I don't see what's so bad about wanting to avoid an area where there's police activity going on. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're doing anything wrong, it's as simple as not wanting to get hassled at a DUI checkpoint or get stuck in traffic because they need 8 squad cars taking up a lane to k-9 search someone. As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
There's barely any point examining the app on its merits.
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state. They are against the app for that reason. They don't really care about what it does or does not do. It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE" and they'd still happily claim it endangers officers lives.
(the fact that they're also able to attack independent media at the same time just makes it all the more alluring target)
This is a perfect example of the problem with media reporting bullshit and then later correcting it. Everyone hears the bullshit, very few people hear the actual reason.
Sadly, if that were actually true that would be even f*** worse.
Oh we're not going to let tourists into our country because we asked them whether or not they'd ever smoked pot and they said yes.
We have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but if it is, that's the dumbest thing I've ever f*** heard, especially given the marijuana's legal in most states in the United States that anyone outside the US would actually want to visit
Genuine question: is sharing the location or distribution of information about police presence illegal? I assume this would be treated differently if it involved military positions, but I'm curious about how the law applies in this case.
Waze is another example of an app where users can share information about police presence or roadblocks, while useful to some, could also be seen as having negative implications depending on the context.
While your question is meaningful and well intentioned, let me point out that it may be inconsequential. The legality of an action is moot when the regime ignores and defies the entire basis of those laws - the constitution. It's like trying to evaluate yourself against a standard that is no longer followed.
Instead, evaluate yourself on the basis of your standing with the regime. If they dislike you for any reason including your skin color, they will find some sort of national security threat in your actions. Or they may punish you first and then claim the inability to correct it. On the other hand if they need you, they will completely ignore your actions, including even leaking of extremely sensitive information to unauthorized individuals.
yeah, it's more a question of "has america's justice system been reduced to arbitrary persecution of things the president or his executives deem a threat to America".
Because that's basically what's unfolding under fascism means.
Most countries don't give you a court hearing for being in the country without a visa or other authorization. Being shipped into a detention facility until you can be deported is the norm here.
Even this is stretching it. It's not as though the Andrew Jackson administration was doing deportations (besides the Trail of Tears, which was euphemistically referred to as a deportation campaign). The practice of criminalizing immigration enforcement didn't coincide with any amendment to the Constitution, which is itself only nominally even part of U.S. law anymore.
Genuinely curious for a good faith answer: one administration allows tens of millions of people into the country during its term. You are saying that every individual is owed multiple court hearings, the full gamut which is usually used for people overstaying a visa or something. A system equipped to handle a relatively small number of people.
The court system cannot possibly fulfill these tens of millions of cases in any reasonable time frame. These people will be in court for the rest of our lives and in the meantime they will have children and ultimately be allowed to stay forever by some future administration. Which is basically the same as just making them citizens.
Do you have a proposed solution other than decades worth of court dates? It doesn’t really seem like the other side has a good faith solution to the problem other than just letting them all stay here forever.
Or maybe I’m missing something and haven’t heard the other side’s arguments.
> Do you have a proposed solution other than decades worth of court dates? It doesn’t really seem like the other side has a good faith solution to the problem other than just letting them all stay here forever.
I think we are at a point where we should accept that there will be decades of court dates. The real alternative is that anyone can be taken away because there would be no process for even a multi-generation born citizen to challenge the arrest. The real deterrent for it happening to such a citizen is reporting and publicity, which is increasingly seeming like it can be thwarted by a population that is primed to strip the humanity of those they disagree with.
The way this is being handled, the timeline where we just let those 10 million stay in the country and avoid similar things in the future seems very appealing indeed. Two wrongs don’t make a right, as the saying goes.
>just let those 10 million stay in the country and avoid similar things in the future
But this is what I’m getting at, this is not the first time this has happened, it’s been happening with millions of people for generations now. Heck Reagan pardoned millions back in the 1980’s. So how long are we supposed to keep saying “okay you guys can stay but let’s do better in the future”? After so many decades it is obvious that nothing is going to change without some kind of drastic political change, which is basically why Trump was elected.
But just looking at the system from a Birds Eye view: it’s easy in, difficult out. All it takes is one president to not enforce the law and the law is basically moot. Just seems disingenuous the people saying deporting people is horrible yet offering no solutions other than to just let them all stay here forever. We are well past the point where saying we’ll do better in the future is an argument that anyone will accept.
Why is there nobody suggesting a law to expedite or fast track the “due process”? That at least seems like a moderate approach.
No, you are not hearing what I am saying. This particular implementation of deportations puts you and I and anyone else at long-term risk of being deported in a similar manner. It puts legal residents at a more immediate risk of being deported in a similar manner. You can’t fast-track due process; that is the point. If you are not afforded due process for allegations that you are an illegal immigrant before you are shipped away then the damage is done and it doesn’t matter that you can prove you were born here to parents who were born here.
I understand what you’re saying and I can agree with you that the rule of law is important. You are ignoring the fact that the previous admin ignored due process for letting them in in the first place, but that was not my original question. You still have not offered any kind of solution other than letting them all stay forever, and at this point the majority of the electorate is more interested in seeing them all go back than making sure that every single one gets their day in court.
> You can’t fast-track due process
We can make laws and change systems, a serious good faith solution would be to propose changes to the due process to account for this case we keep finding ourselves in where we have 20 million people who need to be processed and a system with no hope of handling them all.
>You are ignoring the fact that the previous admin ignored due process for letting them in in the first place
We thought you were kidding, this isn't a fact, it's the complete opposite of a fact, in otherwords, a lie. Very famously the number of arrests of people cross the border went up while biden was president.
Aside from that ludicrous lie, we have to evaluate the situation where we actually live. If there was a literal magic genie who could cause 10 million people to instantly teleport then maybe we could talk about it, but there isn't, so we don't.
In actual reality land, spending 100 billion dollars in order to arrest and deport millions of people who work and pay taxes and in general support the economy of this country is hilariously stupid. Also evil, lets not forget that.
Every axis you want to try to evaluate this on fails at the most cursory examination. Obviously it's a waste of money because you're spending money to remove tax payers and consumers, so that's a double negative. It's also immoral due to the sheer amount of crimes and human rights violations that have already taken place and will continue to take place.
It's not even particularly effective as some kind of macho statement, deporting your own citizens isn't going to impress anyone.
> We can make laws and change systems, a serious good faith solution would be to propose changes to the due process
No, a serious good faith solution would be to establish an actual working immigration/citizenship system with clear rules and then enforce them, because the current situation endangers everyone.
I'm from a different country. We have ID cards. You strictly need an ID card (or a different proof of citizenship or right to residence) from the age of 18 (or even sooner if you are attending schools, using the health system etc) to do basically anything. It's not possible to live here your whole life as a full member of the society without that. When I read how someone lives 60 years in the US without actual legal basis to do that I just shudder. People should be forced to resolve their legal situation one way or another much sooner. And I am pro-immigration, but also there should be order in that.
Once you have a clear, fast proof of right to reside in a country, you don't need to touch due process because it can go fast.
Some people start abducting anyone off the streets and it’s called a “solution” so other people who don’t like it need to shut up or offer a better one? Well, we are each entitled to our opinion and I don’t agree with that one.
Anyway, here’s a better solution: let them stay. I can’t see how that would be nearly as bad as this. For me personally, for my neighbors, for the rust belt, indeed for anybody except those wanting to abuse power.
Let's not continue using propaganda numbers around undocumented immigrants. There's not 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. There's roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in total, and that number has _decreased_ since the early 2000s (when it was closer to 12 million).
A decent percentage of these immigrants are seasonal. A very, very small percentage of the total of undocumented immigrants have criminal histories. Focusing efforts on violent criminals is reasonable, but that doesn't meet the propaganda numbers from the current administration. Deporting tens of thousands of people just doesn't rally hate the same way.
Rather than spending time and money building concentration camps, building out secret police (ICE), and deporting people without due process, we could be fixing our immigration system.
Let's make work visas that allow migrant workers to work seasonally. Let's add paths to citizenship to migrant workers. Let's prioritize fast paths to citizenship for students, especially those with masters and PHDs. Let's introduce a point system to encourage immigration of the best and brightest from high demand countries, allowing them prioritized visas, PRs and naturalization. Let's fix the DREAMER situation by providing those folks clear paths to citizenship.
The reason the immigration situation doesn't get better is because republicans need it to be broken. They use undocumented immigrants as a group to target hate against, which rallies their base.
Prosecutions would be much cheaper if defendants couldn't get court appointed lawyers. Or if we didn't have the exclusionary rule. Or if prosecutions didn't need to turn over Brady evidence.
Are you willing to pay for these things? It'd be much more efficient for a cop to simply murder anybody suspected of a crime. Efficiency should not be the goal when it comes to people's rights.
And a bullet is cheaper then incarceration. But we have a duty to human rights, which isn't always cost effective or expedient. But if those rights are lost for anyone they're lost for everyone. After all, how do you prove you're owed due process in the absence of said due process?
They had people being deported while they were on the queue to renew their documents. US American born citizens were deported just because they "looked latinos". Your legal status is pretty much just in the eyes of whoever ICE agent you're gonna meet today.
Much selective quoting on your part, here is the other half of the truth:
> Gavidia was released, but Javier Ramirez, another US citizen who is Gadivia’s friend and coworker, was detained by two agents, forced facedown on the ground and taken to federal detention, where he has remained in custody, the New York Times reported.
Arrested and eventually released is guilty until proven innocent.
Actually, that's NOT the deal in most Western democracies. In countries with free speech protections, writing an op-ed as a legal resident is following the rules, not breaking them.
Yes, even Western democracies sometimes fail at this - through mistakes, bad laws, or moments of fear. That's precisely why we need to call it out when it happens, not shrug and normalize it.
Rights are inherent to all people. When any government - Western or otherwise - punishes peaceful political expression, they're violating fundamental human rights.
'That's just how it is' is how rights erode. We should aspire to strengthen protections for everyone, not excuse their violation by pointing to other failures.
So.. America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country? If I went to Mexico and started protesting I would fully expect Mexico to send me home. And I'd support their right to do so.
This comparison actually undermines the argument. Mexico's constitution allows non-citizens to participate in peaceful protests generally - it only restricts participation in 'political affairs of the country' specifically (Article 9)[1]. So even Mexico, with significantly weaker democratic institutions, is more permissive than the scenario being described. Canada, meanwhile, guarantees peaceful assembly for everyone (Charter Section 2(c))[2]. The premise that other democracies would automatically deport protesters simply doesn't hold up.
ICE is already brutally arresting vacationers in the US on valid tourist visas, accusing them of being "illegals" simply for being brown. This is why no one from the rest of the world wants to vacation, work, or live in America anymore.
> ICE is already brutally arresting vacationers in the US on valid tourist visas, accusing them of being "illegals" simply for being brown.
Can you back that up with evidence? Just because someone claims that they were denied entry / detained / deported due to skin color doesn't mean that was the case. Many such cases where media has jumped on to claims that turned out to be false.
> This is why no one from the rest of the world wants to vacation, work, or live in America anymore.
Absolutely false, only those who let them be manipulated by scare media think there is actually a measurable risk for coming to the US legally.
> So.. America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country?
Free speech is (was?) an American interest. Further, the country contains multitudes of different, opposing interests, not just those of the current regime.
For all its grandstanding over “cancel culture” this regime’s unusually thin skin when it comes to opposing views would be laughable, were it not so dangerous and abusive.
> America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country?
America shouldn’t be sending masked goons into courthouses to disappear people.
I was actually supportive of Trump’s illegal immigrant pitch at the get go. But then he totally ignored the gangs, going after tax-paying migrants because Miller found them easier to round up. And then he started deporting Americans.
This isn’t even a problem of evil. It’s one of incompetence. We have a bunch of nutwads in masks wearing camo doing whatever they can to hit numbers. This is bureaucratic failure on steroids.
> I'd support their right to do so
Honestly, I’m fine with this. I am also fine with someone publishing this app. (We frankly need a database of ICE agents who have broken the law so they can be dealt with down the road.)
> Deporting people who are in the country illegally is very much in line with the constitution
You’re correct. But in a somewhat irrelevant way. The problem for most Americans aren’t the deportations. It’s the lack of due process, extrajudicial torture, and expansion of these police privileges to now encompassing all naturalised Americans.
it's unlikely the original SS databased had any information about this.
The new one they're building is clearly going to have all this bullshit so they can cherry pick at lightning speed reasons to exile, rendition or punish people.
But just so we're clear, the SS doesn't really care if you're a citizen. All it's tracking is who pays into it and who receives the benefits from the payments.
Yeah, I don't think the US actually has a reliable nationality status database other than those it's issued passports to. This may make the situation worse rather than better for those affected.
>Deporting people who are in the country illegally
Oh? What about people who are permanent residents and are arbitrarily deemed "threat to national security" because of their opposition to Israel? What about the recent denaturalization DOJ unit that was just set up? Are those people "illegally" here too and that is constitutionally valid?
The tunnel vision here is astounding. Do you really not realize that this administration isn't stopping at "just the illegals?" They have deported US citizens, children at that.
The HN voting record shows that HN broadly agrees with GGP (your GP). It makes sense, since people here are big tech developers, who will never come into contact in police in this kind of way.
What about sending people who are here legally to a foreign torture camp (not "deporting", by the way) without due process? Is that in line with the Constitution?
What about ignoring due process while doing so? Is that, in your view, in line with the constitution? If it is, what recourse does a US citizen detained by ICE (either accidentally or not) have? Also, how do you view Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship via Executive Order? Birthright citizenship is in the 14th Amendment. If the president is allowed to arbitrarily redefine who is and is not a citizen, are constitutional protections anything more than ink on paper?
As if that's the extent of things. As if the worst abuses of the Trump administration are just deporting people who were here illegally.
Don't worry about the mass revocations of legal status of previously legal residents. The deprivation of due process. The sending of people to a foreign prison where they endure all kinds of human rights abuses based on flimsy evidence, no due proceas and no expectations of ever getting out alive.
Flashing your headlights to warn others of cops or anything else is generally considered free speech. IIRC, this has been ruled on several times in pretty high courts.
So double check with a lawyer, but I'm like 99% confident there's nothing illegal about these types of Apps. I mean Waze has been doing it for years and even Google maps notifies you about speed traps.
If some new ruling makes it not free speech, we're in danger
In the UK during the early era of cars, the Automobile Association used to send boys out with bicycles to warn drivers about speed traps. This was challenged in court, obstruction of justice or some such, so the AA simply inverted the scheme. The boys were now told to always salute cars to signal that everything was okay, but wouldn't salute if there was a speed trap ahead. It was reasoned that the law couldn't compel the boys to salute. Apparently they kept this up for a few decades, before eventually deciding that speed limits were generally reasonable.
If you drive around in EU then be aware that the law is different depending on the country. Schweiz for example do not allow to use or sell databases that has the location of speed cameras. In Germany you are not allowed to use apps that warn you of it. You are also not allowed to use your car lights to warn other drivers, but you can use hand signals. They are however allowed in other places like Belgium, Neitherlands and Spain.
As someone that lives and works on the DACH region, you just have to listen to German and Swiss radios, they do tend to point out radar spots, regardless of those laws, so dunno how they get their permissions to do so.
I use OsmAnd and it alerts me to pedestrian crosswalks. My wife uses google and it alerts her to speed enforcement. Interesting difference in priorities.
What are the benefits of crosswalks alerts? Usually, there are lots of signs leading to, and at the crosswalks. This is the opposite for fixed and mobile speed traps, they'd rather it be a surprise to drivers.
The benifit is adding another layer of safety to reduce risk. In the swiss cheese model of accidents, each safety measure is a layer of swiss cheese, which has holes through which accidents may go through. But if you stack up a lot of cheese, the accident has to thread a path through several different holes and that is less likely to happen.
In Pennsylvania the court ruled that flashing your lights to signal isn’t illegal but it is dangerous at night. So presumably it’s fine during the day, or perhaps one could signal by turning headlights off and on instead.
Flashing headlights gets people to drive more carefully and within the speed limit, thus you are not helping someone commit a crime. However if you help someone avoid being lawfully detained this might make you complicit in their actions and the courts could very well decide differently. Intent very much matters here.
Using this line of reasoning, let’s imagine for a moment that a car speeding 20mph over the limit sees someone on the other side of the road flashing their lights and slows down in time to avoid a ticket.
Hasn’t the light flasher helped someone who was breaking the law avoid detection?
And isn’t the intent of the flasher to ensure that people who were breaking the law have enough time to stop doing that long enough to avoid detection?
> However if you help someone avoid being lawfully detained
Obligatory “I am not a lawyer” disclaimer, but the people who make posts on this app have no contact with the people the app ostensibly benefits. If the app helped targets of ice find willing drivers in the area to help them escape to somewhere else, that’d be one thing since there is now a direct relationship with a person and the accused and direct action on the part of the app user. But I don’t see how this app is materially different from posting speed traps or DUI checkpoints on Waze, an action that has absolutely helped people avoid lawful intervention by police.
The light flasher has merely persuaded someone to stop breaking the law. Whether or not the lights flashed, the police would not have been able to detect prior speeding, but merely detected speeding near them.
An analogy might be to have a sign in a shop warning thieves of CCTV - the purpose is to prevent theft and is not considered to be helping someone avoid detection, although it does also do that.
Fondly remember 20 years ago when I was doing over 100 on a highway in northern Alaska and all the _cop_ did was flash his lights at me to tell me to slow down.
We’re saying that “intent very much matters here” but when we are talking about people flashing headlights to warn others of a police-manned speed trap, we focus on the effects of the action. Isn’t the intention of the person flashing their headlights (in many cases) to help people break the law? That is, people see the signal and slow down while passing the speed trap only to increase speed once past, evading detection.
This looks much the same to me as people warning those around them of ICE activity.
Nobody flashes their headlights with the intent that someone will speed up. Driving at night, you're not even able to determine whether oncoming traffic is speeding.
It is literally telling someone to obey the law, because the law is watching.
If you have the app, you likely don't need the reminder. You're either evading ICE or helping other people steer clear of ICE.
Police notifications on GPS don't really give you much notification to turn off onto a different road or to avoid them, at least on freeways, which is the only time I've seen them.
Only if you knew by virtue of something like access to secret information (the things you'd have a security clearance to access).
If you see the police are gathered around your local 7-Eleven, you're absolutely free to post it.
If you know in advance that the police are going to be performing a raid on a meth house and you got that information by virtue of a security clearance (I assume they do have something of this sort like federal employees have, though I'm not sure the precise mechanisms) then you'd be violating the policies around that access. This could be illegal (just like a fed leaking secret or top secret information).
If you know in advance because the police have loose lips, but you are not personally under any kind of confidentiality policy, you're free to post it. So the loose lipped cops at the bars I used to frequent could have caused real problems for themselves.
Worth pointing out that the question of legality is besides the point if you are purposefully antagonizing the police state.
It’s not about legality. It’s about compliance.
If you become a target, they will arrest you and drop charges later. They will make you miss work and lose your job. They will set up surveillance on you to catch you doing anything else they want to continue harassment.
You don’t have to look hard to see reporting of officers using official databases to settle personal scores. 404 media just did a big expose on ALPR Flock DB abuses
Honestly, they'll put you in an ICE detention facility indefinitely. They don't have to drop charges if they don't even have to charge you in the first place, and because they're all hiding behind masks there's no way for them to face any kind of repercussions.
Beyond that, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of sending "homegrowns" to overseas concentration camps, so it won't be long now before you don't have to do anything wrong to be targetted and you don't have any recourse regardless.
There is a risk to DUI checkpoints and speeding checkpoints even if you are doing neither. Innocent people die at the hands of the police fairly often, but many more are wrongfully imprisoned. Wanting to limit your interactions with the police is a valid safety and risk management proposal.
If safety was the real goal the police themselves would announce checkpoints and speed traps. This gives people a chance to not drink too much or speed in the first place. I've lived in places where DUI checkpoints were all announced ahead of time, and I think for many it was a serious reminder to not drink and drive.
But for many DUI checkpoints safety is not the goal. It's simply a pretext to check everyone's papers.
That only works if you actually have a DUI checkpoints all the time everywhere. It is a random check because then people need to be careful all the time. If there is a DUI checkpoint 2 times per year in your area you can just avoid driving drunk at those two days per year.
They do. DUI checkpoints are heavily advertised here in California for exactly that reason — to deter drunk drivers. The only thing they don't do is tell the exact intersection so drunks don't just drink and drive the other direction.
What about people that are on their way to work (or somewhere else time sensitive) who want to be aware of places with a slowdown because of checkpoints?
1. I didn't say people can't have another opinion. I didn't say that because I don't believe it and never implied otherwise.
2. Supposing I did believe it and did say it, I would be well within my rights to say it. The First Ammendment assures the right to say things like that, no matter how dumb and misguided those things are.
Doctors and teachers handle that, since they have regular contract with children. At least in my state they're required by law to report suspected child abuse.
As a side note, these laws are doing damage to organizations looking for volunteers that I don't think we have fully grasped yet.
People are willing to put a couple of weekends into making a middle school or high school competition happen. They're a lot less willing to do it if they have to go to an FBI station to get fingerprinted or produce a state and federal background check first. And I'm not talking about people with something to hide; I'm talking about people with a completely clean background who just don't want to be bothered.
NZ OP here. Few weeks ago there was a morning checkpoint to inspect everyone's child car seat installation.
Few years back got chased by a cop and ticketed (and scolded) for not restraining kiddo (small town and my clever 2yo somehow learned how to unbuckle themselves (even that houdini clip didn't help)). Warned I could get prosecuted for child neglect if I continue. I suspect the daycare has tipped him off.
Making slippery slope arguments like this is not discussing in good faith. I was providing the context of someone who lives in that geo-political area.
And check that every single one of your federal papers are present and punctual. We'd hate to have someone that's unbecoming to share a full disclosure of themselves to officers on the road.
I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs, but retaliatory violence is (1) still immoral and (2) self-defeating.
You aren’t realistically going to overpower them, so any violent resistance just helps them DARVO harder and excuse escalating their brutality. That’s why they’re always so eager to find or create violent one-offs within non-violent mass protests.
Deportation is a kind of draft, in that deportees are treated similarly to draft dodgers. ICE aren’t MPs, but in this analogy, they largely are folks who have already been drafted themselves, and who have reported for duty.
A bad day at work is just more contact with the “enemy” and is desired by some to separate the weekend warriors from the true believers. The fog of war is obscuring the reality of the outbreak of conflict which has been brewing under the surface for many years.
The revolution will not be televised because it won’t look like a revolution. It’ll look like C-SPAN. Whatever ICE is doing isn’t a revolution, it’s administrative. People voted for this, and they got it. If people want change, make it happen the way that other changes happen that stick. The lesson of Arab Spring is that even with the military on your side, revolution breaks the status quo, and once broken, norms change because the power structure has changed. Most folks don’t want revolution, they just want a vacation from reality. No one wants to put in the work to make revolutions happen because it’s a lot of paperwork, rehearsals, and standing around. It feels like work because it is. All that effort makes it look natural and inevitable, but that’s the magic of make believe.
A bad day at work as you suggest would be a magic act, but who’s gonna put in the work to pull that rabbit out of that hat? And who benefits from such an obvious misdirection?
I was at Occupy San Francisco, so I am not just asking questions, but asking you to re-examine what you believe is possible, and why you think a mock pitched battle with tin soldiers has tactical value, so I don’t know what your motive is, but I doubt you would be honest about your motives given the circumstances.
As the source article covers, the Trump regime believes that merely reporting the location of an ICE officer constitutes violence against them. I don't think it's a good idea to punch your local ICE officer, and if anyone's considering it I would definitely advise them not to, but issuing a blanket condemnation of hypothetical violence is just terribly naive at this point. I'm extremely confident that, at some point before 2028, someone is going to end up in federal custody for shooting masked home invaders they had no way to know were ICE.
> >I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs
> 50% of Border Patrol agents are Latino.
Even if that was true, and relevant to their capacity to be racist thugs, Border Patrol is a unit of Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—and CBP is a different entity from ICE, at the same organizational level within the Department of Homeland Security—so it would still be a non-sequitur.
Are you suggesting all racists are White rednecks? Racist systems are capable of absorbing contributions from all kinds of people. Whiteness has repeatedly expanded over time.
Please follow your convictions so you can be removed from the internet and placed in jail for a decade or two once you are processed through the legal system and found guilty of assaulting a police officer. The internet will be better off without your calls to violence.
Violence does solve things, but also can make for an immediate 'Very Bad Time'.
Police use violence. Military uses violence. Difference is state-monopoly or not. To say violence doesn't work would be to say the police and military don't work - and they do.
Anybody calling on violent means should absolutely call upon peaceful means first, secondly, and more. Violence should only be after all peaceful means have been tried.
Its better to win by peaceful means, than by exertion of violence. And, violence is no guarantee of winning. And even if you do win, can still be pyrric, in which everyone loses.
Tl; dr. Be wary of people casually calling for violence. They're either a state actor, dumb, or both.
They are officers and they are racist mercenaries.
This is not a new force, they have no new powers. They didn't need to hire new people willing to perform these actions nor train them how to do so.
If you haven't considered this before it should hit you like a hammer to the forehead: where are the resignations? Where are the "good cops" we keep hearing about, what are they doing?
The other federal, state, and local law enforcement officers that are assisting in these actions, where is their principled refusal to violate their oath to uphold the constitution? What statements are their powerful and normally very vocal unions making about all this?
Their "powerful and normally very vocal unions" are saying /nothing/, because the union's overall goal (by their messaging and their members messaging) is to increase and sustain additional hourly pay and increase the wages for said pay.
There is no effective system of checks and balances, or this entire discussion would be moot. Civilian solutions(like ICEBlock and friends) are a whimper of a response compared to the lethal and aggressive actions of these LEOs. Typically entrenched groups(like LEOs) can not be talked or reasoned with into changing their position. Those changes in position come from leverage (ie, your supervisor is replaced or leveraged with the threat of replacement), or direct aggression.
As an example, certain villains took issue with these systems and mounted their own lethal response. We are /still/ talking about these individuals because of how riotously effective their actions were at illuminating and mitigating the perceived problems. Whether your talking about Ted K, or Timmy M....they are examples of people who took action to correct a perceived problem. Right or wrong, every reader of this post knows who they are, what they did, and why they did it. Until something of equal magnitude opposes the authoritarian problem of the day(ie ICE), the status quo will continue.
There are no resignations because they signed up to enforce the law and that's what they are doing now. That you have slurped up propaganda painting that as racists doesn't make it so.
Inciting violence can be protected by the First Ammendment if it isn't inciting imminent illegal action. His post is probably protected. If he were pointing at a guy and saying "We should lynch that ICE agent right now!", that wouldn't be protected speech.
FWIW, I don't even remotely agree with what he's saying.
This is true but HN does not claim to be a free speech site and instead is focused on interesting discussion. There are many things that are legally protected speech that will get you reprimanded or outright banned here.
So you're saying 2 previous presidents were more successful without using a campaign of threats and violence? And they didn't have to ignore court orders either? Makes you wonder...
Yea, that is worth looking in to. It could be that individual ICE agents are just not doing their job in order to sandbag the president. Or it could be that far, far fewer illegal immigrants crossed the border <https://x.com/RealTomHoman/status/1940156659084796257> during Trump’s terms than Biden’s or Obama’s; it’s currently about 60× lower than the average during Biden’s term. There’s also the million people who signed up to self–deport in order to avoid being arrested by ICE. Perhaps the removal numbers will rise as they actually leave.
But have any of Trump’s executive orders told ICE to be more violent? I haven’t noticed any that said that, but maybe you could link to it.
"But it could be this, or it could be that." Just look at the facts without trying to reframe everything. Your comments come across as deceitful.
Listen to the words of this President, and the people in his administration compared to previous Presidents. Not to mention deploying the national guard and USMC against civilians to assist ICE, because ICE's methods have changed.
Then ask yourself why does ICE need a budget of $75 billion in the bill Trump is pushing, when ICE was apparently more successful with magnitudes less in previous administrations?
You might want to link to a specific bill, because I don’t know for sure what you’re referring to otherwise. Do you mean the recent budget bill? There's no way I’m reading that for an internet comment, but if that’s the one you mean then I’ll quote a news article about it:
> The GOP bill allocates $46.5 billion toward completing Trump's border wall. It also puts $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities and $10 billion to be used for border security more broadly. The bill sets aside $4.1 billion to hire and retain more agents and officers, and invests in upgraded technology for screenings and surveillance of U.S. borders.
It doesn’t say anything about ICE specifically, so it’s not very helpful. ICE wouldn't be doing construction, and they wouldn’t be running CBP facilities, but maybe they’ll be getting more agents or officers or both. They also don’t screen travelers or surveil the border. Overall it doesn’t sound like ICE is getting $75 billion.
Anyway, the budget is not very relevant to my question. If removals are down to a third (well, two fifths I guess) of what they were during Biden’s term, how is it that we are suddenly in a police state? If ICE makes us a police state, then weren’t we in a police state then?
No, these are very clearly confounding factors. When there are fewer people walking across the deserts, for example, then there are both fewer deaths from exposure and fewer people to put on a bus and immediately return to Mexico. That makes ICE’s numbers go down. Pointing out confounding factors is not an attempt to reframe the issue; deliberately ignoring confounding factors is actually one of the easiest ways to lie with statistics.
Do you honestly think (being mean to perps at their place of work, church, or while voluntarily attending a court case) needs to be written down? %waving hands at everything% This is the hill you want to (literally or figuratively) die on?
The comment you responded to with this asked a completely legitimate question and even looked up the hard numbers to back up their doubts, only to be flagged. The bratty man-children on this site who flag such comments because "me no like" truly should learn a thing or two about reasoning like a thinking adult.
Nope, it was a legitimate question that does touch upon a number of debatable subjects about narrative, media focus, definitions of deportations and so forth. Either way, flagging comments into literal non-existence just so you can completely shut down whatever opinion you don't want to read is simply childish, and fundamentally moronic.
Because border security is extremely expensive. The point isn't just removals, it's also deterrence & denial of entry (of people and contraband) in the first place.
The security worry isn't extra laborers driving down wages, it's terrorists coming across the border and blowing up Mardi Gras (secondarily, serial rapists or murderers or what have you coming here to ply their trade). Prevention of entry is the only defense there, because presumably those bad actors aren't here for the long haul, economic gain, etc.
I haven't seen a budget breakdown so I can't speak to how defensible the budget is, just that it seems clear that removal metrics don't tell a useful story on their own.
You're essentially peddling the poisoned M&M fallacy. Do we need capable, rational border security? Yes. Do we need unaccountable masked men armed in our city streets, forcefully detaining anyone who looks like they might be [insert bogeyman caricature]? Absolutely fucking not.
When did I defend authoritarian masked men? Perimeter defense is an expensive endeavor, and if you read the words I wrote that's clearly what I was talking about. At first glance, the new budget includes over 50 billion (!) dollars for increasing our perimeter defense. That sounds like capable, rational border security to me.
Please stop accusing people of peddling the straw man you want to tear down. It's Reddit-tier, not worthy of HN.
Then why are they spending so much effort deporting everyday people? This talking point is tired, it's the equivalent of "for the children!". Something that everyone can get behind but isn't anywhere near the level of problem it's made out to be.
Parent is clearly not interested in that kind of statistic. Instead their framing implies that even 1 terrorist/rapist/murderer/etc that makes it across the border is a problem worth solving via authoritarianism. The only successful response is to draw this out and make it clearer for everyone else.
It's right there in your framing. The most charitable take available is that you're approaching the problem like a software engineer, and accepting that framing as defensible. It is not. One of the most important facts to remember at the level of government is that while we must abstract human problems in order to solve for them, humans themselves are not abstractions. When perfect becomes the enemy of the good (enough), human suffering increases.
All that aside, feel free to walk your framing back and I'll change mine accordingly.
No, that’s simply incorrect. ICE is following exactly the same process that has been in place since 1996. It can’t be due process under Biden but then suddenly unconstitutional under Trump.
ICE is not “kidnapping” anybody, and is not “trafficking” them. They are federal police officers who arrest criminals and deport them according the legal process defined by Congress in 1996.
I didn't realize Biden was instructing ICE to grab people off the street and deport them to a gulag in a country they aren't from before they can have a hearing or make any appeals. Would you please provide references for this?
I think the key difference is the usage of face masks and plainclothes - as far as I can tell, from various different news articles - ICE agents weren't concealing their identities en masse using face masks under Biden and Obama.
Based on historical examples of secret police, plainclothes and face masks on Federal Agents by default could definitely make people think that we are "approaching a police state".
I’m not sure exactly what you mean. It’s an objective fact that ICE was removing almost 3× as many people per month this time last year, but that nobody cared at the time. If it’s all about perceptions rather than the objective reality then that makes some sense.
All the president has to do is to make a few speeches about how tough on illegal immigration his administration is going to be and people’s perceptions will shift enough that they suddenly care. Now that someone cares enough to start making threats against federal officers, the officers start wearing masks and bullet–proof vests. This apparently causes perceptions to shift even more and people start thinking we live in a police state.
But the reality is that they’re doing ⅓rd of the work. They’re literally arresting fewer people. If anything, that makes it _less_ of a police state than before. And the law that ICE is upholding was passed last amended in by Congress in 1996, so it’s not like Trump has suddenly given them a new job to do.
So yea, I would say that it’s a misperception. The perception doesn't appear to agree with the objective facts.
I should probably have said “removed” rather than “arrested”, since not every person removed gets arrested. I am using the DHS’s own statistics <https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2022/table3...> which cover every year from 1892 to 2022. For Biden’s term and Trump’s current term I used estimates found in news reports though I don’t have the links in front of me. The estimate for Trump’s current term was just for the first four months of the year.
I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?
But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people? I also remember when that psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem tweeted "suck it" when a group of people who were trying to use legal means to not get deported got deported. Fuck her.
You say it's a misperception, but I think we are all perceiving it exactly as they want us to. They are going to do whatever they can get away with by any means necessary and fuck you if you try to get in the way. Some people just think that's bad.
You might have confused two different things. There's been a bit of a fight over whether the President can intervene in Iran and Yemen recently, since Congress hasn’t declared a war. But that has nothing to do with immigration.
> psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem
If you want anyone to take you seriously then don’t call people names. State your claim without ad hominem attacks or other obvious fallacies.
> I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?
Because the Obama and Biden administrations were not going out of their way (which the Trump administration both is and is publicly flaunting that it is) to avoid providing due process under the terms of existing case law, defying "you must not deport person A to country X" orders of courts.
> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them.
"Alien Enemies Act", the War Powers Act is much newer and unrelated, but not all of the controversial deportations are attached to that.
> Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?
The Alien Enemies Act provides a pretext for deportations with less process than traditional deportation process under regular immigration law (in fact, until the courts ruled otherwise, the Trump Administration was claiming, and treating it as if, it allowed no process at all once the act was invoked and the executive branch designated the target as an alien enemy.)
Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang, not every single illegal alien from every country. So a few dozen or a hundred people, not 35k people per month. If people conflate the two and think that every single illegal alien has been declared an “Enemy Alien” according to that act then that could explain why nobody cared last year. But if that’s true then it is also another case of a gross misperception of reality on the part of the people who suddenly care enough to protest and/or send death threats to federal officers.
> Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang
There is virtually no evidence for many of the people targeted that they were members of that or any other gang, and the standarss used for that designation were laughable.
Had the courts not quickly shut down the Administration contention that expulsions under the act were not subject to challenge, it obviously would have been used much more extensively as a way to sweep up anyone the Administration wishes to deport.
While that is a valid complaint, don’t move the goalposts. The original comment was:
> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?
In other words, this guy thinks that Trump is using this act to boost the number of deportations. But the gang doesn’t have enough members to make a dent in the statistics. 35k illegals are being removed from the country every month and no gang has 35k members, or even 3k. They might have three dozen.
And I’ll reiterate that if lots of people are angry at Trump because they think that he’s using some ancient obscure law against _every_ illegal immigrant then they are suffering a misperception of what has actually been going on. If this is the reason for the sudden protests against ICE then it is a very bad reason indeed.
Do you even know what the process is? Or even have a clue how many people deported had a process but it resulted in an outcome they and maybe you did not like?
I don’t have time to investigate everybody, but of the sampling I did all had orders active to be deported.
The part most of you are missing is there was a process. And failure to comply is what results in people showing up at your house and putting you on a plane.
This is no different than if I murder somebody and and escape after the trail before going to jail. 10 years later I am at a coffee shop. Maybe I have a good job a wife a new born and I have been a functional member of society. You better bet that I’ll be arrested and the Jane to go to jail once somebody finds out.
We would need to 100x the amount of lawyers to deal with the huge pulse that was always going to occur when this aspect of law was going to be enforced.
Cool, so no more due process because it's inconvenient.
Hey, you look kinda brown...I think you're an illegal. Or, you posted a funny picture of a political figure on Facebook. Off to El Salvador with you! No, you don't get a day in court, I don't care if you and your parents and your grandparents were all born in the US, you are being sent to a torture camp in a country you've never been to because I THINK you are illegal.
See how that works? Due process is a RIGHT FOR EVERY FUCKING PERSON BECAUSE THAT IS HOW YOU PROVE YOU ARE INNOCENT, YOU FUCKING FASCIST. You CANNOT bypass THE fundamental part of the justice process because you're making shit up and want to deploy tan people with autism awareness tattoos, or people who think maybe shooting hungry kids in Gaza is bad.
In for example Germany they have raids on workspaces to check for illegal workers as well. But the "police" (customs officer?) are not masked and also check the employer. They can punish them for too long work hours or hiring "illegals".
What I have seen of ICE in the media it feels a bit one sided.
Employers who knowingly employ illegal workers in the US also get in trouble. However, we also have a system called e-verify which handles checking the employability of people for them. It's relatively easily gamed via identity fraud.
> Employers who knowingly employ illegal workers in the US also get in trouble
They might get a slap on the wrist fine that probably doesn't even negate the profits off the illegal labor.
> However, we also have a system called e-verify
The majority of states do not require e-verify for most jobs. Many states don't have any requirements for e-verify and a few only have limited requirements.
Authoritarian states often function via selective enforcement of laws. We see that here. They will use any angle, any technicality to remove someone. Lived here for almost 50 years and are a productive member of your community but you're on a stayed order of release pending you check in regularly and you do so? Sorry, we changed our minds and are deporting you because legally we can. Please come with us in the unmarked car. [0]
Tried to kill police officers while trying to overturn an election on behalf of the dear leader? We'll pardon you and give you a job on a task force about weaponization of government. [1]
The law will be applied to the harshest extent to those Trump and his ilk see as enemies and will be warped in favor of his current friends.
Or, as a Preuvian facist president put it: "For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law!"
I agree with the meat of what you say, but is selective enforcement really so unique to authoritarian governments?
In the US, even before recent administrations, we’ve long had evidence of uneven application of laws. Police love power. Criminalizing more stuff gives them more power to decide who to target.
Look how the war on drugs and policies like stop and frisk have targeted black folks. Even innocuous sounding things like seatbelt laws give police the ability to criminalize “driving while black.”
Meanwhile we’ve long ignored white collar crimes like wage theft. You know rich families aren’t going to be affected by anti-abortion laws.
My heavily tattooed White friends and I recently ignored no trespassing to swim in a nice river in TX. We agreed that if the cops came, I (non tattooed, White) would do the talking.
Anyway, the police have never been interested in holding the rich and powerful to account.
Chattel slavery- direct, constant, and complete control over one's life and death, and the reduction of the person to mere property, is essentially the most authoritarian institution there can be.
