"one of the components that caused former intelligence contractors’ concern was that ERO ONE agents will analyze both classified and nonclassified information to produce “network, link and relationship” analyses."
Should the federal government be tracking our interpersonal relationships?
Should an immigration officer be privy to the timing and manner of communications that I, a citizen, have with other citizens? Why?
Why should ICE be able to collect this information when domestic law enforcement generally has to show probable cause to a judge to gather similar information? Who decided to make ICE the country's supreme law enforcement agency?
Related, ICE is arresting citizens on fake immigration charges[1]. Some US citizens have been deported.
US citizens "can't" be deported, but ICE has supralegal powers. Should we have a law enforcement agency that is not bound by our laws? Why? What guardrails does it have if not law? Who defines those guardrails?
So long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts, congress, or the whitehouse then these things will continue to metastasize.
The entire experiment here is to bring the surveillance apparatus' of dictatorships to the US. They no doubt see the durability of these dictatorships and one-party states around the world and are drooling at the prospect of running it in the US.
That has shown to be nothing but hot air and wishful thinking. The second they got into power they’ve thrown any hint of caring about the constitution out the window.
The primary mechanism for redress of constitutional right violations under current law are monetary damages under FTCA, especially now that universal injunctions are dead. There's no actual counterbalance.
While Republicans certainly have a focus on illegal immigration, support for spying on American citizens is hardly a partisan issue.
ie: 25 years of Patriot Act renewal, Flock rollouts in liberal cities, Obama’s pursuit of Snowden and not the NSA itself
There is certainly liberal leadership concerned with our rights, just as there are conservatives, but they are the minority under both partisan umbrellas.
If you have some information on how much they approve or support these programs i'm open to hearing it, but i'm not sure how much "Both parties have bad people/policies" contributes to a discussion on this specific program.
In my fairly wealthy and liberal community, the mayor (a Democrat) approved a Flock contract and refused to hold a public hearing on the issue until it became a nationwide story, at which point the contract was ripped up. The community was told to kick dirt until it became a political liability, and that's the point.
Political leadership doesn't want civil discourse until it becomes a self-preservation concern for them, same with data centers.
This is shifting the goal posts. You said this will continue to happen as long as Republicans have no counterbalance in courts[0], congress[1], or the whitehouse [2; sic] - which kind of implies (actually not kind of, it directly implies) that if only there were some more Democrats around this wouldn't happen. So "both parties do this" is absolutely a valid criticism of your point and one you probably have to address.
[0] Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.
[1] Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
[2] The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
If anything i'm asking for the conversation to stay 'on-goal'.
If I take for granted that the waterline surveillance increases under previous administrations (and i do, i implicitly conceded it) then the only meaningful discussion is then on its magnitude.
So you tell me, are Republicans going further with this program than before? And furthermore, are Republican courts and Republican congresses going to curtail it at any point?
I already know my answers to this, but if i'm going to be criticized I think it should be against the meaningful alternative facing us where Republicans retain control of these branches.
> Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.
Doesn't matter if the damage is already done. Raise dead doesn't exist in the real world. And the courts don't decide things. The executive has proven it will just ignore the courts.
> Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
First, this it 100% not true, and secondly, if you ignore congress, it doesn't matter. And once again, the damage is already done by the time congress gets around to it.
> The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
Expect? None. Hope for? Basic respect to the rule of law to start. But with pdf in the white house, all bets are off.
Even so, scale, severity, and flaunting of the law matter. Current political powers have turned it up to 11. You can absolutely "both sides bad" in general, but I don't think you should be doing so within this context or it's disingenuous / whataboutism.
It is “don’t expect the Democrat party to save us when they come back into power at the Federal level. With regard to erosion of privacy rights, I don’t see a positive track record for them.
Please surface to me what I’m missing and I’m happy to change my mind.
I disagree, it's important to discuss because it indicates that neither party is capable or interested in deviating from the current trajectory. Say the Republicans are voted out of power this cycle, who's really confident that the trajectory of all of this is going to meaningfully change in the next decade based on what we've seen in the past without a major shakeup in the political system?
It's the same core group of people controlling the centers of power in both parties for many years now, and it's not realistic to expect meaningful change for as long as they remain in power
Surveillance expanded under Obama and Biden. It would have expanded under Clinton or Harris. It will expand under the next Democratic President and it will expand under the next Republican one.
Maybe the Republicans are worse, I don't particularly give a shit. They're both horrible and anti-American on this issue and nothing will change without systemic changes.
Let's be clear here that this is explicitly not just surveillance. This is surveillance in service of abducting people without due process. We can debate surveillance in the abstract, but this specifically is a feeder program to a system that has illegally deported US citizens without any due process. (Which would have, at step 1, indicated that US citizens cannot be deported.)
