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That's what happens when you have mass privatization of productive capacity. The power to procure surveillance pools in fewer and fewer hands.
Not a peep from the second amendment types. Curious.
no one poopoos the golem when its on their side

it might listen, and turn...

Not without work it won't. Trump II has been using "Who won the 2020 election?" as a shibboleth to fill the ranks with True Believers. Nobody gets power without answering "Trump" to that question.
Q: “Who won the 2020 election?” A: “I’m not a biologist”
turns out, they’re into it. they were in favor of it in the 60’s and still are.

the 2nd amendment (the entire Bill of Rights) was written to protect us from our own government, but it’s way more convenient to just shoot brown people or people who speak a different language.

> The Mulford Act is a 1967 California statute which prohibits public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.[2] Named after Republican assemblyman Don Mulford and signed into law by governor of California Ronald Reagan, the law was initially crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party, which was conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods in what would later be termed copwatching.[3][4] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.[5][6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

Just to add color to your comment. These folks were directly exercising 2nd amendment rights against oppressive state forces and that Act was the response to them exercising it.

What do you mean by this? This article seems to be mostly about govt surveillance and not gun rights.
The #1 reason sighted by 2nd amendment loyalists for needing such liberal gun rights is to protect us all from government overreach. I assume that's what he means.
Common misunderstanding. The reason is to protect themselves from government overreach, not you or anyone else. You were supposed to get your own gun to protect yourself, that's why the right needs to extend to everyone.

(disclaimer: this is not my opinion I'm just explaining the logic)

A stated core purpose of the second amendment is for ordinary people to be able to keep a government in check by force or threat of force.

Some people view the actions of ICE, like in this article, to be crossing a line that would normally provoke a response from second amendment types.

Those people are the people who want gun control and therefore don’t have any guns.
The people who would normally argue "but muh 2A!" are either applying to be on ICE, are on ICE, or just support what they're doing, completely oblivious to the obvious.
There have been multiple instances of people doing things with weapons. It's not good, but it has been done.
Go join your local Pink Pistols/Brown Berets/SRA/whatever chapter.

The leftist gun community is mostly focused on arming the LGBTQ community at the moment though. Your chances of getting canoed while trying to stab a trans woman are way up over the past couple years.

Since most people aren't gonna have context on this part of the literature.

This paper is heavily rejected by mainstream criminologists. It relies on victim memorial lists for a count of victims and it relies on a database made by an anti-Trans group for the perpetrator count. This leads to both a significant undercount of victims and overcount of perpetrators.

The ONS has come out against it and said that official homicide data does not track transgender status so there is no official data to back this research up on. Pretty much all mainstream criminologists reject it.

None of this has stopped rightwingers from heavily circulating this paper of course. Somehow I doubt science is the goal here.

Idk about the paper but I know a lot of trans women and I don't think any of them haven't been stabbed/assaulted for being trans at least once.
The same political groups that support hate speech laws are now looking for support from the freedom of speech groups? That sounds like a temporary alliance at best. They aren't going to support you long term because they know leftists are authoritarians of a different color. AKA your rhetoric isn't going to work because you have no principles and they do.
Freedom of speech is a first amendment issue, my friend. The "second amendment types" OP refers to are the people who claim that citizen ownership of any and all types of firearms is a buttress against tyrannical government. Since the Trump admin is at least arguably a tyrannical government, it seems legit to at least ask where the previously vociferously pro-gun people are right now. Many should be at least warning of potential tyranny, but appear not to be doing so.
The OPs point stands; why would anti-tyranny types want to stand with people who are (in their example) linguistic tyrants and thought police?
Previously, they claimed they stand with nazi solely for free speech of everyone purposes, not because they would share the oppressive authoritarian ideology of nazi.

If that was true, that is why.

Now in reality, that was not true, they stood with nazi cause they themselves are nazi who want to bully others.

You keep using the term Nazi but I don't think you actually know what it means.

I can gauge how much of an authoritarian you are with one simple question, is it immoral to privately own the means of production?

>I can gauge how much of an authoritarian you are with one simple question, is it immoral to privately own the means of production?

You keep using the term authoritarian but I don't think you actually know what it means.

>Since the Trump admin is at least arguably a tyrannical government, it seems legit to at least ask where the previously vociferously pro-gun people are right now.

False premise. The Trump administration is doing exactly what he was democratically voted in to do by the "vociferously pro-gun people": close the border and deport illegal immigrants.

It's not "looking for support", it's pointing out the abject hypocrisy. But what's new. Have a great day.
No, it's Leftist rhetoric to use their principles against them. Leftists are trying to weaponize principles even though they don't share the same ones. They don't actually care about the hypocrisy it's a guilt tactic for political leverage.
I note that you do acknowledge the hypocrisy.