For the reader curious why the woman in [0] didn't get permanent residency via marriage:
> Milne was divorced from the nonimmigrant student she married prior to 1983. She then married a U.S. citizen but we found, in our above-said unpublished opinion, that she had admitted that it was a marriage of convenience. After another divorce, she married her current husband, a marriage that is uncontested as "bona fide." Her request for legal permanent resident status based on this marriage was denied under INA § 204(c) which precludes approval based on even an admittedly good-faith union if the petitioner had previously contracted an improper marriage.
And you can be arrested for overstaying a visa. It used to be that after a process that does not include being swiped off the streets by masked thugs. Now we're doing it this way.
> a political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police
Simply enforcing laws is not "becoming a police state", the current administration is doing far worse than this, and is actually blatantly and arbitrarily breaking laws according to multiple courts in various jurisdictions.
This includes ICE which has become a tool of this police state by deporting people (including in a case a US citizen, a two-year-old girl) without due process.
The trouble with laws is two-fold: poorly designed legislation is easily abused by those who enforce it, and regulatory capture often prevents necessary changes to existing laws.
A police state does not mean "a state where laws are enforced." The government is not establishing a police state because it's enforcing laws. It's establishing a police state because it's establishing a police state. But I suspect you already knew that, because I've seen comments like this one far too many times to continue assuming good faith.
This ice stuff is more than that. The law and order stuff is more about getting law and order focused people like you onboard.
You should read about how Mussolini came to power and consolidated control. We’re not building a $49B paramilitary force and database to find typos in 50 year old naturalization documents to deport their descendants for law and order. ICE is something else.
If we had laws Trump would be in jail. If we respected immigration laws Trump would be in jail. Since he he's in the white house I don't think we can saw the US takes following the law very seriously
My wife was just naturalized as a US Citizen a year ago. You can bet she doesn't want to be anywhere near that mess. Her legal status provides her basically no protection from any ICE rookie with a chip on his shoulder.
This is not an example of the scenario esseph described. Foreign students are by definition not US citizens and thus don't have any inherent right to be in the country.
Now Google for keywords Trump + denaturalization, filtering for results in the last 2 weeks. Or what he said about "deporting" citizens by birth since before then.
Aside: limiting the conversation to things that have already happened is uninteresting to me; you skate where the puck is going. One can easily do this by applying the administrations internal logic, i.e. what they said/did in the past, and what the ultimate goal/result was, and mapping that to what they are doing now to extrapolate future outcomes.
This is not a valid argument because there is no way to disprove it. If you was so easy to find an example that actually holds up under scrutiny you would be able to present one yourself.
>just a response to someone saying something "sounds like" something.
It was a response asking for sources, sources you still don't have. You're projecting about being triggered and still don't have sources to bring. Sad.
Her legal status is that she's a US citizen, she has the same "protection from any ICE rookie" as anyone else who is a US citizen naturalized or natural-born.
The president of the United States is literally fighting in court to get the authority to treat natural born newborns as aliens even though the plain letter of the United States Constitution says these babies are citizens.
In an environment like that, legal status doesn't mean shit.
What people care about is reality. Currently the reality is you can be subject to arbitrary detention and deportation with no due process, regardless of you rights.
This is a very disingenuous question for a number of reasons.
- Whether unlawful presence is a civil or criminal law, countries should control who enters the country.
- Masked police seem like a reasonable response to doxxing of police officers? It’s not like the identity of these police aren’t know to the legal system and lawyers of the accused.
- Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense. It’s just meaningless rhetoric as detention bears no resemblance to actual concentration camps.
- Most importantly, the US enforcing its own immigrations laws does not make it an outlier - it was an outlier when it ignored its own immigration laws. Every other country I’ve visited rather strictly enforces its immigration laws including speedy deportation of any encountered who doesn’t have permission to be in the country. If anything the headlines should be “US joins rest of world in enforcing its own immigration laws”
> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.
I don’t think you are paying attention to the abject cruelty in the administration’s own discourse about these facilities. The U.S. president describing with barely restrained delight his anticipation that escapees from the new facility in Florida would be eaten by alligators. I suppose if called out on it, he’d claim it’s a joke. I’m sure many regimes in history had their own euphemistic terms for facilities such as this; but purposeful cruelty is a cardinal feature of concentration camps in my view.
> - Whether unlawful presence is a civil or criminal law, countries should control who enters the country.
Yes. And it's disingenuous to call for brutal police tactics with enormous collateral damage for something the letter of the law regards as the equivalent of a parking ticket.
> - Masked police seem like a reasonable response to doxxing of police officers?
Fuck. No.
> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.
When they are meant for detaining people who are literally not guilty of any crime, and they are deliberately designed to feature inhumane conditions, it makes every sense.
> - - Most importantly, the US enforcing its own immigrations laws does not make it an outlier
I'll ask the same question again: which civil offenses do you think should also be addressed with secret police and concentration camps?
The EU is stricter with immigration than the US. But it does not use secret police and concentration camps.
You're not really arguing in good faith when your response is "Fuck. No."
> The EU is stricter with immigration than the US. But it does not use secret police and concentration camps.
You don't think the police in Europe sometimes hide the identity of their police from onlookers when required? I'm pretty sure they do.
Do you also think Europe doesn't detain people who are in their country illegally? I'm pretty sure they do. They are even creating "return hubs", which are basically detention centers outside their own country which hold immigrants until they can be returned to their home or a third country.
> You're not really arguing in good faith when your response is "Fuck. No."
If you don't already know that keeping the name & badge number visible is the most important part of proper policing, and established as such by the world's first police force and its founder, Robert Peel, there's no point arguing much of anything with you.
It's literally the difference between a police force and a Geheime Staat Polizei.
Yes. Jumping the border is a misdemeanor if you don't immediately self report to request asylum.
But the majority of people getting rounded up right now are for unlawful presence.
And a lot of them have no idea that their presence was marked unlawful until ICE gets them. There's a reason civil offenses are supposed to be handled with proper notification and court summonses instead of this shit.
You can campaign for an amendment to give up American's right to self-determination if you want that but you don't get to just decide to do that on your own.
The "right of self determination" does not exist in the US constitution or law. It's a rhetorical slogan coined by Woodrow Wilson, and his idea of "self determination" came from growing up as a racist southerner who felt the South should have been allowed to self-determine a continuation of chattel slavery.
How this has anything to do with the immigrants in my city trying to live normal lives, perhaps you can explain.
> Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
This is a very nice way to put it. In investing terms, the benefits are limited but the risks are severe. With enough interactions you’re more likely to have experienced the downside.
Nobody forgets that, it’s just that abuse and misconduct sour that. In many communities, people have to weigh the odds that reporting a crime will lead to more problems for them than it will help, with consequences ranging from lack of help to theft to rape or even being shot by mistake. American police departments have largely set themselves above the law, so the average person doesn’t know whether they’re getting a good cop who is genuinely trying to help them or the bad cop whose behavior has been covered up by their fellow officers for years. Anyone concerned about public opinion of police should be focused on accountability and oversight to rebuild public trust.
Let's be real. For all their flaws, US cops are some of the least corrupt in the world. There are places where you better be ready to fork over cash every time you encounter the police.
> US cops are some of the least corrupt in the world
I don't think that's a good metric to judge them by (I also don't think it's true if you compare to first world countries).
Sure, third world countries have police forces that are more corrupt. But US cops are corrupt in a wide variety of ways and we should be very clear about how unacceptable that is. It doesn't matter if someone somewhere else in the world is worse.
I've never understood the "be happy you're not in authoritarian Russia" type of argument for papering over the shortcomings of circumstances here in the US. Like, ok? Why are we comparing ourselves to places that are worse? Shouldn't we be striving to make things better relative to our own ideals and standards?
It's like any economic discussion I have when visiting my parents. I'll advocate for something every other developed nation has, like paid paternity leave or a sane healthcare system, and they immediately start talking about communist East Germany like that's somehow relevant.
Yeah, we know cops in Mexico are corrupt. Our police force has a very different problem set that we need to solve. Pointing out a different problem in a different country contributes nothing.
> I'll advocate for something every other developed nation has, like paid paternity leave or a sane healthcare system
Paid parental leave creates both deadweight loss and moral hazard. It also tends to reduce labor inversely proportional to labor's cost, with the largest reduction in labor hitting highly skilled, sub middle-aged females. This should be obvious as it lowers the expected productivity of workers, moreso when you extend parental leave to family leave and allow for the care of ailing elders. The argument for it seems to hinge on the dollars allowing greater workforce participation, but I'm not sold that greater participation with lower expected productivity is greater than fewer productive workers.
Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?
Regarding healthcare, it's well known that decreasing prices increase demand. While some healthcare demand is totally inelastic (injuries, cancer, etc.), the front line pcp interactions are elastic. Compound in people's willingness to decrease self care since they don't have to pay for future healthcare, and you've increased the rate of inelastic demand instances in the future, increasing demand. Now consider that prices would no longer be dictated by free markets, and now we have trouble with price discovery, with the power seemingly going to the single consumer, so it's likely treatments will be underpaid, which may lead to fewer practicioners and fewer innovations. Maybe I'm wrong... I haven't thought about heath economics in a long while. My preference would be to see a forced decoupling of healthcare provided as work benefits such that everyone had to purchase it on the open market (even if that loss of negotiating freedom between private parties irks me).
>"Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?"
Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you. That's the foundation of socialization, everyone's resources - that they fork over from taxation - is shared for various activities and settlements that give as many individuals (past, present and emerging) as much of an acceptable baseline of living as it can.
To be sure, the goal of socialization is also not usually to make everyone rich or give immense quality of life, it's to make sure everyone has the same "lowest" bar for things that members of society deem as essential, and that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible.
>> "Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?"
> Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you.
I'd set the reason as even more basic than that. Children are absolutely essential the future of society. There is literally no way to argue that is not true.
Since they are essential to society, we should be working on ways to support them; as a society. Now, this can be argued against. But I feel pretty strongly that "I do not think it is important for us, as a society, to works towards goals that beneficial to society" is a fairly brain-dead stance. You can argue about the best uses for _available_ money; but to argue that's a matter of priorities, not "is it a valid goal".
I think my most basic argument is that society is the result of many individuals' participation. It should be viewed as emergemt of individuals working together and not as an organism in-and-of itself.
To that end, I think it is fully appropriate for the society to collapse if individuals within it determine to forgo children. We shouldn't redistribute from some to others purely to ensure society's continuum. Instead, individuals should maximize their utility, and in doing so create society.
These redistributions are not pareto optimal and have major deadweight losses and introduce moral hazard.
> To that end, I think it is fully appropriate for the society to collapse if individuals within it determine to forgo children. We shouldn't redistribute from some to others purely to ensure society's continuum. Instead, individuals should maximize their utility, and in doing so create society.
We have an entire system of laws we put in place to force people to increase their utility within society.
What your statement is effectively arguing is... to go with anarchy; that we should not have rules that change human behavior, because human behavior _should_ be to maximize utility.
I think it's pretty well accepted that "just let everyone do whatever they want" isn't a viable system for a society.
You still need constraints. The law should exist to protect private property. The government should collect taxes to fund the legal system and public goods.
But I absolutely agree that the government shouldn't do much, if anything, more than that. Incentives to shape behavior should be extremely limited, because the government is the only entity that is allowed to force involuntarily transactions.
Voluntary transactions ensure that the transacting parties have a pareto optimal outcome. This is what should be maximized, even at the detriment of the longevity of society itself.
Why should the government do exactly the things that benefit society, benefit you, and don't benefit Debbie, but not the things that benefit society, benefit Debbie and don't benefit you? This is just disguised selfishness.
I'm not deep enough in the theory to know whether "voluntary transactions create a Pareto-optimal outcome" is a true statement. I suspect not, because of information asymmetry and so on.
Pareto-optimal is also kind of an arbitrary stopping point - you chose it because it supports your argument, not because it's actually a good one. If it was possible to make everyone 1000 times richer (in physical resources) but at the cost of making Elon Musk just another average person, that wouldn't be a Pareto move because it would decrease Elon's status, but it would still be extremely good. Why shouldn't we aim for that?
> Why should the government do exactly the things that benefit society, benefit you, and don't benefit Debbie, but not the things that benefit society, benefit Debbie and don't benefit you? This is just disguised selfishness
I want the government to provide the things that benefit Debbie and me equally, and only those things that benefit us equally.
> If it was possible to make everyone 1000 times richer (in physical resources) but at the cost of making Elon Musk just another average person, that wouldn't be a Pareto move because it would decrease Elon's status, but it would still be extremely good. Why shouldn't we aim for that?
How are you defining good? The same resources may be more equitably distributed, but ultimately the same fixed resources exist, and now poor Elon is far worse off. My point of search for pareto optimality is exactly that we should avoid this outcome because it's not better. Following it to it's logical conclusion, redistributing all wealth until it was exactly equally divided amongst the population would produce the most good outcome.
There's also an extremely wide variety of possible Pareto-optimal outcomes and I should have said this sooner.
Communism is Pareto-optimal (both the utopian kind and the USSR kind). Authoritarian dictatorship is Pareto-optimal. Hitler's Germany was Pareto-optimal. Democracy is Pareto-optimal. Whatever America's doing right now is Pareto-optimal. Pretty much everything that ever arises in practice is Pareto-optimal.
Imagine a society with only two people - me and you - where I am constantly stomping my boot on your face and enjoying it. This would be Pareto-optimal, because in order for you to stop having your face stomped on, you'd have to make me stop enjoying it and that wouldn't be a Pareto improvement. Would you really argue that in this situation, it's immoral for you to stop me from stomping on your face, because it's not a Pareto improvement?
> I want the government to provide the things that benefit Debbie and me equally, and only those things that benefit us equally.
So literally nothing. You want no government. Please acknowledge that. Property rights don't benefit you and Debbie equally, so you don't want those either.
> How are you defining good? The same resources may be more equitably distributed, but ultimately the same fixed resources exist
No, I'm talking about everyone having 1000 times more resources except for Elon. The total amount of resources would increase about 999.999 times or so, since everyone would have 1000 times more except for Elon who would have the same amount as everyone else (less than he does now). With regards to Pareto-optimality, this would be very much a "stop stomping your boot on my face" scenario.
I pay something like $150/month for private LTD insurance. All the government policies do is force everyone to participate with lower expected benefits. It would be more efficient for people to privately purchase it, where those who don't assume the risk of noncarry.
I'm talking about ramps to public buildings and handicap accessible bathrooms. It's a public good that most people don't realize they're actually going to use at some point.
Everybody drives the same roads ("Why would I pay to maintain Smith Street? I've never driven on it?"), some people REALLY need a firefighter in an emergency.
> I'm talking about ramps to public buildings and handicap accessible bathrooms.
To the extent these impact public buildings, I think this is a good thing. Just like I think public employers should not be allowed to discriminate based on age, race, etc.
But in both cases I would argue that private companies should not be held to the same standards.
Firefighters could arguably be a public good in that they are (approximately) nonrivalous and are definitely nonexcludable. In addition, fire fighting as a public good prevents the free rider problem that would likely exist with this service in the private market.
Sounds like a pretty good policy to back to me. I’ll never understand people that want to take advantage of the foundations of society for themselves, then become rather churlish when its their turn to do the same for others.
> that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible
But by definition it is inefficient. Redistribution of money from Person A to Person B necessarily means Person A can't spend that money. If their optimal utility was to give that money to Person B, you wouldn't need such a policy governmentally.
Socialization makes sense for public goods, but healthcare and parental leave are both nonpublic.
As an annecdotal example, my state offers 12 weeks of parental leave. The maximum they are willing to pay is about $550/week. My company provides two weeks of paid leave. So for 10 weeks, I get the $550 from the state. But my w2 income is about 2k/week post tax, post 401k max. So I would forgo about $1400 a week to stay home. Daycare costs $550/week, so it's far better for me to work. But then I don't get the time off. And yet I still pay for others. This is an example of a terrible implementation of the already bad policy.
- Preventative care is far cheaper and more effective than reactive care (e.g. your dentist telling you to floss more in a particular area vs. filling a cavity vs. filling a root canal)
- Insurance is more effective at dispersing costs amongst a larger pool of people
- In a system like the US where insurance companies must negotiate prices with healthcare providers, larger pools have more bargaining power
I used to actually bat against universal healthcare for this reason, until COVID. The majority of private insurance companies are already doing that, here.
I think this is mostly because the US system strips choice from the individual. I hypothesize the outcomes would be far better if we decoupled private health insurance from employment and allowed an oprn market for individual consumers.
I have good news: the open market you're describing already exists! You are free to decline your employer's health insurance and sign up for a private plan at healthcare.gov.
I know it exists, but there is no point to denying the employer provided plan unless one is substantially better off paying for out of pocket care plus the forgone income from the employer.
I would propose that we legislate the ban of employer provided healthcare benefits instead of making it universal.
If you think the foregone income would make the difference, negotiate a raise from your employer in exchange for waiving their health insurance. Problem solved!
You can do what you're describing today, in this world. I think the fact that you don't is instructive.
> Socialization makes sense for public goods, but healthcare and parental leave are both nonpublic.
Challenge. Healthcare is very much a public "good". The healthier evereyone is, the less we spend on healthcare overall. And the more we can accomplish overall. It works in everyone's benefit for society to be healthy.
The same way it works in everyone's benefit to have roads. We both want to get to the store/work/etc, and want healthy people to take care of those places. Neither one is a need, both are beneficial to everyone.
There is a duality to providing healthcare as a public good, and that is preventive care through lifestyle choices may diminish. I'm not so careful as to not have four pops a day because the gov will pick up my diabetes tab. It's not clearly a net benefit to society.
For the record, I also suggest roads do not meet the definition of a public good.
Your anecdote values time with your newborn children at $0 and assumes people are physically able to immediately return to work after having a child. Seems like a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of life with a newborn.
It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.
It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.
Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?
I omitted the valuation of time with my child since it is hard to capture empirically.
> It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.
I'm not ignoring this cost. I'm stating that this cost should be borne by the individual that elected to have a child; e.g., lowered labor participation for some duration. The current US federal policy recognizes this by allowing unpaid leave for some duration.
> It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.
My point exactly. If above average compensation is actively harmed by this policy through deadweight loss, it means the policy is bad. This ignores the plethora of moral hazard that is introduced too. For example, how to we reconcile those laborers that take 12 weeks of paid taxpayer vacations only to promptly quit their job upon restarting it? These folks were always going to drop out of the labor force; now we've given them 12 weeks of free money redistributed from productive members.
> Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?
Religious inclinations should direct followers how to execute behavior for themselves of a voluntary nature. It should not be used to dictate that everyone in society follow the same moral orders at the behest of a gun, which is what governmental policy does.
That you phrase it as a "vacation" and can't seem to put a dollar value on it but obviously less than a couple hundred dollars a week really points to the idea you have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't think anyone thinks 12 weeks with a newborn is a vacation, and yet most people probably wouldn't trade that 12 weeks with their newborn for anything in the world.
> I'm not ignoring this cost
You literally are ignoring the cost, as its not your given model. And its not a cost that will only be borne by the immediate caregivers, there are knock-on costs throughout society that will be felt by this change.
The government subsidizes the birth rate because it has decided it IS a social good to have a constantly replenishing workforce (and potential military force). You may disagree with doing that but the argument that it isn't a social good doesn't match where those policies are coming from.
Moreover, this blinders-on-libertarianism "I should only pay for things directly for me" approach doesn't work if you pick and choose; you have to address it in context of the entire system (ie, you can't silently accept all the benefits and only shout about the individual moments you don't come out on top).
This society, for better or worse, pools money to do things at scale even when some of those things don't have the direct and equal benefit to every individual, instead aiming for a general good for all, stability, and a platform for everyone to have higher potential.
Yes, this gets abused in many ways and yes, it should always be constantly evaluated for effectively spending money.
However, your anecdotes about how the women or the poors get more than you in certain policies aren't impactful without looking at the whole which includes everything from the roads, breathable air, a widespread and capable workforce, a dynamic labor market, powerful financial markets, a justice system, fire departments, and lots of consumer protections so we can focus on growth instead of spending all our time trying to research if your bank is actually a scam or if the restaurant down the street washes their hands enough.
My anecdote was used to show how the policy introduces moral hazard and deadweight loss. I would equally oppose it, as I do things like government mandated smoke-free restaurants, even if they benefitted me. I would moreso prefer that smoke-free restaurants exist because the market dictates it wants them by not transacting with smoke-partitioned restaurants.
> everything from the roads, breathable air, a widespread and capable workforce, a dynamic labor market, powerful financial markets, a justice system, fire departments, and lots of consumer protections so we can focus on growth instead of spending all our time trying to research if your bank is actually a scam or if the restaurant down the street washes their hands enough.
There is certainly some gain in being able to outsource research, but it is difficult to determine if it is a net good for society or the individual due to the moral hazard it generates. Not worrying about your bank being a scam allows actual banks to take on outsized risk and then not face any repercussions. It skews the appetite for risk that disproportionately benefits risk takers. For a recent example, see the Silicon Valley Bank failure, which the FEDs totally bailed out to prevent a collapse across many more banks, mostly because those banks overleant at low mortgage rates and couldn't sell the low interest notes at face value after the rise in interest rates, leading to a liquidity crisis.
Focusing on growth comes at a cost; lots of inefficies are introduced. Instead, we could focus on being efficient and low waste and allow the growth to come naturally.
The moral hazard of checks notes mothers breastfeeding and attending to their newborn children and husbands asssisting for a few weeks. Yes. What an absolutely upsidedown society we'll have if we allow such a thing to happen. Terrible. Need to ensure that doesn't happen.
And we need to reduce the rate of this happening to ensure checks notes wealthy people continue producing at high rates to profit the even wealthier.
That so many people have such mindsets and continue to wonder why our birthrates are dropping is astounding.
Wake up buddy. Keep drawing these lines. See where they go. I guess we'll both be dead though, so it doesn't matter.
What do you think your retirement savings represent? They are a claim on goods and services to be produced by a future generation. For that to work there has to be a future generation of sufficient productive capacity. If population declines faster then productivity increases the system will collapse.
That is part of the risk one must take into account when investing. The same happens regardless of population; you must invest where you expect there to still exist market demand in the future.
If the productive capacity of the economy declines your capital will be inflated away. Money is a social construct built on a stable or growing economy.
The FED can target either interest rates or the money supply. It could very well adjust supply to meet a shrinking population pool. Otherwise post war losses of many able bodied men would inflate away economies.
There could be. Our example hasn't considered productivity gains due to capital improvements or tech advancements. We may not need the same population to produce the samd product count in the future.
I don't think it's reasonable to steal from some for the betterment of others. Clearly if those from which money is taken maximized their utility by charitably giving it away to familes with newborns, this policy wouldn't be necessary. To that end, this policy creates deadweight loss for those from whom the redistributive policy takes more than it returns.
> Clearly if those from which money is taken maximized their utility by charitably giving it away to familes with newborns, this policy wouldn't be necessary.
>To that end, this policy creates deadweight loss for those from whom the redistributive policy takes more than it returns.
First, clearly such people don't donate to families, making that a pointless argument, and second, even if they gave new parents money directly, they might still not have a baby if they don't have time to take care of the baby without parental leave. Long work hours for couples decreasing the national birth rate is a negative externality. If all companies acted hostile to parents and no one became a parent, that might boost each individual company's productivity levels, but they would be killing off the workforce in the long term. That, like overfishing, would be an example of the tragedy of the commons.
> First, clearly such people don't donate to families, making that a pointless argument, and second, even if they gave new parents money directly
Yes. That is my point. Theft is required to execute this policy, which defines the deadweight loss.
I argue that companies may offer better leave benefits in order to attract workers. My company provides six weeks for primary and two for secondary caretakers.
Amazon gives a month or something like that. Clearly I would have incentive to work there if I could, and by that I mean others better skilled than me fill those vacancies. The policy is effective.
"All taxation is theft!" is a funny thing to claim in a world where standing alone is no longer viable.
I have a lot of libertarian tendencies but shouting that you're being robbed (from the safety of your stable, productive, society that protects even your right to complain like that) feels childish to me - the actual first step if you're going to act this way seems to be trying to get out from under this government that you never agreed to so you can start doing things your own way. The irony of people who say "if you don't like it, leave" is that they rarely take their own advice.
As a side note, I'm always curious when I see someone say that taxes are theft -- what is "theft" and "property" in your world view without the other systems underpinning it? It seems to always boil down to "stuff in your possession that you can keep someone else from taking away" which always boils down to violence at the end. Does " theft" even make sense in this context and, if so, did you "steal" everything first? It always seems like such a "rules for thee but not for me" kind of claim so I'm (genuinely) curious if you have a more substantial platform for your libertarianism.
The libertarian bent typically suggests that the government must be funded to the extent that it can protect private property. This means it must be able to recognize private property and litigate against its theft, including bodily harm. Therefore I shout from my safe stable, but my prerequisite is that the government exists to provide that safe stable.
It also exists to provide public goods, which are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable, such as national defense (where I would only suggest it be provided insofar as the workforce be entirely voluntary).
Redistributibe policies such as PFML or universal healthcare, are indeed theft. You take from Person A to give to Person B when Person A would otherwise not do so. Please help me understand how that is not theft?
Thanks for the answer and that makes sense for your perspective - government is pretty much just there for you to be able to lay claim to things and all other benefits should be done by explicitly optted-in individuals.
I don't think it's helpful for me to try to take a position about what is and isn't theft by governments you were born into but wish you weren't. I don't even know how to start untangling that one and I think perspective overwhelms any reason there anyway.
I do appreciate your response about my question - very helpful!
I want to be more progressive. I really do! It feels good because typically you get to provide for the less fortunate. But my atomic unit is the individual, and I can't seem to make my belief system reconcile individual liberty and government-enforced charity. That's why I come here sometimes. It helps me talk through things and try to find counterexamples to my ideology.
Here's one way to think about health care in particular: the money being "stolen" from you has no intrinsic value. It's a number in a computer somewhere. If you were truly alone in the world it would have no value at all. So its value comes from an implied consensus of sorts, one that exists because the surrounding society provides infrastructure ranging from national defense to roads to law and contract enforcement to communications regulation to weather forecasting to basic scientific research to public health to ... whatever.
It happens that most advanced societies consider the widespread availability of medical care to be a similar force multiplier, something that enables every individual in the society to produce more and earn more and reach their full economic potential.
Free-market solutions to health care are problematic because there's nothing free about a market that everyone is forced to participate in by virtue of being alive. Likewise, private insurance models make little sense when every insured customer is virtually guaranteed to file expensive claims at one point or another.
Consequently health care is widely considered a valid area for governmental involvement and taxation. Yes, the money for public health care is "stolen" from you, but again, there is a widespread consensus that the economy that you participate in is healthier as a whole because of that. Just like public subsidies for many other things that many/most people agree are important but that fall outside what conventional markets do well at providing. In a society that didn't attend to such needs, you might have more money from a numeric standpoint, but it would be worth less.
Obviously there are weak points in this argument from a libertarian perspective, but it's very hard to convince people that it's without any merit at all.
The people who say they don't want the government to help pay for raising children are the same people who complain about low birth rates. You can't eat your cake and still have it. Would you like sustainable population or would you like low taxes? You can't have both.
Sensible government programs aren't deadweight loss - they are net gains - although a lot of what governments do, especially what the US government does, is not sensible. For example, you pay taxes to have property rights, and I don't think you think that is deadweight loss.
Meanwhile your concern about "why should I pay for someone else?" is literally just insurance but I bet you have insurance, and you only hate insurance when the government does it.
> is literally just insurance but I bet you have insurance, and you only hate insurance when the government does it.
Yes. This is exactly right. And that is because private insurance allows people to voluntarily consume it. Not everyone has the same appetite for risk. Allow people to maximize their individual utility!
You're missing the elephant in the room that our society doesn't have enough distributed wealth to allow most people to pay for their own time off.
I too hate the top-down prescriptivism of narrow "benefit" policies administered by employers. But until we fix the economy so most people have the market power to tell their employer they're taking 3-6+ months off for $whatever, have the savings to pay for it, and be confident that that either their employer will want them back at the end or that they will be able to find a different employer, then it's what we're stuck with. So if you really want to reform this, then work towards fixing wealth inequality.
(The healthcare thing is a politically radioactive topic. It would be fantastic to prevent employers anticompetitively bundling healthcare with employment, but it would take a lot of political capital to rise above fearmongering to people with "good" employer plans and the desire of politicians to lean on the current system out of expedience)
I understand your point, but I am unable to reconcile the inefficiencies introduced by redistributive policies. I would instead prefer a charitable system whereby people voluntarily provide funds to be allocated to new parents to afford them the time off for caretaking.
You're ignoring the current overriding redistributive policy of continually printing a large amount of new money (monetary inflation), and handing most of it to the banks to give away to asset holders. This siphons real wealth away from the edges of our society, and is a significant contributor to wealth inequality.
If you focus on smaller instances of redistributive policies without addressing that, you've done the equivalent of admitting a logical contradiction to your axioms and thus are able to come to some decidedly anti-individual-freedom conclusions. In this case, further turning the financial screws on the edges.
I don't mind turning back the Keynesian dials and abolishing the federal reserve. The reason my discussion is focused on PFML and universal healthcare is because that was the topic of the OP to which I replied at the root of my comment chain.
Those two are also not current or longstanding federal policy, which should making their prevention far easier than their repeal.
> I don't mind turning back the Keynesian dials and abolishing the federal reserve. The reason my discussion is focused on PFML and universal healthcare is because that was the topic of the OP to which I replied at the root of my comment chain.
The point is that without actually doing the former, your point in isolation on the latter comes across as completely out of touch. Currently, the vast majority of people simply do not have the kind of wealth required to make a decision like you're advocating. As it stands, the financial treadmill is a fixed quantity - so in that context, what you're effectively advocating is for people to not have the time to have kids, period.
> Those two are also not current or longstanding federal policy, which should making their prevention far easier than their repeal.
Yes, that is exactly the problem! When you push everywhere with a justification of individual freedom, the places you tend to actually move forward are where you're actually serving an agenda of entrenched centralized power. For example, look at this individual-liberty-appealing "fiscal responsibility" refrain of the past 30 years - it ended up facilitating all that newly-printed money to be given away to banks / asset holders, rather than say purposefully spent making sure our industrial base wasn't getting completely hollowed out. It was basically a kayfabe for looting, and not supporting individual freedom at all.
In a perfect world I would have preferred if that new money hadn't been created in the first place, and that wealth had remained distributed throughout society rather than centrally collected and then centrally assigned. But that wasn't anywhere close to being on the table. So we have to be real about the actual results of the specific policies we're advocating for, lest we become patsies helping to destroy individual liberty.
The reason people think defunding the police might work is because American police are overly militarized and people speculate that plays into violence escalation.
Basically, if you give the police way too many guns and armored vans then they might start thinking those are appropriate tools for too many circumstances. Sort of "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type argument.
So you're erecting a straw man and attacking that. My assertion is that policing in the US has structural issues that need to be addressed. I disagree that it's helpful to remember that it could be worse as evidenced in other countries. That's irrelevant to the original assertion.
Also the argument that there are proposals on how to address structural issues in policing that you deem "ridiculous nonsense" is a straw man that does not address my assertion.
I don't think we should defund most police agencies in the US. I absolutely think that we need to defund ICE, throw a substantial number of its current employees in jail, and build a new immigration enforcement agency from the ground up. Nobody who authorized masked raids by the secret police can be trusted to enforce the law and I do not consider any agency who employs them legitimate.
If I tried to abduct someone from my local courthouse, do you think the cops would let me get away with it? Because they've worked in lockstep with ICE as they've done exactly that. Defunding the police and defunding ICE are not two separate issues.
Cops routinely let private bounty hunters abduct people, albeit not from courthouses so often. I'm not happy about it, but I don't know if I necessarily want my local cops to be equipped to fight the Gestapo.
I can't speak for other first world countries, but Canada has its share of police misconduct. The most recent example is the mishandling of the 22-person killing spree in Nova Scotia[1], and the Toronto police are so famously bad at investigating sex crimes and protecting victims that an entire book was written on the subject[2].
But I'd prefer not to interact in their official capacity with them if possible because there is a non-zero chance that the specific officer I'm talking to is not one of the good ones.
I recently had a run in where I was photographing a duck on the roof of a house. A cop literally ran up to me and asked what I was doing with his hand on his gun, holster released. I was fortunate that he realized how nuts his behavior was when I pointed out that I was taking a picture of a crazy duck sitting on a chimney. I also realized that I probably would have been shot had I not been calm and polite.
i'm not a cop super fan or anything but i did make it a point to wave at and get to know the officers that patrol my neighborhood. I've had them stop by when walking my dogs to let me know that they got a call about a suspicious person and to keep an eye out. Maybe it comes from working in consulting but that level of relationship with police officers is very useful to me as an individual.
If you define “corrupt” as not asking for bribes on duty, perhaps. If you use the common definition of the term to include things like being bound by the law the same as the average person, however, that’s tragically untrue. Officers routinely cover up the misconduct of their fellows and force rehiring of the few officers who are held accountable even for serious crimes.
This has been down-voted a lot, but I actually kinda agree, at least with the second assertion. I've been going down to Baja, Mexico frequently for years, and, as an American (white dude), you quickly learn that you're a target for local police - you're basically their ATM. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You just do your best to avoid them, like agents in The Matrix.
>> For all their flaws, US cops are some of the least corrupt
> I actually kinda agree,
It is my long and consistent experience (MI spouse) that the quality of police officers depends on the quality of the police chief.
We had good, experienced officers here a generation ago. A funding-addicted sheriff was elected. He fired cops w/ decades of exp and replaced them with just-graduated kids. The remaining cops were subject to some kind of dept environment that left them half-unhinged.
Addicted sheriff quit after a few terms and his replacement was pretty good for a while. Now he's average, so kind of crappy.
Germany, Finland, France, Sweden, Canada ... when you compare them to most corrupt states, you are not proving they are best. You are peoving they are not absolute bottom.
That being said, America is unique in officially allowing cops to kill people just because of how they feel, with no objective reason for it.
Speaking of Germany, can you think of other points in history where the public banded together to subvert police authority and hide their neighbors from the cops?
It's not that they're corrupt in the literal sense. It's that they have discretion of enforcement of laws so expansive with so many precedents in their favor that they basically have de-facto power to arrest anyone and that when they do want to do something stupid they're not "corrupt" so you can't just pay them off to be reasonable.
Funny story about the Pinkertons if you don't already know... if you skateboard or do similar shenanigans involving parking structures or industrial wasteland, you've probably been chased by their direct descendants.
> Dude, I paid to have stickers and "sheriff cards" to make it less likely cops are going to stop me cos i'm a "friend of the police".
In many states the FOP stickers and cards are almost like "registration". You get the sticker to put on your card and just like vehicle registration, a year to show you're current. The FOP will say that's just to "show your ongoing support", but it's rather hard not to see it as "are you paid up? you don't get to get a sticker ten years ago...".
Various FOPs have also sued or done eBay take downs of people selling the "year sticker".
You could try searching "police corruption in the US" before saying they're not literally corrupt.
They will literally grab a cop that was prosecuted and found guilty, hide the records and have them hired in some other police force in a nearby town. There's a whole mafia setup going on, organized by their unions, we're not far from having "police controlled neighborhoods" like in many LATAM countries.
Yeah, corruption happens but it's not endemic nor is it accessible to the everyman.
Yeah they'll bend the law for their buddies but we cannot just shove money in their face to make them be reasonable when they bother us like you can in Mexico. Instead we have to shove 10x as much into all manner of rent seeking systems to maintain an air of legitimacy (this last part is a gripe I have with most government stuff here, not just law enforcement related).
LA Police are a literal gang. There are places with police that are corrupt in more obvious ways such as places in Africa but to say US cops are some of the least corrupt is ridiculous.
This is a very sheltered take. Go south of the border to Mexico (you don't need to go anywhere as far as Africa) and you can experience getting pulled over for no reason by a cop looking for a payout. That's not to mention that cartels are allowed to run rampant and collect "protection" in Mexican cities because the cops either don't care, are in the cartel themselves, or are being paid off.
As I said to another commenter, "some of the least corrupt" != "not corrupt". I'm sure some countries are better, but there are not that many.
You don't need to go south of the border. You can get pulled over for no reason in the US and have drugs planted on you by a cop simply having a bad day. I'm not interpreting least corrupt as no corruption. I think least corrupt is still a ridiculous statement.
In Florida and maybe other states, if anyone requests body cam video on a case, the police usually have to provide it, so, of course there is going to be at least one video on Youtube of cops behaving badly, but that does not say anything informative about the rate of bad cop behavior in the US.
We are in a thread that began with, "Go south of the border to Mexico and you can experience getting pulled over for no reason by a cop looking for a payout".
Are you saying that the cops in Northern Idaho are out for bribes?
> You can get pulled over for no reason in the US and have drugs planted on you by a cop simply having a bad day.
The next reply in this thread:
> lol you watch too much tv.
No I'm not asserting they are "asking". They won't bother to ask. They'll either plant something and take your stuff that way, or "smell drugs" and seize your assets under "civil forfeiture".
If we're limiting 'corruption' to just be about bribes, then sure. Of course, in reality it also encompasses racism, nepotism, etc (i.e. anything that is a "corruption" of the impartial execution of their jobs).
I suspect many Black people would prefer paying a bribe to being killed by police at an outsize ratio, or paying a bribe to being charged more aggressively and sentenced more harshly.
Police brutality and incarceration is worse than bribes, my dude.
Credit where credit is due, American cops are considerably less corrupt than American politicians. Most people in America would never even dream of trying to pay off a cop to get out of a speeding ticket, that sort of thing just doesn't work and everybody knows it. On the other hand, bribing local politicians to get some land rezoned for your business, or some other similar crap? That's just standard operating procedure in small towns everywhere.
Corruption just doesn't have much to do with the kind of misconduct that comes up in the US. It's true, yes, that an American officer who's decided to mistreat you won't usually accept a bribe to stop.
> Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim.
I have, multiple times. They don't give a shit. In my case, the only reason to reach out to them is to get documentation for insurance or to start the legal process for obtaining restraining orders through courts.
I've only had to call the cops a few times, but they usually put me on hold. 50/50 if they actually do anything or just give me the law enforcement equivalent of this meme- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-aint-reading-all-that (aka "please don't file a report because it makes our metrics look bad)
People forget that calling the cops as a victim also costs lives. There have been more than enough cases of someone calling in a wellness check on someone who ends up getting murdered by police instead of helped, or victims who call the police and end up getting shot or arrested by them.
The police as they are now in North America are not a good option, they're just the least worst option. You call them and they show up and you hope that they cause more problems for the offender than the victim, but that's never guaranteed.
I have not been unusually lucky in that way, though. I can think of half a dozen occasions when the kind of people who call the cops would have done so, but I didn't, because I expected they would do no good - if they bothered to show up at all - and might well have caused a lot of harm.
lmao, I haven't had a single good interaction with cops and I'm not a minority and I most of the interactions I've had were not as a result of me doing crimes, and the ones that were "crimes" were for things like "being in a park shortly after sundown". I have never once had a reason to view them as anything other than shitty powertripping bullies.
>Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim. People forget that cops also save lives.
I have. Several times. In the latter two cases (burglaries at my home and my brother's home -- one in NYC and the other in the Bay Area), the police were spectacularly inept and completely useless.
In the first case, the police arrested the perpetrators more by happenstance than design, despite the fact that these kids (all except the 22 year-old ringleader were 16 or younger) had been committing similar crimes for months.
As the old saw goes, "I don't hate the police, I just feel better when they're not around."