This is surveillance as part of a department that explicitly says it is not bound by US law or the Constitution.
All of that makes this program materially different than any other US domestic surveillance program or proposal of which I am aware.
Characterizing the propublica pieces as "fake immigration charges" is pretty misleading. All of their arrests of non-illegal-immigrants has been for (bogus) charges unrelated to immigration, usually some variant of "obstruction".
"Some US citizens have been deported" is also a mischaracterization. Aside from minor children of deported parents, the only case where an American citizen was deported was Brian Morales Garcia.
Ya, I am a fan of the coast guard... and I think we need the FAA/TSA to keep the planes running on time. And FEMA might be laughed at in some quarters but a federal disaster response is something we should have ahead of hurricane season.
What does the Coast Guard have to do with my comment? It was founded in 1915 in its current form and has existed since 1790. DHS is only 24 years old, and was a reactionary response to a terrorist attack.
I recall watching live when second tower was hit. US commentator immediately understood the situation and remarked how this is end of an era of freedom and how this will unavoidably bring massive surveillance state aparatus in place from now on and how entire world will be affected negatively. He was 100% correct in all he said.
But lets be clear - its US public that allowed this, over and over. Saner candidates were suppressed as not patriotic enough, entire worse than pointless wars were waged and millions died for nothing. Not US passport holders so I guess thats just an afterthought.
Dont expect rollback in your lifetime. We havent reached even the bottom yet, not with current voting mindset. Still this is what US population wants, I don't see >200 millions even just protesting.
The part that gets me is how many useful idiots who are smart enough to know know better will cheer for these things when sold piecemeal. Your DEP starts trawling the cell phone location records to nab some guy who sold bad dirt. Your traffic cameras tell law enforcement how to tailor their revenue generation toward those who can't push back. Your school system monitors social media to nab some teenager for selling vapes his older relative bought. And people cheer. They call it progress.
Only when the comprehensiveness of this 1984 is presented in an unflattering way like "we're gonna snoop on everything so ICE can round people up" (or an AI camera goes up on every street corner) do they even become uneasy.
If you want to build a stasi-like system then the answer to all that’s yes - which seems to be what the majority of us citizens is in favour of, otherwise they wouldn’t have elected this admin
Naturalized citizens can be deported and their citizenship can be revoked in cases of violent crime or other immoral behavior. That information is provided when swearing in.
It's more accurate to say that US citizens who are law abiding and moral, or who are born in the US, can't be deported.
The specific clearance requirement may suggest Section 702/FISA capability being employed.
If that ends up being the case, then you're talking a reality where American citizens become the target of warrantless domestic surveillance, using data collected by the NSA. Every phone call, e-mail, text message, DM, group chat; anything a person has ever said or done in their digital lives going back years.
It's worse now with AI, because human effort is no longer required to read intercept transcripts or conversations. Instantaneous surfacing of dirt/leverage.
If they can make illegal migrants disappear without any option for them to defend themselves in front of the legal system, they can make anybody disappear, including you.
And if you think: "Why would they want to do that?", consider that even something stupid like someone misinterpreting a gesture or working for a competitor of a company the regime currently favours can get you there.
Anyone cheering for this fail to realize that these kinds of programs never ever go away. Even if their budget is restricted by a future congress, some forms of this will remain. Also, political changes occur every 4-8 years. Sooner or later, the other side will control the same levers. Instead of targeting immigration, it could be used to target a community/ideology/group of individuals you align with.
Nonsense. This administration erased entire programs with the stroke of a pen. A future administration could do the same. Everything this administration has done can be unraveled.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or actually believe that. History clearly show its naive to think that will happen. See Post-9/11 domestic surveillance programs by the NSA ramped up during the GW Bush years continuing or even increasing under Obama. We just haven't had a Snowden level leak to show what programs have persisted in the last two administration.
No, what they are saying is the future Democrat administration which will hem and haw at how their hands are tied will be lying.
They will have the power to at very least lay off every person involved. But will they? Probably not (your point). Trump (illegally) shut down the DOE and USAID by simply firing everyone employed there.
No one spoke out when the government started abducting US citizens (who happened to be brown) off the street and killing them in detention centers or putting them on deportation planes to random countries without any due process. This is just the next logical step of the program. All authoritarian governments handle dissidents in this way.
* Which US citizens have been abducted and by who? Which have been killed?
* Which US citizens found themselves in US detention centers (without lawful arrest) ?
* Which US citizens were placed in other countries without judicial review?
As far as I can tell:
No US citizens have been deported. No US citizens have been detained after evidence of their citizenship has been produced, which is a fast process in practice (taking a few hours), and has affected a few hundred people in total swept up during larger enforcement operations. The worst examples I can find are "At least 36 citizens were held at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or family." No US citizens have died in detention, nor been killed. In detention, deaths have risen on previous years, but are due to existing medical issues being untreated rather than anyone being killed.