That's enough for me.

Double downing on it I see. Nice, makes my point.
I see you brought up the freedom of speech group, but didn't address the potential implications of other similarly important groups such as fursuit afficianados and PETA and, most egregiously, the Taylor Swift fandom.
As part of an imminent, concerted, collective effort with peers during civil unrest? Sure. Most people aren't ready to Luigi themselves to jail for life as a statement.
State resources and armed officers taking a political stance like this is how democracy withers
It's more a self reinforcing side-effect of a withering democracy than the cause. The rhetoric from the far right keeps implying that we're much closer to a single party state than the current election cycle suggests and they have proven themselves to be predictors of outcomes they don't directly control so I'm sure more shenanigans will be revealed shortly.
Man, this is chilling. Between this and those "anti-ice" protestors that got a collective 450 years of jail time, it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.
> it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.

And: which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world?

While the Jan. 6th convicts all get pardons.
That was a riot by morons rather than organized interference with law enforcement by vigilante-morons.
Except for all the Proud Boys who were there and later pardoned.

And then during the debate, when asked about another fascist, racist, far right, or white supremist group, the usual response was given, "Who dat?"

But then were told to "stand back, and stand by."

It definitely was not and there is boatloads of readily-accessible evidence to prove it. And dozens of juries of your peers looked at this evidence and convicted the perpetrators.

If you are too lazy for that, just read the Brooks Brothers Riot wiki page and square that with your recollection of Jan 6.

Didn't they get 450 years of jail time (spread among nine people IIRC) for attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder?[0] If the start of your pattern of "police state levels of power, corruption and control" is people engaging in organized terrorism, (i.e. using violence for political ends) being convicted of terrorism offenses, then I guess I don't see it. Looks to me like some folks wanted to LARP as revolutionaries but with real bullets & explosives and were surprised the government's tolerance for that was limited.

[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyedgnyn4mo

Listen to the NYT Daily episode about this.

tldr, the govt (not the court) decides whether it is terrorism or not, which elevates misdemeanor into decades long felony conviction.

The J6 crowd was not charged with terrorism.

The way you frame the event is very misleading after reading the article.

I know that idiots will argue that "attacking a government building with explosives and committing attempted murder" is "technically correct", but it is stupidity to not understand that it leaves out important nuances.

Attacking a government building with explosives is a stretch. They had fireworks on July 4th to stage a noise protest outside of the detention facility which got out of hand. The issue is that the government's case for 'material support for terror' mostly hinged on them wearing black and all being members of a signal chat [1] and handed down extraordinarily harsh sentences.

The government's case explicitly tried to throw the book at all involved (including 30 years for someone not even at the protest; for moving a box of anti-fascist literature) in line with new executive direction including NSPM-7[1][2].

The BBC article you linked takes many of the procecutor's statements at face value. Looking into this case more may illuminate how wide this survailance and punnishment net will be cast against the administration's political enemies.

[1]https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr... [2]https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...

"Explosives" in this case are "ordinary fireworks you can buy at a stand on the side of the road meant to be loud and annoying."
Non-US here but if there's a government agency whose job it is to deport people in a country illegally, and they do that, where is the controversy? If people then impede them doing that, they should be sanctioned, right? I know the number of actual engineers on here are now dwindling since this became reddit 2.0 but

> If police arrest criminals, and people impede the police arresting criminals > Should the people be punished for that? (A) Yes (B) No

> If paramedics help casualties, and people impede the paramedics helping casualties > Should the people be punished for that? (A) Yes (B) No

> If <noun> <verb> <nouns>, and people impede the <noun> <verb> <nouns> > Should the people be punished for that? (A) Yes (B) No

So long as it's a lawful activity, it shouldn't change from scenario to scenario. Being arrested or convicted is an act of law, not a moral or ethic act. To avoid lawful sanctions, you have to object lawfully. If you act unlawfully, then you risk lawful sanctions. That's a risk you take.

I know it's a little black and white but I'm one of the pre-reddit 2.0 hacker news inhabitants.

> if there's a government agency whose job it is to deport people in a country illegally,

Following you so far

> and they do that,

Yeah, that's where you fucked up. That's not what ICE is doing that everyone is upset about. It's the locking up, deporting, and killing of people who are here legally, they just happen to be brown.

> if there's a government agency whose job it is to deport people in a country illegally

This antecedent is false, so we don’t even need to read the consequent.

Should the paramedics be the one arresting the people impeding their function? If the answer is no, then ICE shouldnt be tracking people they think might impede their function.