I called the cops as a victim of a violent crime. They put me in handcuffs because I was the person on the scene who best fit the profile of a perpetrator, despite the actual perpetrators standing there next to me. I gave them a video and audio recording of the crime being committed. I did not get my cellphone back. Later, I went to court with the perpetrators, and their only penalty was paying me a fine which was slightly less than what I paid in legal costs.
Cops are not your friends, even as a victim; neither are lawyers or judges. Treat the whole justice system more like a Linux server with an SQL injection: amoral, and can be made to do anything you want, if you're evil and happen to know how which levers to pull and how to not get caught.
I've been nearly killed with significant injuries caused by a repeat offender while in full compliance with the law myself and the police conspired to hide body camera evidence of a witness interview and took the side of the person who broke the law.
Since we're throwing in personal experiences to shape skimmer's overall emotions on police- I had a great interaction with police after someone called a wellness check on elderly neighbors. They tried hard to assure they were safe without being invasive or annoying.
I have had positive experiences with American police, but not as many as the negative experiences, and the negative where great enough to sour me on authority. In fact whenever I had a positive experience it was just so weird to have a cop not ruining your day because they had the power to do so, that it seemed surreal.
You are missing the point if you think it is about shaping someones' emotions towards police. The point is that there are plenty of valid reasons to just want to avoid interactions with or areas with police.
I've dealt with the cops a handful of times, with responses anywhere from unhelpful to helpful. It helps to have the right expectations - can a given situation be improved by adding some readily-aggressive dudes, who at the very least will be a little annoyed at having to be there? Sometimes, that answer is yes. Police perform a necessary function in society, and I wouldn't want to have to do that role myself (despite DIYing most other things).
But that does not justify supporting unaccountability as if its some kind of team sport! In fact, if you respect the role of the police then you must support accountability - a cop breaking the law is just a criminal acting under the color of state authority.
Could you please stop using HN primarily for political battle? This is not a valid use of HN, and you're well on the wrong side of the line. I had to go back a good two months before seeing anything else in your posts.
(This is not a comment on your politics. The moderation call here would be the same if you had the opposite politics, or any others.)
Edit: This has been a problem for a long time. I don't believe it's your intention to abuse HN, so I don't want to ban you, but if you don't fix this, we'll end up doing so.
You're so right. I'm not afraid of the cops, especially not ICE flunkies, but interactions with law enforcement has never made my day more convenient and pleasant. It's not that I'd hide anything from them, as much as for me it's a bureaucratic hassle I'd just as soon not have to deal with.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
>Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
You don't have to say anything to them without a court order but obviously they're still cops so they can screw you if you make a jerk of yourself doing it.
> how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
Politicians looking to score brownie points with either the public or the state itself.
So basically you're SOL if you're not a more equal animal or connected to them (Skip Gates), a public persona (Whistlin Diesel), attractive woman (Karen Read, though you can argue that nobody has held the cops accountable on this one, yet) or highly sympathetic individual.
There is some argument to be made that the truth comes out eventually in these sorts of matters but that's not gonna make Breonna Taylor any less dead or the Phonesavanh's kid from being any less disabled.
I think the Floyd factor also prevents cops who are alone or in a pair from escalating stuff unnecessarily as much as they used to which is where a lot of these abuses historically come from.
Most elected politicians at this point are happy to repeat the same lies of "this person was arrested because they were being violent/interfering/were acting suspiciously/refused to identify themselves" even if there is multiple sources of video evidence to the contrary. Republicans in particular have no interest in the truth where it conflicts with the claims they want to make to advance their agenda, and most Democrats are too toothless to call out this misbehavior with the force and passion it deserves.
And when they do call it out, people will be told by Fox News and others that "this senator is opposed to the work ICE is doing to solve the problem of illegal immigrants", and other news agencies will say "such-and-such official says this senator is opposed to..." and the propaganda will spread and people will believe it.
OK, I don't disagree, but there is nothing that guarantees the judiciary will act constitutionally or protect people's rights, so "who will hold the judiciary accountable if they violate your rights, try to punish you for lack of obedience, or fail to hold those who violate peoples rights accountable?""
Legally speaking, they need signed arrest warrants. Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK. In this way, they have much less power than local PD or Sheriffs.
Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.
As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
> Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK.
That's my understanding, too. I do happen to be white, but by multi-generation, I mean that I'm not a recent immigrant, nor are my parents, or theirs, so ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of. Similarly, the vast majority of my Black neighbors have been here for many, many years; same deal for them.
> As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement.
Same here. Being arrested for a BS reason would be quite the hassle, but it sure beats getting shot by a masked try-hard.
Citizenship comes from law. Enforcers and the judiciary choose which law to enact and how to enact them. If enforcers of the "law" are more loyal to the administration than the constitution, then the law and all it's implications, such as citizenship, are up to the arbitrary whims of our new king coronated by the supreme court.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
In many states you’re required to identify yourself, but cooperation with law enforcement is otherwise never required. My sense is that ICE generally still releases citizens swiftly, and if they don’t think you’re a citizen for some reason you’re not going to win an argument about it on the spot no matter how much you cooperate.
For sure. I think I'm reasonably well connected and could make a political nightmare for anyone who deported me illegally, but that's slim consolation if I'm trying urgently to learn the language of whatever prison I'm in.
Unless your name is nationally known, I doubt this is the case. It's not local people who are deporting you. There are numerous cases of well connected people beloved in their community getting deported. There are no consequences for the perpetrators.
That's the main reason its happening, there are no consequences for making mistakes. So they can ship you to a concentration camp and no one will know, because there won't be paperwork anywhere saying this happened, unless someone happened to be there and recorded you being abducted.
By the time someone might decide to check ICE records you could be in South Sudan already. No one is safe.
Could you? We STILL don't know the identities of everyone sent to CECOT. It's hard to make a political nightmare when no one knows where you are, or even that you were "arrested".
Easy debunk: ICE is a federal law enforcement agency. Entering or remaining in the country illegally is, by definition, illegal. ICE agents are law enforcement officers, not "deputized Proud Boys." Federal law enforceent agencies like ICE have recruitment and training processes that are well-established and documented.
There's no federal law requiring officers to give you their name or badge number. It's a myth they have to do so when asked, just like it's a myth cops have to tell you they're law enforcement when asked during a sting operation.
All they have to do is assert their authority, and they don't even have to do that on a particular timetable. If you don't like it, tell you legislator to do their job and change the law.
There was already a case of a copycat dressing in a mask and tactical gear and "asserting his authority". If they don't need to identify, then nobody needs to identify. And if they don't identify then they are nothing more than a masked gang.
I'll also add that masks are illegal to use during crimes to hide identity - which is exactly what these people are doing. They are committing crimes by abducting US citizens and they are blocking due process and they are exporting people to foreign 3rd countries. What they are doing is against the Constitution. We will track down and prosecute these people after this fascist regime is over, which is why they are masking and trying to hide their identity - they know what they are doing is illegal.
> There's no federal law requiring officers to give you their name or badge number
Well then since federal agencies are now abusing this letter of the law in complete bad faith and contributing to this disruption of the general peace, it sounds like it is up to state governors to tackle this epidemic of masked gangs of thugs running around and abducting people - order state and local law enforcement to interrupt any and all masked gang activity and arrest the perps (and order their national guards to deploy if additional force projection is necessary to restore law and order). If it turns out a given gang was acting under "legally valid" federal authority to carry out "legally valid" federal actions and therefore has immunity (and wasn't say a drug cartel hit squad emboldened by the general disorder), that can be sorted out and verified through due process in the courts. States owe no less to their citizens.
>ICE is breaking the law with zero evidence of that
Arresting US citizens without any cause is illegal, and that's exactly what they have been doing, and they will make up excuses to cover their ass. They are also arresting legitimate tourists, without justification.
"According to her attorney, Andrea Velez was released on bond after being detained by immigration enforcement agents on Tuesday and then charged with assaulting a federal officer." [0]
That's good cause for an arrest. Civil disobedience carries consequences.
It is fine to say there isn’t evidence for something. For some reason the poster decided to invite this challenge by calling it “easily debunked” instead. A debunking is specifically a claim that there’s evidence that the original claim was wrong.
This is just a form of gish galloping [0]. Like I alluded to, it's disappointing that discourse on HN is at a place where enough of the participants are supportive of this as long as it's happening to the "other team."
> During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.
See also Brandolini's law [1] if this feels familiar:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
It is not any more effort to say “It is an unsubstantiated and unprovable rumor that ICE has deputized proud boys.” It is also a much more accurate reflection of the level of confidence.
If you call somebody’s claim “easily debunked,” that’s a proactive offer of counter evidence. It isn’t Gish gallop to accept that offer of counter evidence.
Anyway, where else is the conversation supposed to go? The post had the offer of an easy debunking and no other content.
This is not something that can be or should even need to be "debunked". It is the responsibility of the government to act in a way that engenders trust of the citizens. For example, not deploying roving gangs wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves while purporting to act with government authority. Surely you can see how this destroys the rule of law, regardless of whether those are 30 year career civil servants who just now happen to be wearing masks, or some newly-formed lynch mob.
In general, the government justifying itself to citizens is called leadership. This "government" does the exact opposite across the board, and compensates with divisive propaganda that nurtures loyal all-in extremist followers.
Neither of these claims are true. Miranda rights apply to criminal arrests but immigration arrests are typically civil.
The 6th Amendment guarantees the right to a lawyer during critical stages such as interrogation and court proceedings only, e.g. in California the window in which arraignment is guaranteed is 48 hours (this is where the court will offer defendants the opportunity for a court-appointed lawyer).
> Miranda rights apply to criminal arrests but immigration arrests are typically civil.
> The 6th Amendment guarantees the right to a lawyer
I think people arrested by ICE are not guaranteed a lawyer, because, as you say, it's a civil matter. This means if you find yourself sleeping on a cot behind a chain link fence in Alligator Alcatraz, and you want to speak to a lawyer, you'll have to pay for it yourself, because it's all a civil matter.
Maybe, but I think they meant "treat it like a civil matter while giving civil-matter protections". Be consistent. The current criminal treatment with civil protections is inconsistent. Pick a lane.
It's also just not true that they're giving the much-lower civil protections either. Garcia didn't get a jury despite the Seventh Amendment guaranteeing one in common law (for cases exceeding a challenge of $20, which we've been purposively interpreting for decades)
Something being into law doesn't change reality. It is abduction even if the Pope and the Queen sign on it, period. Remember not everyone in the planet is American, this is like quoting North Korean law to justify some random atrocity.
It is Hacker News so of course someone is gonna rationalize fucking abducting people.
What qualifies as "reasonable suspicion" of a citizen committing an immigration crime? Aren't you just advocating for the ability of ICE to arrest anyone who has the wrong color skin or speaks the wrong language?
If the end result is that people are forcibly abducted, extradited, and thrown into an El Salvadoran prison without due process, I really don't give a shit what the law says. It can't be described as "civil."
Due process is ultimately what keeps this from happening to YOU.
Of course they can! They just did right there. You don't have to accept their argument. You can be a heartless sycophant and reject it out-of-hand because their argument doesn't follow the rules of the very framework they are arguing against. That's your choice.
Progress is being made in both directions on this front. If you truly believe in the law, then argue for it. Considering the fact that the current POTUS is a convicted felon, and the supreme court has practically eliminated all checks on his power, I'll be taking arguments for lawlessness seriously.
I don't know the law, and didn't say I did. I know the difference between right and wrong, though. I was responding to the GP comment where you basically argued that, "Well, actshually, nothing Trump's doing is illegal."
I also know that the courts are turning into wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Trump Organization. Not all of them, of course. But as for the rest, if there is no way for them to enforce their rulings -- and it seems there is not -- then they have no more power than random commenters on Hacker News, and deserve no more consideration.
And I grew up believing that America was 'land of the free'.
I've never had to prove my ID to a police-person here in the UK - once or twice they've asked me who I was, but they didn't check the answer I gave them and no ID was shown. I never carry photo ID unless I'm flying, so I wouldn't have been able to prove who I was anyway.
The UK has a complicated relationship with IDs anyway, they don't have a national ID, no one's mandated to have a passport, and a driving license is also optional (only if you want to drive). The US is almost like that except that not having a driving license is an oddity there.
Indeed - but even if you have a license, there is no expectations to carry it when you drive. If the police request they can give you a 'Producer' which historically was where you had to attend a police station with your license and insurance documents - but they can check insurance online via ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) before they've even stopped you.
Getting into clubs as a teenager was comical - as there is no standard ID most people had 'work ID' that was just a laminated bit of paper. Or would carry a paper drivers license with no photo on it.
I’m a latino in Germany of all places and for years I didn’t carry any identification because the only one I had was my passport, the german work permit was just a sticker in one of the pages. I am obviously not gonna risk losing my passport, so it was home.
Police never stopped me, but when I asked “what should I do?” they were more than understanding of the situation and just said that in the worst case I gotta go home grab it.
Only recently I got a German Personalausweis in the shape of a card.
I am a white German with no migration background and i believe it is not all that beautiful here and I have been checked on various places. The reason is, that it really also depends where you are, because police has the right to check IDs e.g. in places where migration crimes are more likely like railway stations or in a buffet zone close to the border. In other places law requires far more actual reasons or a far more concrete suspicion. But I have also been checked in the middle of the night on a flixbus that got pulled out from the highway at the border between Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, which IMHO clearly violated German police law.
Oh, definitely. I'm not saying there's no police checks, I'm just saying according to the police officer it was ok to not have with me at all times and leave at home.
Also, when I was outside of the city I live I would bring the passport, and now the Personalausweis...
I was in a similar situation when I immigrated to Sweden ~20 years ago (I'm Brazilian).
Technically the law says that I'm supposed to carry passport + residence permit (first version was a sticker, then it became a card). However, the hassle of carrying them on a daily basis (and especially losing them!) is too much so I was left them at home. I made a color photocopy of both and put on my wallet instead.
Then later the Swedish tax office started issuing ID cards for non-citizens and I started carrying that (but also the photocopy).
As a foreigner I was not fully complying with letter of the law by doing that but to me the risk of losing my paperwork was far, far higher than being punished for not carrying those. I assumed that in practice if it was something serious they would look me up in the system anyway, or escort me home to produce my paperwork.
Not sure if I that was indeed the reasonable thing to do or if I got lucky, but I never had any problems.
History is filled with people who dug their own graves while a person with a gun pointed at them told them to do it.
It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.
Prior to 9/11, hijackings occurred with mild frequency and the official policy was appeasement: get the plane safely landed and then negotiate with the hijackers. In any ways, 9/11 was possible due to exploiting that particular policy.
Since 9/11 there have been attempts to disrupt planes and no shortage of people willing to tackle the person responsible.
As a frequent flyer who has thought about this scenario a bit, I agree with this. And I actually think that as long as the FAs kept making their inane announcements about credit cards and so forth, most pax wouldn't even notice a takeover at the front of the plane.
You do what the person with the gun says, because you believe they'll shoot if you don't. If you believe that they will shoot and kill you regardless, following their orders is (at best) going to give you a few more agonizing minutes to live. The threat becomes meaningless.
Don't try to overpower the hijackers? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and fail? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and succeed? You live. It only takes one person to do the math and realize they are basically in a no-loss scenario.
Yes, the math is the easy part, doing is the hard part. The difference between understanding and doing is large and denial, shock, rumination, and rationalization all fuel inaction and there is often a moment in which it becomes too late.
People on death marches, in concentration camps, or other similar scenarios have the same math, and yet they get gassed or forced to dig their own graves after which they are shot and buried in them.
So yes, rationally that all makes sense and we should celebrate anyone putting themselves at risk to fight for the benefit of a larger group, but reality is different, especially if the hijackers can guarantee at least one death.
To say a hijack could never happen again is wrong. The doors are a much more reasonable explanation than the courage of men.
History also gets forgotten, such as the history of secret police or mass deportation efforts as is quite clear in this thread.
Assuming something is true doesn't make it true. Colluding airport employees as well as rural airports seem like clear vulnerabilities. When thinking about security problems you don't just assume your security measure always succeed and assuming that all passengers are "equal" seems like a poor assumption, especially for an exceptional case by highly motivated people, potentially with state backing.
I'm not arguing against anything you've said, but this isn't as popular of a sentiment as you think it is. For example, people who post information about DUI checkpoints in local social media forums are typically pilloried in comments sections.
Speaking as a resident of the United States who does not happen to possess paperwork related to my residency, I think this ICE stuff is terrible. I do want to stay here in the US, I do have needs that require welfare for myself and my children. Food, housing, medicine, these are human rights, we all deserve them it's as simple as that. I thought the US supported human rights so that I could stay here and raise a family on the taxpayer dime because someone threatened me one time in my home country. Sadly, that is not the case, for shame.
Reporting traffic cameras/stops is illegal in many countries but not the US. That however does not mean that reporting police activity is automatically always legal there. Similar to how taking along a hitchhiker is legal but driving a getaway car for a crime is not.
> As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
No matter if you are a law-abiding citizen, the cops have too many rights to annoy people. At least in Western nations, anyone should have the right to not answer the police or any other agent of the state about what one is doing or has done without repercussions. Always remember "three felonies a day"!
In practice, we all know that if you do not do what the cop wants (or, frankly, if you have the wrong skin color), the cop finds a way to make your life difficult - from submitting one to the litany of shit they can legally do (like a full roadworthiness check of your vehicle or, if near a border, a full inspection for contraband) down to stuff that should be outright illegal (like civil forfeiture) or is actually illegal (like a lot of the current actions of ICE).
In the US, we're not ordinarily required to keep any sort of ID on our person. There are some exceptions, such as the mentioned airports, crossing federal borders (as in to Canada or Mexico), some federal facilities, maybe some state/local government facilities, and (state dependent I've learned) when operating a car. Otherwise, you're pretty much free to leave your home in nothing but shorts and maybe a shirt (public decency laws and all) and go almost anywhere without issue.
Real ID is irrelevant to this. The issue is that now they can demand that people prove their citizenship almost anywhere and anytime beyond the few places it was permitted before.
The shorts and shirt is state dependent, too. If you're in California, the shorts and shirts are optional (indecent exposure requires "intent to arose or offend")
My understanding is that Real ID isn't considered proof that someone is legally in the US, because in some cases a non citizen can get one while they're here legally and then overstay their welcome.
And that's also ignoring the whole "papers please" of how allegedly Americans aren't required to carry ID if they're just walking around
I live in a country with the equivalent of a Real ID and a law requiring you to present it when asked. Officially they are supposed to have a good reason for it, but in practice they'll happily do it just because they can. And they'll continue "just asking questions" if they feel like it. You're not under arrest of course, but they are happy to waste a few hours of your time when you "refuse to cooperate".
After all, as a law-abiding citizen you don't have anything to hide, do you?
The person you replied to was pointing out a typo in their parent post: "more tan", referring to skin color and the demonstrable effect it has on interactions with law enforcement.
This is anti-social behavior and it leads to lawlessness and society sometimes having rather overbearing response to the increase (see ICE in the United States).
Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
Yeah, sometimes people develop an antipathy to certain social structures, and then that antipathy is defined as anti-social I guess, but there's probably no amount of Jantelov you can lay on that will make them change their minds.
Communism is a failed ideology and we should be on guard to extinguish it wherever we find it. We know that state ownership of the means of production leads to poor economic results at the nation state level.
With that out of the way, if we (and I personally do) want to support transit for the masses and even make sure that those who are struggling financially have a means to use transit to maintain their qualify of life and dignity, we should do so through publicly supported programs and funding instead of "yea go ahead and jump the queue" because that leads to other problems, perhaps chief of all is the perception of anti-social behavior.
You can't have public programs or support a strong community when people perceive that there is injustice taking place, and when they see someone cutting line and seeing no repercussions, you will lose broad support for public works. In other words, the bad apple spoils the bunch.
>and when they see someone cutting line and seeing no repercussions, you will lose broad support for public works
You mean like how a bunch of states imported every tom dick and harry from the 3rd world, immigration papers be damned, handed out licenses/residency like candy, then signed them all up for bennies and consequently support for those social programs is waning among the voting public?
It's maddening that you can't seem to grasp that your thinking can trivially be used to justify the kind of behavior w're currently seeing from ICE
I think we should fund assistance programs for folks to use mass transit (that we also need to build more of and fund more of) instead of having people hop the queue because it leads to negative outcomes for public programs, and it's unfair.
You're free to make of that what you will. If that means you think I support ICE and their current behavior or something, then I guess I do. I don't really care.
They should have really had a ticket in the first place though, otherwise they are stealing from all other riders who have to make up the missed cost in increased ticket prices (or from all taxpayers since public transport costs are almost always already heavily subsidized).
There are so many layers of crazy here but the one that strikes me most is attacking CNN for having a piece about the App. I.e. it's not just that reporting police activity is treated as a problem (it's not) but even an article discussing the way that some people are reporting police activity is a problem.
> "CNN is willfully endangering the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day and enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade US law,"
If the engadget article gets enough eyeballs will they be also be willfully endangering lives? What about a really popular forum thread discussing that article?
> officers who put their lives on the line every day
This sounds a lot less impressive when you realize that cops have the same fatal injury rate as landscaping supervisors or crane operators, less than half the rate of garbage collectors, and one-sixth the rate of logging workers.
There's definitely a decent bit of risk involved in being a cop, but we're not exactly seeing Thin Green Line flags for landscapers either, are we?
Cops should be proud to put their lives at risk. It should be part of the job expectations. You should care so much about the community you're supposed to serve that you'd be willing to make that sacrifice, even for a total stranger. The fact that none of this pride or expectation exists highlights that cops are cowards who get into policing for bad or selfish reasons and perpetuate systemic problems that harm millions.
That's a nice ideal. I honestly kind of agree with you in the sense that I wish that was how things were. But in my view, it's easier to think about the police as a force whose primary purpose is to enforce the property rights of the capital holding class. In the United States there have been court rulings clarifying that police officers are never obligated to risk their lives.
If you look at the actual numbers, at least in the US, policing can really only be viewed as a risky profession from a white-collar point of view. According to OSHA, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and even pilots all have a greater likelihood of dying on the job.
I agree that's both the historical basis and continued reality of what policing is in the US (and also probably elsewhere). It's interesting to see how quickly and ravenously cops respond to businesses calling in reports, and crimes associated to the wealthy and powerful. Meanwhile someone can call the cops about their neighbor beating a spouse and they'll never show up and seem annoyed when they want to make a report.
In an ideal world police are helping tourists find their way to their destination, helping grannies cross the street and writing the occasional traffic fine.
Sure but that point we're idealizing a society where humans are just... not humans. The occasional violence is going to happen amongst humans for a long time, there is a lot of basic evolutionary wiring in us that is going to lead some section of the population into violence as teenagers or adults.
This reminds me of how we have articles and handwringing about “our soldiers were attacked” in a country they had no authorization to even be. It is never discussed what they were actually doing there, but this is usually framed as in “we need more money to defend our men and women overseas”.
Several other leading senators also said they were in the dark about the operation in the western Africa nation.
“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”
He continued: “I got a little insight on why they were there and what they were doing. I can say this to the families: They were there to defend America. They were there to help allies. They were there to prevent another platform to attack America and our allies.”
>"...we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out, because that's not a protected speech. That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country."'
wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned.
I see little to no difference between this, Waze, helmet* taps, or flashing your high beams to other cars when passing the cops. That topic in general has been in court multiple times, and every time the ruling was in favor of it being considered freedom of speech.
Retaliation against free speech is completely normalized at this point. Primarily this administration has gone after large targets (recent Paramount case, the universities) and symbolic targets (students, a mayoral candidate). The circle of targets is going to continue to expand. Soon enough everyone’s speech will be tightly controlled under an AI-powered surveillance apparatus.
> That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers
It sounds like he's suggesting the app is intended as a way to target officers for assassination or something? That does seem like it might make a difference if it were true, but it also doesn't really seem like the intent of the app at all.
thanks.
and yikes! I've been a motorcycle rider for over a decade, many thousands of miles, now on my 3rd bike -- and somehow I'm just now learning this.
> wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned
Trump pardoned felons who attacked law enforcement on January 6th. Bondi has no credibility calling out anyone for endangering law enforcement. If a Democrat were to match Trump’s rhetoric, they’d be promising pardons for anyone who physically assaulted ICE. They’re not. This entire shitshow is posturing.
Disclaimer: I despise this administration, and think ICE should be abolished.
I would assume they mean that cops have a general duty to prevent/catch crime. So all you're doing by notifying people with waze or head taps is saying "hey there's police there!" Which everyone has a right to know.
However, because ICE is specialized, warning people of their presence might be seen as more akin to attempting to warn someone that their house is about to be raided by the FBI
>The app does not collect or store any user data, which TechCrunch confirmed by analyzing the app’s network traffic as part of a test.
Actually pretty decent tech reporting if true. This is a non trivial task that can take some time to setup and analyze. If the app is secure and uses certificate pinning it would require reverse engineering it to patch over the pinning before you could MiTM the traffic and actually see it decrypted.
the author has specified why, in a pretty detailed post about it (https://www.iceblock.app/android). they quote your exact concern as the reason they only support Apple:
> Apple’s ecosystem allows for push notifications to be sent without requiring us to store any user-identifiable information.
iOS dev but not expert in how push notifications are implemented but confused by this claim, both platforms you need a device specific token because? of course you do? I feel like I am missing something
Right? I'm confused how APNS could do this differently from FCM. At least an Android app could implement push notifications without involving Google. This seems like a dev that doesn't really understand Android outside of the GMS features.
I checked and apparently, Apple supports broadcast channels for push. The app only stores the channel information and Apple stores the mapping of devices to channels. So while Apple still has the data, the dev does not.
Sadly they don't specify why that's not necessary with iOS, I'm so curious how that's any different. They need some ID to send push notifications, and Apple keeps those registered to devices for delivery. I don't get how that's any different from Firebase push notifications and wish they could actually explain that.
I believe apple has only the metadata of the push notification, if implemented properly. The payload of the push notification itself can be end-to-end encrypted.
Because law enforcement officers have so much more power than an average citizen, they must be held to much higher standards and have even more accountability. Law enforcement radio should be unencrypted, there should be public databases of officers for facial recognition, and their vehicles and persons should be publicly trackable. The same techniques they use to surveil the citizenry should be applied to them.
https://icespy.org is a site where you can do facial recognition on ICE employees.
I disagree. Every single criminal is going to have a scanner the next day, and it'll become impossible to apprehend genuine criminals.
On the other hand, I would support mandatory recording and archiving of law enforcement radio, just like we are already doing with air traffic control. Combine this with independent incident investigations with public disclosure, and you've essentially achieved the accountability you are asking for.
Such a genuinely odd comment. You must realize that encryption of police radio is a recent thing and that, yes, police were capable of apprehending criminals prior to the adoption of encrypted communications.
Americans give criminals way too much credit. Policing in many countries is way less extreme and dystopian than it is in the states and they tend to have less crime (part of that is that they actually give a shit about their citizens and have funded healthcare, and do reasonable things like ban guns etc)
As an non-American, this situation seems really crazy and is quite hard to understand for me. Why would anyone want to prevent deportation of someone, who is in the country illegaly?
Is this a cultural thing? Because I've heard that US immigration laws kind of suck (long waiting times etc), but I don't really see how this is a solution to anything?
The techical aspect I get of course - I use Waze & I'm glad when someone reports cop with a radar etc. But ICE is not really something, that should concern normal citizens, right? They don't normally interact with US citizens, so as long as you have some kind of ID, they can check that and that is the end of your interaction with them. Or am I missing something?
I'd honestly be glad, if someone could explain that to me, I'm genuinely interested in understanding what is going on.
You have never been accosted by police and assumed to be a criminal, especially in a country foreign to where you live? I think this experience would shed light on your question.
ICE is different from other police agencies. The "punishment" is deportation, which ICE insists requires no time in court in front of a judge to mete out this "punishment". And as we have seen with guy sent to the El Salvador gulag, "deportation" is not simply getting put on a plane back home. It means getting sent to a foreign prison or war zone (South Sudan).
So, you have a small risk of a catastrophic outcome when interacting with ICE. And you will have no recourse in court because ICE intends to make you disappear first. And for many Americans, this whole situation is an affront to American way of life (no due process, very nazi like behavior with the Florida concentration camp).
Lastly, the US is different from other countries because the states are partially sovereign. State law and federal law don't generally intersect and state/local police have no duty to enforce federal law. They aren't supposed to enforce federal law either. In other countries, there is typically a national police agency all police operate under and provincial governments operate under national law.
I have been checked like that as I travel a lot through the Europe. And atleast in my case I just showed them my ID, they ran it through the database and that was the end of it. It sucked, but it was a one-off, so I shrugged it off.
I would argue that deportation is not really a punishment. It is just ejecting you from a place you should not be in the first place - basically a state-operated bouncers. From the perspective of the citizen, I'd want people like that out - for my sake, and their. Because they will create gray economy & not pay taxes. And not only that - since they are in the grey zone of the economy, the people who will employ them can 1) really abuse them as they have no legal/work protections and 2) those companies can get quite a big advantage over other as they have much lower labor costs. Which in turn hurts companies that are employing legal workers, which in turn hurts tax revenue.
Regarding being sent to the active war zones - I always thought that US do have asylums for people esaping from war etc? Meaning those people should be able to get some permit to stay & therefore should not be affected by ICE at all - or is this not a thing in the US? For some reason I thought that this is a part of some kind of international treaty or something, that you cannot deport people who are escaping from war.
Regarding the El Salvador, I read quite a lot about CECOT and about (recent) history of El Salvador and to be frank, I totaly get why the people in El Salvador chose to do what they did. The amount of atrocities that local gangs were commiting was incredible and given the sheer amount of the gang members and their violence, there is really nothing "human" you can do. Granted, I have not visited El Salvador, so my information may not be 100% correct, but right now I shed no tears for the gang members in their gulags. We really are not talking about people that you can reason with.
I knew US states were partially sovereign, but I always thought that federal laws are applied country wide & are enforced like that on all levels. And the local laws are on top of those. I did not know that the local police does not/should not enforce federal law I thought that if you commit something like wire fraud, local police will be working with the FBI to catch you. But as far as I understand it, local police is not really involved in those deportations, right? I always saw ICE agents (= federal) running around & rounding people up.
> Meanwhile, I'm going to download the app right now. Thanks, Streisand effect!
You know they could be going for the Streisand effect. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to add false incidents to reduce the effectiveness of the app. Nothing will get those people riled up like a court ruling in favor of the app. In the end, it could work to the administration's favor to have the app up and running. Nothing like acting all offended in public then celebrating privately as unnecessary fear and confusion sets in with false reports.
Interesting that Apple even allows ICEBlock on the App Store given that 13 years ago they blocked the publication of an app that notified users of American drone strikes abroad as "objectionable" content: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/apple-drone-stri...
> “The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement,” the statement said.
I think Apple hates the current American leadership enough that they'll take their sweet time to take down this app.
ICE isn't the military, though. Effectively sabotaging American war goals is a bit different from warning American civilians. I can see why they were more uncomfortable with the drone strike app.
Tim Cook was at Trump's inauguration, and donated $1 million to it. While I don't know what his private views are, his public ones are to cozy up Trump.
I mean no one had his tongue farther up the golden hole than Elon and look where that landed him. The donation and inauguration appearance was probably to avoid some - not all - consequences.
Hell, you have Jared Isaacman, who also donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration to show some support, hoping to become NASA admin (for which he'd have been an uncharacteristically decent choice, being someone with a genuine interest in aerospace, and not having been all that outspoken politically).
Only for Trump to throw out the nomination as part of his falling out with Elon, saying Isaacman was a democrat.
This is very American, The Green Book guided Black travelers to safe businesses during Jim Crow. The Underground Railroad was literally an information network to help enslaved people reach freedom. During WWII, communities helped hide Japanese Americans from internment. LGBTQ+ people created networks to find safe spaces during decades of criminalization. Native communities have long shared information about safe passage and resources.
Well said. A few days ago I made a response to a comment in a thread, where I laid out a list of some aspects of American Culture [1]. And, 2 of the BIG ones in the Beliefs category were, "fundamental distrust in government and a shared collective identity in those against it, free-speech absolutism"
Except they don't believe in free-speech absolutism. They say they do, but they obviously don't, because every time one of them gets in control of speech, they make it substantially less free.
They don't believe in fundamental distrust of government either, they're a little more forgiving of interpretation and purpose of policy when they're in charge - nonetheless, these virtues are in the American zeitgeist for better or for worse.
3x more than the Marine Corps, for those at home keeping score.
A military branch (either de facto or de jure) that exists for the majority purpose to directly target, round up, and imprison or deport individuals on U.S. soil - especially with a proven record of limiting due process - should have NEVER happened. I cannot stress enough, we're a few bad days - and more and more likely 1 executive action away - from at-scale "Tree of Liberty" stuff.
Well, perhaps if there's a Democratic president in four years, and they aren't afraid to break laws as much as Trump does, they could abolish ICE by withholding Congressional funding, destroying it the way this administration destroyed USAID, and reorganize other agencies to pick up the slack, which is how it was before 2003, when ICE was established.
Past performance estimates future results, and it shows that while Democrats don't actively make things worse, they also don't actively make things better. This is illustrated in the "ratchet and pawl model.
When the Republicans are in power they move things rightwards. When the Democrats are in power they don't move things in either direction. The net effect is a move to the right, and you cannot influence that by voting, and the overall rate of movement depends on how often each party wins, which you can influence by voting.
The chance that a third party wins and moves things leftwards is zero.
When there aren't enough illegal aliens left to warrant it. If you think those people have a right to be there then campaign for that but meanwhile the government should not just give up the rule of law.
The mission creep of the ICE Gestapo will eventually include deporting (forced disappearance and exiling) US citizens who don't agree with the cult^H^H^H^Hadministration.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Yes, indeed. When the wild west was a meat grinder bodies were needed. And no one was paid benefits from other peoples' taxes, so it was real freedom (and responsibility), as adding people didn't add cost.
This is not a dichotomy. Border and deportation reform can coincide with accepting the practical reality of undocumented residents currently in the US.
Republicans allowed this willingly, too.
Ripping apart millions of families and snatching peaceful residents off the streets, out of churches, off of farms and out of courtrooms with masked agents is not the only way.
Separately: Birthright citizenship is a fair topic to debate. What is not normal is pretending it isn't one of the most plain and direct clauses in the Constitution.
But there aren't if no one walks them. How did Trump manage to almost instantly shut down the 10k (or whatever it is) a day crossings the previous administration said was impossible to stop?
Because if you're the party of illegal immigration and you oppose voter ID (because your core voters have such low expectations of African Amerticans that you can claim it's about them not being able to get an ID) then you can import voters.
And then you can indeed also claim "well they're here now; nothing can be done", and indeed do nothing. But that is also not the only path. No path is the only path, so using that criticism selectively is deliberately misleading.
There was an 18 year old legal resident in my city that was forcibly pulled out of his house by ICE, was ignored when he showed his papers, and was shipped from Kentucky to Louisiana where they tried to "deport" him for literally no reason. After a bunch of unnecessary judicial stalling, they just kicked him out on to the street 600 miles from home and he would have essentially been homeless if the community hadn't rallied around him.
(Concerned that the information they would be required to store and handle may require they work with the government during a subpoena)
Apple also has to handle this (internally) to do push notifications, but I suppose that theory is Apple has pockets to fight the government (or it's at least out of the developers hands)
Yeah, that's basically what I deduced. They throw Android under the bus but _really_ it's not any more private, it just makes it up to Apple to comply, not the developer.
There is an argument to be made that Apple is better positioned to fight financially... However, the current administration tends to threaten blocking or mergers/acquisitions, or other red tape unless they comply. I doubt Apple would accept such financially damaging threats to protect ICEBlock's users.
You can frame it like that if you want yes but they certainly aren't "resisting pressure from law enforcement".
As a side note, they do fight sometimes, they fought the EU's DMA for example, but in Russia and China, they complied without a fight though to my knowledge.
It's a different risk calculation with the current government. Deny blocking this, and suddenly there are new tariffs designed to especially hurt Apple, or other punishments for not complying.
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
As other commenters have noted, Apple's treatment of Russian and Chinese users should not give you hope for their resisting US federal oversight.
Apple fought back against forced decryption orders. They could theoretically decrypt any iPhone they're given with new firmware but they don't want to.
On the other hand, Google isn't exactly working with the authorities either. They moved Google Maps' location history to on-device storage because of the many warrants they were served, for instance, and they too refuse to decrypt phones.
These companies know to pick their battles, but they did take on the government various times.
> They could theoretically decrypt any iPhone they're given with new firmware but they don't want to.
This is untrue at some technical level: Apple is currently unable to break AES-256.
The San Bernadino case was about having Apple create and sign new firmware that would enable a brute force attack - which could easily be unsuccessful. I don't believe the Secure Enclave found in newer models even allows for a brute force attack (enforcing some delay, among other things) from BFU state.
If there is any silver lining in any of this, it may be that people will finally start taking privacy as not completely irrelevant trade-off to convenience. I am not really holding my breath, but if people do not have that level of self-preservation in relatively clear instances, it probably does not matter anyway.
The issue is much older than the current US administration : Apple has been listed as participating to PRISM since 2012, and considering the whole opacity of the Patriot Act (and its derivatives), the secret courts in particular, it makes whatever they (or any other US company) might say about their commitment to privacy (when the opponent is the US government) rather irrelevant.
(Personally, I am suspecting that they do try much more than some other companies, but again, the opacity makes it impossible to verify.)
So GrapheneOS says two irrelevant things: one, about ANDROID_ID, and two, about spoofing locations.
Even if we know nothing about what's going on behind the scenes, we know for a fact that Google keeps and uses data that can correlate any user / device with their actions. This is something their business model includes, and we all know they do this all the time. They've even been caught lying, saying they weren't doing this when in fact they were.
So it's incredibly disingenuous for GrapheneOS to mention two irrelevant things, then make the claim that, "Making posts with inaccurate technical claims about Android doesn't inspire confidence."
Yes, GrapheneOS, this doesn't inspire confidence at all. I wouldn't believe anyone who writes irrelevant things when discussing very specific issues in an attempt to confuse and mislead.
Apple tracks user location too. If you log into your iCloud from a country you've never been to, you're going to have to need to provide your 2FA code even with a valid session token. They're not stupid.
Apple is very much in favour of user privacy, as long as that privacy means "protecting your data from third parties". When it comes to the data Apple itself collects, they're far less conservative. They don't share information derived from their massive databases per se, but they do keep track.
Thanks to Apple and Find My, stalking people is easier than ever. The company can look up where you are and where you've been. They'd probably fight a court order to provide live location data to ICE, but who knows what that'll mean with the current American government.
Even on iOS, user data ends up in the hands of data brokers through ads. They're not supposed to collect all that data, but that's not stopping an unethical company from trying.
Android's privacy issues are there, but only if you're protecting your privacy against companies. If you're trying to protect your privacy against the government, there's no difference, really.
But Google doesn't have to be involved! GrapheneOS is specifically a de-googled Android.
Even for normal Google-y Android, you could provide the APK to side-load, so it doesn't go through the Play Store or Google's FCM at all, an option you don't have with Apple.
I think this is what the Graphene posts are trying to say.
As others mention, having a web app would make a lot of sense.
ICEBlock is actively lying, is not open source and is confidently misleading many.
While I don't want to assume regular fed honeypot, we can at the very least be certain that it's an app made by an Apple Kool-Aid drinking person. iOS is, in many ways, more susceptible to governement subpoenas than an Android app would ever be. Sideloading, UnifiedPush, maintaining a connection to a server to handle notifications yourself are all more secure than just trusting that Apple will not just hand you over to the cops.