It's hard to say exactly how many because ICE isn't keeping records precisely to make it easier to hide their captives. There are more than a few reports of midnight flights around the country with lawyers being unable to contact their clients.
But for just a taste, here's a propublica article on the matter.
yes, people spoke out, but i take your point. a lot of people seemed cool with it or were even excited for it when they thought it wouldn't effect them, but obviously, if they could get away with it with a subset of the population, that subset would only grow.
I mean, it's cliche but vote! Use your right to vote and vote in people who will hold those who abuse their power accountable.
If everyone who was allowed to vote actually voted, I think there's a reasonably high chance we'd have better politicians. As it stands, there's this pretend "virtue" from a bunch of pseudo-intellectual morons who think they're cool by abstaining from their right to vote, and dedicate a lot of time trying to convince people that their votes don't matter.
Cynicism is always tempting but ultimately lazy; if they votes didn't matter then there wouldn't be politicians wasting their time trying to make it hard or impossible for you to vote.
When the government is shooting citizens in the face, disenfranchising voters, dismantling election committees, and encouraging militant groups to show up to polling places and intimidate vote counters, all while claiming every election they've been a part of was rigged against them, it's natural for people to look outside of voting to make an impact.
I will be voting, like I always have, but I live in a state where that's easy to do. This administration is testing the limits of what people will put up with.
Blocking roads seems like a very fast way to have people turn on you and your cause. It might be effective in some places, but in much of America I think it's counter productive.
I don't disagree with anything you said. I'm just saying that voting is something that's a right given to US citizens [1] that is woefully underutilized. Only about half of those eligible bother voting! If you don't like the current state of politics, you should at the very least do the minimal effort to participate in our republic.
That is, of course, the minimal thing, but I think we'd have way better elections if people just used this fundamental right.
[1] Yes yes I know about disenfranchisement for felonies and the like, you don't need to lecture me.
And what did you do about it? Probably the same as the rest of us.. nothing that actually matters.
We have no power except a vote. Our country is too big (physically) to effectively protest. Our wealth distribution is too large. Our social safety nets are laughable. People can't even take time off work to protest, or if they just didn't show up they can be fired without recourse.
Our country and government is basically built for the people having no actual power. We are at the mercy of the ultra rich that control everything and a large majority of all of our "elected" officials.
Everyone can be stripped off their citizenship now that birthright is debatable (Supreme Court upheld with a narrow 6-3). At which point they are illegals.
The infra we are building for our future dictator is awesome.
Remember those horrible vicious ni… I mean Haitians in Springfield? The ones who are "poisoning the blood of the country", "probably have AIDS", and are "eating the dogs" and "eating the cats"?
They were legal, every last one of them. They were under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). There was no "law and order" justification to object to their presence. Didn't stop the GOP from going after them. Trump and Vance viciously attacked them with the full support of the conservative media. The administration repealed their TPS protection, turning people who had done no wrong into fugitives.
This is about race. Always has been. When they run out of "illegals", they'll turn people into "illegals". When they run out of immigrants entirely, they'll overturn the 14th Amendment and start stripping citizenship from native-born Americans of the wrong color. They've already tried just that, and three motherfuckers on the Supreme Court voted to let them.
(un)fun fact, Deloitte currently staffs what looks like a smaller version of this contract, that this may be intended to replace based on the timing. Example, award ID 70CDCR21FR0000022 on USAspending.gov
Keep people in “system 1” thinking to control them. Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up, it’s clear that although these fault lines always existed in US society, fringe opinions have been massively signal-boosted by bots for quite some time. I suspect there’s been a psychological Cold War going on online for at least the last decade or two, with a whole ecosystem of grifters and ragebait view farmers bottom-feeding off of state sponsored PsyOps, leading a corrupt inner circle of elite opportunists to take advantage of the resulting anger for personal gain. We’ll probably never get to tease apart what was a natural side effect of social media and what was engineered deliberately but I bet the story would be every bit as fascinating as the Manhattan project.
> Given the palpable shift in online conversation since a couple of Russian datacenters got blown up
This was a rumor based on a misunderstanding and has since been debunked. It was Yandex search crawler traffic that was reduced.
We do plenty of manipulation and divide-and-conquer on ourselves, which is heavily documented at least since the Cold War. No need to blame it all on outsiders, although certainly some of that is present as well.
Look what the Europeans did from their antisemitism in the 1940s. We need to criminalize hate politics like we've banned other antisocial behaviors such as assault and rape. This just feels so obvious to me. Political hatemongering isn't some mystifying slippery ghost.
