Yea we are talking about politicians who proudly tweet about ruining people’s lives and tearing apart families, and their voting base cheering this on. There is no wording that you can use to turn this into a negative for these irredeemable people.
> we are talking about politicians who proudly tweet about ruining people’s lives and tearing apart families, and their voting base cheering this on. There is no wording that you can use to turn this into a negative for these irredeemable people.
I am so tired of this kind of inflammatory rhetoric. Can we please remember that the people who are being deported did, in fact, break the law? While I have empathy for people who want nothing more than to be productive citizens in the USA, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. If you did it the wrong way, you're subject to deportation. That's just how it goes. More than anything, I'm profoundly embarrassed that our politicians have allowed the situation to get this bad.
While I don't support all of the methods the current administration is using, do not support using immigration for weaponizing speech, and certainly wish we had a saner system of immigration, characterizing "enforcing our immigration laws" as some kind of "irredeemable" act is just...beyond the pale. It is not irredeemable to enforce laws.
I have friends who have been waiting for years to get a green card, in large part because of the consequences of years of our de facto open border situation, which have jammed the courts with "refugees" who knew that it was easier to enter the country and claim asylum than wait in line for legal immigration channels.
Edit: I have been respectful and polite in this comment, but it has now been flagged down twice (EDIT: three times). Those of you who abuse the flagging system to censor speech you do not like should be ashamed of yourselves.
> I am tired of people ignoring the US Condition. And in this context, rejecting the Due Process clause. Due Process us for all that enter the USA!
Also tired of this rhetoric. Due process is the process that is due, nothing more. It has been -- will can continue be -- redefined by the government to execute laws.
Again, I don't support everything the current administration is doing, nor do I assert that everything they are doing is legal. But that will ultimately be decided by the due process of law, which is what the term means.
Given that there are a great many trials underway concerning these questions, I am not concerned that the due process of law has disappeared.
Many of the people being rounded up did in fact come here using legal methods: the asylum process, Temporary Protected Status (which is being arbitrarily revoked). And that's not counting people with even more established credentials, like work visas, student visas, green cards.
One thing that has been helpful for me in understanding immigration is to think of this as a case where the law (an aggregation of what the public over the past several decades thinks it wants) is in conflict with what the public actually wants, as expressed by its interpersonal and economic decisions.
Americans are overall extremely happy to transact with, socialize with, be neighbors with, have children with, and educate the children of undocumented immigrants. This strong expression of what we really want (in our actual decisions) creates a powerful incentive pulling people here. Put differently, if a majority of Americans hated undocumented immigrants, impeded them at every turn, and boycotted their labor and the services of businesses that hired them, the number of people who come here would be very different.
In an analogy to tech policy, when you ask the average voter "should people have access to private communication tools that are private even against legitimate warrants under the rule of law, even in cases of serious crimes or terrorism" everyone says "no!" But if you ask them, would you like an app where your own messages are private, many people choose that app, and many engineers and major publicly traded companies choose to build such apps.
We explicitly run a society that uses multiple dueling measures of what people want, the main ones being the will of voters and peoples' choices in the marketplace. Immigration is one place where those two measures collide, and here we are.
As a result, I think it's insufficient to simply point to the law. Maybe the laws are wrong. If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws. This is an important principle in freedom-based societies.
I actually agree with most of what you said, up until the last paragraph. Specifically this part:
> If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws.
Maybe the laws are wrong -- and I disagree with many! -- but street protests and loud people on social media are not sufficient proof that we should abandon enforcement. Consider, for example, that you might be surrounded by a bubble of opinion that matches your own, while ignoring the opinion of a larger group of people who disagree with you. Or (similar to my own case), there are a large number of people who disagree who simply keep quiet, most of the time, because they don't want to be insulted, or worse.
If you don't like the laws, you can try to elect people who will change them, influence their behavior via legal speech, etc. But if your favored people don't get elected, or they otherwise ignore you, that's tough beans. We live in a republic.
The comment you originally responded to was calling out cheerful cruelty, and in response, you gave a lukewarm "I don't support all of the methods the current administration is using" in the midst of a comment otherwise defending the current administration. Consider the meaning of the phrase "praising with faint damns". Also consider that much of what the current administration is doing has nothing to do with laws, and has repeatedly targeted people who have broken no law and in fact did everything entirely legally.
You quoted the entirety of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44553357 apart from the "Yea" and the period at the end, and then provided a spirited defense on behalf of the current administration, suggesting that everything's largely fine if only people would just stop breaking the law, and complaining about people who call the current administration irredeemable. You then acted surprised and annoyed that your "respectful and polite" comment was downvoted and tried to shame people for flagging it. Won't someone think of the poor beleaguered right-wing politicians who are just enforcing the law, and get called cruel and irredeemable for it?
Respectfully and politely: you are completely failing to appreciate or acknowledge the situation, and doing so helps enable the abuses that are taking place. To give a parallel example, you'd get a comparable response if you said "police only kill criminals, with a few high-profile cause celebrè exceptions; people should just stop breaking the law".
