SmirkingRevenge
SmirkingRevenge on Hacker News
But Trumps popularity has plummeted to it's lowest point ever and immigration is a big reason.
It has gone from one of his strongest issues to a major liability, as people are confronted with what mass deportation actually is.
As they have now seen, at least as far as Samuel Sey goes, deportation isn’t simply a matter of following the rule of law. It’s a policy choice rooted both in legal mandates and in acts of presidential discretion. And this president is using his discretion in a way that harms Americans and American national interests.
American immigration law is a mess. The system is overly complicated and often internally contradictory. But one thing is clear — the rule of law does not require mass deportation. It does not mandate that a man like Sey has to leave the country.
And it certainly doesn’t require his detention, away from his family, while the system adjudicates his case.
First, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2023 case, United States v. Texas, the president has considerable “enforcement discretion over arrests and prosecutions” and that discretion “extends to the immigration context.” This means the president “retains discretion over whether to remove a noncitizen from the United States.”
This isn’t a new principle. More than a decade earlier, in a 2012 case, Arizona v. United States, the court held, “Federal officials, as an initial matter, must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all."
You can't speak coherently about the actual facts and realities of immigrants or the immigration system, despite the vast ocean of facts and stories you can use to educate yourself
But hey... imagine a cop, the pope and a bear walk into a bar ... therefore deport, or something. Think about it!
When you have to reach for such increasingly strained and indirect metaphors to talk about an issue instead of dealing with the issue directly on it's own terms, it's a tell you don't actually know much about it all
I can see in your other replies you've really latched onto this "it's not a punishment" line, that you literally just "learned" a couple of replies ago from me (as if it's some magical auto-win button). You're making it up as you go along
And you've even gotten that wrong. I said deportation isn't a criminal punishment. To put it another way, deportation doesn't imply some wrongdoing or a guilty verdict from a judge or jury
But it can be just as consequential as a criminal punishment though, so it's not something to be done lightly without very good reasons. It's drastic, life-altering, sometimes life-destroying, grave and serious thing
To bring it back to some real facts here: There are estimated to be over a million households in the US where an undocumented person is married to a citizen. Many of them have children who are US citizens. Deporting the spouse/parent utterly destroys families, there's no morally justifiable reason to go after these people, except in rare, exceptional cases.
Millions (if not most) of the immigrants who have arrived here in recent years entered through ports of entry or presented themselves to Border Patrol to initiate the immigration process, and have pending immigration cases or asylum claims working their way through the courts. All perfectly legal. Guess what bucket they fall into?
And what exactly are we trying to deter in those cases? Nothing that should be deterred in the first place.
Want to deter illegal border crossings? Sounds good, but we're already pretty good at it. Apprehension rates have been pretty consistent over the years (before and after Trump)
What problem are we actually solving with more "deterrence"?
Reducing the backlog in immigration courts? Fair enough. I agree that's a problem worth solving. But the solution is straightforward: increase the system's capacity to process cases in a timely manner by hiring more immigration judges and implementing a few easy legal reforms.
Instead, we're building a nationwide network of detention facilities, pouring a military-grade budget into an immigration enforcement agency with serious accountability problems, and incentivizing aggressive enforcement through high quotas and broad discretion. The predictable result is the kind of situation we're seeing now, where ICE detains people as they show up for their damn naturalization ceremonies and is quickly turning itself into a domestic military/spying agency.
It's deterring immigration, period.
Net migration has turned negative for the first time in decades. The total US population declined for the 1st time in history in 2025. If that's not turned around, and fast, we're cooked.
The code I own professionally has LOC in the 6 figures, and it's near impossible to hit weekly quota unless I'm running a bunch of experiments on the side or using Fable for everything
Probably a different story when the codebase is much larger
Most of these immigrants aren't islands unto themselves, they are here b/c they have ties here, or have even spent their lives here, and you're ripping them away from their families. Many of the dreamers they're trying to deport right now haven't lived in their "home" country since they were toddlers
That sort of thing leads sensible people to ask themselves, "what good is actually being done here?"
This is why immigration went from a winning issue to a losing issue with Republicans in the span of 2 years.
Said what? That deportation isn't a criminal punishment? Oh no, you got me! Checkmate I guess.
I'll answer as if this is a good faith rejoinder, even though we both know it isn't.
Deportation is drastic. Very drastic. It's also very expensive and often very disruptive to many people's lives, including American citizens. Think households with an undocumented spouse, for example.
It's generally a bad thing to do without very good, justifiable reasons. Not the least of which how expensive it is for the state.
> Would you expect a cop who is detaining you because you were speeding, to let you go without checking your license because of some personal emergency. Why do you expect something different here?
I wouldn't expect police to imprison people indefinitely (and at great cost to the state) for minor traffic violations, no. That would be insane.
Somewhere between half and a solid majority of undocumented immigrants came through ports of entry and have overstayed their visas. Again, this is not a crime
Or perhaps there is a semantic game, but it's coming from the other direction - from those who would demagogue immigrants in order to portray them all as scary, evil criminals
Without a current visa of some kind though, you are deportable, mostly at the whims and mercy of the government. But you wouldn't be committing a crime and deportation is not a criminal punishment.