But no we're like "oh so we have one candidate that wants to adjust the budget to fund some libraries and this other one that wants to build concentration camps and imprison transgendered people. Alright, let's allow both on the ballot"
Being a violent hateful ignorant bigot isn't a qualifying condition for administering civic life.
If you oppose them, it'd be good to understand them instead of being shocked about straw men. If you'd like to understand them, it's very easy to find their media and thought leaders sharing eg. demographic data. "Remigration" is the key term, now.
That's a very leftist media view on the issues that actually concerned most on the right. Both sides used a lot of heavy strawman attacks and had a very distorted view of what the people actually wanted/cared about. In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration- like if HR just started hiring a bunch of random people to your team with no onboarding process, and now you're on the hook for the new workload. The DEI and trans was just annoying because of how forced it was and how distracting from things that actually matter to most Americans.
yeah they may frame it as "uncontrolled migration" but given recent events like the Bo French tweet about Indian Americans, "uncontrolled migration" appears to be more of a euphemism for non-white people becoming more present in American society. Hence the desire to roll back a pluralistic democracy and install an ethnonationalist authoritarian that will privilege a certain class of people and punish others. This is at least the animus behind the MAGA core
As for swing voters, they really just wanted inflation to get under control. So they didn't even trade away their rights for DEI or migration control, just inflation. A bit disconcerting to see that people will so easily give away the very rights that people fought decades to have.
> In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration- like if HR just started hiring a bunch of random people to your team with no onboarding process, and now you're on the hook for the new workload.
Did this actually happen though? Friends/family in e.g. Texas/California are unconvinced, and I don't think I ever saw any real data versus just scaremongering ("they're eating our cats and dogs").
I found a source from 2024 that seems trustworthy. It comes to the conclusion that about 2.5 million were "released into the US", while an estimated 1.6 million snuck in. That's Feb 2021 to Oct 2023.
The details are complicated, and higher numbers seem to come from the fact that usually _encounters_ are counted, in the wild and at ports of entry, which includes millions of people who were turned around, many of whom will have tried and been encountered multiple times.
The source is extremely comprehensive and deep, way beyond what I wrote above.
That being said, the HR bit that you also quoted from GP is a bad analogy. It should be clear that immigration is quite different than onboarding new hires, something a country literally built on immigration like the US is a testament to.
Edit: As someone is mentioning elsewhere in the thread, let's not forget that during the Biden admin there was a bipartisan immigration and border security bill, including many provisions previously demanded by the Republicans, that got rejected in a turnaround by the Republicans in the end in the election year.
Your evidence is a video from "Richard McGough (bible emoji) Bible Wheel"? Why is this guy your go-to for immigration news?
(Also, this video is in reference to the legal fight between the federal Border Patrol and the Texas State government over Texas putting up razorwire at the border and barring Federal Agents from operating in certain locations along the border. A dramatic video, sure, but hardly the facts and data I think people would expect)
> if you honestly don't believe in the millions upon millions upon millions of people who were let into our country with no thought whatsoever under Biden.
How many, specifically, is "millions upon millions upon millions" and why do you think a random video from a literal no one on X is proof of anything?
Weren't the ads Trump ran on trans fear some of the most effective of the entire cycle?
On what basis are you deciding what is or isn't an issue? You think right wing media doesn't talk about DEI and trans people all day? It's like the only issue they have left to win "middle America" over on.
Who likes seeing ICE thugs round up non criminals on the basis of skin color and nationality alone? Not enough of the middle. I'm seeing more and more Trump voters saying they didn't vote for this. The presidency is won on the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter not on partisans. How many of these voters have articulated the same regret when it comes his policies re DEI or trans rights?
Maybe you are projecting because it's easier to come up with an excuse based on alleged economic malaise?
> The presidency is won on the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter
How common is the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter? (Edit: I asked Gemini that question and it demurred). These would be the voters who don't really pay much attention until they get into the voting booth. I'm not sure, maybe that's up to 1/3 or maybe it's like 5%? I suppose it's possible that a chunk of the electorate just votes on feelz and that's pretty depressing.
>In this case, it was unchecked migrants coming in at high rates with no good plan for integration
Theis issue with conservatives isn't the policy you believe in, the issue is that you are just so unbelievably ignorant of how the world works, to where you see an issue like migrants coming in, and think that its such a big problem that the best course of action is giving a flamethrower to a convicted felon rapist and likely a pedo (all the things you supposedly firmly stand against), and trusting him to burn just the right parts down with authoritative force (something you are also supposedly firmly against)
Furthermore, if you bothered to actually care, you would have paid attention, Dems completely would agree with you that undocumented migrants were a problem - Biden had a border bill that was bipartisan, supported by border patrol, that would have allocated all the correct funding to reign in the asylum process, which would have correctly filtered the people that were coming here to work, versus those taking advantage of the system. And consequently, Trump told the Republicans to vote against that bill because it would hurt his chances of getting elected.