Many years ago I used to believe in the narrative of the "right way" to immigrate to the US. However after learning a lot more about the immigration process and the history of immigration in this country, I've learned that the "right way" has extremely high arbitrary barriers that are intended to keep some people out who come from some countries while allowing more from others. This is the quota system.
IMO this is a flawed application for immigration policy because it can cause some people who go the "right way" years to get through the system with one or two minor mishaps meaning you jeopardize your chance of becoming a citizen. It really shouldn't be that hard to become a citizen of this country. Immigration reform has been long discussed as the only solution to this problem, but Republican lawmakers have decided this is too good of a wedge issue to ever fully fix the problem.
So, yes, while I agree with you on the surface, where I disagree with you and this argument is that it papers over the extremely hostile, dated and ineffective policy that has largely been the source of problems for Immigration for decades that lawmakers don't seem to want to solve because it benefits their campaigns.
Being undocumented in the US is a misdemeanor. How does that justify the dehumanizing rhetoric on the right, the escalating and illegal tactics ICE is employing, and the creation of literal concentration camps?
Part of the issue is that this has gone on for so long that to make any meaningful difference there needs to be a large amount of deportations in a short amount of time.
I wish we had kept up Obamas numbers instead of slacking between here and then.
> characterizing "enforcing our immigration laws" as some kind of "irredeemable" act is just...beyond the pale. It is not irredeemable to enforce laws.
Setting aside the other aspects, this misses the point, in my opinion. The irredeemable part is their pride and glee in the unfortunate effects of their “enforcing our immigration laws.” Joking about alligators getting detainees, filming in their Salvadoran gulag, the “deportation ASMR” video, etc. If they were decent people who were “only” enforcing the laws, they would at least do it quietly without all the cruel grandstanding for their fans.
His is not the only case, but is certainly a very obvious one - and that is what people are reacting too. Along with the rhetoric from the current administration that makes it plainly obvious that actual illegal behavior is neither required, not even necessarily desired, to deport someone.
The very public behavior and words of the current administration is extremely unhinged on this topic, and appears to have nothing to do with actual purposes you’re claiming it does.
You might want to re-read your comment again, because you definitely explicitly said that people being deported were being deported because they did something illegal. Full Stop.
I provided two high profile and clear examples where that is either 1) unlikely, or 2) definitely not the case, and actually absurd in context, because she is a born US citizen, and the threats the US President is leveling at her are clearly not even close to legal.
Which you continue to ignore. And which even appear to be headline examples the administration is not only creating, but persisting in making very public.
In that context, how can anyone reasonably assume that the other, less high profile, cases are being done ‘correctly’?
Fixating on a specific example that has become a cause celèbre is not a counterargument to what I said.
Even in the Garcia case, there's no dispute that the man is/was here illegally. Everything revolves around a secondary debate regarding the temporary suspension of deportation.
“He gained legal permission to remain in the United States and established a life here. But in March of 2025, Mr. Abrego Garcia would find himself unlawfully deported and detained in a Salvadoran prison with the very gang members he had fled.” [https://www.gwlr.org/kilmar-abrego-garcia/]
A Immigration Judge had reviewed his situation and given him protected status. Which the Trump admin willfully ignored.
I’m not focusing on a specific example to hide the truth - I’m focusing on a clear, very public, example where the Trump admin itself is making a clear example that they’ll do everything in their (significant) power to do exactly what you are saying they won’t be doing.
So we both agree, he was deported while he was here legally.
And notably, the reason the gov’t has been giving for doing that deportation appears to not be the original illegal immigration offense you seem to think it is - but an apparently purely fictitious claim that he was in MS-13 (including a doctored photo of tattoos presented by Trump).
So to repeat, it seems quite obvious that ICE didn’t deport him because he was here illegally in the past (a Judge had prevented that previously), that he was here legally when he was deported (on a Immigration Judge’s orders even), and that the evidence presented as to why he was a member of MS-13 was clearly faked - but still presented as the truth by the President himself to the public. Ala ‘Iraq WMD’.
And the second example is the President threatening to make a born and raised US citizen stateless and ‘deport them’, which is also blatantly illegal eh? Constitutionally, that isn’t even supposed to be a thing.
The LACK of concern here is what appears to be unjustified. Are there probably completely normal and legally justified deportations still going on? I certainly hope so! But the concern here is that the President (ICE’s boss) is sending a very clear message that it is not only not required, but apparently undesirable, that these deportations be legal.
Agree with this 100 percent and to add further part of the reason this wasn’t dealt with is because people on both sides of the aisle know that it brings cheap labor.
Heck, even Trump wanted to make farm and hotel workers exempt until there was too much blow back.
Every other country enforces its immigration laws. There’s no good reason that we shouldn’t.
I put it in quotes, because one can claim asylum, while not actually being a refugee. And a great many people have done exactly that, knowing that it essentially guaranteed them to be released into the USA pending a trial years in the future.
In case you were wondering, this is a large part of why it takes years to get a review for something like a green card application.
Independently of political opinion, I believe your edit and anger at downvotes are due to misunderstanding the etiquette of the forum. Forum moderators have repeatedly described the culture here as "downvote without a comment is a perfectly fine way to express disagreement, but of course it would be better if you also comment".