If their job is arresting people in the country illegaly, any other matter of public safety should be handled by the correct institution at local or federal police level. Hint, its not ICE.

Well if we're comparing I've been here a bit longer.

I would make two points here.

1. ICE is breaking the law in many, many different ways. It is not legal to murder multiple US citizens like Alex Pretti and Renee Good. The conditions of their internment camps (I will use the euphemism as I suspect you would not like the more accurate term) are not legal. And many, many other issues, please see:

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/we-documented-12...

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/ice-cb...

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-administration-has-de...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/courts-have-ruled-4...

By your legalist moral standards, is this not also "black and white"? Do people not have a right or duty to protest it?

2. What is legal is not always what is morally right. The comments you are making mirror those in past "legal" civil rights violations at scale. The same arguments were made against the civil rights movement in the 60s, anti apartheid movement, and pretty much every civil rights movement. The answer in all of those cases is the same: what is legal does not determine what is morally right, and we have a civic duty to nonviolent protest when the two conflict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...

ICE arguably has a mandate for aggressive deportation. The Trump campaign did not sugarcoat what their goal was. And people still voted for that. Still, the lack of due process, the excessive use of force, deporting people to random countries, ... that's not normal.
> If police arrest criminals, and people impede the police arresting criminals

It did not happened. What happened was police committing crimes and people making videos of it.

> If paramedics help casualties, and people impede the paramedics helping casualties

It did not happened. However, police and ICE did in fact intentionally impede the paramedics helping casualties on multiple occasions.

You think a prison sentence for shooting a federal law enforcement officer in the neck is chilling?
Well 100 years seems disproportionately harsh compared to other sentences for the same crime.

And the other protesters had huge, unjust sentences applied to them for protesting.

No, the 30 year one for not even being at the protest is.

Or the lack of one for a bunch of feds pinning a man to the ground and executing him. And then scattering like fucking roaches after they do so.

But you know all this. Why are you carrying water for it?

Just remember that there is a child somewhere who saw their mum for the last time happily dropping them for school only to be shot by an ICE agent seconds after he called her a fucking bitch - and the agent faced no consequences for this. Every time I think about that kid my heart breaks. Every time I think about the cruelty of the system unwilling to at least put this one wrong right and prosecute the agent properly my heart breaks. What a unbelievably cruel world we live in.
Those 450 collective years of jail time was due to all of the firearms they brought, running away from the scene, shooting at the facility, and lying to law enforcement. I'm all for protesting, but this is not the hill you want to die on as your "chilling" moment.
Firearms are legal in Texas. One person committed violence. Others got 50 years for being at the same protest. Another got 30 years for picking up his own box of zines.

The First Amendment was written by people who experienced this same chilling of free speech.

Unfortunately, people have thrown out all pretense of caring about proper justice or first amendment rights. There really isn't any point in arguing with them because they'll continue to make spurious associations or illegitimate defenses as to why their enemies deserve to be locked up for life.
They are not legal in commission of a crime.
Add to that the weaponization of the justice department. Former FBI directory charged 3 times as retaliation, Senator Mark Kelly and other senators, even lowly aides such as Cassidy Hutchinson, all facing retaliation.

David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist was accused and indicted for damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, purely as a scapegoat.

All federal funds to the state of Colorado frozen to force them to release a convicted-and-imprisoned ally of the administration (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOE6DTMjPEc )

Yeah it isn't "pretty close", it is a police state.

Prosecution of political opponents does not a "police state" make. Remember Trump got prosecuted when he was out of office as well.

Abuse of power? Sure. But I'm sick of the hyperbole.

Are you sick of whataboutism? Because I wouldn't equate what's happening now with Trump's prosecutions. It's incredibly disingenuous to do that.
Cats always have claws, not just when they're showing.
Go watch the body cam footage of the peaceful protest. Looks a lot like people with guns hid in the woods and shot a cop who responded to what looked like a terrorist attack.
> After a local activist uploaded a license-plate search tool on Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud platform, to an infiltrated Signal chat, HSI agents reviewed website DNS queries and Stripe data along with data purchased from a commercial broker. This gave HSI access to SSH session logs, outbound connection records, the Fly.io account’s signup IP, and a Stripe card fingerprint on an account that had never completed a payment. Agents fused that with Minnesota DVS records and commercial data from the Thomson- Reuters CLEAR platform to produce a driver's license nummber, Social Security number summary, years of address history, phone numbers, property records, and jointly registered vehicles.

Wow, I wonder how they got SSH session logs?!

The breadcrumb trail here is chilling.