So for people like you, it was never about the migrants - you don't actually care. It was always about racism and sexism. At least there isn't any questions about it anymore.
NSA has a culture of at least sort of following the laws that govern them. This needs to be ICE to land with people who will happily ignore court orders.
YCombinator and their lackies in Big Tech have promoted these types of abuses to occur. The comment section here will be filled with people who lack any substance but will gladly provide lip service. The stories of the modern day Gestapo cannot be told without Silicon Valley.
Sure, but I would actually like to hear what a Trump supporter has to say here. I suspect you and I have a lot of overlap on our opinions, which is great but sort of tangential to what I want to know.
> Sure, but I would actually like to hear what a Trump supporter has to say here.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
You’re replying to a comment that is re-iterating that they are asking for the opinion of actual Trump supporters. Presumably you are not yourself a Trump supporter, and what you posted is not your opinion.
It’s frustrating seeing people’s genuine questions being mocked.
As a matter of intentional political strategy, I and many other people do not want to see or hear the opinions of actual Trump supporters. I feel it's important to communicate to them that they're bad people with shameful opinions who don't get to have a voice in my circles. In the modern US, this is unfortunately an effective and important component of politics; Trump himself routinely deploys this strategy to great effect.
I really do hope that in the future this strategy will stop being necessary, or that we can at least restore the norms against it. But I'm not going to unilaterally disarm.
People doing illegal things is the problem. Change the law if you think it's wrong but it's the executive branch's duty to enforce the law.
You can't sit back here and be upset that Trump decides to selectively enforce the law in the ways he sees fit while approving of the exact behavior when there's a different executive.
This is why the problem of executive power exists, people only care when they disagree and actively approve when they agree.
Nope, I can distinguish between what is right and "wrong" without arbitrary laws decided by <1k corrupt politicians (Ds and Rs).
I dont make judgements about what a problem is based on whether a law says it is. You should be experiencing the world outside the framework of imaginerary legal constructs.
If America tends to create laws that are antithetical to common sense and goodness, maybe its the problem. Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.
I think you've misjudged me, I think Biden, and Trump should be sharing the same jail cell. I dont approve of basically any US politician, they're all morally corrupt and outright evil.
> If America tends to create laws that are antithetical to common sense
That isn't the root of the problem at all. The root of the problem is we have certain laws that, under some administrations, are barely enforced. Then, under another administration, there are a large group of people who have been flouting the law because it wasn't being enforced.
You've now created huge class of people who have very tenous legal status, based on the whims of the executive. That's the problem.
US immigration laws are some of the most relaxed in the world. There's plenty of debate on whether that should change or not (and how). But circumventing the legislative process might make you feel good about the immediate problem but it creates a side effect of having an underclass of non-citizens that live under constant threat of deportation and have limited access to social programs.
The only judgement I've made of you is that you seem to think not enforcing the law based on personal feelings is right and you've only confirmed that.
In a democracy, the law isn't just some words on papers, it represents the collective moral judgement of the voting population. It is inherently antithetical to democracy to ignore laws you don't agree with.
> Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.
Pretty ironic considering this entire situation is caused by people ignoring the system rather than patching it.
Speaking as a die-hard Libertarian who has seen the Democrats and Republicans as approximately equally undesirable for most of my life... I'm voting for every Democrat I can at the Federal level in this coming election. Possibly at the State level as well. Because what the modern day GOP has become is so vile, so reprehensible, that there is now a legit reason for preferring one over the other. And we have to have people in office who can check or counteract at least some of what these Fascist assholes are trying to do.
Will I have to pinch my nose to vote Democrat? Absolutely. Will I feel icky doing it? Absolutely. But will I do it anyway because it's the best choice given the current situation? Absolutely.
Yeah what’s disingenuous about the “spies from China” is that if they are already identified as spies they would be under targeted surveillance already.
> If you try to visualize this in action, replace economic migrants from Latin America with spies from China. And you quickly see there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea.
I'd rather my tax money wasted on get US people watched and silenced, than bombing schools and killing children in Middle East.
I mean if I can choose, I want my tax money spent on making Americans healthier, but I don't get to choose. ICE has $70B to spend, this is just 1/700. I'm sure they will do more before next congress trying to crawl back their money.
It's the same forces doing the bombing and the spying. Want to object to Israel/the US murdering a school full of girls? Guess what, now you've got a Palantir tag on you. Push hard enough and maybe Bill Ackman will jump on Twitter and get you blacklisted.
I can’t fathom this kind of thinking. It’s not a case of having to choose between the lesser of evils, it’s a case of having some principles and making decisions based on them.
Should the federal government be tracking our interpersonal relationships?
Should an immigration officer be privy to the timing and manner of communications that I, a citizen, have with other citizens? Why?
