No, it was indeed a pedantic, dickhead take. One could interpret my comment as I intended, as in, the federal government being representative of the rest of the country (i.e. the states that don't obstruct federal immigration enforcement, which is most of them).

The responder chose not to give me the benefit of the doubt, and to interpret my statement literally so as to own me. Guess we know what he thinks about ICE. It was not really in the spirit of Hacker News which encourages people to respond in good faith. Haters gon' hate.

This is the thing that disappoints me: I was pointing out for the sake of information that this is a separation of powers thing, my comment was nonpartisan and intended simply to inform. It was directly relevant and intended to be helpful to the original guy who had a question, because he said he wasn't American, so he probably wouldn't have thought about this angle.

The dickhead guy had to go make this dirty though.