DNS, too. I imagine they weren't using their ISP's DNS server, as that could cut out needing a bunch of this data, but then I wonder what data they did get from whatever DNS provider...
They might mean SSH TCP traffic logs, maybe?

Also SSH isn't a perfectly opaque protocol. There's stuff you can use to fingerprint e.g. client/server versions and often narrow it to architecture, OS, even OS version. That helps.

How is it chilling? Am I missing something?

Someone is using paid service to surveil actual LEO agency and they are surprised LEOs can compel paid service to produce records? And all that while playing with license plate searches ( and heavens know what else ) that would normally suggest some basic levels of competence?

You play with a bull. You get he horns. Sometimes even if you know what you are doing.

edit:

Kids these days: Wah, the government is not playing faaaair.

“they are surprised LEOs can compel paid service to produce records”

I’m not surprised, but this is not how it’s supposed to be in the US.

The fourth amendment is supposed to force a high bar for collecting evidence in this way but we’ve been slowly eroding those rights away over the last 50 years.

Your stance of LEO being an antagonistic force belies a deeper moral corruption that I find gross and incompatible with a liberal (free) society. Wilhoit’s Law and all that.
I am genuinely intrigued. Please elaborate.
Not sure what there is to elaborate upon.

Allowing law enforcement to maintain a default stance of antagonism - “us vs them” - can only lead to law enforcement being leveraged by those in power (political or capital power) to define who the “them” is.

I’d much rather have law enforcement have a default cooperative stance with their communities and society at large. You know, if “protect and serve” wasn’t just a marketing gimmick but an actual principle applied during process and procedures.

In essence: thin blue line is an illiberal aesthetic that has 19th century American leaders rolling in their graves - at least the ones who weren’t chasing down slaves to return to the South.

Hmm. Interesting. Function may be an emergent quality of the organization itself ( as human I have two hands, as octopus I have more appendages to play with ). In other words, the question is not really on what you personally would rather have, but what a given body type bestows upon a given organizational type.

Your body determines your function oversimplification for the purposes of this argument.

America is crazy, why are you letting people sell your data like this?
Because "private good public bad" brainwashing has been so effective that most Americans see this structure as a good thing, even though the consequences are very obvious and very bad.
How are we gonna get them to do that? We have a choice between two parties each propped up by trillions of dollars in donations that are both cool with selling our data.
There's a secret third political option, but it's usually frowned upon.
Labor organizing?
That's pretty normal. I think bro is pointing at either a general strike or regicide, both of which are highly frowned upon.
Define letting? The political system has de-criminalized vote buying by re-branding the bribers as 'lobbyists' and protecting it as a 1st Amendment right. Even Guilfoyle's controversy was asking for 100k to her Amex account from a "lobbyist". In most countries it's a jailable offense.

This lobbying means that the politicians might be elected by "us" but they work for "them" - the "lobbyists."

Does this answer your question sufficiently?

Because of FUD spread about data protection laws… such as the GDPR?
There's no "selling" of data. These are just connection logs kept as part of routine auditing/anti-spam/anti-abuse practice by the ISP (something we all agree here is a good thing). And ICE appears to have gotten a warrant for them, which showed them the personal IPs of their targets.

You can argue the warrant was poorly justified (and I'd agree!), but I don't see a plausible world where "ISPs aren't allowed to do connection analysis on their own networks" is going to help anyone. Well, anyone except spammers. They'd love that.

America is a backwards country where unless something is explicitly illegal, apparently it's totally okay to engage in said thing.
In 2026 illegal just means it’s negotiable if you have access to the trump admin
Don't you get it?! What if a restaurant had a QR code and I had to ask the waiter what to eat? Or what if I had to pay more for a TV? Or WORSE -- not watch TV? I have to be comfortable and and everything must be convenient ALL THE TIME. I love the 4th amendment, but the MOMENT I suffer even the most minor inconvenience I MUST throw the 4th amendment out the window. Don't you see I have no choice?
This is maybe half correct (or fully correct for some people). It's not that simple though. We're talking about a web service the fascists didn't like. How do you host that anonymously other than Tor (which no one will use)? As someone who doesn't partake in any sort of MSM in the US and actively tries to avoid fascism, I would genuinely like to know what the solution is here.

Also re: AI, how do we not fall behind those who are willing/on the same team as Anthropic, OpenAI, X... SOTA models are currently fully captured by ideologies I would consider to be willfully and gleefully violating nearly all human rights.

At some point, foregoing everything that is similar to what you just mentioned moves out of inconvenience territory and into social self-exclusion territory. To remain ideologically consistent with your argument, one must fully self-exclude.