When you do crimes, you get criminally punished (hypothetically) citizen or not (jail, fines, etc).
Whether the government can, should or must carry out a deportation are all truly separate considerations, often with distinct, case-by-case answers.
And with all this in mind, pause for a moment and sit with the fact that thousands of people who have committed no crime at all are getting grabbed off the street and incarcerated indefinitely by ICE and subjected to ghastly conditions
Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.
Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).
Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.
The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous
We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country
It only becomes a crime once you're formally deported
The internet era has brought about the rise of small dollar donors making an outsized impact (for better or worse - it's not always a good thing)
This has given rise to more forms of populism (left and right, benign and toxic)
In any case, it does provide some counter weight to large donor class.
Money tends to have diminishing returns past a certain point, when it comes to elections.
And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
This is why advocates have always tried to reframe things from "illegal" to "undocumented"
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
The act of crossing the border "illegally" is a misdemeanor (the first time) on the level of something like a speeding ticket - but its still not illegal to be here even if you crossed "illegally"
Who must be deported is mostly left up to discretion.
And since deportation is very expensive and drastic - an option of last resort - it's usually better for all involved to come up with other arrangements.
Most prior presidents had good sense enough to understand that mass deportation is a major foot-gun, politically and economically. And kind of morally monstrous.
For better or worse, the arrangement that's been informally agreed upon is to let most of the undocumented who have been here a long time, remain (dreamers, etc).
Sadly, that left them all vulnerable to the discretion of a capricious criminal wanna-be dictator like Trump.
The cost of experimenting is just mind mindbogglingly cheap now, it's really insane. Don't like the abstractions it comes up with, or think it generated a bunch of slop? Go again, who cares? With a little more steering, they'll often produce exactly what you want.
As for contracting firms, many of them were slop shops before AI, I imagine those kinds of firms are even worse slop shops now.
2) No of course we are not necessarily morally obligated to donate aid in perpetuity. We can decide to stop if we want to. But it was not Musk's or even Trump's decision to make. But since they assumed that mantle of illegitimate authority, they assumed the moral blame that comes with it.
(And yes, every Trump voter also shares significant moral blame for the deaths of all those people. Atrocity was a predictable and likely consequence of a Trump vote in 2024)
This should literally be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of this guy - a mass murderer working his way up to the level of the despots of the early 20th century
The twitter purchase likely did little either way
If you let it go buck wild on a massive change, there are those times where it sort of paints itself into a corner but rewrites are cheap (for now), so it's just not that big of a deal, imho
Disorder, drug use and homelessness aren't problems caused by immigrants, documented or undocumented.
Immigrants (even the undocumented ones) pay more in taxes, receive fewer public benefits, commit less crime, are less likely to be homeless, and more likely to have a job than natives. The differences are small in most of these cases, but are more than enough to put down these meritless, racist tropes.
And across the spectrum, from low to high skill, documented to undocumented, on net, immigrants contribute positively to the economy and fuel growth
If you wanted to deliberately exacerbate all those social disorder issues you claim to care about a good place to start would be mass deportation
EDIT: I've also been all over the country. I've also been to quite a few legit third world countries. No where in American really compares, but closest you can probably get are usually rural and white (and also not very good at English) - like places throughout Appalachia.
This statistic is completely false. But you can use is as a good credibility filter. Media figures and politicians who make this claim are liars - stop believing what they say. You'll become much more well informed overnight.
An estimated 2-2.5 million immigrants were allowed to reside in the US as immigration cases were pending. Most came through ports of entry, some crossed "illegally" (a misdemeanor).
There were an estimated ~9 million apprehensions. This is the number they cite to mislead you. Apprehensions does not mean 9 million unique people, nor does it mean they all now reside in the US.
Most of those people were deported or ejected. And most of those were actually the same people trying to cross multiple times. An unintended consequence of Title 42 (the covid restrictions imposed during Trump term) was an explosion in repeat crossing attempts.
Formal deportation makes it a felony to return. Under Title 42 though people were just ejected without formal deportation and could try again without consequence. Cartels/Smugglers even started selling packages that involved multiple tries to cross the border.
But there is such a rich, colorful history of regular people building civic institutions and movements in this country - from unions, to legal movements, to civil rights movements - you have to really work to not see it.
Progress is often slow, frustrating and filled with many setbacks and losses. We certainly have tons of headroom to even the odds between all the Davids and all the Goliaths, but any victories achieved on that front is probably going to be because some regular people decided they had enough and fought for it.
About 5% of the labor force works more than one job btw - and this number doesn't seem to fluctuate all that much. Not totally insignificant, but people with multiple jobs are outliers.
Success is hard of course, but you have the freedom to try.
And in the states, I think people would be very surprised by the kind of impact they can have on local politics - which also happen to be the politics that have the most direct impact on their lives.