Why should ICE be able to collect this information when domestic law enforcement generally has to show probable cause to a judge to gather similar information? Who decided to make ICE the country's supreme law enforcement agency?
Related, ICE is arresting citizens on fake immigration charges[1]. Some US citizens have been deported.
US citizens "can't" be deported, but ICE has supralegal powers. Should we have a law enforcement agency that is not bound by our laws? Why? What guardrails does it have if not law? Who defines those guardrails?
1 - https://projects.propublica.org/american-citizens-detained-d...
The entire experiment here is to bring the surveillance apparatus' of dictatorships to the US. They no doubt see the durability of these dictatorships and one-party states around the world and are drooling at the prospect of running it in the US.
Until that's true, the 2nd amendment is meaningless when USAF can buy JDAMs and F35s and I, an American citizen, cannot.
A DOJ with its ducks in a row would be charging this left and right.
ie: 25 years of Patriot Act renewal, Flock rollouts in liberal cities, Obama’s pursuit of Snowden and not the NSA itself
There is certainly liberal leadership concerned with our rights, just as there are conservatives, but they are the minority under both partisan umbrellas.
Political leadership doesn't want civil discourse until it becomes a self-preservation concern for them, same with data centers.
[0] Most things are decided long before SCOTUS involvement, and most courts are liberal-leaning.
[1] Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
[2] The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
If I take for granted that the waterline surveillance increases under previous administrations (and i do, i implicitly conceded it) then the only meaningful discussion is then on its magnitude.
So you tell me, are Republicans going further with this program than before? And furthermore, are Republican courts and Republican congresses going to curtail it at any point?
I already know my answers to this, but if i'm going to be criticized I think it should be against the meaningful alternative facing us where Republicans retain control of these branches.
Doesn't matter if the damage is already done. Raise dead doesn't exist in the real world. And the courts don't decide things. The executive has proven it will just ignore the courts.
> Republicans are far short of a supermajority in the Senate so nothing passes Congress without Democratic votes
First, this it 100% not true, and secondly, if you ignore congress, it doesn't matter. And once again, the damage is already done by the time congress gets around to it.
> The White House is always singularly partisan by definition, what Democratic counterbalance you expect to see in a Republican White House, or vice versa?
Expect? None. Hope for? Basic respect to the rule of law to start. But with pdf in the white house, all bets are off.
It is “don’t expect the Democrat party to save us when they come back into power at the Federal level. With regard to erosion of privacy rights, I don’t see a positive track record for them.
Please surface to me what I’m missing and I’m happy to change my mind.
It's the same core group of people controlling the centers of power in both parties for many years now, and it's not realistic to expect meaningful change for as long as they remain in power
Maybe the Republicans are worse, I don't particularly give a shit. They're both horrible and anti-American on this issue and nothing will change without systemic changes.
This is surveillance as part of a department that explicitly says it is not bound by US law or the Constitution.
All of that makes this program materially different than any other US domestic surveillance program or proposal of which I am aware.
"Some US citizens have been deported" is also a mischaracterization. Aside from minor children of deported parents, the only case where an American citizen was deported was Brian Morales Garcia.
https://www.newsweek.com/democratic-bill-abolish-ice-shut-do...
Ya, I am a fan of the coast guard... and I think we need the FAA/TSA to keep the planes running on time. And FEMA might be laughed at in some quarters but a federal disaster response is something we should have ahead of hurricane season.
But lets be clear - its US public that allowed this, over and over. Saner candidates were suppressed as not patriotic enough, entire worse than pointless wars were waged and millions died for nothing. Not US passport holders so I guess thats just an afterthought.
Dont expect rollback in your lifetime. We havent reached even the bottom yet, not with current voting mindset. Still this is what US population wants, I don't see >200 millions even just protesting.
Only when the comprehensiveness of this 1984 is presented in an unflattering way like "we're gonna snoop on everything so ICE can round people up" (or an AI camera goes up on every street corner) do they even become uneasy.
Source: I'm a naturalized citizen.
Naturalized citizens can be deported and their citizenship can be revoked in cases of violent crime or other immoral behavior. That information is provided when swearing in.
It's more accurate to say that US citizens who are law abiding and moral, or who are born in the US, can't be deported.
If that ends up being the case, then you're talking a reality where American citizens become the target of warrantless domestic surveillance, using data collected by the NSA. Every phone call, e-mail, text message, DM, group chat; anything a person has ever said or done in their digital lives going back years.
It's worse now with AI, because human effort is no longer required to read intercept transcripts or conversations. Instantaneous surfacing of dirt/leverage.
in fact it sounds uncannily similar to what a bunch of organizations in USSR were doing to citizens, like NKVD and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka
And if you think: "Why would they want to do that?", consider that even something stupid like someone misinterpreting a gesture or working for a competitor of a company the regime currently favours can get you there.