Consider all of the sources of the available tracking data on a person in the United States. If you don't have a cell phone, don't drive a car, don't walk around outdoor networked cameras, don't patronize businesses that have networked cameras, don't use a credit card, how exactly are you interacting with this society?

Except for the flock cameras, we opted into this system with open arms. If you're coming of age right now it must suck, but there has been a steady march towards a demolition of privacy for more than 20 years.
We keep voting for people promising they won’t do things like this, who then proceed to do things like this.
The court rulings are based on telephone directories and the conflicts between their disparate companies (including Ma Bell). The phone company tried to claim that they owned the phone numbers (and any derivative intellectual property rights). The companies that published competing phone books successfully argued that the only property rights exist in the compilation of data - not in the data itself. The result of this pile of history is that whosoever owns the computer owns the data on that computer.

The GDPR comes from the opposite direction - you own the data about yourself.

(comment deleted)
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but wasn’t this in response to a massive organized anti-ICE operation?

Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.

Yes - the question has always been whether that is a good reason for a new, big federal organization to expand its surveillance capabilities, budget, and prosecution powers.

As a MN'n, I have my own opinions about the escalatory tactics of protestors (the marches were awesome, but many of the follow/callout patrols seemed designed to get people killed), and the predictable response of ICE. All while I strongly oppose gov surveillance and tracking like this.

I have no idea, but why would that change anything?
The framing applied here in this comment is very odd. People are allowed to organize and assemble.

One might even go a step further and say people are obligated to do so when the government repeatedly abuses its power to intimidate and violently affect the lives of people without due process or cause.

> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.

The headline makes it look like they run "One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Ops in US History". The only way the trigger matters is if the response to that trigger is justified. These justifications, once you consider them valid, just trigger a vicious cycle. Most of the people are being put under surveillance by this "massive anti US citizen campaign" with no reasonable suspicion, no judicial supervision, by an agency which should have no business doing any of this. Just another flavor of authoritarianism. Is it justified for them to escalate? If not then your argument is bunk. The title says what it really is and justifying the extremist actions of one side only betrays a bias.

(1) protest is protected by the first amendment (2) American law enforcement isn't supposed to have access to this kind of information about citizens absent a warrant
They don’t, a private entity has it, and shared it with law enforcement.

We’re very grateful to these corporate servants of the community.

> a massive organized anti-ICE operation?

What operation? Did they go around hacking into servers and invade their privacy?

> Headline makes it seem like ICE just did this in a vacuum.

Would they not do it in a vacuum? There’s been a a vagrant disregard for laws on their side. Why are they getting the benefit of the doubt here? It’s very clear they have been targeting certain demographics and political leaning from its institution.

I’m really not liking this pro-ICE attitude by the commenter. Seems extremely myopic.

if fly.io has servers based in the U.S by all means the gvt has access to those logs legally and illegally.
Fly.io signup IP, huh ?

A proper warrant must be respected and adhered to …

… but was it a proper warrant or just a bluff and, further, was the customer notified?

I insist on knowing the answer to this question and if you are a customer of fly.io (I am not) you should too.

(comment deleted)
Adding `fly.io` to my permanent "never use" list. If they're not going to lawyer up when it comes to the 4th amendment, I will never use this service.

It's so reassuring to know that all a cloud provider needs to compromise its users trust is an official looking letterhead.

Definitely 0% chance they could ever be phished by a foreign (or domestic) power with enough email (or letter) know-how.

At least other big tech companies were forced to kneel with secret (unconstitutional) FISA orders. Both Apple and Google at least try to show that they're pushing back.

EG: google shifted location data to local device only to combat Geo fencing warrants

EG: Apple [requiring warrants](https://apnews.com/article/apple-push-notification-data-cour...) to read push notifications

(why aren't push notifications E2E encrypted in the year-of-our-lord 202X?)

This is going to be moderated off the front page.
I remember the early days of the internet when hating surveillance was non-political.

Back when it was just nerds on the internet, and powerfull people with agenda's had not infiltrated everything

The evidence will remain in ssh logs and such. That is part of why it got posted here. This political struggle has gone technical and we're all involved.
(comment deleted)
I think the history of the FBI suggests this will continue long after Trump himself leaves office, effectively becoming a state run gang.
don't worry. Global warming will kill us all within the next 100 years anyways.
seems like they're trying to make it come faster with fossil fuels.
Alas, it will not. It will instead dramatically increase suffering in the world while leaving most humans alive.
Stop voting for these assholes.
>Group organizes massive anti law enforcement operation, including violent rhetoric and threats

>Law enforcement starts monitoring Group

>shockedpikachuface.gif

> Court records show the feds used an administrative summons request reserved for violations of customs and taxation requirements, which does not fit the activity that made up the criminal charges filed by the Minnesota US attorney against former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others.