In addition, if the author is worried about a subpoena, it means that they're US based. Which is an absurdly stupid thing to do if you're going to make a fascist-reporting app while living in a fascist country.
This clearly demonstrates that the developer doesn't know what they're talking about. If anything, android is more secure because you can
A. Sideload an app so that google play store doesn't know you've installed it.
B: Run periodic background tasks to poll any https endpoint so no service provider has logs of device ids for push notifications.
C: Create local notifications on the device.
In this case the only logs that any company could be asked to produce is server logs which only show ip addresses.
I think this is a very good question to ask, along with why the Trump admin is threatening the developer rather than Apple. Forcing Apple to take it down is the only way to get rid of it now that it’s been published. Combine that with the fact that most people had never heard of this app before Trump made it go viral. I think we’ve all had enough conspiracy theories to last a lifetime, but it would be wise to exercise caution here.
I don't want to advocate for the Google Play store, but doesn't seem like legitimate technical / privacy reasons.
I know it's possible to do push notifications without user accounts - I'm doing that in an app I maintain.
But it is tedious to publish Android apps with a personal developer account - you need to run a 2 week test with 12 (used to be 20) users before you can release the app.
What prevents law enforcement for ordering the developer to alter the application in a way that reveals user info, maybe the order is simply that they have to hand over their signing certificates for the app?
Interesting. I was wondering about that. There are definitely solutions out there that'd make this feasible on Android from a privacy perspective, but may need a bit more work. Perhaps like ntfy.
Also, as an offside, this is one of the things I hate about Google's handling of AOSP: they keep shuttling things into their proprietary layer, making it next to impossible for alternative approaches to gain traction.
Yeah people dont know what they dont know, but just the fact people are risking their freedom to do something is important.
Someone explain to him that whatever he is doing, he needs to end to end encrypt so none of the infrastructure or middlemen can see anything but ips and who installed it (until they control the end device). (Better yet use veilid if it works yet, or i think there is some kind of tor routing over http these days)
Also he is making a weird mistake by not being a website instead of obvious corporate controlled "app", also should have tried harder to keep anonymous
Apple could be subpoenaed for the data, and we all know that Tim Apple is happy to jump when Trump says jump.
Meanwhile on Android they could easily just distribute the app from their own website and if they really insist on push messages there are plenty of non-google options that are actually private.
Making your own push system on Android is rather unreliable. On phones from several brands (Samsung, for one) the system would constantly try to kill any long-running polling operation or background refresh daemon.
I don't really see their point about device IDs, though. There are ways around that, from cryptography to on-device filtering.
It's also not like Apple isn't storing device IDs to send these push messages. There's no difference to user privacy.
All of that said, by leaving it up to Apple to keep track of device IDs, they're not going to be on the hook for warrants. The government can get that data from Apple instead, but they can claim innocence. It's CYA.
yeah, i'm certainly not the "police officers are biggest monsters in the history of the universe" type but this app seems like a nothing burger from a legal standpoint. If there was an ice raid near me i'd like to know so i can avoid the traffic. Besides, people have to report the sighting when they see it so it's not like it gives a warning to a raid before it happens, only during or after the fact.
Why isn't this a privacy first PWA? Is a native iOS app more secure? Even if I delete it from my device it's still in my "Cloud" and there's a record (at Apple) of me downloading/installing it.
Apple provides a lot of things for free that you'd otherwise have to pay for (maintain, pay for, and/or scale) yourself. A big one that comes to mind is maps API and geocoding. This is all free on iOS, if you use the API from a native app.
I maintain an app on both iOS, Android, and the web, and the google maps API costs (used on Android and Web) add up really fast.
Serving tiles sucks. Generating tiles sucks even more. In CPU time, in storage, in network. It's really not something you want to handle yourself, and most of the OSM alternatives end up basically only preloading a small area. Their vector renderer's performance is also somewhat bad.
>the google maps API costs (used on Android [...]) add up really fast.
The regular Maps SDK on Android is entirely free. There are very few reasons to even end up paying API costs, you're either running afoul of their terms of service, or wanting to use dynamic maps for some reason. My company has 15M monthly users on a _very_ maps heavy app and pays absolutely nothing on Android.
Aren't there also browser APIs for location services? I imagine this functionality could be possible with a web app.
Edit: What I don't know is whether a web app running on iOS could do the equivalent of a push notification. Last I heard, WebKit's functionality is/was? limited here. That might be a reason to use a native app after all.
The tricky part here is receiving notifications in your proximity while the app is in the background. Native apps can request permission to track your location at all times, but I don't think that's an option for PWAs.
A small number of people could easily flood a system like this with bad reports. Every good faith user has to wait for an actual sighting - bad faith users don’t.
In my immediate area, ICE has been "spotted" numerous times and that news relayed on social media. Unfortunately, ICE hasn't actually engaged in any removal operations in this county. All of the sightings have been other agencies. The spotters are batting 0.0, and that's without any bad faith actors purposely spoofing reports.
Unfortunate for the spotters: they've been wrong about who they're seeing in the field. In this area, all of the Feds that have been seen have been DEA and HSI after suspects who are US citizens, not ICE enforcing immigration law. The spotters are historically not good at distinguishing Feds from each other, which makes the utility of this app a little questionable (unless you're just trying to avoid all police).
My guess, and it's just a guess, is that the ordered scale-back on ICE agricultural worker immigration enforcement took place before they got to this county. That said, I don't know why they haven't been here, just that they haven't.
Sounds a lot like a problem the current administration created. Blowback is a real phenomenon. Americans are having trouble distinguishing which teams of masked men with guns roaming our streets and courthouses are "the good guys".
apparently the developer has consulted attorneys on the matter. in any case, i would have thought that simply reporting an officer's presence is completely legal as you aren't really obstructing them
How is it any different from Google Maps' "Police Reported Here" feature?
In the U.S., sharing the location of police officers is generally protected by the First Amendment, as long as the information is obtained legally and is publicly available. This is why apps like Waze and police scanners are lawful and widely used.
For an act to qualify as obstruction of justice, there must be a clear and intentional effort to hinder or delay law enforcement in the investigation, arrest, or prosecution of a crime.
Since that's obviously the intent with this app, it's relying on a thin veneer of plausible deniability.
A question as a non-American that I hope will be taken in the spirit of enquiry.
I am hearing a lot more about ICE raids, particularly on reddit. Is this an artefact of more attention to raids that have been going on for years, or is there an increase in the number or impact of the raids? I find it hard to tell as I'm in somewhat of a bubble in terms of the US news I come across.
It has increased massively since the beginning of this administration, and more importantly for the news has become less about targeted raids and more about a show of force.
For a bit of context, the administration decided to use undocumented people (read: Latin migrants) as (one of many) scapegoats and made a to promise to deport a certain number of millions. By most accounts the number of immigrants he promised to deport is well above the number of undocumented immigrants in the country, especially Latin migrant workers, which has been the target of, to put it frankly, persecution.
They're being conducted by disguised goons with the explicit purpose of making it harder to identify that an ICE raid is happening. If you haven't seen the video of Rümeysa Öztürk's detention, I think you'll understand the concern fully when you do - they're just doing action movie kidnappings and calling them immigration enforcement.
These raids are objectively more frequent and more brazen than they have ever been. The volume of going after people peacefully about their business and picking up people at courthouses is unprecedented.
I'm fine with that. I call ICE the Gestapo under my real name too. Unless and until they start rounding up citizens en masse, anyone who can has a duty to.
Interesting that this is an iOS app, not Android or web app. What percent of illegal immigrants who are worried about being randomly swept up (i.e., those who can be visibly profiled) have iOS devices?
I was under the impression that iOS devices were prevalent among wealthy and aspiring wealthy Americans, but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
>I was under the impression that iOS devices were prevalent among wealthy and aspiring wealthy Americans, but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
I think your impression is pretty dated, like to 2010 or something?Apple has generally kept iPhones fully updated for a good 5-7 years, with some security updates after and apps typically supporting n-1 or n-2 OS. Current iOS 18 supports devices back to the iPhone XR/XS released in 2018. And the pace of progress has leveled off a huge amount since the heady early days in the steep part of the S-curve. But prices still fall fast on used phones. Even if you go back fewer years, iPhone 11s and 12s can be had for a few hundred bucks or less and still work well (I had a 12 until recently). Battery replacement can be done for ~$30.
So while sure, if someone was always on the newest phone that'd have some premium, it's definitely not any big deal or sign of riches to have an iPhone. They're all over the US market space.
I'm just going based off of what type of devices I see people using. The wealthy people I know who are not devs generally have iPhones. The people I see working in positions that may not require legal status seem to be much more on the Android side of things. Back in 2010, low-income people did not have smartphones, period. I'd be curious if there's any data available on current trends.
I will never understand people defending migration for ideological reasons.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. Your empathy or moral display is of no interest to me, yet upholding a social order and public safety is.
So why should everyone sacrifice the first for your moral display?
What exactly do you believe you’re sacrificing because of immigration? Immigrants commit fewer crimes in the US than native born Americans, so I’m finding your comment all around confusing.
Cheaper and easier to build. Apple's SDK offers a lot of options and doesn't require a lot of credit card details, unlike some of Google's APIs.
Plus, web apps are gimped on iOS (no notification support without going through a cumbersome PWA installation flow and data getting wiped every 14 days if you're just letting it run in the background).
You see, we've had government mandated "apps", but they are intentionally "hidden" (only by omission of course) from the layperson! So you, John Q. Public, are not exposed to them, but every regulated service provider is turned into a facilitator for law enforcement monitoring activity.
Bumping it down to handsets simply hasn't been done because it's just easier to plug in upstream through Third Party Doctrine and it'd be self-defeating in a sense to straight up make and admit that handsets purpose is to surveil you for law enforcement purposes. Businesses can have compliance compelled through the threat of disincorporation, so can be relied upon to cooperate as a pre-requisite of doing business.
Now, this software is generally considered "the good guys doing good guy things" so isn't generally considered problematic. As I hope is being learned by everyone; there is no line between a system that exists for well intentioned people to do good things with and a system capable of being used by evil people to do evil things, at scale with.
Well they could do that for theater but they don't need it anymore
They've already illegally cross-linked all the federal databases and banking data
People would have to be 100% off the grid which is nearly impossible and miserable these days
The real question is after they run out of 15 million "undocumented"
will ICE be used again 25 million naturalized citizens (yes likely with new $140 Billion budget)
And then there is the question how many millions of birthright citizens will ICE go after, how many generations back, where on earth would they deport them since they've never lived in any other country?
US won't be recognizable by 2028, going to be a horror show
$140 billion for 15 million illegal immigrants is under $10,000 per deportation, which strikes me as kind of light, given that as the process is likely to involve international plane flights, board. and so on.
I don't think there are any plans to deport citizens or legal immigrants, as opposed to illegal aliens.
The real question is that if the Dems ever get power back, what can be done to punish the bad people who participated in all this criminality?
With every other social norm being broken, I don't see why political reprisals shouldn't be the way forward. Just say that any of the pardons were illegal[1], and start stripping citizenship from anyone involved in this.
The genie's out of the bottle, and not punishing the thugs involved in this would just embolden them and their minions to try harder the next time they have power. Criminality should have consequences.
Deprivation of rights under color of law is a serious crime in this country, and should be treated as such.
[1] The current administration regularly declares immigration decisions made by the previous one illegal, and retroactively applies that label to the people affected by them. I'm not sure why any of its decisions should be worth the paper they are printed on, if it is ever theown out.
I bet is going to be like with the Patriot Act, the torture, and all the other horrible things from GWOT. Things are going to be tweaked to fit a new agenda, but carried nonetheless.
How so? If I report seeing ICE at 123 Main St., that doesn't mean there are more than usual undocumented immigrants there. It just means that's where I saw ICE at that moment.
Years ago I had to live the house in a hurry for my daughter nearly died due to a very rare medical complication. So I forgot to put the alarm on. Twelve hours later I came back home to pick some clothes for my kid and wife (as she had to stays for days at the hospital) only to arrive and see gypsies [1] watching the entrance of the street. I arrived at my home and, well, thieves had broken, damaged our window and stolen belongings of ours. While my kid was between life and death.
Now today, no latter than today, on the way to school, I saw four police car and policemen everywhere, obviously looking for someone. Then I saw a gypsy [1] hiding in the bushes, waiting for the proper moment to jump over a fence and evade cops.
Karma is a bitch. I drove in reverse and yelled at the cops, pointing to where the guy was. And they got him.
You fuck with me (by visiting my house, breaking a window and stealing stuff), I fuck with you.
I have zero tolerance for people turning our high trust societies into low trust ones.
It is my understanding democrats rely on the votes of many illegals to have the representation they have but is this really what this has come to? Import as many illegals as possible to "beat the republicans"?
And side with illegals by writing an app allowing to prevent ICE from doing their job?
I've got a question: I'm an EU citizen. I want to come live to the US. Is it open? Can I just come and live as an illegal alien, not pay taxes, get a free driving license?
Shall you guys root for me? What if I promise to vote democrat? Deal? (for it certainly seems to be part of the deal)
What is a country? What are borders for? Do you find Mexico a political system and economy to be striving to imitate? Do you wish there were more cartels in the US growing plants to make drugs?
Why insisting on protecting illegals? Should US citizenship be granted to anyone who asks for it? Africa shall have one billion more people from now til 2025: should that billion additional people all be sent to the US and given US citizenship?
[1] my father has lived on a plot land in an abandoned trailer next to gypsies: I can tell a gypsy 100% guaranteed.
People are critical of ICEs practices because they ignore the due process constitutional rights of people in the US (all people in the US not just citizens). They abduct people and send them to foreign gulags where they are tortured.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/02/kilmar-abreg...
You misrepresent ICE by acting like they just fight crime.
> I have zero tolerance for people turning our high trust societies into low trust ones.
> It is my understanding democrats rely on the votes of many illegals to have the representation they have but is this really what this has come to? Import as many illegals as possible to "beat the republicans"?
Bruh. Your uncritical consumption and repetition of Faceboot nonsense is exactly what is turning our society into a low trust society. Is a shred of self-awareness too much to ask for?
> "A family that was deported to Mexico hopes they can find a way to return to the U.S. and ensure their 10-year-old daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, can continue her brain cancer treatment."
So far as I can tell, the girl left with her parents (who are not US citizens). This has been the pattern in all of these cases that I have heard about so far. It’s completely disingenuous to suggest that these situations are equivalent to “American citizens being deported” like they are running no-knock raids on farmsteads in Idaho.
These children are still entitled to return if they are in the custody of a guardian who has a legal right to reside in the US.
ICE deporting US citizens is not a new problem. In 2021 the GAO estimated that between 2015-2020 70 potential U.S. citizens were removed.
There are also cases where children who are citizens have been removed with a parent. In those cases the US government claims that they parents voluntary took the children, while the families claim that little no chance was given for the families to arrange for the children to stay.
I am reading “potential citizen” as “a detainee who claims to be an American citizen whose citizenship status was not ascertained.” The article doesn’t really give a good indication of if these cases had any merit. Since officers are supposed to stop the interview if they believe the individual is a US citizen, I suspect that these deportations were warranted. Law enforcement can get things wrong, but in this case, I haven’t heard of any documented instances where this has happened.
> Wikipedia has a good round of sources for the recent removals of US children:
This article cites two examples, and in both instances the parents were residing in the country illegally with children who were not even in grade school yet. Jus Soli leads to all kinds of absurdities like this. The idea that a 2 year old being sent back to his mother’s country of origin is comparable to “American citizens being deported” is farcical; it’s technically true, but completely misleading. The people making these claims intend to frighten the audience into believing that regular immigration enforcement actions like these are somehow comparable to kidnapping people off of the street.
> I am reading “potential citizen” as “a detainee who claims to be an American citizen whose citizenship status was not ascertained.”
That's not what it means in this context. The GAO report is based on ICE's own database records, they found 70 deportees that records indicated they were potentially citizens.
> Law enforcement can get things wrong, but I haven’t read of any documented instances of this happening.
Wikipedia has an article that lists documented instances of citizens being removed.
> Wikipedia has an article that lists documented instances of citizens being removed.
Thanks. It looks like the article lists 8 instances where deportation occurred. In 3 of those instances, the deportee sued and successfully returned, and in 2 they appear to have failed to return after their deportation. This is more like 3 / 5 though as the examples involving children were not technically deportations of the children but of the parents, who were not US citizens.
So it’s more than 0, but so far as I can tell none of the counted deportations occurred when Trump was in office; the last one was in 2008.
There was an 18 year old legal resident in my city that was forcibly pulled out of his house by ICE, was ignored when he showed his papers, and was shipped from Kentucky to Louisiana where they tried to "deport" him for literally no reason. After detaining him for a month and a bunch of unnecessary judicial stalling, they just kicked him out on to the street 600 miles from home and he would have essentially been homeless if the community hadn't rallied around him.
- ICE has not previously arrested en-masse the first-time visa overstays via felony responses. It's typically a misdemeanor offense, and should receive a different response from ICE.
I don't care if it's "productive" in some narrow sense. If I discover that someone works for or with ICE during the current administration, I am precommitting to lose my mind over it. I'll block them, undermine them, blacklist them, do whatever I can to punish them for their heinous actions. I understand and accept that this diminishes the incentives for ICE to behave incrementally better, because I don't think that behaving incrementally better is adequate. ICE has a lot of hiring coming up with their new budget, and I want every applicant to understand that taking the job will ruin their life.
I disagree that the raids have been going on with this frequency or with this level of going after people in neighborhoods, preying on them at courthouses and so on.
It is critical to consider the context as well. The Trump administration demonizes all immigrants, legal or illegal. Listen to Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, or Laura Loomer. The terror is the point.
i want to assume you have good intent here, but you have to understand that this is kind of tone-deaf in the face of my neighbors being forced into vans and disappeared. i'm truly happy that you haven't had to experience the same kind of abuse and i hope that ICE doesn't start disappearing people who fly private planes alongside fruit vendors and day laborers for the crime of being brown.
The application appears to be a geofenced messaging application like Yik Yak. What is to prevent feds from joining and changing their appearance based on reports of their current appearance?
Is the stat they keep repeating relevant? Attacks on ICE agents increased 500%? If attacks went from 1 to 6 that is an increase of 500% but if there is also 6x more ICE activity the baseline rate of attack is the same.
It’s like complaining there’s more shark attacks in the summer vs winter and concluding sharks have seasonal mood swings.
This isn't actually true, because interference is illegal ONLY when you physically obstruct or deceive officers - warning others about police or ICE presence is speech that courts protect as a First Amendment right.
A federal judge in Missouri barred tickets for drivers who flashed headlights to signal a speed trap, the Supreme Court in Houston v. Hill affirmed the right to challenge police verbally, and other federal rulings in Florida and Tennessee reached the same conclusion.
Alerting neighbors that agents are around is expression, not obstruction. And case law protects it in case they want to try (though this is becoming increasingly irrelevant, which - at the same time - makes our social contract to honor such institutions proportionally irrelevant)
Alerting people of traffic checks does not directly encourage them to engage in illegal acts. Telling people to hide from the police when there is a legal reason for detention on the other hand does.
You’re going to have to make a convincing argument that alerting people of a traffic cop isn’t the same as alerting people of police presence in general, and that the merits of one has more weight for the usage of someone already committing crimes.
As it is, by batting for the legality of alerting traffic checks, you’re already batting for the alert and notification of police presence - because that’s what traffic checks consist of
Courts are not stupid. You're not "altering people of police presence in general" when you're making or participating an app that is clearly intended to help people facing the legal consequences of their actions.
That assumes people were going to break the law in the first place by speeding... you can't be guilty of the crime of not helping someone else commit a crime.
Maybe if they had some way to prove that you knew it would help them avoid police in order to speed... but that seems like a pretty high bar of evidence would be required (and they would have to attempt to go after you in the first place).
>Reporting on the presence on police is protected first amendment activity
Using this specific app is obviously protected by the 1st Amendment, which is why the relevant laws are much more specific than merely "interfering with law enforcement."
It still shocks me that, as republican politicians and voters rode their high horse about free speech absolutism for the last ten years, so many people believed they were sincere.
On what grounds? Could you give a simple search term for this?
This reminds me of the musk elonjet case on twitter. Generally, if I were to follow a person (in public spaces) and constantly report their location, is that against the law? (If yes, could you clarify which law specifically?) If it is truly against the law here, does it make a difference that here the reports are non-individual in nature, ie reporting that ice is present, not that a particular ice officer is present.
Is there something special about doing the same thing for police/ice?
I think I remember this kind of scenario coming up in supreme court cases before but don't remember specifics, and google isn't helping.
But I admit I generally feel that my response is "So what?"
which seems to suggest this specific scenario has not been addressed by the supreme court, but has been addressed by various appeals courts, and it claims that 61% of the population lives in states that have affirmed this right.
It's funny how quickly those apps become terrible. It was the same with the conservative versions of twitter when they were banning republican politicians; something about how when there are a lot of users looking for things to interact with and limited spam prevention algorithms you end up with terrible content.
I don't see what's so bad about wanting to avoid an area where there's police activity going on. It has nothing to do with whether or not you're doing anything wrong, it's as simple as not wanting to get hassled at a DUI checkpoint or get stuck in traffic because they need 8 squad cars taking up a lane to k-9 search someone. As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
There's barely any point examining the app on its merits.
The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state. They are against the app for that reason. They don't really care about what it does or does not do. It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE" and they'd still happily claim it endangers officers lives.
(the fact that they're also able to attack independent media at the same time just makes it all the more alluring target)
They literally did detain travelers who have funny meme images of the VP on their phones.
This is a perfect example of the problem with media reporting bullshit and then later correcting it. Everyone hears the bullshit, very few people hear the actual reason.
they detained him for his drug use
https://x.com/CBP/status/1937651325354795444
"He told the Norwegian newspaper Nordlys that he was questioned at the airport about illegal drug use.
He admitted to having used cannabis on two occasions — in Germany and in New Mexico.
- It’s legal in both places, so in my mind it was irrelevant, he said." - Nordlys
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/25/norwegian-tourist-jd-... https://www.nordlys.no/denied-entry-to-the-us-admitted-to-le...
Sadly, if that were actually true that would be even f*** worse.
Oh we're not going to let tourists into our country because we asked them whether or not they'd ever smoked pot and they said yes.
We have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but if it is, that's the dumbest thing I've ever f*** heard, especially given the marijuana's legal in most states in the United States that anyone outside the US would actually want to visit
If the existence of the app is evidence of nascent police state, what does increasing the budget of ICE by 13x suggest?
That reinforces the idea of police state
Civil war, obviously.
Genuine question: is sharing the location or distribution of information about police presence illegal? I assume this would be treated differently if it involved military positions, but I'm curious about how the law applies in this case.
Waze is another example of an app where users can share information about police presence or roadblocks, while useful to some, could also be seen as having negative implications depending on the context.
While your question is meaningful and well intentioned, let me point out that it may be inconsequential. The legality of an action is moot when the regime ignores and defies the entire basis of those laws - the constitution. It's like trying to evaluate yourself against a standard that is no longer followed.
Instead, evaluate yourself on the basis of your standing with the regime. If they dislike you for any reason including your skin color, they will find some sort of national security threat in your actions. Or they may punish you first and then claim the inability to correct it. On the other hand if they need you, they will completely ignore your actions, including even leaking of extremely sensitive information to unauthorized individuals.
yeah, it's more a question of "has america's justice system been reduced to arbitrary persecution of things the president or his executives deem a threat to America".
Because that's basically what's unfolding under fascism means.
That's a rhetorical question at this point.
Deporting people who are in the country illegally is very much in line with the constitution.
Deporting people who are in the country illegally is in line with the constitution. Deporting people without due process is not.
Most countries don't give you a court hearing for being in the country without a visa or other authorization. Being shipped into a detention facility until you can be deported is the norm here.
How many of those countries are subject to the US constitution?
Even this is stretching it. It's not as though the Andrew Jackson administration was doing deportations (besides the Trail of Tears, which was euphemistically referred to as a deportation campaign). The practice of criminalizing immigration enforcement didn't coincide with any amendment to the Constitution, which is itself only nominally even part of U.S. law anymore.
Genuinely curious for a good faith answer: one administration allows tens of millions of people into the country during its term. You are saying that every individual is owed multiple court hearings, the full gamut which is usually used for people overstaying a visa or something. A system equipped to handle a relatively small number of people.
The court system cannot possibly fulfill these tens of millions of cases in any reasonable time frame. These people will be in court for the rest of our lives and in the meantime they will have children and ultimately be allowed to stay forever by some future administration. Which is basically the same as just making them citizens.
Do you have a proposed solution other than decades worth of court dates? It doesn’t really seem like the other side has a good faith solution to the problem other than just letting them all stay here forever.
Or maybe I’m missing something and haven’t heard the other side’s arguments.
"Following the law is tedious and expensive" is not actually an argument for violating the law.
All rights for criminal defendants make the state's job harder.
> Do you have a proposed solution other than decades worth of court dates? It doesn’t really seem like the other side has a good faith solution to the problem other than just letting them all stay here forever.
I think we are at a point where we should accept that there will be decades of court dates. The real alternative is that anyone can be taken away because there would be no process for even a multi-generation born citizen to challenge the arrest. The real deterrent for it happening to such a citizen is reporting and publicity, which is increasingly seeming like it can be thwarted by a population that is primed to strip the humanity of those they disagree with.
The way this is being handled, the timeline where we just let those 10 million stay in the country and avoid similar things in the future seems very appealing indeed. Two wrongs don’t make a right, as the saying goes.
>just let those 10 million stay in the country and avoid similar things in the future
But this is what I’m getting at, this is not the first time this has happened, it’s been happening with millions of people for generations now. Heck Reagan pardoned millions back in the 1980’s. So how long are we supposed to keep saying “okay you guys can stay but let’s do better in the future”? After so many decades it is obvious that nothing is going to change without some kind of drastic political change, which is basically why Trump was elected.
But just looking at the system from a Birds Eye view: it’s easy in, difficult out. All it takes is one president to not enforce the law and the law is basically moot. Just seems disingenuous the people saying deporting people is horrible yet offering no solutions other than to just let them all stay here forever. We are well past the point where saying we’ll do better in the future is an argument that anyone will accept.
Why is there nobody suggesting a law to expedite or fast track the “due process”? That at least seems like a moderate approach.
> people saying deporting people is horrible
No, you are not hearing what I am saying. This particular implementation of deportations puts you and I and anyone else at long-term risk of being deported in a similar manner. It puts legal residents at a more immediate risk of being deported in a similar manner. You can’t fast-track due process; that is the point. If you are not afforded due process for allegations that you are an illegal immigrant before you are shipped away then the damage is done and it doesn’t matter that you can prove you were born here to parents who were born here.
I understand what you’re saying and I can agree with you that the rule of law is important. You are ignoring the fact that the previous admin ignored due process for letting them in in the first place, but that was not my original question. You still have not offered any kind of solution other than letting them all stay forever, and at this point the majority of the electorate is more interested in seeing them all go back than making sure that every single one gets their day in court.
> You can’t fast-track due process
We can make laws and change systems, a serious good faith solution would be to propose changes to the due process to account for this case we keep finding ourselves in where we have 20 million people who need to be processed and a system with no hope of handling them all.
>You are ignoring the fact that the previous admin ignored due process for letting them in in the first place
We thought you were kidding, this isn't a fact, it's the complete opposite of a fact, in otherwords, a lie. Very famously the number of arrests of people cross the border went up while biden was president.
Aside from that ludicrous lie, we have to evaluate the situation where we actually live. If there was a literal magic genie who could cause 10 million people to instantly teleport then maybe we could talk about it, but there isn't, so we don't.
In actual reality land, spending 100 billion dollars in order to arrest and deport millions of people who work and pay taxes and in general support the economy of this country is hilariously stupid. Also evil, lets not forget that.
Every axis you want to try to evaluate this on fails at the most cursory examination. Obviously it's a waste of money because you're spending money to remove tax payers and consumers, so that's a double negative. It's also immoral due to the sheer amount of crimes and human rights violations that have already taken place and will continue to take place.
It's not even particularly effective as some kind of macho statement, deporting your own citizens isn't going to impress anyone.
> We can make laws and change systems, a serious good faith solution would be to propose changes to the due process
No, a serious good faith solution would be to establish an actual working immigration/citizenship system with clear rules and then enforce them, because the current situation endangers everyone.
I'm from a different country. We have ID cards. You strictly need an ID card (or a different proof of citizenship or right to residence) from the age of 18 (or even sooner if you are attending schools, using the health system etc) to do basically anything. It's not possible to live here your whole life as a full member of the society without that. When I read how someone lives 60 years in the US without actual legal basis to do that I just shudder. People should be forced to resolve their legal situation one way or another much sooner. And I am pro-immigration, but also there should be order in that.
Once you have a clear, fast proof of right to reside in a country, you don't need to touch due process because it can go fast.
> a serious good faith solution
You are free to offer something yourself. I was answering your question:
> Do you have a proposed solution other than decades worth of court dates?
No, I don’t. At least, not one that doesn’t degrade rule of law. I’m all ears for better solutions but this shit I’m seeing ain’t it.
It kind of sounds like you need to offer a solution not him. Because his side did come up with a solution and are implementing it.
Some people start abducting anyone off the streets and it’s called a “solution” so other people who don’t like it need to shut up or offer a better one? Well, we are each entitled to our opinion and I don’t agree with that one.
Anyway, here’s a better solution: let them stay. I can’t see how that would be nearly as bad as this. For me personally, for my neighbors, for the rust belt, indeed for anybody except those wanting to abuse power.
Let's not continue using propaganda numbers around undocumented immigrants. There's not 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. There's roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in total, and that number has _decreased_ since the early 2000s (when it was closer to 12 million).
A decent percentage of these immigrants are seasonal. A very, very small percentage of the total of undocumented immigrants have criminal histories. Focusing efforts on violent criminals is reasonable, but that doesn't meet the propaganda numbers from the current administration. Deporting tens of thousands of people just doesn't rally hate the same way.
Rather than spending time and money building concentration camps, building out secret police (ICE), and deporting people without due process, we could be fixing our immigration system.
Let's make work visas that allow migrant workers to work seasonally. Let's add paths to citizenship to migrant workers. Let's prioritize fast paths to citizenship for students, especially those with masters and PHDs. Let's introduce a point system to encourage immigration of the best and brightest from high demand countries, allowing them prioritized visas, PRs and naturalization. Let's fix the DREAMER situation by providing those folks clear paths to citizenship.
The reason the immigration situation doesn't get better is because republicans need it to be broken. They use undocumented immigrants as a group to target hate against, which rallies their base.
> The reason the immigration situation doesn't get better is because republicans need it to be broken.
I try to keep an open mind but its very hard to take the debate seriously when you end with disingenuous points like this.
Why'd they refuse to pass an immigration bill under Biden then?
so you're willing to pay for it?
Prosecutions would be much cheaper if defendants couldn't get court appointed lawyers. Or if we didn't have the exclusionary rule. Or if prosecutions didn't need to turn over Brady evidence.
Are you willing to pay for these things? It'd be much more efficient for a cop to simply murder anybody suspected of a crime. Efficiency should not be the goal when it comes to people's rights.
And a bullet is cheaper then incarceration. But we have a duty to human rights, which isn't always cost effective or expedient. But if those rights are lost for anyone they're lost for everyone. After all, how do you prove you're owed due process in the absence of said due process?
They had people being deported while they were on the queue to renew their documents. US American born citizens were deported just because they "looked latinos". Your legal status is pretty much just in the eyes of whoever ICE agent you're gonna meet today.
Is there proof of this? What’s the source?
US citizens were deported because of their skin color?
I think this is disinformation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/los-angeles-...
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/ice-us-citizens-arrest-deportati...
>Gavidia was released
>Eventually, the officers reviewed the identification in his wallet and released him
I thought you said they were deported based on their skin color? Both of these articles seem to say the opposite of that.
Much selective quoting on your part, here is the other half of the truth:
> Gavidia was released, but Javier Ramirez, another US citizen who is Gadivia’s friend and coworker, was detained by two agents, forced facedown on the ground and taken to federal detention, where he has remained in custody, the New York Times reported.
Arrested and eventually released is guilty until proven innocent.
What about deporting a student who is in the country legally as punishment writing an op-ed you don't like?
as a guest that's the deal in most countries.
Actually, that's NOT the deal in most Western democracies. In countries with free speech protections, writing an op-ed as a legal resident is following the rules, not breaking them.
Yes, even Western democracies sometimes fail at this - through mistakes, bad laws, or moments of fear. That's precisely why we need to call it out when it happens, not shrug and normalize it.
Rights are inherent to all people. When any government - Western or otherwise - punishes peaceful political expression, they're violating fundamental human rights.
'That's just how it is' is how rights erode. We should aspire to strengthen protections for everyone, not excuse their violation by pointing to other failures.
> that's the deal in most countries
Most countries aren’t America.
So.. America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country? If I went to Mexico and started protesting I would fully expect Mexico to send me home. And I'd support their right to do so.
This comparison actually undermines the argument. Mexico's constitution allows non-citizens to participate in peaceful protests generally - it only restricts participation in 'political affairs of the country' specifically (Article 9)[1]. So even Mexico, with significantly weaker democratic institutions, is more permissive than the scenario being described. Canada, meanwhile, guarantees peaceful assembly for everyone (Charter Section 2(c))[2]. The premise that other democracies would automatically deport protesters simply doesn't hold up.
[1] https://www.constitucionpolitica.mx/titulo-1-garantias-indiv...
[2] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-12.html under article 2(c)
ICE is already brutally arresting vacationers in the US on valid tourist visas, accusing them of being "illegals" simply for being brown. This is why no one from the rest of the world wants to vacation, work, or live in America anymore.
> ICE is already brutally arresting vacationers in the US on valid tourist visas, accusing them of being "illegals" simply for being brown.
Can you back that up with evidence? Just because someone claims that they were denied entry / detained / deported due to skin color doesn't mean that was the case. Many such cases where media has jumped on to claims that turned out to be false.
> This is why no one from the rest of the world wants to vacation, work, or live in America anymore.
Absolutely false, only those who let them be manipulated by scare media think there is actually a measurable risk for coming to the US legally.
> So.. America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country?
Free speech is (was?) an American interest. Further, the country contains multitudes of different, opposing interests, not just those of the current regime.
For all its grandstanding over “cancel culture” this regime’s unusually thin skin when it comes to opposing views would be laughable, were it not so dangerous and abusive.
> America can't protect American interests when deciding who should be in the country?
America shouldn’t be sending masked goons into courthouses to disappear people.
I was actually supportive of Trump’s illegal immigrant pitch at the get go. But then he totally ignored the gangs, going after tax-paying migrants because Miller found them easier to round up. And then he started deporting Americans.
This isn’t even a problem of evil. It’s one of incompetence. We have a bunch of nutwads in masks wearing camo doing whatever they can to hit numbers. This is bureaucratic failure on steroids.
> I'd support their right to do so
Honestly, I’m fine with this. I am also fine with someone publishing this app. (We frankly need a database of ICE agents who have broken the law so they can be dealt with down the road.)
Do you like freedom or not?
What makes you say that?
America argues it is their right to assemble who they want in their borders.
Not America. The current administration and a select set of piss poor citizens
> Deporting people who are in the country illegally is very much in line with the constitution
You’re correct. But in a somewhat irrelevant way. The problem for most Americans aren’t the deportations. It’s the lack of due process, extrajudicial torture, and expansion of these police privileges to now encompassing all naturalised Americans.
Easy when a DOGE 21 year old can simply open up the SSN database and set your "legal resident?" flag to "no".
it's unlikely the original SS databased had any information about this.
The new one they're building is clearly going to have all this bullshit so they can cherry pick at lightning speed reasons to exile, rendition or punish people.
But just so we're clear, the SS doesn't really care if you're a citizen. All it's tracking is who pays into it and who receives the benefits from the payments.
Yeah, I don't think the US actually has a reliable nationality status database other than those it's issued passports to. This may make the situation worse rather than better for those affected.
>Deporting people who are in the country illegally
Oh? What about people who are permanent residents and are arbitrarily deemed "threat to national security" because of their opposition to Israel? What about the recent denaturalization DOJ unit that was just set up? Are those people "illegally" here too and that is constitutionally valid?
The tunnel vision here is astounding. Do you really not realize that this administration isn't stopping at "just the illegals?" They have deported US citizens, children at that.
Indeed. GP needs to read "First They Came".
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The HN voting record shows that HN broadly agrees with GGP (your GP). It makes sense, since people here are big tech developers, who will never come into contact in police in this kind of way.
how about illegally deporting people?
https://www.cato.org/blog/50-venezuelans-imprisoned-el-salva...
What about sending people who are here legally to a foreign torture camp (not "deporting", by the way) without due process? Is that in line with the Constitution?
No. No it is not.
Stop playing stupid.
https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
What about ignoring due process while doing so? Is that, in your view, in line with the constitution? If it is, what recourse does a US citizen detained by ICE (either accidentally or not) have? Also, how do you view Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship via Executive Order? Birthright citizenship is in the 14th Amendment. If the president is allowed to arbitrarily redefine who is and is not a citizen, are constitutional protections anything more than ink on paper?
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As if that's the extent of things. As if the worst abuses of the Trump administration are just deporting people who were here illegally.
Don't worry about the mass revocations of legal status of previously legal residents. The deprivation of due process. The sending of people to a foreign prison where they endure all kinds of human rights abuses based on flimsy evidence, no due proceas and no expectations of ever getting out alive.
Fascist fucks
IANAL
Flashing your headlights to warn others of cops or anything else is generally considered free speech. IIRC, this has been ruled on several times in pretty high courts.
So double check with a lawyer, but I'm like 99% confident there's nothing illegal about these types of Apps. I mean Waze has been doing it for years and even Google maps notifies you about speed traps.
If some new ruling makes it not free speech, we're in danger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlight_flashing
In the UK during the early era of cars, the Automobile Association used to send boys out with bicycles to warn drivers about speed traps. This was challenged in court, obstruction of justice or some such, so the AA simply inverted the scheme. The boys were now told to always salute cars to signal that everything was okay, but wouldn't salute if there was a speed trap ahead. It was reasoned that the law couldn't compel the boys to salute. Apparently they kept this up for a few decades, before eventually deciding that speed limits were generally reasonable.
If you drive around in EU then be aware that the law is different depending on the country. Schweiz for example do not allow to use or sell databases that has the location of speed cameras. In Germany you are not allowed to use apps that warn you of it. You are also not allowed to use your car lights to warn other drivers, but you can use hand signals. They are however allowed in other places like Belgium, Neitherlands and Spain.
Here is a list (but I can't say how accurate it is): https://lizhiguos.com/driving-aids-and-speed-camera-warnings...
As someone that lives and works on the DACH region, you just have to listen to German and Swiss radios, they do tend to point out radar spots, regardless of those laws, so dunno how they get their permissions to do so.
Now you get the warning on your satnav...
I use OsmAnd and it alerts me to pedestrian crosswalks. My wife uses google and it alerts her to speed enforcement. Interesting difference in priorities.
What are the benefits of crosswalks alerts? Usually, there are lots of signs leading to, and at the crosswalks. This is the opposite for fixed and mobile speed traps, they'd rather it be a surprise to drivers.
