Abolish ICE?

[Grumpy]

 ICE has routinely shown itself to be an overreaching and unaccountable agency. Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology found that ICE has scanned the driver's license photos of one in three American adults and could access the driver's license data of three in four American adults. The agency boasts a "long history of impersonating police officers, abusing immigrants in ICE detention, [and] building a vast surveillance network of data purchased from brokers and other legally questionable means," reported Electronic Privacy Information Center Counsel Jake Wiener.

ICE's budget has steadily increased since the agency's creation in 2003, from $3.7 billion ($6.4 billion in current dollars) to $9.1 billion in FY 2024. The ERO's work force has nearly tripled in the same time period, reaching 7,711 in FY 2024. It's worth asking tough questions about the return on investment, but few politicians are willing to do so because they largely view ICE as an indispensable tool.

Many of the issues ICE purports to address would be better solved by overhauling the U.S. immigration system. The country's undocumented immigrants are overwhelmingly a benefit, not a liability. It makes far more sense to bring them out of the shadows by providing a pathway to citizenship than to use government force to upend their lives. Reducing the incentives that drive illegal immigration, such as expanding work visa pathways and streamlining visa and green card processing, would further reduce whatever issues ICE currently thinks it must solve.

ICE is tasked with disrupting American communities and families at great cost and little benefit to taxpayers. Some important duties fall under its umbrella—there is a role for the government to play in detaining and deporting actually dangerous migrants, for one—but such things were handled before its creation, and they can be handled again by relevant law enforcement agencies. ICE's current powers and central deportation mission are neither appropriately sized nor easily reformed. It would be much better for the government to extend an olive branch to nonviolent undocumented immigrants, reassign ICE's useful functions elsewhere, and let the agency go once and for all.

http://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-ice-2/


Consider some of the Ice horror shows from the past 30 days alone:

    On 8 May, Ice agents “held a young girl’s face to the ground” while they detained her mother in Worcester, Massachusetts. A video of the incident from Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra shows the teenage girl screaming as multiple agents and officers chase her and grab her legs.

    On 7 May, Ice agents detained Jensy Machado, a US citizen, in northern Virginia with “guns drawn”, to quote the Virginia Democratic congressman Don Beyer. Despite his attempt to show his Real ID and prove his legal status, they put him in cuffs.

    On 5 May, Ice agents detained Daniel Orellana, a 25-year-old Guatemalan, at a gas station in Framingham, Massachusetts. When they were told they had apprehended the wrong man, according to Orellana’s girlfriend, one of the agents said: “OK, but we’re going to take you anyway.”

    On 4 May, a group of Ice agents detained a man filling up gas in his truck at a gas station in Oxnard, California – and left his children behind on their own. “They arrested someone,” said an eyewitness. “They left the children inside the truck.”


    On 26 April, court papers filed by the Department of Homeland Security admitted that Ice agents did not have a warrant when they arrested the Palestinian activist and green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil in March.

    On 24 April, in the middle of the night, Ice agents burst into the home of a family of US citizens in Oklahoma City, while executing a search warrant issued for someone else. The agents ordered the family outside into the rain in their underwear, the mother said, and confiscated their phones, laptops and all their cash savings as “evidence”.

    On 22 April, Ice agents detained a mother and her two-year-old daughter, a US citizen, during a routine check-in with the agency in New Orleans and then deported the mother back to Honduras with her American child. A Trump-appointed federal judge said he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process”.



    Also on 22 April, Ice agents in plain clothes, without badges or warrants, detained two men during a raid on a courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. Two bystanders who dared to ask those agents to show them a warrant were ordered not to “impede” the arrest and have since been threatened with prosecution by Ice.

    On 14 April, Ice agents stopped an undocumented Guatemalan couple in their car in New Bedford, Massachusetts, while looking for another man. When Juan Francisco and Marilu Méndez’s lawyer told them over the phone to stay in the car until she got there, the Ice agents used a large hammer to smash the rear window of the car and drag them out.

    Also on 14 April, we learned that Ice agents detained a 19-year old Venezuelan asylum seeker and deported him to the Cecot prison in El Salvador – despite his lack of criminal convictions or even tattoos. During the arrest, according to his father, one Ice agent said: “No, he’s not the one,” as if they were looking for someone else, but another agent said: “Take him anyway.”

All of these incidents are just from the past month. Go back further, and I could go on and on and on.