When they are arresting news anchors for reporting on ICE's activities, it should be obvious that Trump and his administration is fascist-curious.

It has always been obvious since ICE’s budget was raised over 10x what it used to be, even though ICE was already struggling to find enough people with criminal records to deport, that ICE was intended to be far more than an immigration enforcement agency.
To be fair, this was obvious to many people who study domestic civil rights as early as the bill that originally created the DHS and ICE. For eg, this review from 2002:

https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...

>Americans’ liberties have been trammeled in a variety of different ways. Under the guise of stopping terrorism, law enforcement officials and government leaders have now been given the right to conduct searches of homes and offices without prior notice, use roving wiretaps to listen in on telephone conversations, and monitor computers and e-mail messages, even to the degree of eavesdropping on attorney/client conversations.

>Conceivably, these extensions of the definition of “terrorist” could bring within their sweep diverse domestic political groups, which have been accused of acts of intimidation or property damage such as Act Up, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Operation Rescue, and the Vieques demonstrators.

Ice is a part of a parallel state, a strategy to facilitate a smooth transition of power when replacing the existing state infrastructure
You do understand that ICE also does customs enforcement like stopping drugs and trafficking as well, right? Not everything in ICE is immigration.
While they both fall under DHS, you're confusing CBP with ICE.

CBP's job is to protect the border and stop drug and people trafficking entering, whereas ICE's original purpose was to enforce immigration law within the US.

While not "everything" ICE was tasked with was immigration, that was their bread and butter. Where the vast majority of their workforce and spend went.

They were doing that before the 10x budget, yeah?
Even if that were true, so what? ICE's violence and overreach are unacceptable and its culture is rotten to the core. The agency needs to be abolished. If there are functions they're performing that we actually need, move those functions elsewhere, but as an agency ICE is irredeemable.
How is America any different from Russia or China?
not a us citizen but this seems reasonable from historical US perspective
I am from the US and the headline is accurate. Not “the largest,” but “one of the largest.” We’ve been here before. The question is does it get kneecapped or does it spin out of control?
Not clear how central the patriot act was to this operation, but it does pop up here.

Russ Feingold was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot act. I really do think about that a lot.

For me it wasn't so much that he was the only one to vote against it, as it was that when he did vote against it the people of his state promptly replaced him with a more Law and Order senator.

In the US we claim we want freedom, privacy, and all that good stuff. But where the rubber meets the road, it becomes pretty clear that we don't.

Votes that lose by a large margin have no information. They’re commitment free actions taken purely for political gain. Narrow wins are the only ones where you can really learn something.

If everyone else is voting for some necessary evil, it frees me up to vote against it while still wanting it.

I think that effect still exists on small margin votes too. You know pretty much how it’s goona go down on every vote. 99-1 feels a little different to me. That no one else even wanted to claim that lane.
Yeah, I think narrow wins are the only ones you can count on. Those require participation. Otherwise it’s all local constituency branding.
You have the power to stop them. There are plenty of technical opportunities out there and every internal security memo with your hn handle on it is another piece of grear they can't use and time they've wasted ratcheting their own paranoia.
It is eerily similar to the 1930s era in central Europe.

I would not call it "Anti-Left" though. Fascism should never be confused with having an agenda other than fascism itself, be it Trump's corporate fascism or Putin's neo-Stalinism. All pocket away wealth and power to their cronies.

I change countries a lot and my default assumption for any new country is that overstaying your visa will be treated seriously, resulting in something like immediate detention (in a very lousy environment), probably a fine, and near-immediate deportation (at your expense), and probably some sort of quite serious ban (probably greater than merely months). And that's if the individual has a clean record; I'd expect it to significantly less benign otherwise.

Although this default expectation is pessimistic (and some countries might not be nearly that harsh), I don't think it's wildly inaccurate. What I don't understand is why it's common for intelligent people (seemingly only in the US) to think violations of visa/immigration conditions is acceptable and ICE are bad guys for enforcing the 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?
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.

Helping refugees makes sense, but should existing laws be changed or broken? (there's a big difference). It feels like many smart people are advocating the latter, which appears at odds with their behaviour and attitudes in most other domains (i.e. law abiding). Also, what makes refugees specifically the US's responsibility? E.g. verifying, processing and integrating refugees puts strain on domestic systems, and strain scales with volume.
Some people DO advocate for better laws. It doesn't mean that it will pass. At then end of the day, you have to convince enough people to vote for people who want to make it a law, or make enough noise and be an enough electoral power that politician wants to do it. But, while a lot of people care about immigration and such, at the end of the day, some other issues (the typical example is the cost of living), might take precedences.