The benifit is adding another layer of safety to reduce risk. In the swiss cheese model of accidents, each safety measure is a layer of swiss cheese, which has holes through which accidents may go through. But if you stack up a lot of cheese, the accident has to thread a path through several different holes and that is less likely to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
In Pennsylvania the court ruled that flashing your lights to signal isn’t illegal but it is dangerous at night. So presumably it’s fine during the day, or perhaps one could signal by turning headlights off and on instead.
Flashing headlights gets people to drive more carefully and within the speed limit, thus you are not helping someone commit a crime. However if you help someone avoid being lawfully detained this might make you complicit in their actions and the courts could very well decide differently. Intent very much matters here.
Using this line of reasoning, let’s imagine for a moment that a car speeding 20mph over the limit sees someone on the other side of the road flashing their lights and slows down in time to avoid a ticket.
Hasn’t the light flasher helped someone who was breaking the law avoid detection?
And isn’t the intent of the flasher to ensure that people who were breaking the law have enough time to stop doing that long enough to avoid detection?
> However if you help someone avoid being lawfully detained
Obligatory “I am not a lawyer” disclaimer, but the people who make posts on this app have no contact with the people the app ostensibly benefits. If the app helped targets of ice find willing drivers in the area to help them escape to somewhere else, that’d be one thing since there is now a direct relationship with a person and the accused and direct action on the part of the app user. But I don’t see how this app is materially different from posting speed traps or DUI checkpoints on Waze, an action that has absolutely helped people avoid lawful intervention by police.
Speech that indirectly results in someone committing more crime is not the same as speech that directly incites someone to commit more crime.
The light flasher has merely persuaded someone to stop breaking the law. Whether or not the lights flashed, the police would not have been able to detect prior speeding, but merely detected speeding near them.
An analogy might be to have a sign in a shop warning thieves of CCTV - the purpose is to prevent theft and is not considered to be helping someone avoid detection, although it does also do that.
Fondly remember 20 years ago when I was doing over 100 on a highway in northern Alaska and all the _cop_ did was flash his lights at me to tell me to slow down.
Times sure are changing
We’re saying that “intent very much matters here” but when we are talking about people flashing headlights to warn others of a police-manned speed trap, we focus on the effects of the action. Isn’t the intention of the person flashing their headlights (in many cases) to help people break the law? That is, people see the signal and slow down while passing the speed trap only to increase speed once past, evading detection.
This looks much the same to me as people warning those around them of ICE activity.
Nobody flashes their headlights with the intent that someone will speed up. Driving at night, you're not even able to determine whether oncoming traffic is speeding.
It is literally telling someone to obey the law, because the law is watching.
Maybe they’s why people post on the app too, to remind folks to have their documentation in order.
If you have the app, you likely don't need the reminder. You're either evading ICE or helping other people steer clear of ICE.
Police notifications on GPS don't really give you much notification to turn off onto a different road or to avoid them, at least on freeways, which is the only time I've seen them.
Only if you knew by virtue of something like access to secret information (the things you'd have a security clearance to access).
If you see the police are gathered around your local 7-Eleven, you're absolutely free to post it.
If you know in advance that the police are going to be performing a raid on a meth house and you got that information by virtue of a security clearance (I assume they do have something of this sort like federal employees have, though I'm not sure the precise mechanisms) then you'd be violating the policies around that access. This could be illegal (just like a fed leaking secret or top secret information).
If you know in advance because the police have loose lips, but you are not personally under any kind of confidentiality policy, you're free to post it. So the loose lipped cops at the bars I used to frequent could have caused real problems for themselves.
Worth pointing out that the question of legality is besides the point if you are purposefully antagonizing the police state.
It’s not about legality. It’s about compliance.
If you become a target, they will arrest you and drop charges later. They will make you miss work and lose your job. They will set up surveillance on you to catch you doing anything else they want to continue harassment.
You don’t have to look hard to see reporting of officers using official databases to settle personal scores. 404 media just did a big expose on ALPR Flock DB abuses
Crowd-sourced flock camera locations: https://deflock.me/
Honestly, they'll put you in an ICE detention facility indefinitely. They don't have to drop charges if they don't even have to charge you in the first place, and because they're all hiding behind masks there's no way for them to face any kind of repercussions.
Beyond that, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of sending "homegrowns" to overseas concentration camps, so it won't be long now before you don't have to do anything wrong to be targetted and you don't have any recourse regardless.
Behold the June 11 Justice Dept Memo on wedge applications for "5. Prioritizing Denaturalization"
https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl
with some discussion at: DOJ Opens Door To Stripping Citizenship Over Politics - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/doj-opens-door-to-strippi...
"We can't let those (accused) commies take over New York (even if elected)"
the whole idea behind a police state is that legality doesn't matter when it conflicts with "the state wants to employ machinery to keep you in line"
Since Waze still has their speed trap reporting feature, I’m guessing it’s still legal.
This is now built into google maps
Waze in NZ removed this feature after threats from police.
If you post to local social media groups about DUI checkpoints or mobile speed cameras you’ll be scolded by about 30% of people.
Pretty depressing it is only 30%.
Why?
Because folks don't want to enable drink-drivers and speeders? Maybe they want to use their roads with some basic level of safety?
There is a risk to DUI checkpoints and speeding checkpoints even if you are doing neither. Innocent people die at the hands of the police fairly often, but many more are wrongfully imprisoned. Wanting to limit your interactions with the police is a valid safety and risk management proposal.
Not in NZ
If safety was the real goal the police themselves would announce checkpoints and speed traps. This gives people a chance to not drink too much or speed in the first place. I've lived in places where DUI checkpoints were all announced ahead of time, and I think for many it was a serious reminder to not drink and drive.
But for many DUI checkpoints safety is not the goal. It's simply a pretext to check everyone's papers.
That only works if you actually have a DUI checkpoints all the time everywhere. It is a random check because then people need to be careful all the time. If there is a DUI checkpoint 2 times per year in your area you can just avoid driving drunk at those two days per year.
They do. DUI checkpoints are heavily advertised here in California for exactly that reason — to deter drunk drivers. The only thing they don't do is tell the exact intersection so drunks don't just drink and drive the other direction.
Like in sports, how before every drug test the athlete is given a heads-up right?
Or is perhaps the chance of a random test at any moment more of a deterrent?
What about people that are on their way to work (or somewhere else time sensitive) who want to be aware of places with a slowdown because of checkpoints?
A lot of people think that a few delays once in a while are a reasonable price to pay for suppressing the rate of DUIs.
yeah, and thats fine, but you dont have the right to say someone cant have another opinion
1. I didn't say people can't have another opinion. I didn't say that because I don't believe it and never implied otherwise.
2. Supposing I did believe it and did say it, I would be well within my rights to say it. The First Ammendment assures the right to say things like that, no matter how dumb and misguided those things are.
Umm, that’s exactly what free speech is.
True, they should set up child abuse checkpoints too - think of the children after all.
Doctors and teachers handle that, since they have regular contract with children. At least in my state they're required by law to report suspected child abuse.
As a side note, these laws are doing damage to organizations looking for volunteers that I don't think we have fully grasped yet.
People are willing to put a couple of weekends into making a middle school or high school competition happen. They're a lot less willing to do it if they have to go to an FBI station to get fingerprinted or produce a state and federal background check first. And I'm not talking about people with something to hide; I'm talking about people with a completely clean background who just don't want to be bothered.
The equivalent checks outside the US may not require fingerprinting, they don't in the UK.
NZ OP here. Few weeks ago there was a morning checkpoint to inspect everyone's child car seat installation.
Few years back got chased by a cop and ticketed (and scolded) for not restraining kiddo (small town and my clever 2yo somehow learned how to unbuckle themselves (even that houdini clip didn't help)). Warned I could get prosecuted for child neglect if I continue. I suspect the daycare has tipped him off.
Nanny state isn’t synonymous with police state, but it rhymes.
Making slippery slope arguments like this is not discussing in good faith. I was providing the context of someone who lives in that geo-political area.
And check that every single one of your federal papers are present and punctual. We'd hate to have someone that's unbecoming to share a full disclosure of themselves to officers on the road.
Absolutely not illegal.
> It could be an app where you press a button and the phone says "boo ICE"
oh great, stealing my idea?
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I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs, but retaliatory violence is (1) still immoral and (2) self-defeating.
You aren’t realistically going to overpower them, so any violent resistance just helps them DARVO harder and excuse escalating their brutality. That’s why they’re always so eager to find or create violent one-offs within non-violent mass protests.
There's more than 340 million people in the US and only a handful are ICE.
All it would take is one bad day for anybody in ICE to be afraid to show up to work.
Deportation is a kind of draft, in that deportees are treated similarly to draft dodgers. ICE aren’t MPs, but in this analogy, they largely are folks who have already been drafted themselves, and who have reported for duty.
A bad day at work is just more contact with the “enemy” and is desired by some to separate the weekend warriors from the true believers. The fog of war is obscuring the reality of the outbreak of conflict which has been brewing under the surface for many years.
The revolution will not be televised because it won’t look like a revolution. It’ll look like C-SPAN. Whatever ICE is doing isn’t a revolution, it’s administrative. People voted for this, and they got it. If people want change, make it happen the way that other changes happen that stick. The lesson of Arab Spring is that even with the military on your side, revolution breaks the status quo, and once broken, norms change because the power structure has changed. Most folks don’t want revolution, they just want a vacation from reality. No one wants to put in the work to make revolutions happen because it’s a lot of paperwork, rehearsals, and standing around. It feels like work because it is. All that effort makes it look natural and inevitable, but that’s the magic of make believe.
A bad day at work as you suggest would be a magic act, but who’s gonna put in the work to pull that rabbit out of that hat? And who benefits from such an obvious misdirection?
I was at Occupy San Francisco, so I am not just asking questions, but asking you to re-examine what you believe is possible, and why you think a mock pitched battle with tin soldiers has tactical value, so I don’t know what your motive is, but I doubt you would be honest about your motives given the circumstances.
As the source article covers, the Trump regime believes that merely reporting the location of an ICE officer constitutes violence against them. I don't think it's a good idea to punch your local ICE officer, and if anyone's considering it I would definitely advise them not to, but issuing a blanket condemnation of hypothetical violence is just terribly naive at this point. I'm extremely confident that, at some point before 2028, someone is going to end up in federal custody for shooting masked home invaders they had no way to know were ICE.
Hmm. So the right has come around to "speech is violence"? I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
>I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs
50% of Border Patrol agents are Latino. Believing the delusion that they're racist White rednecks is buying into propaganda.
> >I don’t disagree with the characterization of ICE officers as racist thugs
> 50% of Border Patrol agents are Latino.
Even if that was true, and relevant to their capacity to be racist thugs, Border Patrol is a unit of Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—and CBP is a different entity from ICE, at the same organizational level within the Department of Homeland Security—so it would still be a non-sequitur.
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50% of the Latino population in the US are White Hispanic solely or in combination.
The idea that only "white rednecks" can be racist certainly is interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Hispanic_and_Latino_Amer...
Are you suggesting all racists are White rednecks? Racist systems are capable of absorbing contributions from all kinds of people. Whiteness has repeatedly expanded over time.
Please follow your convictions so you can be removed from the internet and placed in jail for a decade or two once you are processed through the legal system and found guilty of assaulting a police officer. The internet will be better off without your calls to violence.
Slowly running out of alternatives, unfortunately.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK
Absolutely.
Violence does solve things, but also can make for an immediate 'Very Bad Time'.
Police use violence. Military uses violence. Difference is state-monopoly or not. To say violence doesn't work would be to say the police and military don't work - and they do.
Anybody calling on violent means should absolutely call upon peaceful means first, secondly, and more. Violence should only be after all peaceful means have been tried.
Its better to win by peaceful means, than by exertion of violence. And, violence is no guarantee of winning. And even if you do win, can still be pyrric, in which everyone loses.
Tl; dr. Be wary of people casually calling for violence. They're either a state actor, dumb, or both.
They are officers and they are racist mercenaries.
This is not a new force, they have no new powers. They didn't need to hire new people willing to perform these actions nor train them how to do so.
If you haven't considered this before it should hit you like a hammer to the forehead: where are the resignations? Where are the "good cops" we keep hearing about, what are they doing?
The other federal, state, and local law enforcement officers that are assisting in these actions, where is their principled refusal to violate their oath to uphold the constitution? What statements are their powerful and normally very vocal unions making about all this?
Their "powerful and normally very vocal unions" are saying /nothing/, because the union's overall goal (by their messaging and their members messaging) is to increase and sustain additional hourly pay and increase the wages for said pay.
There is no effective system of checks and balances, or this entire discussion would be moot. Civilian solutions(like ICEBlock and friends) are a whimper of a response compared to the lethal and aggressive actions of these LEOs. Typically entrenched groups(like LEOs) can not be talked or reasoned with into changing their position. Those changes in position come from leverage (ie, your supervisor is replaced or leveraged with the threat of replacement), or direct aggression.
As an example, certain villains took issue with these systems and mounted their own lethal response. We are /still/ talking about these individuals because of how riotously effective their actions were at illuminating and mitigating the perceived problems. Whether your talking about Ted K, or Timmy M....they are examples of people who took action to correct a perceived problem. Right or wrong, every reader of this post knows who they are, what they did, and why they did it. Until something of equal magnitude opposes the authoritarian problem of the day(ie ICE), the status quo will continue.
edit: typo
There are no resignations because they signed up to enforce the law and that's what they are doing now. That you have slurped up propaganda painting that as racists doesn't make it so.
No, your post shouldn’t be allowed because you’re inciting violence.
Inciting violence can be protected by the First Ammendment if it isn't inciting imminent illegal action. His post is probably protected. If he were pointing at a guy and saying "We should lynch that ICE agent right now!", that wouldn't be protected speech.
FWIW, I don't even remotely agree with what he's saying.
This is true but HN does not claim to be a free speech site and instead is focused on interesting discussion. There are many things that are legally protected speech that will get you reprimanded or outright banned here.
"Shouldn't be allowed" is ambiguous.
To add to this, the speech needs to be imminent, specific and actionable.
For example, "People should [bad thing] ICE agents" would be protected speech as it isn't imminent, specific or actionable.
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So you're saying 2 previous presidents were more successful without using a campaign of threats and violence? And they didn't have to ignore court orders either? Makes you wonder...
Yea, that is worth looking in to. It could be that individual ICE agents are just not doing their job in order to sandbag the president. Or it could be that far, far fewer illegal immigrants crossed the border <https://x.com/RealTomHoman/status/1940156659084796257> during Trump’s terms than Biden’s or Obama’s; it’s currently about 60× lower than the average during Biden’s term. There’s also the million people who signed up to self–deport in order to avoid being arrested by ICE. Perhaps the removal numbers will rise as they actually leave.
But have any of Trump’s executive orders told ICE to be more violent? I haven’t noticed any that said that, but maybe you could link to it.
"But it could be this, or it could be that." Just look at the facts without trying to reframe everything. Your comments come across as deceitful.
Listen to the words of this President, and the people in his administration compared to previous Presidents. Not to mention deploying the national guard and USMC against civilians to assist ICE, because ICE's methods have changed.
Then ask yourself why does ICE need a budget of $75 billion in the bill Trump is pushing, when ICE was apparently more successful with magnitudes less in previous administrations?
You might want to link to a specific bill, because I don’t know for sure what you’re referring to otherwise. Do you mean the recent budget bill? There's no way I’m reading that for an internet comment, but if that’s the one you mean then I’ll quote a news article about it:
> The GOP bill allocates $46.5 billion toward completing Trump's border wall. It also puts $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities and $10 billion to be used for border security more broadly. The bill sets aside $4.1 billion to hire and retain more agents and officers, and invests in upgraded technology for screenings and surveillance of U.S. borders.
It doesn’t say anything about ICE specifically, so it’s not very helpful. ICE wouldn't be doing construction, and they wouldn’t be running CBP facilities, but maybe they’ll be getting more agents or officers or both. They also don’t screen travelers or surveil the border. Overall it doesn’t sound like ICE is getting $75 billion.
Anyway, the budget is not very relevant to my question. If removals are down to a third (well, two fifths I guess) of what they were during Biden’s term, how is it that we are suddenly in a police state? If ICE makes us a police state, then weren’t we in a police state then?
Why didn’t anyone care about this last year?
No, these are very clearly confounding factors. When there are fewer people walking across the deserts, for example, then there are both fewer deaths from exposure and fewer people to put on a bus and immediately return to Mexico. That makes ICE’s numbers go down. Pointing out confounding factors is not an attempt to reframe the issue; deliberately ignoring confounding factors is actually one of the easiest ways to lie with statistics.
Do you honestly think (being mean to perps at their place of work, church, or while voluntarily attending a court case) needs to be written down? %waving hands at everything% This is the hill you want to (literally or figuratively) die on?
The comment you responded to with this asked a completely legitimate question and even looked up the hard numbers to back up their doubts, only to be flagged. The bratty man-children on this site who flag such comments because "me no like" truly should learn a thing or two about reasoning like a thinking adult.
Conflating less deportation numbers with less of a police state is twisting the narrative, and you know it.
Nope, it was a legitimate question that does touch upon a number of debatable subjects about narrative, media focus, definitions of deportations and so forth. Either way, flagging comments into literal non-existence just so you can completely shut down whatever opinion you don't want to read is simply childish, and fundamentally moronic.
Why is ICE slated to have a higher budget than the USMC if they're only removing ~40k people per month?
Because border security is extremely expensive. The point isn't just removals, it's also deterrence & denial of entry (of people and contraband) in the first place.
The security worry isn't extra laborers driving down wages, it's terrorists coming across the border and blowing up Mardi Gras (secondarily, serial rapists or murderers or what have you coming here to ply their trade). Prevention of entry is the only defense there, because presumably those bad actors aren't here for the long haul, economic gain, etc.
I haven't seen a budget breakdown so I can't speak to how defensible the budget is, just that it seems clear that removal metrics don't tell a useful story on their own.
You're essentially peddling the poisoned M&M fallacy. Do we need capable, rational border security? Yes. Do we need unaccountable masked men armed in our city streets, forcefully detaining anyone who looks like they might be [insert bogeyman caricature]? Absolutely fucking not.
When did I defend authoritarian masked men? Perimeter defense is an expensive endeavor, and if you read the words I wrote that's clearly what I was talking about. At first glance, the new budget includes over 50 billion (!) dollars for increasing our perimeter defense. That sounds like capable, rational border security to me.
Please stop accusing people of peddling the straw man you want to tear down. It's Reddit-tier, not worthy of HN.
A single dollar figure (with no additional context) suggests capable, rational border security to you?
> it's terrorists coming across the border
Then why are they spending so much effort deporting everyday people? This talking point is tired, it's the equivalent of "for the children!". Something that everyone can get behind but isn't anywhere near the level of problem it's made out to be.
don't illegal immigrants commit less crimes per capita?
Parent is clearly not interested in that kind of statistic. Instead their framing implies that even 1 terrorist/rapist/murderer/etc that makes it across the border is a problem worth solving via authoritarianism. The only successful response is to draw this out and make it clearer for everyone else.
Please stop with the straw man BS. That's not what I was saying at all and I think you know that.
HN has reached Reddit levels of partisan nonsense. Sigh.
It's right there in your framing. The most charitable take available is that you're approaching the problem like a software engineer, and accepting that framing as defensible. It is not. One of the most important facts to remember at the level of government is that while we must abstract human problems in order to solve for them, humans themselves are not abstractions. When perfect becomes the enemy of the good (enough), human suffering increases.
All that aside, feel free to walk your framing back and I'll change mine accordingly.
Please stop defending masked thugs that don’t identify themselves kidnapping us citizens and trafficking them to foreign countries.
Previous administrations followed this thing we call “due process”. This admin is not.
No, that’s simply incorrect. ICE is following exactly the same process that has been in place since 1996. It can’t be due process under Biden but then suddenly unconstitutional under Trump.
ICE is not “kidnapping” anybody, and is not “trafficking” them. They are federal police officers who arrest criminals and deport them according the legal process defined by Congress in 1996.
I didn't realize Biden was instructing ICE to grab people off the street and deport them to a gulag in a country they aren't from before they can have a hearing or make any appeals. Would you please provide references for this?
These are presumably threat actors choosing an infiltration route on purpose. At least, that's how I understand the logic behind it.
I think the key difference is the usage of face masks and plainclothes - as far as I can tell, from various different news articles - ICE agents weren't concealing their identities en masse using face masks under Biden and Obama.
Based on historical examples of secret police, plainclothes and face masks on Federal Agents by default could definitely make people think that we are "approaching a police state".
I guess it could be purely a misperception that will vanish mysteriously in four years.
So real reporting of happenings from news outlets that don't comport with your desired reality : misperception. Got it.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean. It’s an objective fact that ICE was removing almost 3× as many people per month this time last year, but that nobody cared at the time. If it’s all about perceptions rather than the objective reality then that makes some sense.
All the president has to do is to make a few speeches about how tough on illegal immigration his administration is going to be and people’s perceptions will shift enough that they suddenly care. Now that someone cares enough to start making threats against federal officers, the officers start wearing masks and bullet–proof vests. This apparently causes perceptions to shift even more and people start thinking we live in a police state.
But the reality is that they’re doing ⅓rd of the work. They’re literally arresting fewer people. If anything, that makes it _less_ of a police state than before. And the law that ICE is upholding was passed last amended in by Congress in 1996, so it’s not like Trump has suddenly given them a new job to do.
So yea, I would say that it’s a misperception. The perception doesn't appear to agree with the objective facts.
> It’s an objective fact that ICE was removing almost 3× as many people per month this time last year
It is? What is your source for this?
According to TRAC's published stats, in May 2024, ICE booked 8,451 people into detention. In May 2025, ICE booked 23,662 people into detention.
https://tracreports.org/immigration/detentionstats/book_in_a...
I should probably have said “removed” rather than “arrested”, since not every person removed gets arrested. I am using the DHS’s own statistics <https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2022/table3...> which cover every year from 1892 to 2022. For Biden’s term and Trump’s current term I used estimates found in news reports though I don’t have the links in front of me. The estimate for Trump’s current term was just for the first four months of the year.
I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?
But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people? I also remember when that psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem tweeted "suck it" when a group of people who were trying to use legal means to not get deported got deported. Fuck her.
You say it's a misperception, but I think we are all perceiving it exactly as they want us to. They are going to do whatever they can get away with by any means necessary and fuck you if you try to get in the way. Some people just think that's bad.
You might have confused two different things. There's been a bit of a fight over whether the President can intervene in Iran and Yemen recently, since Congress hasn’t declared a war. But that has nothing to do with immigration.
> psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem
If you want anyone to take you seriously then don’t call people names. State your claim without ad hominem attacks or other obvious fallacies.
> I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?
Because the Obama and Biden administrations were not going out of their way (which the Trump administration both is and is publicly flaunting that it is) to avoid providing due process under the terms of existing case law, defying "you must not deport person A to country X" orders of courts.
> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them.
"Alien Enemies Act", the War Powers Act is much newer and unrelated, but not all of the controversial deportations are attached to that.
> Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?
The Alien Enemies Act provides a pretext for deportations with less process than traditional deportation process under regular immigration law (in fact, until the courts ruled otherwise, the Trump Administration was claiming, and treating it as if, it allowed no process at all once the act was invoked and the executive branch designated the target as an alien enemy.)
Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang, not every single illegal alien from every country. So a few dozen or a hundred people, not 35k people per month. If people conflate the two and think that every single illegal alien has been declared an “Enemy Alien” according to that act then that could explain why nobody cared last year. But if that’s true then it is also another case of a gross misperception of reality on the part of the people who suddenly care enough to protest and/or send death threats to federal officers.
> Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang
There is virtually no evidence for many of the people targeted that they were members of that or any other gang, and the standarss used for that designation were laughable.
Had the courts not quickly shut down the Administration contention that expulsions under the act were not subject to challenge, it obviously would have been used much more extensively as a way to sweep up anyone the Administration wishes to deport.
While that is a valid complaint, don’t move the goalposts. The original comment was:
> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?
In other words, this guy thinks that Trump is using this act to boost the number of deportations. But the gang doesn’t have enough members to make a dent in the statistics. 35k illegals are being removed from the country every month and no gang has 35k members, or even 3k. They might have three dozen.
And I’ll reiterate that if lots of people are angry at Trump because they think that he’s using some ancient obscure law against _every_ illegal immigrant then they are suffering a misperception of what has actually been going on. If this is the reason for the sudden protests against ICE then it is a very bad reason indeed.
Masked agents. You have masked unidentified agents snatching people from the street, some of them targeted specifically for their wrongthink.
Note this is even orthogonal to the actual issue of immigration policy.
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The laws themselves are highly political, and ALWAYS on the side of capital.
If I steal $100 from the till at my employer, they call the cops and I'm arrested.
If my employer forges timecards to pay me $100 less, its a civil matter. If the state wants to, they might help, but likely not.
Police can kill people by simply saying "I thought I saw them pull a weapon", and the consequence is paid time off with an investigation.
Citizens killing in self-defense have regularly been tried for murder since they didn't do every possible thing before lethal response.
Congress themselves engage in massive amounts of insider trading, all completely 'legal' cause congress refuses to make laws that apply to everyone.
Yet someone in the public gets word of a secret or upcoming announcement, and the SEC comes down on you like a ton of bricks.
Face it - this country's real problem is that we are the 3rd world corrupt shithole we think of those 'other' lesser nations.
> And laws generally should be enforced.
what about the law where people get due process, right to an appeal, and adequate legal representation?
Oh. The cry of due process.
Do you even know what the process is? Or even have a clue how many people deported had a process but it resulted in an outcome they and maybe you did not like?
I don’t have time to investigate everybody, but of the sampling I did all had orders active to be deported.
The part most of you are missing is there was a process. And failure to comply is what results in people showing up at your house and putting you on a plane.
This is no different than if I murder somebody and and escape after the trail before going to jail. 10 years later I am at a coffee shop. Maybe I have a good job a wife a new born and I have been a functional member of society. You better bet that I’ll be arrested and the Jane to go to jail once somebody finds out.
We would need to 100x the amount of lawyers to deal with the huge pulse that was always going to occur when this aspect of law was going to be enforced.
Cool, so no more due process because it's inconvenient.
Hey, you look kinda brown...I think you're an illegal. Or, you posted a funny picture of a political figure on Facebook. Off to El Salvador with you! No, you don't get a day in court, I don't care if you and your parents and your grandparents were all born in the US, you are being sent to a torture camp in a country you've never been to because I THINK you are illegal.
See how that works? Due process is a RIGHT FOR EVERY FUCKING PERSON BECAUSE THAT IS HOW YOU PROVE YOU ARE INNOCENT, YOU FUCKING FASCIST. You CANNOT bypass THE fundamental part of the justice process because you're making shit up and want to deploy tan people with autism awareness tattoos, or people who think maybe shooting hungry kids in Gaza is bad.
ICE just got a massive boost in funding, so the money is obviously there to pay for it.
In for example Germany they have raids on workspaces to check for illegal workers as well. But the "police" (customs officer?) are not masked and also check the employer. They can punish them for too long work hours or hiring "illegals".
What I have seen of ICE in the media it feels a bit one sided.
Employers who knowingly employ illegal workers in the US also get in trouble. However, we also have a system called e-verify which handles checking the employability of people for them. It's relatively easily gamed via identity fraud.
> Employers who knowingly employ illegal workers in the US also get in trouble.
If this were true -- if they were actually punished (eg sent to prison for N years) -- the whole problem would solve itself overnight.
No. They don't get in trouble. They could, but they don't.
> Employers who knowingly employ illegal workers in the US also get in trouble
They might get a slap on the wrist fine that probably doesn't even negate the profits off the illegal labor.
> However, we also have a system called e-verify
The majority of states do not require e-verify for most jobs. Many states don't have any requirements for e-verify and a few only have limited requirements.
They don't. They get elected president despite committing crimes
Authoritarian states often function via selective enforcement of laws. We see that here. They will use any angle, any technicality to remove someone. Lived here for almost 50 years and are a productive member of your community but you're on a stayed order of release pending you check in regularly and you do so? Sorry, we changed our minds and are deporting you because legally we can. Please come with us in the unmarked car. [0]
Tried to kill police officers while trying to overturn an election on behalf of the dear leader? We'll pardon you and give you a job on a task force about weaponization of government. [1]
The law will be applied to the harshest extent to those Trump and his ilk see as enemies and will be warped in favor of his current friends.
Or, as a Preuvian facist president put it: "For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law!"
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/03/ice-iran-don... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/02/january-6-ri...
I agree with the meat of what you say, but is selective enforcement really so unique to authoritarian governments?
In the US, even before recent administrations, we’ve long had evidence of uneven application of laws. Police love power. Criminalizing more stuff gives them more power to decide who to target.
Look how the war on drugs and policies like stop and frisk have targeted black folks. Even innocuous sounding things like seatbelt laws give police the ability to criminalize “driving while black.”
Meanwhile we’ve long ignored white collar crimes like wage theft. You know rich families aren’t going to be affected by anti-abortion laws.
My heavily tattooed White friends and I recently ignored no trespassing to swim in a nice river in TX. We agreed that if the cops came, I (non tattooed, White) would do the talking.
Anyway, the police have never been interested in holding the rich and powerful to account.
The US has been authoritarian from the get-go.
Chattel slavery- direct, constant, and complete control over one's life and death, and the reduction of the person to mere property, is essentially the most authoritarian institution there can be.
Yeah read chomskys Consequences of Capitalism and see how the "always has been" meme is alive and well
For the reader curious why the woman in [0] didn't get permanent residency via marriage:
> Milne was divorced from the nonimmigrant student she married prior to 1983. She then married a U.S. citizen but we found, in our above-said unpublished opinion, that she had admitted that it was a marriage of convenience. After another divorce, she married her current husband, a marriage that is uncontested as "bona fide." Her request for legal permanent resident status based on this marriage was denied under INA § 204(c) which precludes approval based on even an admittedly good-faith union if the petitioner had previously contracted an improper marriage.
Perhaps you should read the law. "Unlawful presence in the United States" is a civil offense, just like a parking ticket.
What other civil offenses you think should be enforced with secret police and concentration camps?
You can be arrested for not paying your parking tickets.
And you can be arrested for overstaying a visa. It used to be that after a process that does not include being swiped off the streets by masked thugs. Now we're doing it this way.
You need a refresher on what police state means:
> a political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police
Simply enforcing laws is not "becoming a police state", the current administration is doing far worse than this, and is actually blatantly and arbitrarily breaking laws according to multiple courts in various jurisdictions.
This includes ICE which has become a tool of this police state by deporting people (including in a case a US citizen, a two-year-old girl) without due process.
The trouble with laws is two-fold: poorly designed legislation is easily abused by those who enforce it, and regulatory capture often prevents necessary changes to existing laws.
A police state does not mean "a state where laws are enforced." The government is not establishing a police state because it's enforcing laws. It's establishing a police state because it's establishing a police state. But I suspect you already knew that, because I've seen comments like this one far too many times to continue assuming good faith.
This ice stuff is more than that. The law and order stuff is more about getting law and order focused people like you onboard.
You should read about how Mussolini came to power and consolidated control. We’re not building a $49B paramilitary force and database to find typos in 50 year old naturalization documents to deport their descendants for law and order. ICE is something else.
If we had laws Trump would be in jail. If we respected immigration laws Trump would be in jail. Since he he's in the white house I don't think we can saw the US takes following the law very seriously
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The mere existence of the app shows resistance to the government's attempts at establishing something approaching a police state.
Or, perhaps it shows that illegal aliens don’t want to get caught?
My wife was just naturalized as a US Citizen a year ago. You can bet she doesn't want to be anywhere near that mess. Her legal status provides her basically no protection from any ICE rookie with a chip on his shoulder.
For those of you not paying attention, just posting a response like this can make you and your family a target.
This is not the US I knew.
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US resumes visas for foreign students but demands access to social media accounts
https://ground.news/article/us-visa-restrictions-on-ecowas-s...
Note: 565 linked sources in that
You can easily tell when someone isn't asking something in Good Faith just by the first couple of search engine hits. Dead giveaway.
This is not an example of the scenario esseph described. Foreign students are by definition not US citizens and thus don't have any inherent right to be in the country.
Now Google for keywords Trump + denaturalization, filtering for results in the last 2 weeks. Or what he said about "deporting" citizens by birth since before then.
Aside: limiting the conversation to things that have already happened is uninteresting to me; you skate where the puck is going. One can easily do this by applying the administrations internal logic, i.e. what they said/did in the past, and what the ultimate goal/result was, and mapping that to what they are doing now to extrapolate future outcomes.
>Now Google for keywords Trump + denaturalization, filtering for results in the last 2 weeks
Lots of links to fake news sites and Russian propaganda outlets. Not sources.
The June 11 Justice Dept Memo on wedge applications for "5. Prioritizing Denaturalization"
https://www.justice.gov/civil/media/1404046/dl
with some discussion at: DOJ Opens Door To Stripping Citizenship Over Politics - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/doj-opens-door-to-strippi...
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This is not a valid argument because there is no way to disprove it. If you was so easy to find an example that actually holds up under scrutiny you would be able to present one yourself.
It wasn't an argument, just a response to someone saying something "sounds like" something.
>It wasn't an argument
Clearly.
>just a response to someone saying something "sounds like" something.
It was a response asking for sources, sources you still don't have. You're projecting about being triggered and still don't have sources to bring. Sad.
Sounds like you and they are equally competent at finding sources. It's not hard if you try.
I don't need to enable anyone's laziness.
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Don't confuse my declining to enable your laziness with evidence you are correct.
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Her legal status is that she's a US citizen, she has the same "protection from any ICE rookie" as anyone else who is a US citizen naturalized or natural-born.
The president of the United States is literally fighting in court to get the authority to treat natural born newborns as aliens even though the plain letter of the United States Constitution says these babies are citizens.
In an environment like that, legal status doesn't mean shit.
She has the same abstract rights.
What people care about is reality. Currently the reality is you can be subject to arbitrary detention and deportation with no due process, regardless of you rights.
Right — in the absence of due process, none.
Right — in the absence of due process, none, the same as it applies to anyone regardless of status.
Agreed!
Unlawful presence on US soil is a civil offense. It's literally the same class of offense as a parking ticket.
Are there any other civil offenses that you think should be dealt with using masked police and concentration camps?
This is a very disingenuous question for a number of reasons.
- Whether unlawful presence is a civil or criminal law, countries should control who enters the country.
- Masked police seem like a reasonable response to doxxing of police officers? It’s not like the identity of these police aren’t know to the legal system and lawyers of the accused.
- Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense. It’s just meaningless rhetoric as detention bears no resemblance to actual concentration camps.
- Most importantly, the US enforcing its own immigrations laws does not make it an outlier - it was an outlier when it ignored its own immigration laws. Every other country I’ve visited rather strictly enforces its immigration laws including speedy deportation of any encountered who doesn’t have permission to be in the country. If anything the headlines should be “US joins rest of world in enforcing its own immigration laws”
> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.
I don’t think you are paying attention to the abject cruelty in the administration’s own discourse about these facilities. The U.S. president describing with barely restrained delight his anticipation that escapees from the new facility in Florida would be eaten by alligators. I suppose if called out on it, he’d claim it’s a joke. I’m sure many regimes in history had their own euphemistic terms for facilities such as this; but purposeful cruelty is a cardinal feature of concentration camps in my view.
> - Whether unlawful presence is a civil or criminal law, countries should control who enters the country.
Yes. And it's disingenuous to call for brutal police tactics with enormous collateral damage for something the letter of the law regards as the equivalent of a parking ticket.
> - Masked police seem like a reasonable response to doxxing of police officers?
Fuck. No.
> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.
When they are meant for detaining people who are literally not guilty of any crime, and they are deliberately designed to feature inhumane conditions, it makes every sense.
> - - Most importantly, the US enforcing its own immigrations laws does not make it an outlier
I'll ask the same question again: which civil offenses do you think should also be addressed with secret police and concentration camps?
The EU is stricter with immigration than the US. But it does not use secret police and concentration camps.
You're not really arguing in good faith when your response is "Fuck. No."
> The EU is stricter with immigration than the US. But it does not use secret police and concentration camps.
You don't think the police in Europe sometimes hide the identity of their police from onlookers when required? I'm pretty sure they do.
Do you also think Europe doesn't detain people who are in their country illegally? I'm pretty sure they do. They are even creating "return hubs", which are basically detention centers outside their own country which hold immigrants until they can be returned to their home or a third country.
> You don't think the police in Europe sometimes hide the identity of their police from onlookers when required? I'm pretty sure they do.
Yes in the UK they do. However this is breaking the law and those who do this have been punished.
> You're not really arguing in good faith when your response is "Fuck. No."
If you don't already know that keeping the name & badge number visible is the most important part of proper policing, and established as such by the world's first police force and its founder, Robert Peel, there's no point arguing much of anything with you.
It's literally the difference between a police force and a Geheime Staat Polizei.
>Unlawful presence on US soil is a civil offense. It's literally the same class of offense as a parking ticket.
Overstaying a visa is a civil offense, 'improper entry' e.g. jumping the border is criminal.
Yes. Jumping the border is a misdemeanor if you don't immediately self report to request asylum.
But the majority of people getting rounded up right now are for unlawful presence.
And a lot of them have no idea that their presence was marked unlawful until ICE gets them. There's a reason civil offenses are supposed to be handled with proper notification and court summonses instead of this shit.
I'll take immigrants in my neighborhood over ice agents in my neighborhood every day of the week.
You can campaign for an amendment to give up American's right to self-determination if you want that but you don't get to just decide to do that on your own.
The "right of self determination" does not exist in the US constitution or law. It's a rhetorical slogan coined by Woodrow Wilson, and his idea of "self determination" came from growing up as a racist southerner who felt the South should have been allowed to self-determine a continuation of chattel slavery.
How this has anything to do with the immigrants in my city trying to live normal lives, perhaps you can explain.
Sorry, I don't think I follow this comment. Which part of kidnapping people is the kidnappee's self-determination?
Navigation apps have long been reporting police activity along with other aspects of traffic you might want to avoid.
Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
> Interacting with cops will never make your day better, so it's only sensible to avoid them if you can.
This is a very nice way to put it. In investing terms, the benefits are limited but the risks are severe. With enough interactions you’re more likely to have experienced the downside.
>> will never make your day better
> the benefits are limited
So, which is it?
Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim. People forget that cops also save lives.
Nobody forgets that, it’s just that abuse and misconduct sour that. In many communities, people have to weigh the odds that reporting a crime will lead to more problems for them than it will help, with consequences ranging from lack of help to theft to rape or even being shot by mistake. American police departments have largely set themselves above the law, so the average person doesn’t know whether they’re getting a good cop who is genuinely trying to help them or the bad cop whose behavior has been covered up by their fellow officers for years. Anyone concerned about public opinion of police should be focused on accountability and oversight to rebuild public trust.
Let's be real. For all their flaws, US cops are some of the least corrupt in the world. There are places where you better be ready to fork over cash every time you encounter the police.
> US cops are some of the least corrupt in the world
I don't think that's a good metric to judge them by (I also don't think it's true if you compare to first world countries).
Sure, third world countries have police forces that are more corrupt. But US cops are corrupt in a wide variety of ways and we should be very clear about how unacceptable that is. It doesn't matter if someone somewhere else in the world is worse.
I've never understood the "be happy you're not in authoritarian Russia" type of argument for papering over the shortcomings of circumstances here in the US. Like, ok? Why are we comparing ourselves to places that are worse? Shouldn't we be striving to make things better relative to our own ideals and standards?
It's like any economic discussion I have when visiting my parents. I'll advocate for something every other developed nation has, like paid paternity leave or a sane healthcare system, and they immediately start talking about communist East Germany like that's somehow relevant.
