The best way to change a law that reasonable people disagree with, is to enforce it effectively.

What I'm saying is that while I don't necessarily agree with the full extent of the policy, I recognize that reasonable people can disagree with it as a whole, and that enforcing it is the best way to demonstrate what's wrong with the policy, rather than demonstrating what's wrong with the enforcement (the effect of selective enforcement).

It is a tempting premise: if something is wrong, taking it to its full extent will demonstrate just how wrong it is, causing everyone to unite in striking it down. Justice wins in the end!

It is too optimistic to think that being right is enough to effect change. I think that framing the discussion this way will allow people who want to keep the status quo to use survivorship as a basis for legitimacy. When idyllic justice fails and the change doesn't happen, that becomes proof that the status quo was correct all along.

That's not how our system works for better or worse. The executive branch has co-opted much of congress's authority over the years, so we now have a system where the executive branch is also a legislative branch.

You can complain about the long term problem, and the short term problem at the same time.

Executive branch or legislative branch, not a huge difference, they both serve at the will of those who put up the money to get them elected. Elections are where the people decide which capitalists get to use the government to advance their financial interests. That is the long-term problem.

Executive branch makes decisions about priorities all the time. They certainly don't enforce all the laws all the time with the same effort.

It makes sense to complain, criticise or defend those decisions.

The executive's ability to be flexible with the law is supposed to be used expeditiously when it's urgent. For example, it would be appropriate to suspend ICE operations temporarily during a national emergency. The executive isn't supposed to just unilaterally decide that some law is "too mean" and then stop enforcing that law indefinitely. It's shocking that people so hostile to the executive body seem to wish for the executive body to gain implicit legislative power!

>It's shocking that people so hostile to the executive body seem to wish for the executive body to gain implicit legislative power!

The executive body already has implicit legislative power. There are 2 arguments. How they use that power, and whether they should have it in the first place.

You can have both of those arguments simultaneously.

GP said that the executive does exercise such discretion all the time, which is true. Talking about how it should use that discretion judiciously (not expeditiously BTW) is a non sequitur.

That shocking thing is part of justice system in USA, explicitely. (In contrast, in Germany cops+prosecutors are indeed legaly obligated to prosecure all crimes they know of, but in USA they don't. )

"We won't prosecute this or that crime" is even sometimes announced.

This isn't about the fact that they're enforcing the law. It's about how. Even if I loved the way the law is, I'd still object to enforcing it in a way that takes resources away from catching serious criminals and uses them instead to go after people who pose little to no threat.

According to the article, the university wasn't really teaching classes and it didn't have a real campus: the resources used for this sting are not that high.

Speculating here, but what if the 8 recruiters who were charged are people who make a business out of finding people with expiring visas, and counseling them about ways to stay in the country, while charging them a fee? "Hey, I heard you have visa troubles. You give me $1,000 plus expenses, and I make those visa troubles disappear." If it's something like that, then heck yeah resources should be devoted to catching those guys!

> the resources used for this sting are not that high.

How would you like to pay for it out of your own pocket then? Even if it cost no more than several ICE agents' time, it's still a much more significant waste than you're trying to portray. Let's try to keep this factual, OK?

The fact that you say "those guys" is telling. The focus should be on efficiency and effectiveness relative to ICE's mission, not on making sure that "we're hurting the right people" (as the unintentionally-honest meme goes).

When I said "those guys", that was clearly referring to hypothetical criminals in the immediately preceding three sentences. Has HN really sunk to the level now where we attack people for uttering forbidden noun-phrases like "those guys", without even examining the context in which they're uttered?

>hurting the right people

No-one wants to hurt people just for fun. I speculated about a situation in which the charged recruiters would unambiguously be harming society and it would be imperative for the state to protect society from them. I don't know if that situation is what's really going on, there isn't enough info. The point is it's not necessarily a case of Disney-villain ICE agents pulling wings off of flies for giggles (which is how a lot of commenters are treating it).

>How would you like to pay for it out of your own pocket then?

I do, it's called taxes, and I'm fine with that.

Yeah, the alt-righters have gotten pretty good at the whole "I'm being unfairly attacked for saying something completely innocent" after they say something that supports that agenda. Yawn