> Also, what makes refugees specifically the US's responsibility? E.g. verifying, processing and integrating refugees puts strain on domestic systems, and strain scales with volume.

I think nobody said it's the U.S responsibility, in spirit. Factually it is by the fact that they have to handle it and international laws. But that is why country sometimes collaborate on those issues. The U.S and Mexico do collaborate on immigration issue. Mexico do stop a lot of south american immigrant from reaching the U.S border. But the border is huge. There is also other ways to get in, legally or illegally. You can't possibly stop everything. And it is the burden you get when you are a rich country. The U.S is not the only one. And mind you, the U.S and Western European country have benefitted a lot from exploiting the people and resources in poor country and pushing allied authoritarian regime there. Immigration is but a small cost they pay for what they did, and got.

Economic migrants are by far the majority in the US. In fact, economic migrants abusing “asylum” have basically made it impossible for the immigration authorities to have a sane asylum policy.
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.

Got it. So distain is more for ICE's thuggish approach than the laws/consequences themselves.

To play devil's advocate for the heavy handedness and harsh detentions, Australia had a problem with 'boat people' in the 2000's, and subsequently built a massive detention centre on a island, meaning those intercepted never made mainland. The heat was oppressive, processing times were usually measured in years, and illegal arrivals were mostly sent back to where they came from.

But.. the illegal arrivals basically entirely stopped. So although it was harsh (including on a lot of legitimate refugees), it did force entry via legal channels (of which Australia has historically had a lot of).

I mean, it's also a bit of disdain for the law, because in the US we've somehow made laws whose actual enforcement is economically untenable. Large chunks of our economy depend on illegal labor. But yes, it's mostly the nakedly evil "enforcement" methods under Trump.
I lived in Australia for a year during COVID. It's surrounded by water and doesn't have thousand-mile long borders to any country. Controlling entry is not the same logistical problem as controlling entry to the US.

That said, a lot of US's immigration problems has been neglect to enforce immigration law, deliberate sabotaging of legislation throughout the years, and multiple broad amnesty decrees that basically broke the system. The system is broken by design and almost tailor-made to foment anti-immigrant sentiment that has sparked this new, ugly phase driven by unaccountable maniacs.

The majority of my concern has to do with tactics, yes.

The other issue is intent.

I support reasonable immigration enforcement for practical reasons like added strain on public facilities like social programs. That’s rational.

Our 2024 Trump-aligned candidates ran on more of a xenophobia-centric platform. Xenophobia is irrational and unpredictable reasoning for immigration enforcement.

Depends on the political framework of the person you are speaking to. I think the laws are thuggish, as are the goons executing them.

Something, something, Borders do not exist as anything other than an abstract concept.

> They’ve murdered multiple peaceful protestors in the street.

Unapologetically, then tried to frame each of these people as radicals who deserved it. And there is no investigation, no punishment, no accountability.

It is the utter shamelessness and craven dodging of responsibility that is criminal.

And the American media and American populace do not hold their feet to the fire.

There is no line they won't eventually cross, and the slide into the abyss is accelerating.

American media, such as CBS has been purchased by Larry Ellison and directed not to.

Read the exit comments of journalists who worked there.

> “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me,” Pelley said. “And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/scott-pelley-cbs-new-yo...

This is the state of media, and it's looking like the media of certain other countries.

It's also known that ICE on the street right now differs from ICE in 2024.

To meet the unrealistic (practically, per resources) targets for arrest and deportation that the administration set for itself, they greatly loosened the training constraints and qualifications for new ICE agents.

Analogies to the German Sturmabteilung of the '20s and '30s are not entirely inaccurate.

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.

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

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.

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.
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.

> the United States has spent a long time having a tacit policy of only partially enforcing its immigration laws

This seems relevant. In other policy areas (unrelated to immigration), there's the concept of gradual change, or a 'glide path'. For example, when raising prices on things like licences or levies, sometimes governments do it gradually over a number of years. Another example: when something is banned, the ban is not enforced immediately but intermediate steps are taken to ensure the public can adjust. By contrast, the transition from immigration rules being unenforced to enforced seems to have been sudden.

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.
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.
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?"

