re-framed as an emergency location group broadcast app without focusing on immigration and lawyers. Maybe re-use the wording that those "life alert" systems use and then spread the app name through the word of mouth or other channels.
That said, they could just seed their system with a ton of fake users to make it more useless for ICE purposes.
Does this really stop the inevitable deportation? and other than informing others.... what else is the outcome that the app helps with?
While I see the value of having an attorney the site isn't clear what else it can do or help with.
Basically, ransomware, but the good kind that encrypts all the data on your device and holds the key until:
A. You've passed the border (or checkpoint)
B. You've securely authenticated yourself
C. Are sure your device wasn't tampered with
Probably is going to be a fatal flaw, since it leaves you open to the "rubber hose" sector of attacks (in various legal forms).
D. Have a second person, not traveling with you, vouch that you're safe.
If you had a robust solution to time-locked encryption, that in itself would be worth a lot! (Anybody keeping up to tabs on that stuff know about whether or not its achievable / what the SOTA is?)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberhose_(file_system)
Locks the files, sends a message to your peeps telling them to tell you this keyphrase next time they see you.