Forget about talk of “reform”. At this point, there is no way to improve or “fix” Ice. It has to be abolished. Shut down. Scrapped. To quote Gillibrand in 2018, the entirety of immigration enforcement in the United States must be “reimagined”.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/13/democrats-abolish-ice-trump

[krimster2]

since the first census of the United States in 1790, counts that include both citizens and noncitizens have been used to apportion seats in the House of Representatives,
A Republican accusation gaining traction is that Democrats want high levels of illegal immigration because of its effect on the census, congressional apportionment, and electoral college votes.

co-president Elon Musk, who has promoted this view on social media. “Most people in America don’t know that the census is based on a simple headcount of people (including illegals) not just citizens." Musk tweeted in February. "This shifts political power and money to states and Congressional districts with the highest number of illegals."
In March, Musk tweeted "Since illegals are mostly in Democrat states, both the House and the Presidential vote are shifted ~5% to the left, which is enough to change the entire balance of power!" In a subsequent X interview with Don Lemon, Musk put a number on that political power alleging that Democrats have gained 20 seats in the House due to illegal immigration.1 Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said Democrats "want these illegal migrants to create more electoral power for them in their blue states" and estimated Democrats gained 13 seats because of them.

bottom line...
this is all about protecting Republican power

we used to have a very good system for this that started in WWII
An executive order called the Mexican Farm Labor Program established the Bracero Program in 1942.
this was a VERY successful program which was discontinued in 1964
http://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program

the USA ALWAYS had a new wave of incoming immigrants to use as low cost labor after the previous wave of immigrants moved up
my Russian Jewish ancestors were in the wave of immigration that built the Garment Disstrict in NYC, when 10s of thousands of Jewish tailors worked in the sweatshops in manhattan like The Triangle Shirt Factory
but it was cheaper to outsource to asia, and that made more money for business owners
so hundreds of thousands of garment workers lost their jobs, and these jobs ended up in china

from the very beginning of the industrial revolution, production always moved to the cheapest location

in 1820, Britain dominated the global textile trade
because of power looms
china produced inferior textiles with hand looms, so the UK even sold to China!!!
then ya'll stole some tea seeds and planted them in India and ya'll took the Chinese Tea trade as well
then, ya'll sold opium (the Fentanyl of the 19th century) to the chinese to save on trade silver for silk, orcelain and spice trade

in 1820, water wheeled poweredc machinery along the Roach canal created an industry COMPLETELY powered by renewable energy that was equal in number of employed to the Garment District in NYC, or 250,000 employed, which was 1% of the UK's population in 1820
but they abandoned it in favor of steam power in other locations in the UK that had cheaper land and labor
then it moved on to the USA and now Asia

it's like water flowing downhill
you want to be the leader in manufacturing, just have the lowest production cost
and it'll ALWAYS flow to you

central american labor is very competitive to Chinese labor
but the USA and europe aren't even close


 

[Grumpy]

 Leave aside the question of when, if at all, it is proper to prosecute bystanders under these circumstances. Why is it considered acceptable for ICE enforcers to wear masks to hide their identity in the first place? They did so last week, a video shows, when they arrested Newark, NJ Mayor Ras Baraka as he protested at a detention facility. A casual search reveals that ICE agents have worn face coverings, ski masks, and the like in raids and stops reported from around the country (Westminster, MD; Douglas County, CO; Great Barrington, MA; Bellingham, WA). Federal agents wore masks when they abducted Turkish grad student Rümeysa Öztürk off a street near her Boston-area home. (She was freed by a judge last week.) The Trump Department of Homeland Security appears to have made it standard practice.

At what point will we as a nation find ourselves with a secret police?

People who mask themselves before street confrontations ordinarily do so to avoid legal and public accountability, especially when they are up to no good.

You don’t have to take my word on this. In its letter sent to Harvard University on April 11, the Trump administration itself insisted, as part of its demands to toughen student discipline, that “Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.” Its rationale was straightforward enough: if student demonstrators can conceal their identity, they might break laws or rules with impunity.

For the Trump administration, turning masked raids into standard practice fits into a wider effort to dodge accountability for potentially illegal and unconstitutional actions. In the contempt proceedings over its alien removals, for example, as I noted last week, the Department of Homeland Security has defied a judge’s insistence that it make clear which individual officials made key decisions, a necessary step if judges are to impose accountability correctly.

And the administration’s newest rumbling—that it might try to suspend the writ of habeas corpus itself—can be viewed in one light as an even wider bid to escape identification and responsibility for misconduct. It is through habeas and similar proceedings, after all, that judges ascertain that a particular raid detained the wrong person by mistake, or detained someone who is a citizen or in the country legally, or evaded required legal steps—mistakes that fuel public ire and demand for closer controls on the process. (In practice, presidential adviser Stephen Miller’s overtures about suspending habeas are themselves lawless, because the Constitution puts Congress in charge of such a suspension and requires, as colleague Ilya Somin has explained, that it both occur in time of invasion or rebellion, and separately that it be necessary for the public safety, neither of which condition is now met.)

Whether or not they follow through, the administration’s floating of the idea of suspending habeas shows clearly where some of its key figures would like to head. No habeas? No public revelations about who was wrongly taken and what was wrongly done to them. And ever more impunity for an administration that seems hell-bent on trampling constitutional liberties.

http://www.cato.org/blog/ice-agents-seizing-people-now-routinely-wear-masks-thats-wrong

[krimster2]

fascism is ALWAYS incremental
and fascists ALWAYS LIE

here is the origin of the German Version of fascism that we all know about
http://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program

we have Fascism-Lite, all the great taste of regular fascism, but less filling
our version of fascism will just cut-off inferior people from receiving health care or deport them to ein Koncentration Lager in El Salvadore
which seems a little kinder than the German version
so maybe humanity is making some progress
and that people are "basically good" after all, just like Aunt Annie said