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.
the pendulum will eventually swing back and most of these fucks will be thrown in prison.
Yeah, just like the J6 rioters. Oh wait. Shit.
Where are all the Don't Tread on Me people who prepped for decades for precisely such cases?
Ya this is the big lie 2Aers are bought into, turns out being able to organize is as important or more than just having a bunch of guns and a ooh-rah attitude. And as you can see from article the government will be there if you start acting in a way the admin disapprove of
Apparently the full expression is "Don't Tread On Me, But Feel Free To Tread On Those With Whom I Disagree"
They're too busy re-enacting the "Clown Applying Makeup" meme, to achieve a proper mar-a-lago face.
They don't want to be trod upon, they want to tread on everyone else.
They aren't going to support Leftists. There might be a temporary alliance at best but they know leftist aren't actually interested in smaller government, freedom of speech, and private property rights. They know Leftists are equally as authoritarian because of the social control policies implemented during COVID. For example The political hunts connected to the SPLC and FBI/DOJ burned those bridges. They remember how Leftists treat them when they work against them. Therefore your attempt to use their principles against them aren't going to work very well.
> They know Leftists are equally as authoritarian because of the social control policies implemented during COVID.

The actual restrictions were quite reasonable in the vast majority of cases, weren't in place very long, and were only spottily enforced.

Sorry you missed a couple nights at Applebees.

> Leftists are equally as authoritarian because of the social control policies implemented during COVID

In the western world how many of these COVID controls remain in place as of today?

Yes! I lost my entire career because I wouldn't participate in the Covid production. Dems will cheer on surveillance tech embedded with law enforcement when they view the target as their political opponents.
Give me a break. Dems weren't throwing people in foreign torture prisons for not wearing a mask at the grocery store. Or throwing them in internment camps and stripping them of their citizenship for simply expressing an opinion.
They watch the TV network that tells them every single day that huge numbers of illegal immigrants (or other scary brown-skinned people) are the reason for all their troubles & fears. They always hype the false story that there is a huge caravan of migrants approaching US borders but only during lead-up to elections.

Trump is persecuting the same "others" that the "don't tread on me" group also hate. They only wave their weapons when Democrats are sitting in the White House.

Why do they call it 'Anti-Left'?
Because the justification for running these operations is NSPM-7, which explicitly designates leftist groups and beliefs as terrorism.
Their status in society should be comparable to former Stasi. You probably haven't heard much about how former Stasi were treated, and how they still are perceived.
You mean being voted into regional parliaments in the former GDR states?

Sorry, but the German far right party that just won their first state governmental majority vote has the highest share of former Stasi officials in their ranks.

So basically - being ex-stasi is nothing to be ashamed of anymore in some parts of Germany.

They're talking about the period of time that followed reunification. Going from there to where Germany is today isn't inevitable.
anti-left sure, but more like "anti everyone who isn't part of a small set of VERY far right movements by general western standards, many affected people just don't know about it yet or are willful ignorant about it"

you are centrist and have a good point to complain about not liked by them, sorry you are now left

you are conservative right, but have very different views about separation of religion and state, sorry that is woke you are now left, too

you care bout civil right of all US citizens and especially want to better protect workers against abuse, oh dang I fear that is "left extremist" maybe even "domestic terrorist"

/s

I'm having flashbacks to when I was in high school in the 1970's while Nixon was at the height of his powers.

The difference is Nixon had real domestic enemies to worry about: The Weather Underground were bombing buildings, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the "Symbionese Liberation Army", the Black Panthers were making demands which conservative America found frightening, mass protests were going on about the war in Vietnam on college campuses which resulted in the deaths at Kent State. Nixon believed these protests were driven by Chinese and Soviet influence to support North Vietnam in the war. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS spent years looking for foreign control of the antiwar movement and reported back that there wasn’t any.

What domestic enemies does Trump have? Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. Black Lives Matter protests were his last administration. There have been a few lone wolf attacks like the Dallas ICE sniper, but the domestic threat is no here near what Nixon faced.

Under the Trump's White House directive NSPM-7, which defines a potential domestic terrorist as anyone expressing “anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, or anti-American” views, DHS launched an operation to find a “network of conspirators” against ICE.

The surveillance op in the Wired article targeted labor unions, a climate change group and socialist collectives — the SEIU had three years of wire transfers investigated, and the AFL-CIO, DSA and Showing Up for Racial Justice were also investigated. That’s the mismatch: a 1970s-scale dragnet for a threat that isn’t 1970s-scale.

Trump appears to be grabbing power for the sake of grabbing power.

According to my MAGA friends/family, Antifa is the biggest threat to the US.
he's a wannabe dictator.

yeah - he's shaken u.s institutional protections to their core. but lucky they keep standing. maybe he or someone else will finally make a break through - but most likely it won't be trump due to his incompetency and him surrounding himself with 'yes' incompetent people.