Yeah, we know cops in Mexico are corrupt. Our police force has a very different problem set that we need to solve. Pointing out a different problem in a different country contributes nothing.
yOu LiVE iN sOCiEtY YeT yOu CritIciZe SoCiETY
> I'll advocate for something every other developed nation has, like paid paternity leave or a sane healthcare system
Paid parental leave creates both deadweight loss and moral hazard. It also tends to reduce labor inversely proportional to labor's cost, with the largest reduction in labor hitting highly skilled, sub middle-aged females. This should be obvious as it lowers the expected productivity of workers, moreso when you extend parental leave to family leave and allow for the care of ailing elders. The argument for it seems to hinge on the dollars allowing greater workforce participation, but I'm not sold that greater participation with lower expected productivity is greater than fewer productive workers.
Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?
Regarding healthcare, it's well known that decreasing prices increase demand. While some healthcare demand is totally inelastic (injuries, cancer, etc.), the front line pcp interactions are elastic. Compound in people's willingness to decrease self care since they don't have to pay for future healthcare, and you've increased the rate of inelastic demand instances in the future, increasing demand. Now consider that prices would no longer be dictated by free markets, and now we have trouble with price discovery, with the power seemingly going to the single consumer, so it's likely treatments will be underpaid, which may lead to fewer practicioners and fewer innovations. Maybe I'm wrong... I haven't thought about heath economics in a long while. My preference would be to see a forced decoupling of healthcare provided as work benefits such that everyone had to purchase it on the open market (even if that loss of negotiating freedom between private parties irks me).
>"Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?"
Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you. That's the foundation of socialization, everyone's resources - that they fork over from taxation - is shared for various activities and settlements that give as many individuals (past, present and emerging) as much of an acceptable baseline of living as it can.
To be sure, the goal of socialization is also not usually to make everyone rich or give immense quality of life, it's to make sure everyone has the same "lowest" bar for things that members of society deem as essential, and that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible.
>> "Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?"
> Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you.
I'd set the reason as even more basic than that. Children are absolutely essential the future of society. There is literally no way to argue that is not true.
Since they are essential to society, we should be working on ways to support them; as a society. Now, this can be argued against. But I feel pretty strongly that "I do not think it is important for us, as a society, to works towards goals that beneficial to society" is a fairly brain-dead stance. You can argue about the best uses for _available_ money; but to argue that's a matter of priorities, not "is it a valid goal".
I think my most basic argument is that society is the result of many individuals' participation. It should be viewed as emergemt of individuals working together and not as an organism in-and-of itself.
To that end, I think it is fully appropriate for the society to collapse if individuals within it determine to forgo children. We shouldn't redistribute from some to others purely to ensure society's continuum. Instead, individuals should maximize their utility, and in doing so create society.
These redistributions are not pareto optimal and have major deadweight losses and introduce moral hazard.
> To that end, I think it is fully appropriate for the society to collapse if individuals within it determine to forgo children. We shouldn't redistribute from some to others purely to ensure society's continuum. Instead, individuals should maximize their utility, and in doing so create society.
We have an entire system of laws we put in place to force people to increase their utility within society.
What your statement is effectively arguing is... to go with anarchy; that we should not have rules that change human behavior, because human behavior _should_ be to maximize utility.
I think it's pretty well accepted that "just let everyone do whatever they want" isn't a viable system for a society.
You still need constraints. The law should exist to protect private property. The government should collect taxes to fund the legal system and public goods.
But I absolutely agree that the government shouldn't do much, if anything, more than that. Incentives to shape behavior should be extremely limited, because the government is the only entity that is allowed to force involuntarily transactions.
Voluntary transactions ensure that the transacting parties have a pareto optimal outcome. This is what should be maximized, even at the detriment of the longevity of society itself.
Why should the government do exactly the things that benefit society, benefit you, and don't benefit Debbie, but not the things that benefit society, benefit Debbie and don't benefit you? This is just disguised selfishness.
I'm not deep enough in the theory to know whether "voluntary transactions create a Pareto-optimal outcome" is a true statement. I suspect not, because of information asymmetry and so on.
Pareto-optimal is also kind of an arbitrary stopping point - you chose it because it supports your argument, not because it's actually a good one. If it was possible to make everyone 1000 times richer (in physical resources) but at the cost of making Elon Musk just another average person, that wouldn't be a Pareto move because it would decrease Elon's status, but it would still be extremely good. Why shouldn't we aim for that?
> Why should the government do exactly the things that benefit society, benefit you, and don't benefit Debbie, but not the things that benefit society, benefit Debbie and don't benefit you? This is just disguised selfishness
I want the government to provide the things that benefit Debbie and me equally, and only those things that benefit us equally.
> If it was possible to make everyone 1000 times richer (in physical resources) but at the cost of making Elon Musk just another average person, that wouldn't be a Pareto move because it would decrease Elon's status, but it would still be extremely good. Why shouldn't we aim for that?
How are you defining good? The same resources may be more equitably distributed, but ultimately the same fixed resources exist, and now poor Elon is far worse off. My point of search for pareto optimality is exactly that we should avoid this outcome because it's not better. Following it to it's logical conclusion, redistributing all wealth until it was exactly equally divided amongst the population would produce the most good outcome.
There's also an extremely wide variety of possible Pareto-optimal outcomes and I should have said this sooner.
Communism is Pareto-optimal (both the utopian kind and the USSR kind). Authoritarian dictatorship is Pareto-optimal. Hitler's Germany was Pareto-optimal. Democracy is Pareto-optimal. Whatever America's doing right now is Pareto-optimal. Pretty much everything that ever arises in practice is Pareto-optimal.
Imagine a society with only two people - me and you - where I am constantly stomping my boot on your face and enjoying it. This would be Pareto-optimal, because in order for you to stop having your face stomped on, you'd have to make me stop enjoying it and that wouldn't be a Pareto improvement. Would you really argue that in this situation, it's immoral for you to stop me from stomping on your face, because it's not a Pareto improvement?
> I want the government to provide the things that benefit Debbie and me equally, and only those things that benefit us equally.
So literally nothing. You want no government. Please acknowledge that. Property rights don't benefit you and Debbie equally, so you don't want those either.
> How are you defining good? The same resources may be more equitably distributed, but ultimately the same fixed resources exist
No, I'm talking about everyone having 1000 times more resources except for Elon. The total amount of resources would increase about 999.999 times or so, since everyone would have 1000 times more except for Elon who would have the same amount as everyone else (less than he does now). With regards to Pareto-optimality, this would be very much a "stop stomping your boot on my face" scenario.
"We're making accomodations for the disabled because, on average, 100% of the population is disabled at one time or another."
I pay something like $150/month for private LTD insurance. All the government policies do is force everyone to participate with lower expected benefits. It would be more efficient for people to privately purchase it, where those who don't assume the risk of noncarry.
I'm talking about ramps to public buildings and handicap accessible bathrooms. It's a public good that most people don't realize they're actually going to use at some point.
Everybody drives the same roads ("Why would I pay to maintain Smith Street? I've never driven on it?"), some people REALLY need a firefighter in an emergency.
> I'm talking about ramps to public buildings and handicap accessible bathrooms.
To the extent these impact public buildings, I think this is a good thing. Just like I think public employers should not be allowed to discriminate based on age, race, etc.
But in both cases I would argue that private companies should not be held to the same standards.
Firefighters could arguably be a public good in that they are (approximately) nonrivalous and are definitely nonexcludable. In addition, fire fighting as a public good prevents the free rider problem that would likely exist with this service in the private market.
Sounds like a pretty good policy to back to me. I’ll never understand people that want to take advantage of the foundations of society for themselves, then become rather churlish when its their turn to do the same for others.
> that the bar set as "lowest" is as humane and efficient as possible
But by definition it is inefficient. Redistribution of money from Person A to Person B necessarily means Person A can't spend that money. If their optimal utility was to give that money to Person B, you wouldn't need such a policy governmentally.
Socialization makes sense for public goods, but healthcare and parental leave are both nonpublic.
As an annecdotal example, my state offers 12 weeks of parental leave. The maximum they are willing to pay is about $550/week. My company provides two weeks of paid leave. So for 10 weeks, I get the $550 from the state. But my w2 income is about 2k/week post tax, post 401k max. So I would forgo about $1400 a week to stay home. Daycare costs $550/week, so it's far better for me to work. But then I don't get the time off. And yet I still pay for others. This is an example of a terrible implementation of the already bad policy.
No, it's definitely more efficient:
- Preventative care is far cheaper and more effective than reactive care (e.g. your dentist telling you to floss more in a particular area vs. filling a cavity vs. filling a root canal)
- Insurance is more effective at dispersing costs amongst a larger pool of people
- In a system like the US where insurance companies must negotiate prices with healthcare providers, larger pools have more bargaining power
Yes, but what happens when you remove competition? Bargining power becomes absolute.
What happens when the single purchaser of healthcare refuses to pay an amount sufficient to raise supply to meet demand?
There's no need to ask this as a hypothetical; simply look at the many, many countries that have successfully implemented such systems.
I used to actually bat against universal healthcare for this reason, until COVID. The majority of private insurance companies are already doing that, here.
I think this is mostly because the US system strips choice from the individual. I hypothesize the outcomes would be far better if we decoupled private health insurance from employment and allowed an oprn market for individual consumers.
I have good news: the open market you're describing already exists! You are free to decline your employer's health insurance and sign up for a private plan at healthcare.gov.
I know it exists, but there is no point to denying the employer provided plan unless one is substantially better off paying for out of pocket care plus the forgone income from the employer.
I would propose that we legislate the ban of employer provided healthcare benefits instead of making it universal.
If you think the foregone income would make the difference, negotiate a raise from your employer in exchange for waiving their health insurance. Problem solved!
You can do what you're describing today, in this world. I think the fact that you don't is instructive.
> Socialization makes sense for public goods, but healthcare and parental leave are both nonpublic.
Challenge. Healthcare is very much a public "good". The healthier evereyone is, the less we spend on healthcare overall. And the more we can accomplish overall. It works in everyone's benefit for society to be healthy.
The same way it works in everyone's benefit to have roads. We both want to get to the store/work/etc, and want healthy people to take care of those places. Neither one is a need, both are beneficial to everyone.
There is a duality to providing healthcare as a public good, and that is preventive care through lifestyle choices may diminish. I'm not so careful as to not have four pops a day because the gov will pick up my diabetes tab. It's not clearly a net benefit to society.
For the record, I also suggest roads do not meet the definition of a public good.
Your anecdote values time with your newborn children at $0 and assumes people are physically able to immediately return to work after having a child. Seems like a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of life with a newborn.
It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.
It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.
Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?
I omitted the valuation of time with my child since it is hard to capture empirically.
> It also ignores the societal costs of separating mothers and babies at such extremely young ages, reducing the rates of successful breastfeeding, and more.
I'm not ignoring this cost. I'm stating that this cost should be borne by the individual that elected to have a child; e.g., lowered labor participation for some duration. The current US federal policy recognizes this by allowing unpaid leave for some duration.
> It also assumes a considerably above-average income job.
My point exactly. If above average compensation is actively harmed by this policy through deadweight loss, it means the policy is bad. This ignores the plethora of moral hazard that is introduced too. For example, how to we reconcile those laborers that take 12 weeks of paid taxpayer vacations only to promptly quit their job upon restarting it? These folks were always going to drop out of the labor force; now we've given them 12 weeks of free money redistributed from productive members.
> Your username is hellojesus. Which action is more Christlike, providing for children and families or hoarding your wealth? Are we called to build bigger barns?
Religious inclinations should direct followers how to execute behavior for themselves of a voluntary nature. It should not be used to dictate that everyone in society follow the same moral orders at the behest of a gun, which is what governmental policy does.
That you phrase it as a "vacation" and can't seem to put a dollar value on it but obviously less than a couple hundred dollars a week really points to the idea you have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't think anyone thinks 12 weeks with a newborn is a vacation, and yet most people probably wouldn't trade that 12 weeks with their newborn for anything in the world.
> I'm not ignoring this cost
You literally are ignoring the cost, as its not your given model. And its not a cost that will only be borne by the immediate caregivers, there are knock-on costs throughout society that will be felt by this change.
The government subsidizes the birth rate because it has decided it IS a social good to have a constantly replenishing workforce (and potential military force). You may disagree with doing that but the argument that it isn't a social good doesn't match where those policies are coming from.
Moreover, this blinders-on-libertarianism "I should only pay for things directly for me" approach doesn't work if you pick and choose; you have to address it in context of the entire system (ie, you can't silently accept all the benefits and only shout about the individual moments you don't come out on top).
This society, for better or worse, pools money to do things at scale even when some of those things don't have the direct and equal benefit to every individual, instead aiming for a general good for all, stability, and a platform for everyone to have higher potential.
Yes, this gets abused in many ways and yes, it should always be constantly evaluated for effectively spending money.
However, your anecdotes about how the women or the poors get more than you in certain policies aren't impactful without looking at the whole which includes everything from the roads, breathable air, a widespread and capable workforce, a dynamic labor market, powerful financial markets, a justice system, fire departments, and lots of consumer protections so we can focus on growth instead of spending all our time trying to research if your bank is actually a scam or if the restaurant down the street washes their hands enough.
My anecdote was used to show how the policy introduces moral hazard and deadweight loss. I would equally oppose it, as I do things like government mandated smoke-free restaurants, even if they benefitted me. I would moreso prefer that smoke-free restaurants exist because the market dictates it wants them by not transacting with smoke-partitioned restaurants.
> everything from the roads, breathable air, a widespread and capable workforce, a dynamic labor market, powerful financial markets, a justice system, fire departments, and lots of consumer protections so we can focus on growth instead of spending all our time trying to research if your bank is actually a scam or if the restaurant down the street washes their hands enough.
There is certainly some gain in being able to outsource research, but it is difficult to determine if it is a net good for society or the individual due to the moral hazard it generates. Not worrying about your bank being a scam allows actual banks to take on outsized risk and then not face any repercussions. It skews the appetite for risk that disproportionately benefits risk takers. For a recent example, see the Silicon Valley Bank failure, which the FEDs totally bailed out to prevent a collapse across many more banks, mostly because those banks overleant at low mortgage rates and couldn't sell the low interest notes at face value after the rise in interest rates, leading to a liquidity crisis.
Focusing on growth comes at a cost; lots of inefficies are introduced. Instead, we could focus on being efficient and low waste and allow the growth to come naturally.
> due to the moral hazard it generates.
The moral hazard of checks notes mothers breastfeeding and attending to their newborn children and husbands asssisting for a few weeks. Yes. What an absolutely upsidedown society we'll have if we allow such a thing to happen. Terrible. Need to ensure that doesn't happen.
And we need to reduce the rate of this happening to ensure checks notes wealthy people continue producing at high rates to profit the even wealthier.
That so many people have such mindsets and continue to wonder why our birthrates are dropping is astounding.
Wake up buddy. Keep drawing these lines. See where they go. I guess we'll both be dead though, so it doesn't matter.
What do you think your retirement savings represent? They are a claim on goods and services to be produced by a future generation. For that to work there has to be a future generation of sufficient productive capacity. If population declines faster then productivity increases the system will collapse.
Look at what is happening to South Korea.
That is part of the risk one must take into account when investing. The same happens regardless of population; you must invest where you expect there to still exist market demand in the future.
If the productive capacity of the economy declines your capital will be inflated away. Money is a social construct built on a stable or growing economy.
The FED can target either interest rates or the money supply. It could very well adjust supply to meet a shrinking population pool. Otherwise post war losses of many able bodied men would inflate away economies.
Either way you won’t be able to obtain the goods and services you saved for, there just won’t be enough of them.
There could be. Our example hasn't considered productivity gains due to capital improvements or tech advancements. We may not need the same population to produce the samd product count in the future.
>Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?
It's a net benefit to society encourage people to have kids and keep the number of births closer to replacement rate.
I don't think it's reasonable to steal from some for the betterment of others. Clearly if those from which money is taken maximized their utility by charitably giving it away to familes with newborns, this policy wouldn't be necessary. To that end, this policy creates deadweight loss for those from whom the redistributive policy takes more than it returns.
> Clearly if those from which money is taken maximized their utility by charitably giving it away to familes with newborns, this policy wouldn't be necessary.
>To that end, this policy creates deadweight loss for those from whom the redistributive policy takes more than it returns.
First, clearly such people don't donate to families, making that a pointless argument, and second, even if they gave new parents money directly, they might still not have a baby if they don't have time to take care of the baby without parental leave. Long work hours for couples decreasing the national birth rate is a negative externality. If all companies acted hostile to parents and no one became a parent, that might boost each individual company's productivity levels, but they would be killing off the workforce in the long term. That, like overfishing, would be an example of the tragedy of the commons.
> First, clearly such people don't donate to families, making that a pointless argument, and second, even if they gave new parents money directly
Yes. That is my point. Theft is required to execute this policy, which defines the deadweight loss.
I argue that companies may offer better leave benefits in order to attract workers. My company provides six weeks for primary and two for secondary caretakers.
Amazon gives a month or something like that. Clearly I would have incentive to work there if I could, and by that I mean others better skilled than me fill those vacancies. The policy is effective.
"All taxation is theft!" is a funny thing to claim in a world where standing alone is no longer viable.
I have a lot of libertarian tendencies but shouting that you're being robbed (from the safety of your stable, productive, society that protects even your right to complain like that) feels childish to me - the actual first step if you're going to act this way seems to be trying to get out from under this government that you never agreed to so you can start doing things your own way. The irony of people who say "if you don't like it, leave" is that they rarely take their own advice.
As a side note, I'm always curious when I see someone say that taxes are theft -- what is "theft" and "property" in your world view without the other systems underpinning it? It seems to always boil down to "stuff in your possession that you can keep someone else from taking away" which always boils down to violence at the end. Does " theft" even make sense in this context and, if so, did you "steal" everything first? It always seems like such a "rules for thee but not for me" kind of claim so I'm (genuinely) curious if you have a more substantial platform for your libertarianism.
The libertarian bent typically suggests that the government must be funded to the extent that it can protect private property. This means it must be able to recognize private property and litigate against its theft, including bodily harm. Therefore I shout from my safe stable, but my prerequisite is that the government exists to provide that safe stable.
It also exists to provide public goods, which are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable, such as national defense (where I would only suggest it be provided insofar as the workforce be entirely voluntary).
Redistributibe policies such as PFML or universal healthcare, are indeed theft. You take from Person A to give to Person B when Person A would otherwise not do so. Please help me understand how that is not theft?
Thanks for the answer and that makes sense for your perspective - government is pretty much just there for you to be able to lay claim to things and all other benefits should be done by explicitly optted-in individuals.
I don't think it's helpful for me to try to take a position about what is and isn't theft by governments you were born into but wish you weren't. I don't even know how to start untangling that one and I think perspective overwhelms any reason there anyway.
I do appreciate your response about my question - very helpful!
Thanks, I appreciate that.
I want to be more progressive. I really do! It feels good because typically you get to provide for the less fortunate. But my atomic unit is the individual, and I can't seem to make my belief system reconcile individual liberty and government-enforced charity. That's why I come here sometimes. It helps me talk through things and try to find counterexamples to my ideology.
I appreciate everyone's time and discussions.
Here's one way to think about health care in particular: the money being "stolen" from you has no intrinsic value. It's a number in a computer somewhere. If you were truly alone in the world it would have no value at all. So its value comes from an implied consensus of sorts, one that exists because the surrounding society provides infrastructure ranging from national defense to roads to law and contract enforcement to communications regulation to weather forecasting to basic scientific research to public health to ... whatever.
It happens that most advanced societies consider the widespread availability of medical care to be a similar force multiplier, something that enables every individual in the society to produce more and earn more and reach their full economic potential.
Free-market solutions to health care are problematic because there's nothing free about a market that everyone is forced to participate in by virtue of being alive. Likewise, private insurance models make little sense when every insured customer is virtually guaranteed to file expensive claims at one point or another.
Consequently health care is widely considered a valid area for governmental involvement and taxation. Yes, the money for public health care is "stolen" from you, but again, there is a widespread consensus that the economy that you participate in is healthier as a whole because of that. Just like public subsidies for many other things that many/most people agree are important but that fall outside what conventional markets do well at providing. In a society that didn't attend to such needs, you might have more money from a numeric standpoint, but it would be worth less.
Obviously there are weak points in this argument from a libertarian perspective, but it's very hard to convince people that it's without any merit at all.
The people who say they don't want the government to help pay for raising children are the same people who complain about low birth rates. You can't eat your cake and still have it. Would you like sustainable population or would you like low taxes? You can't have both.
Sensible government programs aren't deadweight loss - they are net gains - although a lot of what governments do, especially what the US government does, is not sensible. For example, you pay taxes to have property rights, and I don't think you think that is deadweight loss.
Meanwhile your concern about "why should I pay for someone else?" is literally just insurance but I bet you have insurance, and you only hate insurance when the government does it.
> is literally just insurance but I bet you have insurance, and you only hate insurance when the government does it.
Yes. This is exactly right. And that is because private insurance allows people to voluntarily consume it. Not everyone has the same appetite for risk. Allow people to maximize their individual utility!
You're missing the elephant in the room that our society doesn't have enough distributed wealth to allow most people to pay for their own time off.
I too hate the top-down prescriptivism of narrow "benefit" policies administered by employers. But until we fix the economy so most people have the market power to tell their employer they're taking 3-6+ months off for $whatever, have the savings to pay for it, and be confident that that either their employer will want them back at the end or that they will be able to find a different employer, then it's what we're stuck with. So if you really want to reform this, then work towards fixing wealth inequality.
(The healthcare thing is a politically radioactive topic. It would be fantastic to prevent employers anticompetitively bundling healthcare with employment, but it would take a lot of political capital to rise above fearmongering to people with "good" employer plans and the desire of politicians to lean on the current system out of expedience)
I understand your point, but I am unable to reconcile the inefficiencies introduced by redistributive policies. I would instead prefer a charitable system whereby people voluntarily provide funds to be allocated to new parents to afford them the time off for caretaking.
You're ignoring the current overriding redistributive policy of continually printing a large amount of new money (monetary inflation), and handing most of it to the banks to give away to asset holders. This siphons real wealth away from the edges of our society, and is a significant contributor to wealth inequality.
If you focus on smaller instances of redistributive policies without addressing that, you've done the equivalent of admitting a logical contradiction to your axioms and thus are able to come to some decidedly anti-individual-freedom conclusions. In this case, further turning the financial screws on the edges.
I don't mind turning back the Keynesian dials and abolishing the federal reserve. The reason my discussion is focused on PFML and universal healthcare is because that was the topic of the OP to which I replied at the root of my comment chain.
Those two are also not current or longstanding federal policy, which should making their prevention far easier than their repeal.
> I don't mind turning back the Keynesian dials and abolishing the federal reserve. The reason my discussion is focused on PFML and universal healthcare is because that was the topic of the OP to which I replied at the root of my comment chain.
The point is that without actually doing the former, your point in isolation on the latter comes across as completely out of touch. Currently, the vast majority of people simply do not have the kind of wealth required to make a decision like you're advocating. As it stands, the financial treadmill is a fixed quantity - so in that context, what you're effectively advocating is for people to not have the time to have kids, period.
> Those two are also not current or longstanding federal policy, which should making their prevention far easier than their repeal.
Yes, that is exactly the problem! When you push everywhere with a justification of individual freedom, the places you tend to actually move forward are where you're actually serving an agenda of entrenched centralized power. For example, look at this individual-liberty-appealing "fiscal responsibility" refrain of the past 30 years - it ended up facilitating all that newly-printed money to be given away to banks / asset holders, rather than say purposefully spent making sure our industrial base wasn't getting completely hollowed out. It was basically a kayfabe for looting, and not supporting individual freedom at all.
In a perfect world I would have preferred if that new money hadn't been created in the first place, and that wealth had remained distributed throughout society rather than centrally collected and then centrally assigned. But that wasn't anywhere close to being on the table. So we have to be real about the actual results of the specific policies we're advocating for, lest we become patsies helping to destroy individual liberty.
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The reason people think defunding the police might work is because American police are overly militarized and people speculate that plays into violence escalation.
Basically, if you give the police way too many guns and armored vans then they might start thinking those are appropriate tools for too many circumstances. Sort of "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type argument.
I don't know if it'll work, but that's the idea.
So you're erecting a straw man and attacking that. My assertion is that policing in the US has structural issues that need to be addressed. I disagree that it's helpful to remember that it could be worse as evidenced in other countries. That's irrelevant to the original assertion.
Also the argument that there are proposals on how to address structural issues in policing that you deem "ridiculous nonsense" is a straw man that does not address my assertion.
I don't think we should defund most police agencies in the US. I absolutely think that we need to defund ICE, throw a substantial number of its current employees in jail, and build a new immigration enforcement agency from the ground up. Nobody who authorized masked raids by the secret police can be trusted to enforce the law and I do not consider any agency who employs them legitimate.
If I tried to abduct someone from my local courthouse, do you think the cops would let me get away with it? Because they've worked in lockstep with ICE as they've done exactly that. Defunding the police and defunding ICE are not two separate issues.
Cops routinely let private bounty hunters abduct people, albeit not from courthouses so often. I'm not happy about it, but I don't know if I necessarily want my local cops to be equipped to fight the Gestapo.
I can't speak for other first world countries, but Canada has its share of police misconduct. The most recent example is the mishandling of the 22-person killing spree in Nova Scotia[1], and the Toronto police are so famously bad at investigating sex crimes and protecting victims that an entire book was written on the subject[2].
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/canada-police-mistakes-novia...
[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Story-Jane-Doe-Book-About/dp/067931275...
incompetence =/= corruption.
Corruption allows incompetence to thrive. Deliberate inaction can also be whitewashed as "incompetence".
We do have good police in the US.
But I'd prefer not to interact in their official capacity with them if possible because there is a non-zero chance that the specific officer I'm talking to is not one of the good ones.
I recently had a run in where I was photographing a duck on the roof of a house. A cop literally ran up to me and asked what I was doing with his hand on his gun, holster released. I was fortunate that he realized how nuts his behavior was when I pointed out that I was taking a picture of a crazy duck sitting on a chimney. I also realized that I probably would have been shot had I not been calm and polite.
i'm not a cop super fan or anything but i did make it a point to wave at and get to know the officers that patrol my neighborhood. I've had them stop by when walking my dogs to let me know that they got a call about a suspicious person and to keep an eye out. Maybe it comes from working in consulting but that level of relationship with police officers is very useful to me as an individual.
If you define “corrupt” as not asking for bribes on duty, perhaps. If you use the common definition of the term to include things like being bound by the law the same as the average person, however, that’s tragically untrue. Officers routinely cover up the misconduct of their fellows and force rehiring of the few officers who are held accountable even for serious crimes.
This has been down-voted a lot, but I actually kinda agree, at least with the second assertion. I've been going down to Baja, Mexico frequently for years, and, as an American (white dude), you quickly learn that you're a target for local police - you're basically their ATM. And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You just do your best to avoid them, like agents in The Matrix.
>> For all their flaws, US cops are some of the least corrupt
> I actually kinda agree,
It is my long and consistent experience (MI spouse) that the quality of police officers depends on the quality of the police chief.
We had good, experienced officers here a generation ago. A funding-addicted sheriff was elected. He fired cops w/ decades of exp and replaced them with just-graduated kids. The remaining cops were subject to some kind of dept environment that left them half-unhinged.
Addicted sheriff quit after a few terms and his replacement was pretty good for a while. Now he's average, so kind of crappy.
Germany, Finland, France, Sweden, Canada ... when you compare them to most corrupt states, you are not proving they are best. You are peoving they are not absolute bottom.
That being said, America is unique in officially allowing cops to kill people just because of how they feel, with no objective reason for it.
In Germany you are not even allowed to insult the police and they do use that to go after people they don't like.
While true, that is true for everyone, there's no special law about police.
Speaking of Germany, can you think of other points in history where the public banded together to subvert police authority and hide their neighbors from the cops?
Why did they do that?
It's not that they're corrupt in the literal sense. It's that they have discretion of enforcement of laws so expansive with so many precedents in their favor that they basically have de-facto power to arrest anyone and that when they do want to do something stupid they're not "corrupt" so you can't just pay them off to be reasonable.
Dude, I paid to have stickers and "sheriff cards" to make it less likely cops are going to stop me cos i'm a "friend of the police".
Its wild to read cops in the US are not corrupt, did people just not read modern US history? Prohibition? Civil rights? Union busting? The Pinkertons?
Funny story about the Pinkertons if you don't already know... if you skateboard or do similar shenanigans involving parking structures or industrial wasteland, you've probably been chased by their direct descendants.
[1] https://www.securitas.com/en/newsroom/press-releases_list/se...
Hey! I resemble that remark!
I worked as a security guard through college. Never chased a skateboarder, but I did ask them nicely to leave at least once a week.
> Dude, I paid to have stickers and "sheriff cards" to make it less likely cops are going to stop me cos i'm a "friend of the police".
In many states the FOP stickers and cards are almost like "registration". You get the sticker to put on your card and just like vehicle registration, a year to show you're current. The FOP will say that's just to "show your ongoing support", but it's rather hard not to see it as "are you paid up? you don't get to get a sticker ten years ago...".
Various FOPs have also sued or done eBay take downs of people selling the "year sticker".
They're not literally corrupt. There's just a huge amount of conflict of interests, bad incentives and bad behavior.
People play fast and loose with the word "corrupt" the same way they do with "conspiracy".
You could try searching "police corruption in the US" before saying they're not literally corrupt.
They will literally grab a cop that was prosecuted and found guilty, hide the records and have them hired in some other police force in a nearby town. There's a whole mafia setup going on, organized by their unions, we're not far from having "police controlled neighborhoods" like in many LATAM countries.
Yeah, corruption happens but it's not endemic nor is it accessible to the everyman.
Yeah they'll bend the law for their buddies but we cannot just shove money in their face to make them be reasonable when they bother us like you can in Mexico. Instead we have to shove 10x as much into all manner of rent seeking systems to maintain an air of legitimacy (this last part is a gripe I have with most government stuff here, not just law enforcement related).
I don't know what you'd call literal police gangs that kill people for initiation rites, kill their own whistleblowers, etc other than corruption.
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
"least corrupt" != "not corrupt"
What you're describing is bad but also pretty mild by international standards.
If you are comparing to northern Mexico, sure. If you are comparing to northern Europe, LMAO.
With FOP stickers, "courtesy cards", placard abuse, and violent impunity, there's lots of corruption going around.
https://apnews.com/article/nypd-courtesy-card-police-miscond...
As someone who lives in a SEA country, I'm 100x safer with a local cop who wants a few bucks at a traffic stop than with any American cop.
LA Police are a literal gang. There are places with police that are corrupt in more obvious ways such as places in Africa but to say US cops are some of the least corrupt is ridiculous.
This is a very sheltered take. Go south of the border to Mexico (you don't need to go anywhere as far as Africa) and you can experience getting pulled over for no reason by a cop looking for a payout. That's not to mention that cartels are allowed to run rampant and collect "protection" in Mexican cities because the cops either don't care, are in the cartel themselves, or are being paid off.
As I said to another commenter, "some of the least corrupt" != "not corrupt". I'm sure some countries are better, but there are not that many.
"Sheltered take"? Your only concern about police malfeasance seems to be money.
Many people have WAY worse concerns. There's a sheltered view here, but it's not the one you're thinking of.
You don't need to go south of the border. You can get pulled over for no reason in the US and have drugs planted on you by a cop simply having a bad day. I'm not interpreting least corrupt as no corruption. I think least corrupt is still a ridiculous statement.
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This is recorded. There is at least one famous one on YouTube.
In Florida and maybe other states, if anyone requests body cam video on a case, the police usually have to provide it, so, of course there is going to be at least one video on Youtube of cops behaving badly, but that does not say anything informative about the rate of bad cop behavior in the US.
Spend some time in the less fortunate areas of your city. You'll learn very quickly how things work when it comes to the police.
Or just anywhere in Northern Idaho. Especially roads that connect to Oregon.
We are in a thread that began with, "Go south of the border to Mexico and you can experience getting pulled over for no reason by a cop looking for a payout".
Are you saying that the cops in Northern Idaho are out for bribes?
Let's review:
> You can get pulled over for no reason in the US and have drugs planted on you by a cop simply having a bad day.
The next reply in this thread:
> lol you watch too much tv.
No I'm not asserting they are "asking". They won't bother to ask. They'll either plant something and take your stuff that way, or "smell drugs" and seize your assets under "civil forfeiture".
No they won’t. Planting evidence is so uncommon it’s hilarious you even make such an absurd claim.
Of course not. The police would definitely do no such thing: https://www.kristv.com/news/local-news/in-your-neighborhood/...
And there definitely aren't any departments funding themselves by seizing assets from people never even accused of a crime https://www.nlg-npap.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Civil-As...
This is Whataboutism. What the police are like in Mexico is irrelevant to someone living in the United States.
If we're limiting 'corruption' to just be about bribes, then sure. Of course, in reality it also encompasses racism, nepotism, etc (i.e. anything that is a "corruption" of the impartial execution of their jobs).
I suspect many Black people would prefer paying a bribe to being killed by police at an outsize ratio, or paying a bribe to being charged more aggressively and sentenced more harshly.
Police brutality and incarceration is worse than bribes, my dude.
Credit where credit is due, American cops are considerably less corrupt than American politicians. Most people in America would never even dream of trying to pay off a cop to get out of a speeding ticket, that sort of thing just doesn't work and everybody knows it. On the other hand, bribing local politicians to get some land rezoned for your business, or some other similar crap? That's just standard operating procedure in small towns everywhere.
Corruption just doesn't have much to do with the kind of misconduct that comes up in the US. It's true, yes, that an American officer who's decided to mistreat you won't usually accept a bribe to stop.
> Nobody forgets that
Disproven already: "Interacting with cops will never make your day better"
First, words like always and never should be to mean nearly always and nearly never. That's just colloquial English.
Second, I doubt many victims feel like their days are better after talking with the police. Just look at the abysmal solve rates.
> First, words like always and never should be to mean nearly always and nearly never.
Good luck petitioning the dictionary! :)
> Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim.
I have, multiple times. They don't give a shit. In my case, the only reason to reach out to them is to get documentation for insurance or to start the legal process for obtaining restraining orders through courts.
I've only had to call the cops a few times, but they usually put me on hold. 50/50 if they actually do anything or just give me the law enforcement equivalent of this meme- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-aint-reading-all-that (aka "please don't file a report because it makes our metrics look bad)
People forget that calling the cops as a victim also costs lives. There have been more than enough cases of someone calling in a wellness check on someone who ends up getting murdered by police instead of helped, or victims who call the police and end up getting shot or arrested by them.
The police as they are now in North America are not a good option, they're just the least worst option. You call them and they show up and you hope that they cause more problems for the offender than the victim, but that's never guaranteed.
I have not been unusually lucky in that way, though. I can think of half a dozen occasions when the kind of people who call the cops would have done so, but I didn't, because I expected they would do no good - if they bothered to show up at all - and might well have caused a lot of harm.
Consider yourself lucky that you've never called the cops as a victim and then been further victimized by the police.
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lmao, I haven't had a single good interaction with cops and I'm not a minority and I most of the interactions I've had were not as a result of me doing crimes, and the ones that were "crimes" were for things like "being in a park shortly after sundown". I have never once had a reason to view them as anything other than shitty powertripping bullies.
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Yeah no. This happens in my city and to my friends. You're making a lot of assumptions about people's experiences here.
Sometimes, maybe, and increasingly rarely. I live in Texas. Ask me about Uvalde.
Yeah, it's great that someone shows up three hours late and writes a worse report than you would.
I have. They showed up late and didn't do anything useful
>Consider yourself lucky that you've never had to call the cops as a victim. People forget that cops also save lives.
I have. Several times. In the latter two cases (burglaries at my home and my brother's home -- one in NYC and the other in the Bay Area), the police were spectacularly inept and completely useless.
In the first case, the police arrested the perpetrators more by happenstance than design, despite the fact that these kids (all except the 22 year-old ringleader were 16 or younger) had been committing similar crimes for months.
As the old saw goes, "I don't hate the police, I just feel better when they're not around."
I called the cops as a victim of a violent crime. They put me in handcuffs because I was the person on the scene who best fit the profile of a perpetrator, despite the actual perpetrators standing there next to me. I gave them a video and audio recording of the crime being committed. I did not get my cellphone back. Later, I went to court with the perpetrators, and their only penalty was paying me a fine which was slightly less than what I paid in legal costs.
Cops are not your friends, even as a victim; neither are lawyers or judges. Treat the whole justice system more like a Linux server with an SQL injection: amoral, and can be made to do anything you want, if you're evil and happen to know how which levers to pull and how to not get caught.
Since it's relevant here, I am a white man.
I've called cops as a victim. They were less than helpful to say the least. If anything, they were annoyed that I even bothered to ask for help.
I've been nearly killed with significant injuries caused by a repeat offender while in full compliance with the law myself and the police conspired to hide body camera evidence of a witness interview and took the side of the person who broke the law.
Since we're throwing in personal experiences to shape skimmer's overall emotions on police- I had a great interaction with police after someone called a wellness check on elderly neighbors. They tried hard to assure they were safe without being invasive or annoying.
I have had positive experiences with American police, but not as many as the negative experiences, and the negative where great enough to sour me on authority. In fact whenever I had a positive experience it was just so weird to have a cop not ruining your day because they had the power to do so, that it seemed surreal.
You are missing the point if you think it is about shaping someones' emotions towards police. The point is that there are plenty of valid reasons to just want to avoid interactions with or areas with police.
I've dealt with the cops a handful of times, with responses anywhere from unhelpful to helpful. It helps to have the right expectations - can a given situation be improved by adding some readily-aggressive dudes, who at the very least will be a little annoyed at having to be there? Sometimes, that answer is yes. Police perform a necessary function in society, and I wouldn't want to have to do that role myself (despite DIYing most other things).
But that does not justify supporting unaccountability as if its some kind of team sport! In fact, if you respect the role of the police then you must support accountability - a cop breaking the law is just a criminal acting under the color of state authority.
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Could you please stop using HN primarily for political battle? This is not a valid use of HN, and you're well on the wrong side of the line. I had to go back a good two months before seeing anything else in your posts.
(This is not a comment on your politics. The moderation call here would be the same if you had the opposite politics, or any others.)
Edit: This has been a problem for a long time. I don't believe it's your intention to abuse HN, so I don't want to ban you, but if you don't fix this, we'll end up doing so.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121542 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22436733 (Feb 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19972399 (May 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19715736 (April 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16758558 (April 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16749749 (April 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457684 (Feb 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234007 (Jan 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15849007 (Dec 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15773271 (Nov 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15484503 (Oct 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672661 (June 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14233383 (April 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13517054 (Jan 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13515750 (Jan 2017)
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You're so right. I'm not afraid of the cops, especially not ICE flunkies, but interactions with law enforcement has never made my day more convenient and pleasant. It's not that I'd hide anything from them, as much as for me it's a bureaucratic hassle I'd just as soon not have to deal with.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
>Out of curiosity, does anyone know, officially, how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
You don't have to say anything to them without a court order but obviously they're still cops so they can screw you if you make a jerk of yourself doing it.
> how much a multi-generation born-in-America person is actually obligated to cooperate with or answer to ICE?
This is the wrong question. The right question is "who will hold them accountable if they violate your rights or try to punish you for lack of obedience?"
>"who will hold them accountable
Politicians looking to score brownie points with either the public or the state itself.