I'm sure Trump has had plenty of input from Putin about all this. Even if he's not formally an "asset", it's more a case of shared goals.
Whatever functions we need can be rebuilt from scratch later. But this is a rebuild moment, not a refactor moment.
They will have the power to at very least lay off every person involved. But will they? Probably not (your point). Trump (illegally) shut down the DOE and USAID by simply firing everyone employed there.
* Which US citizens have been abducted and by who? Which have been killed?
* Which US citizens found themselves in US detention centers (without lawful arrest) ?
* Which US citizens were placed in other countries without judicial review?
As far as I can tell:
No US citizens have been deported. No US citizens have been detained after evidence of their citizenship has been produced, which is a fast process in practice (taking a few hours), and has affected a few hundred people in total swept up during larger enforcement operations. The worst examples I can find are "At least 36 citizens were held at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or family." No US citizens have died in detention, nor been killed. In detention, deaths have risen on previous years, but are due to existing medical issues being untreated rather than anyone being killed.
But for just a taste, here's a propublica article on the matter.
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
If everyone who was allowed to vote actually voted, I think there's a reasonably high chance we'd have better politicians. As it stands, there's this pretend "virtue" from a bunch of pseudo-intellectual morons who think they're cool by abstaining from their right to vote, and dedicate a lot of time trying to convince people that their votes don't matter.
Cynicism is always tempting but ultimately lazy; if they votes didn't matter then there wouldn't be politicians wasting their time trying to make it hard or impossible for you to vote.
I will be voting, like I always have, but I live in a state where that's easy to do. This administration is testing the limits of what people will put up with.
The Serbians did that for two years straight, until their government resigned and called for new elections. Look at videos from a protest: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1jc29fk/breathtakin...
If a much poorer country with (for now!) much worse repression can do it, what's your excuse, Americans?
Politics isn't just the ballot box every couple of years. Politics is always and everywhere.
That is, of course, the minimal thing, but I think we'd have way better elections if people just used this fundamental right.
[1] Yes yes I know about disenfranchisement for felonies and the like, you don't need to lecture me.
And what did you do about it? Probably the same as the rest of us.. nothing that actually matters.
We have no power except a vote. Our country is too big (physically) to effectively protest. Our wealth distribution is too large. Our social safety nets are laughable. People can't even take time off work to protest, or if they just didn't show up they can be fired without recourse.
Our country and government is basically built for the people having no actual power. We are at the mercy of the ultra rich that control everything and a large majority of all of our "elected" officials.
The infra we are building for our future dictator is awesome.
They were legal, every last one of them. They were under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). There was no "law and order" justification to object to their presence. Didn't stop the GOP from going after them. Trump and Vance viciously attacked them with the full support of the conservative media. The administration repealed their TPS protection, turning people who had done no wrong into fugitives.
This is about race. Always has been. When they run out of "illegals", they'll turn people into "illegals". When they run out of immigrants entirely, they'll overturn the 14th Amendment and start stripping citizenship from native-born Americans of the wrong color. They've already tried just that, and three motherfuckers on the Supreme Court voted to let them.
Let's add some levity to the situation, and here's the link: https://youtu.be/EJR1H5tf5wE?si=lGJ7_L0IN31WNMKE
This was a rumor based on a misunderstanding and has since been debunked. It was Yandex search crawler traffic that was reduced.
We do plenty of manipulation and divide-and-conquer on ourselves, which is heavily documented at least since the Cold War. No need to blame it all on outsiders, although certainly some of that is present as well.
Never underestimate how much most Americans will gladly shit on their freedoms if they're told it will hurt someone slightly different than them.
But no we're like "oh so we have one candidate that wants to adjust the budget to fund some libraries and this other one that wants to build concentration camps and imprison transgendered people. Alright, let's allow both on the ballot"
Being a violent hateful ignorant bigot isn't a qualifying condition for administering civic life.
You can't really understand a hypocrite by taking their public utterances at face value.
As for swing voters, they really just wanted inflation to get under control. So they didn't even trade away their rights for DEI or migration control, just inflation. A bit disconcerting to see that people will so easily give away the very rights that people fought decades to have.
Did this actually happen though? Friends/family in e.g. Texas/California are unconvinced, and I don't think I ever saw any real data versus just scaremongering ("they're eating our cats and dogs").
The details are complicated, and higher numbers seem to come from the fact that usually _encounters_ are counted, in the wild and at ports of entry, which includes millions of people who were turned around, many of whom will have tried and been encountered multiple times.
The source is extremely comprehensive and deep, way beyond what I wrote above.
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/breaking-down-the-immigrat...
