> I’d expect minimum statutory damages for this sort of thing to be north of $10K / day, paid up front, and garnished from ICE’s payroll budget. However, I don’t make the rules.

Heh. It's funny what people think about government sometimes.

This is nothing. Read about what the IRS can legally do to you, without any recourse, or just search for horror stories on the internet, as they actually do those things regularly. Blocking all your bank accounts, then convicting you based on non-payment is normal for them.

That's one of the problems of people in general. If you give people essentially unlimited power (that's what Congress has, in theory), they're not going to be nice about using that power.

That means that government departments that see it as their mission to fix things in society, immigration, mental health, child support, veteran's affairs, ... well, frankly it is pretty well known among lawyers that things like constant human rights violations, outright criminal direct abuse (rape, beatings, ...), absurd imprisonment (e.g. solitary confinement for long periods), they're part of normal operation for a lot of these departments. For instance, did you know the odds of a kid getting raped or sexually assaulted are actually higher in the care of CPA than with abusive parents ? Despite, of course, that the whole point of CPA is to lower these occurrences ? The same goes with metal-health related suicides: they're actually higher when patients are "being treated" in mental health hospitals that without any care (which means, no forced care).

People just seem utterly unable to admit or believe that attempts to fix things are making matters worse, so these things just do not get resolved.