So basically you're SOL if you're not a more equal animal or connected to them (Skip Gates), a public persona (Whistlin Diesel), attractive woman (Karen Read, though you can argue that nobody has held the cops accountable on this one, yet) or highly sympathetic individual.
There is some argument to be made that the truth comes out eventually in these sorts of matters but that's not gonna make Breonna Taylor any less dead or the Phonesavanh's kid from being any less disabled.
I think the Floyd factor also prevents cops who are alone or in a pair from escalating stuff unnecessarily as much as they used to which is where a lot of these abuses historically come from.
Most elected politicians at this point are happy to repeat the same lies of "this person was arrested because they were being violent/interfering/were acting suspiciously/refused to identify themselves" even if there is multiple sources of video evidence to the contrary. Republicans in particular have no interest in the truth where it conflicts with the claims they want to make to advance their agenda, and most Democrats are too toothless to call out this misbehavior with the force and passion it deserves.
And when they do call it out, people will be told by Fox News and others that "this senator is opposed to the work ICE is doing to solve the problem of illegal immigrants", and other news agencies will say "such-and-such official says this senator is opposed to..." and the propaganda will spread and people will believe it.
So there’s this thing called the judiciary…
In this thread: you slowly realizing that you live in an increasingly corrupt despotic police state...
Sure you might be fine (they just harass the brown and black people), but it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.
Oh yeah, those guys who came up with qualified immunity.
North Korea has a judiciary. So does Iran. So does China. They all have the rough equivalent of a Supreme Court too.
A judiciary can only function as a check on other types of power when it is allowed to do so. Merely being called by that name is not enough.
OK, I don't disagree, but there is nothing that guarantees the judiciary will act constitutionally or protect people's rights, so "who will hold the judiciary accountable if they violate your rights, try to punish you for lack of obedience, or fail to hold those who violate peoples rights accountable?""
Pretty much all layers say judiciary is deferential to cops and prosecution to the point of absurdity.
Legally speaking, they need signed arrest warrants. Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK. In this way, they have much less power than local PD or Sheriffs.
Practically speaking, of course, there's news stories every week about them arresting citizens, even when they're saying stuff like "please, check my wallet, my ID is in there!". I haven't followed up, but I'd be shocked if any of these incidents resulted in any sort of reparations for the victim.
As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement. Getting arrested is bad, but getting shot by someone with terrible trigger discipline and no training is worse... At best, they're especially aggressive, masked cops with absolutely zero accountability.
> Being "multi-generation" (aka "clearly white"?) doesn't factor into it -- all residents are owed this protection, AFAIK.
That's my understanding, too. I do happen to be white, but by multi-generation, I mean that I'm not a recent immigrant, nor are my parents, or theirs, so ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of. Similarly, the vast majority of my Black neighbors have been here for many, many years; same deal for them.
> As a side note, I'd be way more afraid of "flunkies" than any other type of law enforcement.
Same here. Being arrested for a BS reason would be quite the hassle, but it sure beats getting shot by a masked try-hard.
> ICE doesn't have any clear power over me that I'm aware of
They have a bunch of guys with guns. Maybe no warrants or id's or anything legal like that, but guns are probably enough.
With this latest bill, they are going to be one of the largest armed forces in the world. They'll get more money than the US Marines.
Citizenship comes from law. Enforcers and the judiciary choose which law to enact and how to enact them. If enforcers of the "law" are more loyal to the administration than the constitution, then the law and all it's implications, such as citizenship, are up to the arbitrary whims of our new king coronated by the supreme court.
That's the problem with not defending Rule of Law. If law is arbitrary and only serves the interests of one person and isn't grounded in some greater objective truth, then it doesn't matter what is officially allowed or not. If judges and enforcers are loyalists then they get to make the call whether your lack of cooperation is obstruction of justice or not. Who is going to punish them for violating your rights? Other ICE agents? The DOJ? You might not even be given standing to fight for your rights in court.
An ICE agent may choose not to believe you are a US citizen and call your documents fake, and put you in a concentration camp or deport you to El Salvador.
As with Kilmar we saw that ICE can act without due process, and due process is what determines your citizenship status.
Trump is also openly talking about revoking the citizenship of citizens.
It's worth a reading about de-naturalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denaturalization#Human_rights
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Ah yes, it's certainly the fault of the Biden administration. Why hadn't we realized this, it changes everything.
Stop it. Be serious.
In many states you’re required to identify yourself, but cooperation with law enforcement is otherwise never required. My sense is that ICE generally still releases citizens swiftly, and if they don’t think you’re a citizen for some reason you’re not going to win an argument about it on the spot no matter how much you cooperate.
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For sure. I think I'm reasonably well connected and could make a political nightmare for anyone who deported me illegally, but that's slim consolation if I'm trying urgently to learn the language of whatever prison I'm in.
Unless your name is nationally known, I doubt this is the case. It's not local people who are deporting you. There are numerous cases of well connected people beloved in their community getting deported. There are no consequences for the perpetrators.
That's the main reason its happening, there are no consequences for making mistakes. So they can ship you to a concentration camp and no one will know, because there won't be paperwork anywhere saying this happened, unless someone happened to be there and recorded you being abducted.
By the time someone might decide to check ICE records you could be in South Sudan already. No one is safe.
Could you? We STILL don't know the identities of everyone sent to CECOT. It's hard to make a political nightmare when no one knows where you are, or even that you were "arrested".
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I don’t even know if the claim is true or not, but “easily debunked” is a pretty strong statement. How would you easily debunk it?
Easy debunk: ICE is a federal law enforcement agency. Entering or remaining in the country illegally is, by definition, illegal. ICE agents are law enforcement officers, not "deputized Proud Boys." Federal law enforceent agencies like ICE have recruitment and training processes that are well-established and documented.
https://www.ice.gov/about-ice https://www.ice.gov/careers
The masked ICE gestapo bunch refuse to identify. You can't prove that they aren't "deputized proud boys" if they won't identify.
Do you have evidence of federal law enforcement officers refusing to identify themselves when making an arrest?
please, if you use instagram, follow @uniondelbarrio and @lataco - they often repost videos of kidnappings in progress.
i have seen many such videos, and not once have i seen any evidence that ICE agents are identifying themselves.
If you've seen many such videos, certainly you can produce one where the officer refused to identify themselves, right?
unfortunately most sites like youtube etc are blocked on my work network, but i did already give you a couple of sources to find such videos.
there's also discussion of legislation against this behavior here: https://fox40.com/news/no-vigilantes-act-introduced-in-an-ef...
another source (LA Times) which mentions the lack of identification: https://web.archive.org/web/20250702182237/https://www.latim...
the mayor acknowledges this. city council acknowledges this. if you're talking in good faith, it's time to acknowledge this.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ICE+refusing+to+identify
Plenty of articles out there... go read for yourself.
There's no federal law requiring officers to give you their name or badge number. It's a myth they have to do so when asked, just like it's a myth cops have to tell you they're law enforcement when asked during a sting operation.
All they have to do is assert their authority, and they don't even have to do that on a particular timetable. If you don't like it, tell you legislator to do their job and change the law.
There was already a case of a copycat dressing in a mask and tactical gear and "asserting his authority". If they don't need to identify, then nobody needs to identify. And if they don't identify then they are nothing more than a masked gang.
I'll also add that masks are illegal to use during crimes to hide identity - which is exactly what these people are doing. They are committing crimes by abducting US citizens and they are blocking due process and they are exporting people to foreign 3rd countries. What they are doing is against the Constitution. We will track down and prosecute these people after this fascist regime is over, which is why they are masking and trying to hide their identity - they know what they are doing is illegal.
https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-lawsuit-trump-adminis...
> There's no federal law requiring officers to give you their name or badge number
Well then since federal agencies are now abusing this letter of the law in complete bad faith and contributing to this disruption of the general peace, it sounds like it is up to state governors to tackle this epidemic of masked gangs of thugs running around and abducting people - order state and local law enforcement to interrupt any and all masked gang activity and arrest the perps (and order their national guards to deploy if additional force projection is necessary to restore law and order). If it turns out a given gang was acting under "legally valid" federal authority to carry out "legally valid" federal actions and therefore has immunity (and wasn't say a drug cartel hit squad emboldened by the general disorder), that can be sorted out and verified through due process in the courts. States owe no less to their citizens.
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>ICE is breaking the law with zero evidence of that
Arresting US citizens without any cause is illegal, and that's exactly what they have been doing, and they will make up excuses to cover their ass. They are also arresting legitimate tourists, without justification.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/26/immigration-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/04/12/ice-to...
"According to her attorney, Andrea Velez was released on bond after being detained by immigration enforcement agents on Tuesday and then charged with assaulting a federal officer." [0]
That's good cause for an arrest. Civil disobedience carries consequences.
[0] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/family-outraged-fed...
>That's good cause for an arrest.
It's also a lie.
So debunk it??
Have we reached a place on HN now where we're asking people to prove negatives, just because it aligns with our collective politics?
It is fine to say there isn’t evidence for something. For some reason the poster decided to invite this challenge by calling it “easily debunked” instead. A debunking is specifically a claim that there’s evidence that the original claim was wrong.
This is just a form of gish galloping [0]. Like I alluded to, it's disappointing that discourse on HN is at a place where enough of the participants are supportive of this as long as it's happening to the "other team."
> During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.
See also Brandolini's law [1] if this feels familiar:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
It is not any more effort to say “It is an unsubstantiated and unprovable rumor that ICE has deputized proud boys.” It is also a much more accurate reflection of the level of confidence.
If you call somebody’s claim “easily debunked,” that’s a proactive offer of counter evidence. It isn’t Gish gallop to accept that offer of counter evidence.
Anyway, where else is the conversation supposed to go? The post had the offer of an easy debunking and no other content.
This is not something that can be or should even need to be "debunked". It is the responsibility of the government to act in a way that engenders trust of the citizens. For example, not deploying roving gangs wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves while purporting to act with government authority. Surely you can see how this destroys the rule of law, regardless of whether those are 30 year career civil servants who just now happen to be wearing masks, or some newly-formed lynch mob.
In general, the government justifying itself to citizens is called leadership. This "government" does the exact opposite across the board, and compensates with divisive propaganda that nurtures loyal all-in extremist followers.
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They've abducted US citizens, it's perfectly reasonable to want to avoid them.
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Arrest my ass. If they don’t mirandize, give you a phone call and immediate and consistent access to a lawyer, then it’s abduction.
Neither of these claims are true. Miranda rights apply to criminal arrests but immigration arrests are typically civil.
The 6th Amendment guarantees the right to a lawyer during critical stages such as interrogation and court proceedings only, e.g. in California the window in which arraignment is guaranteed is 48 hours (this is where the court will offer defendants the opportunity for a court-appointed lawyer).
> Miranda rights apply to criminal arrests but immigration arrests are typically civil.
> The 6th Amendment guarantees the right to a lawyer
I think people arrested by ICE are not guaranteed a lawyer, because, as you say, it's a civil matter. This means if you find yourself sleeping on a cot behind a chain link fence in Alligator Alcatraz, and you want to speak to a lawyer, you'll have to pay for it yourself, because it's all a civil matter.
Are we great again?
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Maybe, but I think they meant "treat it like a civil matter while giving civil-matter protections". Be consistent. The current criminal treatment with civil protections is inconsistent. Pick a lane.
It's also just not true that they're giving the much-lower civil protections either. Garcia didn't get a jury despite the Seventh Amendment guaranteeing one in common law (for cases exceeding a challenge of $20, which we've been purposively interpreting for decades)
Something being into law doesn't change reality. It is abduction even if the Pope and the Queen sign on it, period. Remember not everyone in the planet is American, this is like quoting North Korean law to justify some random atrocity.
It is Hacker News so of course someone is gonna rationalize fucking abducting people.
What type of "immigration arrests" are valid against citizens?
Arrests are based on suspicion. As long as there is reasonable suspicion at the time of the arrest then it’s valid.
Reasonable suspicion is not a high enough bar to jail somebody.
What qualifies as "reasonable suspicion" of a citizen committing an immigration crime? Aren't you just advocating for the ability of ICE to arrest anyone who has the wrong color skin or speaks the wrong language?
isn't that the point?
Probable cause or a warrant. I am not sure what PC for being an illegal immigrant looks like, maybe seeing someone climbing the border wall?
Obviously it's being brown or speaking Spanish...
If the end result is that people are forcibly abducted, extradited, and thrown into an El Salvadoran prison without due process, I really don't give a shit what the law says. It can't be described as "civil."
Due process is ultimately what keeps this from happening to YOU.
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Of course they can! They just did right there. You don't have to accept their argument. You can be a heartless sycophant and reject it out-of-hand because their argument doesn't follow the rules of the very framework they are arguing against. That's your choice.
Progress is being made in both directions on this front. If you truly believe in the law, then argue for it. Considering the fact that the current POTUS is a convicted felon, and the supreme court has practically eliminated all checks on his power, I'll be taking arguments for lawlessness seriously.
I don't know the law, and didn't say I did. I know the difference between right and wrong, though. I was responding to the GP comment where you basically argued that, "Well, actshually, nothing Trump's doing is illegal."
I also know that the courts are turning into wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Trump Organization. Not all of them, of course. But as for the rest, if there is no way for them to enforce their rulings -- and it seems there is not -- then they have no more power than random commenters on Hacker News, and deserve no more consideration.
And I grew up believing that America was 'land of the free'.
I've never had to prove my ID to a police-person here in the UK - once or twice they've asked me who I was, but they didn't check the answer I gave them and no ID was shown. I never carry photo ID unless I'm flying, so I wouldn't have been able to prove who I was anyway.
The UK has a complicated relationship with IDs anyway, they don't have a national ID, no one's mandated to have a passport, and a driving license is also optional (only if you want to drive). The US is almost like that except that not having a driving license is an oddity there.
Indeed - but even if you have a license, there is no expectations to carry it when you drive. If the police request they can give you a 'Producer' which historically was where you had to attend a police station with your license and insurance documents - but they can check insurance online via ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) before they've even stopped you.
Getting into clubs as a teenager was comical - as there is no standard ID most people had 'work ID' that was just a laminated bit of paper. Or would carry a paper drivers license with no photo on it.
The more the government has to tell you how free you are, the less free you are.
There are zero known exceptions to this principle.
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I’m a latino in Germany of all places and for years I didn’t carry any identification because the only one I had was my passport, the german work permit was just a sticker in one of the pages. I am obviously not gonna risk losing my passport, so it was home.
Police never stopped me, but when I asked “what should I do?” they were more than understanding of the situation and just said that in the worst case I gotta go home grab it.
Only recently I got a German Personalausweis in the shape of a card.
I am a white German with no migration background and i believe it is not all that beautiful here and I have been checked on various places. The reason is, that it really also depends where you are, because police has the right to check IDs e.g. in places where migration crimes are more likely like railway stations or in a buffet zone close to the border. In other places law requires far more actual reasons or a far more concrete suspicion. But I have also been checked in the middle of the night on a flixbus that got pulled out from the highway at the border between Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, which IMHO clearly violated German police law.
Oh, definitely. I'm not saying there's no police checks, I'm just saying according to the police officer it was ok to not have with me at all times and leave at home.
Also, when I was outside of the city I live I would bring the passport, and now the Personalausweis...
I was in a similar situation when I immigrated to Sweden ~20 years ago (I'm Brazilian).
Technically the law says that I'm supposed to carry passport + residence permit (first version was a sticker, then it became a card). However, the hassle of carrying them on a daily basis (and especially losing them!) is too much so I was left them at home. I made a color photocopy of both and put on my wallet instead.
Then later the Swedish tax office started issuing ID cards for non-citizens and I started carrying that (but also the photocopy).
As a foreigner I was not fully complying with letter of the law by doing that but to me the risk of losing my paperwork was far, far higher than being punished for not carrying those. I assumed that in practice if it was something serious they would look me up in the system anyway, or escort me home to produce my paperwork.
Not sure if I that was indeed the reasonable thing to do or if I got lucky, but I never had any problems.
> anywhere that's not an airport
Why are we accepting this even at airport?
Locking the doors of the cockpit made another 9/11 close to impossible.
Murdering all the passengers made another 9/11 impossible -- nobody is going to sit quietly while their plane is hijacked anymore.
History is filled with people who dug their own graves while a person with a gun pointed at them told them to do it.
It takes an exceptional person to act before their fate is sealed and the majority of passengers, if not all of them, will be in a state of denial or shock at the situation they are in preventing them from action. Others who might want to act, but not having been in the situation before, will think about what to do or when the right moment to act is, and the right moment will never come, especially if the hijackers can guarantee the first person who acts dies.
Prior to 9/11, hijackings occurred with mild frequency and the official policy was appeasement: get the plane safely landed and then negotiate with the hijackers. In any ways, 9/11 was possible due to exploiting that particular policy.
Since 9/11 there have been attempts to disrupt planes and no shortage of people willing to tackle the person responsible.
As a frequent flyer who has thought about this scenario a bit, I agree with this. And I actually think that as long as the FAs kept making their inane announcements about credit cards and so forth, most pax wouldn't even notice a takeover at the front of the plane.
You do what the person with the gun says, because you believe they'll shoot if you don't. If you believe that they will shoot and kill you regardless, following their orders is (at best) going to give you a few more agonizing minutes to live. The threat becomes meaningless.
Don't try to overpower the hijackers? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and fail? You die. Try to overpower the hijackers and succeed? You live. It only takes one person to do the math and realize they are basically in a no-loss scenario.
Yes, the math is the easy part, doing is the hard part. The difference between understanding and doing is large and denial, shock, rumination, and rationalization all fuel inaction and there is often a moment in which it becomes too late.
People on death marches, in concentration camps, or other similar scenarios have the same math, and yet they get gassed or forced to dig their own graves after which they are shot and buried in them.
So yes, rationally that all makes sense and we should celebrate anyone putting themselves at risk to fight for the benefit of a larger group, but reality is different, especially if the hijackers can guarantee at least one death.
To say a hijack could never happen again is wrong. The doors are a much more reasonable explanation than the courage of men.
History also gets forgotten, such as the history of secret police or mass deportation efforts as is quite clear in this thread.
Airport security has rendered passengers equal. There is no imbalance of power that exists in all the examples that you provided.
Assuming something is true doesn't make it true. Colluding airport employees as well as rural airports seem like clear vulnerabilities. When thinking about security problems you don't just assume your security measure always succeed and assuming that all passengers are "equal" seems like a poor assumption, especially for an exceptional case by highly motivated people, potentially with state backing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_West_Flight_612
Here is an example where a man got a gun on a plane in 2007, which directly disproves the 'equality' if passengers.
I'm not arguing against anything you've said, but this isn't as popular of a sentiment as you think it is. For example, people who post information about DUI checkpoints in local social media forums are typically pilloried in comments sections.
Unless I'm mistaken, I remember some years ago the Apple Store blocked a DUI Checkpoint app. Has that changed?
ICE has quota requirements to meet. And this makes it difficult for them to meet it. They don’t want to work so hard. It is a big problem.
Speaking as a resident of the United States who does not happen to possess paperwork related to my residency, I think this ICE stuff is terrible. I do want to stay here in the US, I do have needs that require welfare for myself and my children. Food, housing, medicine, these are human rights, we all deserve them it's as simple as that. I thought the US supported human rights so that I could stay here and raise a family on the taxpayer dime because someone threatened me one time in my home country. Sadly, that is not the case, for shame.
In essence it's no different from users being able to report a speed check on Apple/Google Maps
> As a more tan law-abiding US citizen
At first I misread this and thought you must be a vigilante
> not wanting to get hassled at a DUI checkpoint
We don’t get this in NZ. Waze has removed this feature after threats. I don’t like cops either, but it is super fair and logical to me.
Reporting traffic cameras/stops is illegal in many countries but not the US. That however does not mean that reporting police activity is automatically always legal there. Similar to how taking along a hitchhiker is legal but driving a getaway car for a crime is not.
> As a more tan law-abiding US citizen, the possibility of some agent asking me for papers and then asking probing questions to "prove myself" anywhere that's not an airport is enough for me to want a heads up not to be in area where that might happen.
No matter if you are a law-abiding citizen, the cops have too many rights to annoy people. At least in Western nations, anyone should have the right to not answer the police or any other agent of the state about what one is doing or has done without repercussions. Always remember "three felonies a day"!
In practice, we all know that if you do not do what the cop wants (or, frankly, if you have the wrong skin color), the cop finds a way to make your life difficult - from submitting one to the litany of shit they can legally do (like a full roadworthiness check of your vehicle or, if near a border, a full inspection for contraband) down to stuff that should be outright illegal (like civil forfeiture) or is actually illegal (like a lot of the current actions of ICE).
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You can hold both of those opinions simultaneously. They pair nicely.
You definitely can. I was prompting the parent commenter to see if they had made that connection or not.
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In the US, we're not ordinarily required to keep any sort of ID on our person. There are some exceptions, such as the mentioned airports, crossing federal borders (as in to Canada or Mexico), some federal facilities, maybe some state/local government facilities, and (state dependent I've learned) when operating a car. Otherwise, you're pretty much free to leave your home in nothing but shorts and maybe a shirt (public decency laws and all) and go almost anywhere without issue.
Real ID is irrelevant to this. The issue is that now they can demand that people prove their citizenship almost anywhere and anytime beyond the few places it was permitted before.
The shorts and shirt is state dependent, too. If you're in California, the shorts and shirts are optional (indecent exposure requires "intent to arose or offend")
My understanding is that Real ID isn't considered proof that someone is legally in the US, because in some cases a non citizen can get one while they're here legally and then overstay their welcome.
And that's also ignoring the whole "papers please" of how allegedly Americans aren't required to carry ID if they're just walking around
No, why would it?
I live in a country with the equivalent of a Real ID and a law requiring you to present it when asked. Officially they are supposed to have a good reason for it, but in practice they'll happily do it just because they can. And they'll continue "just asking questions" if they feel like it. You're not under arrest of course, but they are happy to waste a few hours of your time when you "refuse to cooperate".
After all, as a law-abiding citizen you don't have anything to hide, do you?
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If you truly believe that; then you are not paying attention
The person you replied to was pointing out a typo in their parent post: "more tan", referring to skin color and the demonstrable effect it has on interactions with law enforcement.
Intent matters.
I've considered making a similar app for Denmark's train and bus ticket checkers, but I expect it would get rule illegal and blocked.
https://www.thelocal.dk/20240529/what-happens-if-you-board-a...
This is anti-social behavior and it leads to lawlessness and society sometimes having rather overbearing response to the increase (see ICE in the United States).
Paying for public services is a duty of the public. Otherwise you won’t have public services anymore. It’s morally equivalent to being a tax cheat, in my view.
Yeah, sometimes people develop an antipathy to certain social structures, and then that antipathy is defined as anti-social I guess, but there's probably no amount of Jantelov you can lay on that will make them change their minds.
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Communism is a failed ideology and we should be on guard to extinguish it wherever we find it. We know that state ownership of the means of production leads to poor economic results at the nation state level.
With that out of the way, if we (and I personally do) want to support transit for the masses and even make sure that those who are struggling financially have a means to use transit to maintain their qualify of life and dignity, we should do so through publicly supported programs and funding instead of "yea go ahead and jump the queue" because that leads to other problems, perhaps chief of all is the perception of anti-social behavior.
You can't have public programs or support a strong community when people perceive that there is injustice taking place, and when they see someone cutting line and seeing no repercussions, you will lose broad support for public works. In other words, the bad apple spoils the bunch.
>and when they see someone cutting line and seeing no repercussions, you will lose broad support for public works
You mean like how a bunch of states imported every tom dick and harry from the 3rd world, immigration papers be damned, handed out licenses/residency like candy, then signed them all up for bennies and consequently support for those social programs is waning among the voting public?
It's maddening that you can't seem to grasp that your thinking can trivially be used to justify the kind of behavior w're currently seeing from ICE
Let me summarize my thoughts here:
I think we should fund assistance programs for folks to use mass transit (that we also need to build more of and fund more of) instead of having people hop the queue because it leads to negative outcomes for public programs, and it's unfair.
You're free to make of that what you will. If that means you think I support ICE and their current behavior or something, then I guess I do. I don't really care.
I went as a biljettkontrollant (Swedish ticket inspector) for Halloween—thought it’d be funny as a Yank expat.
Entering a room, I could feel the anxiety as some people instinctively grabbed their phones to buy a ticket.
That's in poor taste, but only because it cost them money.
They should have really had a ticket in the first place though, otherwise they are stealing from all other riders who have to make up the missed cost in increased ticket prices (or from all taxpayers since public transport costs are almost always already heavily subsidized).
There are so many layers of crazy here but the one that strikes me most is attacking CNN for having a piece about the App. I.e. it's not just that reporting police activity is treated as a problem (it's not) but even an article discussing the way that some people are reporting police activity is a problem.
> "CNN is willfully endangering the lives of officers who put their lives on the line every day and enabling dangerous criminal aliens to evade US law,"
If the engadget article gets enough eyeballs will they be also be willfully endangering lives? What about a really popular forum thread discussing that article?
> officers who put their lives on the line every day
This sounds a lot less impressive when you realize that cops have the same fatal injury rate as landscaping supervisors or crane operators, less than half the rate of garbage collectors, and one-sixth the rate of logging workers.
There's definitely a decent bit of risk involved in being a cop, but we're not exactly seeing Thin Green Line flags for landscapers either, are we?
Now I want a loggers "Thin Brown Line" flag XD
Cops should be proud to put their lives at risk. It should be part of the job expectations. You should care so much about the community you're supposed to serve that you'd be willing to make that sacrifice, even for a total stranger. The fact that none of this pride or expectation exists highlights that cops are cowards who get into policing for bad or selfish reasons and perpetuate systemic problems that harm millions.
That's a nice ideal. I honestly kind of agree with you in the sense that I wish that was how things were. But in my view, it's easier to think about the police as a force whose primary purpose is to enforce the property rights of the capital holding class. In the United States there have been court rulings clarifying that police officers are never obligated to risk their lives.
If you look at the actual numbers, at least in the US, policing can really only be viewed as a risky profession from a white-collar point of view. According to OSHA, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and even pilots all have a greater likelihood of dying on the job.
I agree that's both the historical basis and continued reality of what policing is in the US (and also probably elsewhere). It's interesting to see how quickly and ravenously cops respond to businesses calling in reports, and crimes associated to the wealthy and powerful. Meanwhile someone can call the cops about their neighbor beating a spouse and they'll never show up and seem annoyed when they want to make a report.
No they shouldn’t.
In an ideal world police are helping tourists find their way to their destination, helping grannies cross the street and writing the occasional traffic fine.
Where I live, violent crime is rare.
Sure but that point we're idealizing a society where humans are just... not humans. The occasional violence is going to happen amongst humans for a long time, there is a lot of basic evolutionary wiring in us that is going to lead some section of the population into violence as teenagers or adults.
Yes, but the level of risk police should be exposed to can be negligible.
This reminds me of how we have articles and handwringing about “our soldiers were attacked” in a country they had no authorization to even be. It is never discussed what they were actually doing there, but this is usually framed as in “we need more money to defend our men and women overseas”.
Example: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/10/23/politics/niger-troops-law...
Several other leading senators also said they were in the dark about the operation in the western Africa nation.
“I didn’t know there was 1,000 troops in Niger,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “They are going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing.”
He continued: “I got a little insight on why they were there and what they were doing. I can say this to the families: They were there to defend America. They were there to help allies. They were there to prevent another platform to attack America and our allies.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/06/793895401/iraqi-parliament-vo...
Even when a country’s leaders unanimously tell us to withdraw our troops, we say nah:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-withdrawing-iraq-agreemen...
“Are we the baddies?” — Mitchell & Webb
Antagonistic posts could well be by Russian misinformation. They’ve done this before and that’s what they do.
They just need to do enough to trigger others off.
>"...we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out, because that's not a protected speech. That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country."'
wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned.
I see little to no difference between this, Waze, helmet* taps, or flashing your high beams to other cars when passing the cops. That topic in general has been in court multiple times, and every time the ruling was in favor of it being considered freedom of speech.
Retaliation against free speech is completely normalized at this point. Primarily this administration has gone after large targets (recent Paramount case, the universities) and symbolic targets (students, a mayoral candidate). The circle of targets is going to continue to expand. Soon enough everyone’s speech will be tightly controlled under an AI-powered surveillance apparatus.
I’m nervous about how willing SCOTUS has been to throw out precedent and side with this administration.
> That is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers
It sounds like he's suggesting the app is intended as a way to target officers for assassination or something? That does seem like it might make a difference if it were true, but it also doesn't really seem like the intent of the app at all.
They know, they just don't care. They have a friendly Supreme Court, and even if they lose in court they suffer zero consequences for trying.
head taps?
People on motorcycles signal "police ahead" to riders in the opposite direction by reaching up with their left hand and tapping their head/helmet.
on a motorcycle when you pass a cop you tap your helmet to warn other riders.
thanks. and yikes! I've been a motorcycle rider for over a decade, many thousands of miles, now on my 3rd bike -- and somehow I'm just now learning this.
> wild statement from the person who went to law school, but threw out everything they learned
Trump pardoned felons who attacked law enforcement on January 6th. Bondi has no credibility calling out anyone for endangering law enforcement. If a Democrat were to match Trump’s rhetoric, they’d be promising pardons for anyone who physically assaulted ICE. They’re not. This entire shitshow is posturing.
The difference is scale. Waze and the like apps will let everyone know, not just a handful drivers.
>Waze and the like apps will let everyone know, not just a handful drivers.
What do you mean by this? I don’t use the app in the article (or Waze or any others, so they don’t let _me_ know).
What does ICEBlock do differently?
Disclaimer: I despise this administration, and think ICE should be abolished.
I would assume they mean that cops have a general duty to prevent/catch crime. So all you're doing by notifying people with waze or head taps is saying "hey there's police there!" Which everyone has a right to know.
However, because ICE is specialized, warning people of their presence might be seen as more akin to attempting to warn someone that their house is about to be raided by the FBI
>The app does not collect or store any user data, which TechCrunch confirmed by analyzing the app’s network traffic as part of a test.
Actually pretty decent tech reporting if true. This is a non trivial task that can take some time to setup and analyze. If the app is secure and uses certificate pinning it would require reverse engineering it to patch over the pinning before you could MiTM the traffic and actually see it decrypted.
Apple still has all the download and push notification data.
They can hand it over to the government real quickly.
The author does not provide a Android version and does not specify why.
Edit: ok, the author does specify why, see the replies below.
the author has specified why, in a pretty detailed post about it (https://www.iceblock.app/android). they quote your exact concern as the reason they only support Apple:
> Apple’s ecosystem allows for push notifications to be sent without requiring us to store any user-identifiable information.
edit: however, GrapheneOS disputes this: https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3lswujex4e22w
iOS dev but not expert in how push notifications are implemented but confused by this claim, both platforms you need a device specific token because? of course you do? I feel like I am missing something
Right? I'm confused how APNS could do this differently from FCM. At least an Android app could implement push notifications without involving Google. This seems like a dev that doesn't really understand Android outside of the GMS features.
I checked and apparently, Apple supports broadcast channels for push. The app only stores the channel information and Apple stores the mapping of devices to channels. So while Apple still has the data, the dev does not.
They do specify why: https://www.iceblock.app/android
They say they'd have to maintain a DB of device info and user accounts to send push notifications, whereas Apple devices do not require this.
Sadly they don't specify why that's not necessary with iOS, I'm so curious how that's any different. They need some ID to send push notifications, and Apple keeps those registered to devices for delivery. I don't get how that's any different from Firebase push notifications and wish they could actually explain that.
I believe apple has only the metadata of the push notification, if implemented properly. The payload of the push notification itself can be end-to-end encrypted.
Isn't that true of any notification system? You're the one setting the payload, you can encrypt it before it gets to Google or Apple.
Yes, probably true. I only ever briefly interacted with APNS, can’t speak to firebase.
Because law enforcement officers have so much more power than an average citizen, they must be held to much higher standards and have even more accountability. Law enforcement radio should be unencrypted, there should be public databases of officers for facial recognition, and their vehicles and persons should be publicly trackable. The same techniques they use to surveil the citizenry should be applied to them.
https://icespy.org is a site where you can do facial recognition on ICE employees.
> Law enforcement radio should be unencrypted
I disagree. Every single criminal is going to have a scanner the next day, and it'll become impossible to apprehend genuine criminals.
On the other hand, I would support mandatory recording and archiving of law enforcement radio, just like we are already doing with air traffic control. Combine this with independent incident investigations with public disclosure, and you've essentially achieved the accountability you are asking for.
Did you know there are currently many large police agencies that use unencrypted radios and they don't usually have any issues with it?
Such a genuinely odd comment. You must realize that encryption of police radio is a recent thing and that, yes, police were capable of apprehending criminals prior to the adoption of encrypted communications.
Americans give criminals way too much credit. Policing in many countries is way less extreme and dystopian than it is in the states and they tend to have less crime (part of that is that they actually give a shit about their citizens and have funded healthcare, and do reasonable things like ban guns etc)
As an non-American, this situation seems really crazy and is quite hard to understand for me. Why would anyone want to prevent deportation of someone, who is in the country illegaly?
Is this a cultural thing? Because I've heard that US immigration laws kind of suck (long waiting times etc), but I don't really see how this is a solution to anything?
The techical aspect I get of course - I use Waze & I'm glad when someone reports cop with a radar etc. But ICE is not really something, that should concern normal citizens, right? They don't normally interact with US citizens, so as long as you have some kind of ID, they can check that and that is the end of your interaction with them. Or am I missing something?
I'd honestly be glad, if someone could explain that to me, I'm genuinely interested in understanding what is going on.
You have never been accosted by police and assumed to be a criminal, especially in a country foreign to where you live? I think this experience would shed light on your question.
ICE is different from other police agencies. The "punishment" is deportation, which ICE insists requires no time in court in front of a judge to mete out this "punishment". And as we have seen with guy sent to the El Salvador gulag, "deportation" is not simply getting put on a plane back home. It means getting sent to a foreign prison or war zone (South Sudan).
So, you have a small risk of a catastrophic outcome when interacting with ICE. And you will have no recourse in court because ICE intends to make you disappear first. And for many Americans, this whole situation is an affront to American way of life (no due process, very nazi like behavior with the Florida concentration camp).
Lastly, the US is different from other countries because the states are partially sovereign. State law and federal law don't generally intersect and state/local police have no duty to enforce federal law. They aren't supposed to enforce federal law either. In other countries, there is typically a national police agency all police operate under and provincial governments operate under national law.
I have been checked like that as I travel a lot through the Europe. And atleast in my case I just showed them my ID, they ran it through the database and that was the end of it. It sucked, but it was a one-off, so I shrugged it off.
I would argue that deportation is not really a punishment. It is just ejecting you from a place you should not be in the first place - basically a state-operated bouncers. From the perspective of the citizen, I'd want people like that out - for my sake, and their. Because they will create gray economy & not pay taxes. And not only that - since they are in the grey zone of the economy, the people who will employ them can 1) really abuse them as they have no legal/work protections and 2) those companies can get quite a big advantage over other as they have much lower labor costs. Which in turn hurts companies that are employing legal workers, which in turn hurts tax revenue.
Regarding being sent to the active war zones - I always thought that US do have asylums for people esaping from war etc? Meaning those people should be able to get some permit to stay & therefore should not be affected by ICE at all - or is this not a thing in the US? For some reason I thought that this is a part of some kind of international treaty or something, that you cannot deport people who are escaping from war.
Regarding the El Salvador, I read quite a lot about CECOT and about (recent) history of El Salvador and to be frank, I totaly get why the people in El Salvador chose to do what they did. The amount of atrocities that local gangs were commiting was incredible and given the sheer amount of the gang members and their violence, there is really nothing "human" you can do. Granted, I have not visited El Salvador, so my information may not be 100% correct, but right now I shed no tears for the gang members in their gulags. We really are not talking about people that you can reason with.
I knew US states were partially sovereign, but I always thought that federal laws are applied country wide & are enforced like that on all levels. And the local laws are on top of those. I did not know that the local police does not/should not enforce federal law I thought that if you commit something like wire fraud, local police will be working with the FBI to catch you. But as far as I understand it, local police is not really involved in those deportations, right? I always saw ICE agents (= federal) running around & rounding people up.
Thanks for the comment & explanation
The security secretary and attorneys general going after a private citizen by name is gross
Basic authoritarian stuff.
Going after him is (worse than) gross. Using his name is normal.
In reference to the app developer: we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out...
So they're not even trying to disguise the fact anymore that they're a bunch of goons? And this, coming from a person that went to law school.
Meanwhile, I'm going to download the app right now. Thanks, Streisand effect!
> Meanwhile, I'm going to download the app right now. Thanks, Streisand effect!
You know they could be going for the Streisand effect. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to add false incidents to reduce the effectiveness of the app. Nothing will get those people riled up like a court ruling in favor of the app. In the end, it could work to the administration's favor to have the app up and running. Nothing like acting all offended in public then celebrating privately as unnecessary fear and confusion sets in with false reports.
It can be validated like a lot of the traffic apps to verify the authenticity of a report.
Interesting that Apple even allows ICEBlock on the App Store given that 13 years ago they blocked the publication of an app that notified users of American drone strikes abroad as "objectionable" content: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/apple-drone-stri...
Apple also removed a similar app in Hong Kong during protests because the Chinese Government asked them to: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/apple-removes-police-trackin...
> “The app displays police locations and we have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement,” the statement said.
I think Apple hates the current American leadership enough that they'll take their sweet time to take down this app.
ICE isn't the military, though. Effectively sabotaging American war goals is a bit different from warning American civilians. I can see why they were more uncomfortable with the drone strike app.
Tim Cook was at Trump's inauguration, and donated $1 million to it. While I don't know what his private views are, his public ones are to cozy up Trump.
That was public ass kissing but it didn't work. Tarrifs hurt apple. Trump is fixated on making iPhone in USA which is not good for apple's business.
I mean no one had his tongue farther up the golden hole than Elon and look where that landed him. The donation and inauguration appearance was probably to avoid some - not all - consequences.
Hell, you have Jared Isaacman, who also donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration to show some support, hoping to become NASA admin (for which he'd have been an uncharacteristically decent choice, being someone with a genuine interest in aerospace, and not having been all that outspoken politically).
Only for Trump to throw out the nomination as part of his falling out with Elon, saying Isaacman was a democrat.
You misspelled "Tim Apple."
I think it’s important to take a second and reflect that in 2025 America we need an app like this at all.
This is very American, The Green Book guided Black travelers to safe businesses during Jim Crow. The Underground Railroad was literally an information network to help enslaved people reach freedom. During WWII, communities helped hide Japanese Americans from internment. LGBTQ+ people created networks to find safe spaces during decades of criminalization. Native communities have long shared information about safe passage and resources.
Reminders like these are strangely comforting to me. It tells me we've been through this and worse, and have come out intact or even better afterward.
Perfectly put. American as in the historic reality. Unamerican as in the marketing ideal.
Well said. A few days ago I made a response to a comment in a thread, where I laid out a list of some aspects of American Culture [1]. And, 2 of the BIG ones in the Beliefs category were, "fundamental distrust in government and a shared collective identity in those against it, free-speech absolutism"
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=HaZeust#44411990
Except they don't believe in free-speech absolutism. They say they do, but they obviously don't, because every time one of them gets in control of speech, they make it substantially less free.
They don't believe in fundamental distrust of government either, they're a little more forgiving of interpretation and purpose of policy when they're in charge - nonetheless, these virtues are in the American zeitgeist for better or for worse.
I'm wondering if the West Bank has such a guide to avoid settlers.
This to me isn’t comforting at all because what we’re seeing now is a regression. We haven’t dealt with a regression before.