That being said, the HR bit that you also quoted from GP is a bad analogy. It should be clear that immigration is quite different than onboarding new hires, something a country literally built on immigration like the US is a testament to.
Edit: As someone is mentioning elsewhere in the thread, let's not forget that during the Biden admin there was a bipartisan immigration and border security bill, including many provisions previously demanded by the Republicans, that got rejected in a turnaround by the Republicans in the end in the election year.
(Also, this video is in reference to the legal fight between the federal Border Patrol and the Texas State government over Texas putting up razorwire at the border and barring Federal Agents from operating in certain locations along the border. A dramatic video, sure, but hardly the facts and data I think people would expect)
How many, specifically, is "millions upon millions upon millions" and why do you think a random video from a literal no one on X is proof of anything?
On what basis are you deciding what is or isn't an issue? You think right wing media doesn't talk about DEI and trans people all day? It's like the only issue they have left to win "middle America" over on.
Who likes seeing ICE thugs round up non criminals on the basis of skin color and nationality alone? Not enough of the middle. I'm seeing more and more Trump voters saying they didn't vote for this. The presidency is won on the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter not on partisans. How many of these voters have articulated the same regret when it comes his policies re DEI or trans rights?
Maybe you are projecting because it's easier to come up with an excuse based on alleged economic malaise?
How common is the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter? (Edit: I asked Gemini that question and it demurred). These would be the voters who don't really pay much attention until they get into the voting booth. I'm not sure, maybe that's up to 1/3 or maybe it's like 5%? I suppose it's possible that a chunk of the electorate just votes on feelz and that's pretty depressing.
I'm speaking about the Electoral College for President, which is rather notorious for making only a small fraction of the overall electorate count.
Theis issue with conservatives isn't the policy you believe in, the issue is that you are just so unbelievably ignorant of how the world works, to where you see an issue like migrants coming in, and think that its such a big problem that the best course of action is giving a flamethrower to a convicted felon rapist and likely a pedo (all the things you supposedly firmly stand against), and trusting him to burn just the right parts down with authoritative force (something you are also supposedly firmly against)
Furthermore, if you bothered to actually care, you would have paid attention, Dems completely would agree with you that undocumented migrants were a problem - Biden had a border bill that was bipartisan, supported by border patrol, that would have allocated all the correct funding to reign in the asylum process, which would have correctly filtered the people that were coming here to work, versus those taking advantage of the system. And consequently, Trump told the Republicans to vote against that bill because it would hurt his chances of getting elected.
So for people like you, it was never about the migrants - you don't actually care. It was always about racism and sexism. At least there isn't any questions about it anymore.
It’s frustrating seeing people’s genuine questions being mocked.
I really do hope that in the future this strategy will stop being necessary, or that we can at least restore the norms against it. But I'm not going to unilaterally disarm.
You can't sit back here and be upset that Trump decides to selectively enforce the law in the ways he sees fit while approving of the exact behavior when there's a different executive.
This is why the problem of executive power exists, people only care when they disagree and actively approve when they agree.
I dont make judgements about what a problem is based on whether a law says it is. You should be experiencing the world outside the framework of imaginerary legal constructs.
If America tends to create laws that are antithetical to common sense and goodness, maybe its the problem. Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.
I think you've misjudged me, I think Biden, and Trump should be sharing the same jail cell. I dont approve of basically any US politician, they're all morally corrupt and outright evil.
That isn't the root of the problem at all. The root of the problem is we have certain laws that, under some administrations, are barely enforced. Then, under another administration, there are a large group of people who have been flouting the law because it wasn't being enforced.
You've now created huge class of people who have very tenous legal status, based on the whims of the executive. That's the problem.
US immigration laws are some of the most relaxed in the world. There's plenty of debate on whether that should change or not (and how). But circumventing the legislative process might make you feel good about the immediate problem but it creates a side effect of having an underclass of non-citizens that live under constant threat of deportation and have limited access to social programs.
The only judgement I've made of you is that you seem to think not enforcing the law based on personal feelings is right and you've only confirmed that.
In a democracy, the law isn't just some words on papers, it represents the collective moral judgement of the voting population. It is inherently antithetical to democracy to ignore laws you don't agree with.
> Maybe we need to do away with the whole system, not patch it.
Pretty ironic considering this entire situation is caused by people ignoring the system rather than patching it.
Will I have to pinch my nose to vote Democrat? Absolutely. Will I feel icky doing it? Absolutely. But will I do it anyway because it's the best choice given the current situation? Absolutely.
If you try to visualize this in action, replace somebody with a bad guy. And you quickly see there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea.
Is this a joke?
I mean if I can choose, I want my tax money spent on making Americans healthier, but I don't get to choose. ICE has $70B to spend, this is just 1/700. I'm sure they will do more before next congress trying to crawl back their money.
You can say no.