cmtm4

If that were true, they'd be showing up with real warrants (super easy if these are convicted felon illegal immigrants as they claim! But of course there are nowhere near as many of those as, say, the "thousands" they claim exist in Minneapolis) and mostly dressing in much more ordinary federal agent clothes and it'd all be boring and uneventful and legal enough that most of what they're doing would hardly even be noticed.

Going several thousand(!) strong into a US city and rolling around town in paramilitary convoys questioning people who don't "look American", to... "support fraud investigations" apparently, LOL, WTF... among other things, is why they're a hot topic right now. If they were doing what they claim to be doing, this would all be boring stuff.

Frankly I don't feel like I should be having to explain why guys in SUVs wearing plate carriers and comically overloaded with blinged out Call of Duty gear driving around a US city and sometimes jumping out literally going "papers, please" to people who "look foreign", all while universally masking up to hide their identities, is extremely fucking bad, to the point that I think that language is way too mild, but here we are I guess.

Fucking endlessly, yes.

When was it ever substantially not "whoever could make it over the border"?

That only stopped being (mostly—see the Chinese Exclusion Act) our actual policy in what, the 1950s? And after that, much to the relief of the agriculture industry that sharply opposed the change, we de facto barely enforced the new policy.

I think the reason this take gets push-back in discussions (including here) is that it's highly regional.

I've lived in parts of the US where I doubt more than 10% of pickup trucks on the road (and there were a lot of them) were really justifiable purchases as trucks. They were aspirational purchases, and/or were selected for status/class/politics signaling.

I've lived other places in the US where the whole region had far fewer trucks (but a hell of a lot more Volvos... like, easily 10x as many as the other place) where I bet at least 50% of pickup trucks saw enough truck-use to really be justifiable.

I hardly have anything that I'd trust to a mechanical washer or dryer, these days. The things I do (mostly underwear and socks) still need cold-wash and extra-low-heat dry.