I was going to write expletives. But lets rather reflect. When is this ICE stuff going to end?
Well, they just got like $170 Billion budget passed, so they've got plenty of money to stay busy for a while.
3x more than the Marine Corps, for those at home keeping score.
A military branch (either de facto or de jure) that exists for the majority purpose to directly target, round up, and imprison or deport individuals on U.S. soil - especially with a proven record of limiting due process - should have NEVER happened. I cannot stress enough, we're a few bad days - and more and more likely 1 executive action away - from at-scale "Tree of Liberty" stuff.
Over what timeframe and earmarked for what?
Let's figure out accurately what scale and scope of damage and harassment is coming.
See also: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-budget-big-beautiful-b...
Well, perhaps if there's a Democratic president in four years, and they aren't afraid to break laws as much as Trump does, they could abolish ICE by withholding Congressional funding, destroying it the way this administration destroyed USAID, and reorganize other agencies to pick up the slack, which is how it was before 2003, when ICE was established.
Past performance estimates future results, and it shows that while Democrats don't actively make things worse, they also don't actively make things better. This is illustrated in the "ratchet and pawl model.
When the Republicans are in power they move things rightwards. When the Democrats are in power they don't move things in either direction. The net effect is a move to the right, and you cannot influence that by voting, and the overall rate of movement depends on how often each party wins, which you can influence by voting.
The chance that a third party wins and moves things leftwards is zero.
I don’t believe we will have another free and fair election in this country.
I'm pessimistic about it, too.
When there aren't enough illegal aliens left to warrant it. If you think those people have a right to be there then campaign for that but meanwhile the government should not just give up the rule of law.
> ...but meanwhile the government should not just give up the rule of law.
Isn't due process a rule of law? How about laws against bribery?
The mission creep of the ICE Gestapo will eventually include deporting (forced disappearance and exiling) US citizens who don't agree with the cult^H^H^H^Hadministration.
The self-unware irony...
Whenever I hear anything about the US in the last months it sounds like from a bad movie.
Trump always wanted to be in show business, not real estate. Now he runs the government like he's playing the role of Mafia boss on The Apprentice.
if this app is the "hmm" moment for anybody, god help us.
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> In basically no other country... do you have the birthright citizenship
I see plenty of countries on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#/media/File:Jus_soli_... what're you talking about?
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Yes, indeed. When the wild west was a meat grinder bodies were needed. And no one was paid benefits from other peoples' taxes, so it was real freedom (and responsibility), as adding people didn't add cost.
Both of those things have radically changed.
This is not a dichotomy. Border and deportation reform can coincide with accepting the practical reality of undocumented residents currently in the US.
Republicans allowed this willingly, too.
Ripping apart millions of families and snatching peaceful residents off the streets, out of churches, off of farms and out of courtrooms with masked agents is not the only way.
Separately: Birthright citizenship is a fair topic to debate. What is not normal is pretending it isn't one of the most plain and direct clauses in the Constitution.
There are other paths.
> is not the only way
> There are other paths.
But there aren't if no one walks them. How did Trump manage to almost instantly shut down the 10k (or whatever it is) a day crossings the previous administration said was impossible to stop?
Because if you're the party of illegal immigration and you oppose voter ID (because your core voters have such low expectations of African Amerticans that you can claim it's about them not being able to get an ID) then you can import voters.
And then you can indeed also claim "well they're here now; nothing can be done", and indeed do nothing. But that is also not the only path. No path is the only path, so using that criticism selectively is deliberately misleading.
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There was an 18 year old legal resident in my city that was forcibly pulled out of his house by ICE, was ignored when he showed his papers, and was shipped from Kentucky to Louisiana where they tried to "deport" him for literally no reason. After a bunch of unnecessary judicial stalling, they just kicked him out on to the street 600 miles from home and he would have essentially been homeless if the community hadn't rallied around him.
It's not a unique story.
How is this still your stance after everything that’s happened?
You don't need the app.
Ice are the good guys
The left think evil is good and good if evil nowadays
Growing up reading cyberpunk, this is both expected and welcome.
Apple App Store only. Developer has a statement about privacy concerns on Android:
https://www.iceblock.app/android
(Concerned that the information they would be required to store and handle may require they work with the government during a subpoena)
Apple also has to handle this (internally) to do push notifications, but I suppose that theory is Apple has pockets to fight the government (or it's at least out of the developers hands)
GrapheneOS has a retort: https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3lswujex4e22w
Yeah, that's basically what I deduced. They throw Android under the bus but _really_ it's not any more private, it just makes it up to Apple to comply, not the developer.
There is an argument to be made that Apple is better positioned to fight financially... However, the current administration tends to threaten blocking or mergers/acquisitions, or other red tape unless they comply. I doubt Apple would accept such financially damaging threats to protect ICEBlock's users.
Apple has resisted pressure from law enforcement in the past. That gives me a real reason to believe that they will not fold in the future.
They also threw their Chinese users under the bus and complied with the russian government as part of their war censorship.
translation: they followed local law where they operate
You can frame it like that if you want yes but they certainly aren't "resisting pressure from law enforcement".
As a side note, they do fight sometimes, they fought the EU's DMA for example, but in Russia and China, they complied without a fight though to my knowledge.
Just like Apple followed federal law installing the American backdoor for Push Notifications.
See? No laws broken, perfectly safe.
It's a different risk calculation with the current government. Deny blocking this, and suddenly there are new tariffs designed to especially hurt Apple, or other punishments for not complying.
Which pressure from law enforcement? Ron Wyden blew the whistle on Apple's warrantless Push Notification backdoor, which Apple did admit to implementing for the federal government: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
As other commenters have noted, Apple's treatment of Russian and Chinese users should not give you hope for their resisting US federal oversight.Apple fought back against forced decryption orders. They could theoretically decrypt any iPhone they're given with new firmware but they don't want to.
On the other hand, Google isn't exactly working with the authorities either. They moved Google Maps' location history to on-device storage because of the many warrants they were served, for instance, and they too refuse to decrypt phones.
These companies know to pick their battles, but they did take on the government various times.
> They could theoretically decrypt any iPhone they're given with new firmware but they don't want to.
This is untrue at some technical level: Apple is currently unable to break AES-256.
The San Bernadino case was about having Apple create and sign new firmware that would enable a brute force attack - which could easily be unsuccessful. I don't believe the Secure Enclave found in newer models even allows for a brute force attack (enforcing some delay, among other things) from BFU state.
Agreed, and they certainly have better lawyers than an indie dev could afford.
If there is any silver lining in any of this, it may be that people will finally start taking privacy as not completely irrelevant trade-off to convenience. I am not really holding my breath, but if people do not have that level of self-preservation in relatively clear instances, it probably does not matter anyway.
The issue is much older than the current US administration : Apple has been listed as participating to PRISM since 2012, and considering the whole opacity of the Patriot Act (and its derivatives), the secret courts in particular, it makes whatever they (or any other US company) might say about their commitment to privacy (when the opponent is the US government) rather irrelevant.
(Personally, I am suspecting that they do try much more than some other companies, but again, the opacity makes it impossible to verify.)
This is... misleading at best.
So GrapheneOS says two irrelevant things: one, about ANDROID_ID, and two, about spoofing locations.
Even if we know nothing about what's going on behind the scenes, we know for a fact that Google keeps and uses data that can correlate any user / device with their actions. This is something their business model includes, and we all know they do this all the time. They've even been caught lying, saying they weren't doing this when in fact they were.
So it's incredibly disingenuous for GrapheneOS to mention two irrelevant things, then make the claim that, "Making posts with inaccurate technical claims about Android doesn't inspire confidence."
Yes, GrapheneOS, this doesn't inspire confidence at all. I wouldn't believe anyone who writes irrelevant things when discussing very specific issues in an attempt to confuse and mislead.
Apple tracks user location too. If you log into your iCloud from a country you've never been to, you're going to have to need to provide your 2FA code even with a valid session token. They're not stupid.
Apple is very much in favour of user privacy, as long as that privacy means "protecting your data from third parties". When it comes to the data Apple itself collects, they're far less conservative. They don't share information derived from their massive databases per se, but they do keep track.
Thanks to Apple and Find My, stalking people is easier than ever. The company can look up where you are and where you've been. They'd probably fight a court order to provide live location data to ICE, but who knows what that'll mean with the current American government.
Even on iOS, user data ends up in the hands of data brokers through ads. They're not supposed to collect all that data, but that's not stopping an unethical company from trying.
Android's privacy issues are there, but only if you're protecting your privacy against companies. If you're trying to protect your privacy against the government, there's no difference, really.
This is orthogonal to the discussion.
But Google doesn't have to be involved! GrapheneOS is specifically a de-googled Android. Even for normal Google-y Android, you could provide the APK to side-load, so it doesn't go through the Play Store or Google's FCM at all, an option you don't have with Apple.
I think this is what the Graphene posts are trying to say.
As others mention, having a web app would make a lot of sense.
ICEBlock is actively lying, is not open source and is confidently misleading many.
While I don't want to assume regular fed honeypot, we can at the very least be certain that it's an app made by an Apple Kool-Aid drinking person. iOS is, in many ways, more susceptible to governement subpoenas than an Android app would ever be. Sideloading, UnifiedPush, maintaining a connection to a server to handle notifications yourself are all more secure than just trusting that Apple will not just hand you over to the cops.
In addition, if the author is worried about a subpoena, it means that they're US based. Which is an absurdly stupid thing to do if you're going to make a fascist-reporting app while living in a fascist country.
This clearly demonstrates that the developer doesn't know what they're talking about. If anything, android is more secure because you can
In this case the only logs that any company could be asked to produce is server logs which only show ip addresses.Why does this need to be an app?
I think this is a very good question to ask, along with why the Trump admin is threatening the developer rather than Apple. Forcing Apple to take it down is the only way to get rid of it now that it’s been published. Combine that with the fact that most people had never heard of this app before Trump made it go viral. I think we’ve all had enough conspiracy theories to last a lifetime, but it would be wise to exercise caution here.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114783982297156136
I don't want to advocate for the Google Play store, but doesn't seem like legitimate technical / privacy reasons.
I know it's possible to do push notifications without user accounts - I'm doing that in an app I maintain.
But it is tedious to publish Android apps with a personal developer account - you need to run a 2 week test with 12 (used to be 20) users before you can release the app.
What prevents law enforcement for ordering the developer to alter the application in a way that reveals user info, maybe the order is simply that they have to hand over their signing certificates for the app?
Interesting. I was wondering about that. There are definitely solutions out there that'd make this feasible on Android from a privacy perspective, but may need a bit more work. Perhaps like ntfy.
Also, as an offside, this is one of the things I hate about Google's handling of AOSP: they keep shuttling things into their proprietary layer, making it next to impossible for alternative approaches to gain traction.
Yeah people dont know what they dont know, but just the fact people are risking their freedom to do something is important.
Someone explain to him that whatever he is doing, he needs to end to end encrypt so none of the infrastructure or middlemen can see anything but ips and who installed it (until they control the end device). (Better yet use veilid if it works yet, or i think there is some kind of tor routing over http these days)
Also he is making a weird mistake by not being a website instead of obvious corporate controlled "app", also should have tried harder to keep anonymous
Yeah, it's absolute nonsense.
Apple could be subpoenaed for the data, and we all know that Tim Apple is happy to jump when Trump says jump.
Meanwhile on Android they could easily just distribute the app from their own website and if they really insist on push messages there are plenty of non-google options that are actually private.
It is a false statement since apps can trivially be side-loaded on Android.
Everyone can bypass Play store from side-load from a web download without root
and they can make their own push system so that claim doesn't hold water?
Making your own push system on Android is rather unreliable. On phones from several brands (Samsung, for one) the system would constantly try to kill any long-running polling operation or background refresh daemon.
I don't really see their point about device IDs, though. There are ways around that, from cryptography to on-device filtering.
It's also not like Apple isn't storing device IDs to send these push messages. There's no difference to user privacy.
All of that said, by leaving it up to Apple to keep track of device IDs, they're not going to be on the hook for warrants. The government can get that data from Apple instead, but they can claim innocence. It's CYA.
That.. is only technically true. For a huge population of Apple users, messing around with non-standard solutions is not exactly popular.
Oh shit. Graphene says it's a honeypot. Slick marketing.
They're explicitly not saying that in a reply: https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3lsyep3s4ac2x
I think Iran has a similar app for signaling where the religious police is checking haircuts and head covers :)
Gershad — not sure it’s super active but seems like it still has a user base. https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/12/10977296/gershad-app-iran...
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> After they run out of migrants they'll come back to check haircuts and covers.
Anf your voting record and your attendance of protests.
You don't downsize a government agency once it's been given a budget larger than the entire Marine corps. You just give it new targets if needed.
This is exactly what will happen. If you criticize MAGA, the Man come and take you away.
This seems fine under the 1st amendment. I will enjoy hearing the closing arguments when it finally reaches the Supreme Court.
yeah, i'm certainly not the "police officers are biggest monsters in the history of the universe" type but this app seems like a nothing burger from a legal standpoint. If there was an ice raid near me i'd like to know so i can avoid the traffic. Besides, people have to report the sighting when they see it so it's not like it gives a warning to a raid before it happens, only during or after the fact.
> If there was an ice raid near me i'd like to know so i can avoid the traffic.
So a traffic app?
ICE is a waste of tax payers money, I rather have satellite data for hurricanes.
Why isn't this a privacy first PWA? Is a native iOS app more secure? Even if I delete it from my device it's still in my "Cloud" and there's a record (at Apple) of me downloading/installing it.
Apple provides a lot of things for free that you'd otherwise have to pay for (maintain, pay for, and/or scale) yourself. A big one that comes to mind is maps API and geocoding. This is all free on iOS, if you use the API from a native app.
I maintain an app on both iOS, Android, and the web, and the google maps API costs (used on Android and Web) add up really fast.
Why do you even need an API in the first place though ?
Can't you run it mostly offline with OSM ?
Serving tiles sucks. Generating tiles sucks even more. In CPU time, in storage, in network. It's really not something you want to handle yourself, and most of the OSM alternatives end up basically only preloading a small area. Their vector renderer's performance is also somewhat bad.
>the google maps API costs (used on Android [...]) add up really fast.
The regular Maps SDK on Android is entirely free. There are very few reasons to even end up paying API costs, you're either running afoul of their terms of service, or wanting to use dynamic maps for some reason. My company has 15M monthly users on a _very_ maps heavy app and pays absolutely nothing on Android.
The article is sparse on details, but I assume an app like this relies on background location services to determine when nearby alerts are relevant.
Aren't there also browser APIs for location services? I imagine this functionality could be possible with a web app.
Edit: What I don't know is whether a web app running on iOS could do the equivalent of a push notification. Last I heard, WebKit's functionality is/was? limited here. That might be a reason to use a native app after all.
The tricky part here is receiving notifications in your proximity while the app is in the background. Native apps can request permission to track your location at all times, but I don't think that's an option for PWAs.
Ah, got it.
That's okay, you trust Apple right?
If you didn't, you'd just buy another phone. That's what HN tells me.
Hong Kong waves from the past.
I wonder how long until this one gets removed under the same ridiculous pretence.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/apple-removes-police-trackin...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678 ("Apple Removes HKmap.live from the App Store", 893 comments)
FYI - It's rising to the top rn because it is also being flooded with false reporting as an adversary tactic.
A small number of people could easily flood a system like this with bad reports. Every good faith user has to wait for an actual sighting - bad faith users don’t.
Also, good faith users are very often wrong.
In my immediate area, ICE has been "spotted" numerous times and that news relayed on social media. Unfortunately, ICE hasn't actually engaged in any removal operations in this county. All of the sightings have been other agencies. The spotters are batting 0.0, and that's without any bad faith actors purposely spoofing reports.
Unfortunately?
Unfortunate for the spotters: they've been wrong about who they're seeing in the field. In this area, all of the Feds that have been seen have been DEA and HSI after suspects who are US citizens, not ICE enforcing immigration law. The spotters are historically not good at distinguishing Feds from each other, which makes the utility of this app a little questionable (unless you're just trying to avoid all police).
My guess, and it's just a guess, is that the ordered scale-back on ICE agricultural worker immigration enforcement took place before they got to this county. That said, I don't know why they haven't been here, just that they haven't.
Sounds a lot like a problem the current administration created. Blowback is a real phenomenon. Americans are having trouble distinguishing which teams of masked men with guns roaming our streets and courthouses are "the good guys".
Same could work for ICE reports if you could figure out a way to submit them without being traceable... Hrm.
Ah, the good old Sybil attack problem.
Usually resolved by reputation systems and auto-ban algorithms.
So ICE is ... everywhere?
Nice. We need less of a surveillance state and more surveillance of the state.
Is this actually legal? When I looked into something similar it said gray area but most likely illegal as they can claim obstruction of justice?
apparently the developer has consulted attorneys on the matter. in any case, i would have thought that simply reporting an officer's presence is completely legal as you aren't really obstructing them
How is it any different from Google Maps' "Police Reported Here" feature?
In the U.S., sharing the location of police officers is generally protected by the First Amendment, as long as the information is obtained legally and is publicly available. This is why apps like Waze and police scanners are lawful and widely used.
For an act to qualify as obstruction of justice, there must be a clear and intentional effort to hinder or delay law enforcement in the investigation, arrest, or prosecution of a crime.
Since that's obviously the intent with this app, it's relying on a thin veneer of plausible deniability.
So would using public street cameras to track known ICE license plates be legal?
A question as a non-American that I hope will be taken in the spirit of enquiry.
I am hearing a lot more about ICE raids, particularly on reddit. Is this an artefact of more attention to raids that have been going on for years, or is there an increase in the number or impact of the raids? I find it hard to tell as I'm in somewhat of a bubble in terms of the US news I come across.
70% of farm workers are not showing up to work in California. This is unprecedented.
It has increased massively since the beginning of this administration, and more importantly for the news has become less about targeted raids and more about a show of force.
For a bit of context, the administration decided to use undocumented people (read: Latin migrants) as (one of many) scapegoats and made a to promise to deport a certain number of millions. By most accounts the number of immigrants he promised to deport is well above the number of undocumented immigrants in the country, especially Latin migrant workers, which has been the target of, to put it frankly, persecution.
They're being conducted by disguised goons with the explicit purpose of making it harder to identify that an ICE raid is happening. If you haven't seen the video of Rümeysa Öztürk's detention, I think you'll understand the concern fully when you do - they're just doing action movie kidnappings and calling them immigration enforcement.
These raids are objectively more frequent and more brazen than they have ever been. The volume of going after people peacefully about their business and picking up people at courthouses is unprecedented.
Ah ok as an outsider it's hard for me to recognise that
Prior to this administration, ICE wouldn't go into schools, churches and courthouses.
This no longer the case.
More raids because being in USA illegally is being INCORRECTLY treated as a FELONY by ice when, for first occurrences, it's usually a MISDEMEANOR.
So, ICE is incorrectly enforcing the law, under the Trump administration.
Not even a misdemeanor, it's a civil offense.
They have been some in the past but big increase in frequency and scope with the new administration.
Yay, Streisand effect! More power to the publisher and every user of this app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Those commenting on HN should know that ICE has a contract to buy bulk AI profiles on HN commenters (among other specific sites),
https://www.404media.co/the-200-sites-an-ice-surveillance-co... ("The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring")
If you're not on multiple naughty lists by the end of this administration, you're doing something wrong.
I'm fine with that. I call ICE the Gestapo under my real name too. Unless and until they start rounding up citizens en masse, anyone who can has a duty to.
They’re watching everything but they will never win because regular people love America too much! They not like us.
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Perfect for a real life DDOS.
Want empty parking at a Dodger game? Use the ICE app.
Also a great honeypot to query out all the users of this app and schedule them for a visit.
FTA:
> The app does not collect or store any user data, which TechCrunch confirmed by analyzing the app’s network traffic as part of a test.
It's just one auto update away from changing
> Also a great honeypot to query out all the users of this app and schedule them for a visit.
In other threads people have noted that the Dev's decision to be iOS only means Apple has a complete list of users but the Dev does not.
The app isn't available on Android because it supposedly cannot preserve anonymity. Why is that? That doesn't make any sense.
Can Sauron use his Palatir to get info from this app?
Reminds me of Warn A Brother (https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/513-ahwUxZL.jpg).
Pity that it's not open source and decentralized using something like iroh.computer, especially given the lacking Android support.
> "because it would have to collect information on Android that could put people at risk."
What's this about? Surely it's technically possible to implement. Can someone add more detail?
Interesting that this is an iOS app, not Android or web app. What percent of illegal immigrants who are worried about being randomly swept up (i.e., those who can be visibly profiled) have iOS devices?
I was under the impression that iOS devices were prevalent among wealthy and aspiring wealthy Americans, but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
> but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
An iPhone would be a very minor expense for a person from middle class (lawyers, doctors, sofware engineers…).
I imagine for working class or poor people Android vs iPhone could be a real concern financial though.
>I was under the impression that iOS devices were prevalent among wealthy and aspiring wealthy Americans, but that middle class and lower class Americans were much more likely to have Android devices.
I think your impression is pretty dated, like to 2010 or something?Apple has generally kept iPhones fully updated for a good 5-7 years, with some security updates after and apps typically supporting n-1 or n-2 OS. Current iOS 18 supports devices back to the iPhone XR/XS released in 2018. And the pace of progress has leveled off a huge amount since the heady early days in the steep part of the S-curve. But prices still fall fast on used phones. Even if you go back fewer years, iPhone 11s and 12s can be had for a few hundred bucks or less and still work well (I had a 12 until recently). Battery replacement can be done for ~$30.
So while sure, if someone was always on the newest phone that'd have some premium, it's definitely not any big deal or sign of riches to have an iPhone. They're all over the US market space.
I'm just going based off of what type of devices I see people using. The wealthy people I know who are not devs generally have iPhones. The people I see working in positions that may not require legal status seem to be much more on the Android side of things. Back in 2010, low-income people did not have smartphones, period. I'd be curious if there's any data available on current trends.
Part of the article said this:
> The app is only available on iOS, because it would have to collect information on Android that could put people at risk.
Can anyone describe what this means? I don't know of a requirement to collect data on android? Is there something I'm not thinking of?
[EDIT] carried on reading the comments and it appears to be answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445392
Perhaps it went viral because MAGA are downloading and flooding it with false reports to make the app useless?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445180
Whelp, that's one less application that I feel compelled to make
I am worried the app is just a honeypot made by bad actors to get a create a database of the "rebels" they will soon be hunting down.
I will never understand people defending migration for ideological reasons. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Your empathy or moral display is of no interest to me, yet upholding a social order and public safety is. So why should everyone sacrifice the first for your moral display?
What exactly do you believe you’re sacrificing because of immigration? Immigrants commit fewer crimes in the US than native born Americans, so I’m finding your comment all around confusing.
this can just be flooded with fake data making it useless
We had the same thing happening in Ukraine. Conscription agents are sweeping the streets and forcefully kidnapping people.
So, yeah, it did not took long before public chats with real-time reporting popped up and became country-wide phenomenon.
Welcome to the club, America!
O hi.
Well, they are one logical leap away from realizing that instead of sending undesirables to CECOT they can send them to their guerre du jour instead.
I guess Erik Prince could use a penal battalion or two.
After reading their blatant misinformation on Android support (https://www.iceblock.app/android, which makes no sense as explained in https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3lswujex4e22w), and seeing their refusal to publish the source code, I can't help but wonder if it's an honeypot.
Don't want to see ethnics at Costco? Boy do I have the app for you!
Why is this an app and not a website?
Cheaper and easier to build. Apple's SDK offers a lot of options and doesn't require a lot of credit card details, unlike some of Google's APIs.
Plus, web apps are gimped on iOS (no notification support without going through a cumbersome PWA installation flow and data getting wiped every 14 days if you're just letting it run in the background).
It can monitor your location and notify you about nearby reports.
For one users don't have to say they consent to data extraction as often, and some people don't use web sites very much.
Surely this won’t be used by trolls.
There was a commenter that got buried, where the person making it wasn't aware of the precedent for government mandated "apps". So i80and...
Look no further than CALEA mandated forensics packages on most network backbone gear!
https://www.subsentio.com/solutions/platforms-technologies/
https://www.fcc.gov/calea
You see, we've had government mandated "apps", but they are intentionally "hidden" (only by omission of course) from the layperson! So you, John Q. Public, are not exposed to them, but every regulated service provider is turned into a facilitator for law enforcement monitoring activity.
Bumping it down to handsets simply hasn't been done because it's just easier to plug in upstream through Third Party Doctrine and it'd be self-defeating in a sense to straight up make and admit that handsets purpose is to surveil you for law enforcement purposes. Businesses can have compliance compelled through the threat of disincorporation, so can be relied upon to cooperate as a pre-requisite of doing business.
Now, this software is generally considered "the good guys doing good guy things" so isn't generally considered problematic. As I hope is being learned by everyone; there is no line between a system that exists for well intentioned people to do good things with and a system capable of being used by evil people to do evil things, at scale with.
Is there a way to prevent this snooping? Or at least make it less useful? From a tech standpoint eg use a VPN?
Has anyone decompiled it yet to make sure it's legit?
> The app does not collect or store any user data, which TechCrunch confirmed by analyzing the app’s network traffic as part of a test.
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Why would they need to make it mandatory? I suspect it would be very popular.
Well they could do that for theater but they don't need it anymore
They've already illegally cross-linked all the federal databases and banking data
People would have to be 100% off the grid which is nearly impossible and miserable these days
The real question is after they run out of 15 million "undocumented"
will ICE be used again 25 million naturalized citizens (yes likely with new $140 Billion budget)
And then there is the question how many millions of birthright citizens will ICE go after, how many generations back, where on earth would they deport them since they've never lived in any other country?
US won't be recognizable by 2028, going to be a horror show
> People would have to be 100% off the grid which is nearly impossible and miserable these days
Or you can just use someone else's identity. There's more incentive now than ever.
$140 billion for 15 million illegal immigrants is under $10,000 per deportation, which strikes me as kind of light, given that as the process is likely to involve international plane flights, board. and so on.
I don't think there are any plans to deport citizens or legal immigrants, as opposed to illegal aliens.
> I don't think there are any plans to deport citizens or legal immigrants
Then why are they talking about stripping naturalization?
To make them illegal and thus deportable - doh!
> I don't think there are any plans to deport citizens or legal immigrants
Incorrect. Why are you so vastly uninformed about this and speaking? They have already deported thousands of legal US residents.
If he paid attention he’d need to change his thinking.
The real question is that if the Dems ever get power back, what can be done to punish the bad people who participated in all this criminality?
With every other social norm being broken, I don't see why political reprisals shouldn't be the way forward. Just say that any of the pardons were illegal[1], and start stripping citizenship from anyone involved in this.
The genie's out of the bottle, and not punishing the thugs involved in this would just embolden them and their minions to try harder the next time they have power. Criminality should have consequences.
Deprivation of rights under color of law is a serious crime in this country, and should be treated as such.
[1] The current administration regularly declares immigration decisions made by the previous one illegal, and retroactively applies that label to the people affected by them. I'm not sure why any of its decisions should be worth the paper they are printed on, if it is ever theown out.
I bet is going to be like with the Patriot Act, the torture, and all the other horrible things from GWOT. Things are going to be tweaked to fit a new agenda, but carried nonetheless.
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To be fair we already have lots of mandatory apps already...... Facebook,Netflix,etc are system apps on most androids
it's not mandatory to run android though
We already have toms
What is "toms"?
I'm sorry I think my phone ate half a comment.and I don't know how to delete or edit on Hacki app.
Hi you can right swipe on your comment to edit.
Yeah in this case not being FOSS makes it most likely a honeypot
How so? If I report seeing ICE at 123 Main St., that doesn't mean there are more than usual undocumented immigrants there. It just means that's where I saw ICE at that moment.
Not a honey pot for immigrants but for dissidents and anyone anti ice or anti administration
If we go down that road, I suspect everyone registered to vote as a Democrat will be on the same dissidents list.
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Years ago I had to live the house in a hurry for my daughter nearly died due to a very rare medical complication. So I forgot to put the alarm on. Twelve hours later I came back home to pick some clothes for my kid and wife (as she had to stays for days at the hospital) only to arrive and see gypsies [1] watching the entrance of the street. I arrived at my home and, well, thieves had broken, damaged our window and stolen belongings of ours. While my kid was between life and death.
Now today, no latter than today, on the way to school, I saw four police car and policemen everywhere, obviously looking for someone. Then I saw a gypsy [1] hiding in the bushes, waiting for the proper moment to jump over a fence and evade cops.
Karma is a bitch. I drove in reverse and yelled at the cops, pointing to where the guy was. And they got him.
You fuck with me (by visiting my house, breaking a window and stealing stuff), I fuck with you.
I have zero tolerance for people turning our high trust societies into low trust ones.
It is my understanding democrats rely on the votes of many illegals to have the representation they have but is this really what this has come to? Import as many illegals as possible to "beat the republicans"?
And side with illegals by writing an app allowing to prevent ICE from doing their job?
I've got a question: I'm an EU citizen. I want to come live to the US. Is it open? Can I just come and live as an illegal alien, not pay taxes, get a free driving license?
Shall you guys root for me? What if I promise to vote democrat? Deal? (for it certainly seems to be part of the deal)
What is a country? What are borders for? Do you find Mexico a political system and economy to be striving to imitate? Do you wish there were more cartels in the US growing plants to make drugs?
Why insisting on protecting illegals? Should US citizenship be granted to anyone who asks for it? Africa shall have one billion more people from now til 2025: should that billion additional people all be sent to the US and given US citizenship?
[1] my father has lived on a plot land in an abandoned trailer next to gypsies: I can tell a gypsy 100% guaranteed.
That's a lie. https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/10/16/undocumented-immigran...
People are critical of ICEs practices because they ignore the due process constitutional rights of people in the US (all people in the US not just citizens). They abduct people and send them to foreign gulags where they are tortured. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/02/kilmar-abreg...
You misrepresent ICE by acting like they just fight crime.
> I have zero tolerance for people turning our high trust societies into low trust ones.
> It is my understanding democrats rely on the votes of many illegals to have the representation they have but is this really what this has come to? Import as many illegals as possible to "beat the republicans"?
Bruh. Your uncritical consumption and repetition of Faceboot nonsense is exactly what is turning our society into a low trust society. Is a shred of self-awareness too much to ask for?
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> we're even sometimes deporting legal US citizens.
When has that happened?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-citizen-child-recover... ("U.S. citizen child recovering from brain cancer removed to Mexico with undocumented parents")
> "A family that was deported to Mexico hopes they can find a way to return to the U.S. and ensure their 10-year-old daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, can continue her brain cancer treatment."
So far as I can tell, the girl left with her parents (who are not US citizens). This has been the pattern in all of these cases that I have heard about so far. It’s completely disingenuous to suggest that these situations are equivalent to “American citizens being deported” like they are running no-knock raids on farmsteads in Idaho.
These children are still entitled to return if they are in the custody of a guardian who has a legal right to reside in the US.
ICE deporting US citizens is not a new problem. In 2021 the GAO estimated that between 2015-2020 70 potential U.S. citizens were removed.
There are also cases where children who are citizens have been removed with a parent. In those cases the US government claims that they parents voluntary took the children, while the families claim that little no chance was given for the families to arrange for the children to stay.
GAO Report: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-487
Wikipedia has a good round of sources for the recent removals of US children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_and_deportation_of_A...
I am reading “potential citizen” as “a detainee who claims to be an American citizen whose citizenship status was not ascertained.” The article doesn’t really give a good indication of if these cases had any merit. Since officers are supposed to stop the interview if they believe the individual is a US citizen, I suspect that these deportations were warranted. Law enforcement can get things wrong, but in this case, I haven’t heard of any documented instances where this has happened.
> Wikipedia has a good round of sources for the recent removals of US children:
This article cites two examples, and in both instances the parents were residing in the country illegally with children who were not even in grade school yet. Jus Soli leads to all kinds of absurdities like this. The idea that a 2 year old being sent back to his mother’s country of origin is comparable to “American citizens being deported” is farcical; it’s technically true, but completely misleading. The people making these claims intend to frighten the audience into believing that regular immigration enforcement actions like these are somehow comparable to kidnapping people off of the street.
> I am reading “potential citizen” as “a detainee who claims to be an American citizen whose citizenship status was not ascertained.”
That's not what it means in this context. The GAO report is based on ICE's own database records, they found 70 deportees that records indicated they were potentially citizens.
> Law enforcement can get things wrong, but I haven’t read of any documented instances of this happening.
Wikipedia has an article that lists documented instances of citizens being removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_...
> Wikipedia has an article that lists documented instances of citizens being removed.
Thanks. It looks like the article lists 8 instances where deportation occurred. In 3 of those instances, the deportee sued and successfully returned, and in 2 they appear to have failed to return after their deportation. This is more like 3 / 5 though as the examples involving children were not technically deportations of the children but of the parents, who were not US citizens.
So it’s more than 0, but so far as I can tell none of the counted deportations occurred when Trump was in office; the last one was in 2008.
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There was an 18 year old legal resident in my city that was forcibly pulled out of his house by ICE, was ignored when he showed his papers, and was shipped from Kentucky to Louisiana where they tried to "deport" him for literally no reason. After detaining him for a month and a bunch of unnecessary judicial stalling, they just kicked him out on to the street 600 miles from home and he would have essentially been homeless if the community hadn't rallied around him.
It's not a unique story.
its a unique story, thats why you know about it.
Well, this IS different
- ICE has not previously arrested en-masse the first-time visa overstays via felony responses. It's typically a misdemeanor offense, and should receive a different response from ICE.
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I don't care if it's "productive" in some narrow sense. If I discover that someone works for or with ICE during the current administration, I am precommitting to lose my mind over it. I'll block them, undermine them, blacklist them, do whatever I can to punish them for their heinous actions. I understand and accept that this diminishes the incentives for ICE to behave incrementally better, because I don't think that behaving incrementally better is adequate. ICE has a lot of hiring coming up with their new budget, and I want every applicant to understand that taking the job will ruin their life.
If I were you, I wouldn't publicly precommit to antagonizing the Gestapo. That will just make them more likely to come for you sooner.
> a long time
ICE is not that old. It was only formed in 2002. Most of HN is older than ICE!
I disagree that the raids have been going on with this frequency or with this level of going after people in neighborhoods, preying on them at courthouses and so on.
It is critical to consider the context as well. The Trump administration demonizes all immigrants, legal or illegal. Listen to Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, or Laura Loomer. The terror is the point.
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i want to assume you have good intent here, but you have to understand that this is kind of tone-deaf in the face of my neighbors being forced into vans and disappeared. i'm truly happy that you haven't had to experience the same kind of abuse and i hope that ICE doesn't start disappearing people who fly private planes alongside fruit vendors and day laborers for the crime of being brown.
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The application appears to be a geofenced messaging application like Yik Yak. What is to prevent feds from joining and changing their appearance based on reports of their current appearance?
Remove their masks and drop their guns? Half is won in that case!
> What is to prevent feds from joining and changing their appearance based on reports of their current appearance?
probably the same weird compulsion to cosplay the gestapo in the first place. they don't need to move in silence. they want to make people afraid.
Is the stat they keep repeating relevant? Attacks on ICE agents increased 500%? If attacks went from 1 to 6 that is an increase of 500% but if there is also 6x more ICE activity the baseline rate of attack is the same.
It’s like complaining there’s more shark attacks in the summer vs winter and concluding sharks have seasonal mood swings.
The baseline number of attacks was in the single digits, yes.
I also have a feeling their definition of "attack" would differ from mine.
"Attack" is when your arms get in the way of their baton swinging at your face.
The silly app requires iOS 18.2. I have an iPhone 11 and can't get to iOS 18. They shot themselves in the foot with this ridiculous requirement.
Are you sure you have an iPhone 11? My iPhone 11 runs iOS 18.5 fine and is reportedly going to support iOS 26.
You're right, according to https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ .
Well, mine doesn't go above iOS 17. I triple checked it now.
It does: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-models-compati...
You might need to download an image and install it via a computer if you don’t have enough free space or something.
A lot of folks about to discover that interfering with law enforcement is in fact a crime.
This isn't actually true, because interference is illegal ONLY when you physically obstruct or deceive officers - warning others about police or ICE presence is speech that courts protect as a First Amendment right.
A federal judge in Missouri barred tickets for drivers who flashed headlights to signal a speed trap, the Supreme Court in Houston v. Hill affirmed the right to challenge police verbally, and other federal rulings in Florida and Tennessee reached the same conclusion.
Alerting neighbors that agents are around is expression, not obstruction. And case law protects it in case they want to try (though this is becoming increasingly irrelevant, which - at the same time - makes our social contract to honor such institutions proportionally irrelevant)
Alerting people of traffic checks does not directly encourage them to engage in illegal acts. Telling people to hide from the police when there is a legal reason for detention on the other hand does.
You’re going to have to make a convincing argument that alerting people of a traffic cop isn’t the same as alerting people of police presence in general, and that the merits of one has more weight for the usage of someone already committing crimes.
As it is, by batting for the legality of alerting traffic checks, you’re already batting for the alert and notification of police presence - because that’s what traffic checks consist of
Courts are not stupid. You're not "altering people of police presence in general" when you're making or participating an app that is clearly intended to help people facing the legal consequences of their actions.
Let’s wait and see
Waze has had a way to report speed traps for years. Where are those subpoenas? That at least is a loss of revenue.
This also assumes that this can be traced back to whoever reported it in the app, and it would be trivial just simply not log any PII on that
> loss of revenue
That assumes people were going to break the law in the first place by speeding... you can't be guilty of the crime of not helping someone else commit a crime.
Maybe if they had some way to prove that you knew it would help them avoid police in order to speed... but that seems like a pretty high bar of evidence would be required (and they would have to attempt to go after you in the first place).
>Reporting on the presence on police is protected first amendment activity
Interfering with these specific people is also a civic duty, so I’ll need to draw inspiration from Thoreau on decisions like this.
Using this specific app is obviously protected by the 1st Amendment, which is why the relevant laws are much more specific than merely "interfering with law enforcement."
Police reporting is already common in like waze though
It still shocks me that, as republican politicians and voters rode their high horse about free speech absolutism for the last ten years, so many people believed they were sincere.
On what grounds? Could you give a simple search term for this?
This reminds me of the musk elonjet case on twitter. Generally, if I were to follow a person (in public spaces) and constantly report their location, is that against the law? (If yes, could you clarify which law specifically?) If it is truly against the law here, does it make a difference that here the reports are non-individual in nature, ie reporting that ice is present, not that a particular ice officer is present.
Is there something special about doing the same thing for police/ice?
I think I remember this kind of scenario coming up in supreme court cases before but don't remember specifics, and google isn't helping.
But I admit I generally feel that my response is "So what?"
I googled some more and found this, https://firstamendmentwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/C...
which seems to suggest this specific scenario has not been addressed by the supreme court, but has been addressed by various appeals courts, and it claims that 61% of the population lives in states that have affirmed this right.
I agree with you but only because I believe they will make it a crime.
Reporting on the presence on police is protected first amendment activity, but like I said, that’s just ink on paper.
It effectively means nothing now and yea, I wouldn’t download this app because of it
Slightly OT, but TIL that I've never heard of the 2nd most popular social networking app on the App Store ("threads").
It's Meta's response to X. It started quite popular, but at this point it's almost all engagement slop.
It's funny how quickly those apps become terrible. It was the same with the conservative versions of twitter when they were banning republican politicians; something about how when there are a lot of users looking for things to interact with and limited spam prevention algorithms you end up with terrible content.