Yeah, and your point? ICE has already descended into detaining anyone, literally anyone, because they have quotas to meet. They seized a white Irishman last October who had a valid work permit and was just about to head to his green card interview.
That guy had been overstaying a tourist visa for something like 17 years, and only started the green card process in April 2025. I don't think people who have overstayed tourist visas for 17 years should be eligible for any kind of permanent residency in the US, and would support laws making it impossible for someone in his position to get a green card or a work permit.
The fact that he is a white Irishman is legally irrelevant and enforcing immigration law in a race-neutral way is pretty un-Gestapo-like behavior.
Only because we made the "overstaying" an illegal offense. But there's no reason to -- if the guy was paying taxes the whole time, and never committed a serious crime, then we should be happy to welcome such guys, ramping up our GDP.
Don't forget that the paperwork costs a lot, if one has children, can get close to $10k.
Look at Spain -- instead of deporting "illegals", they just made them "legals" (those without a criminal record). Easy, problem solved.
You make it sound like deportations happen because of some mistaken legal wording. That's distortion of reality. A significant amount of US citizens voted for them to happen. I'm sure they heard about GDP many times and still found other reasons more important. It wouldn't be a wild guess to assume that they won't buy Spain as a good example.
I like this theory of paying taxes is a felony, tell me more!!
Levity aside, working on a tourist visa is a violation but generally isn't prosecuted as a felony.
Also the grandparent post said "They seized a white Irishman last October who had a valid work permit and was just about to head to his green card interview."
If he had a valid work permit I suppose this means that he was allowed to work and pay taxes on that work, in other words - no, he was not committing a felony.
All you need to pay taxes is an SSN.
One can get an SSN in many ways, e.g. long ago on another visa. Same as income to pay on -- can be earned in many ways.
The first lady originally came to the US on a tourist visa before getting work as a model and eventually applying for a green card several years later. Musk came to the US on a student visa for a program that he never actually enrolled in. Even if you want to argue its "race-neutral", it's certainly not "proximity to the president neutral" so it still is very much "Gestapo-like behavior".
It's not Gestapo-like, and whatever is your position on political spectrum it's ridiculous to put things like Stalin-Hitler-Mao-Pol Pot repressions on the same level as anything happening in the US.
Two teenagers just doing their jobs, dogpiled by roughly four adult men, beaten up and released hours later. One of them was just dropped off at the Walmart down the street, the other they released at the federal building they’re working out of.
I am confused here. If the law grants ICE (or whatever is the umbrella agency that ICE operates under) the power to detain to determine legality of the status, ICE does it, and then releases people back, the law works as intended, no?
I am confused what is the difference between this, and police who can detain a “tall man in black short and red hat” and 10 hours later (or whenever) release back due to new information, or mistake in ID?
I understand that we absolutely have to strive to zero of such cases, but operations at scale (like law enforcement) have zero chance to have no mistakes.
Replace "tall man in black short and red hat who may have committed a violent crime" with "anyone who looks like they may speak Spanish even if no crime has been committed," even if they have a valid government ID card and we arrive at the problem with ICE.
> "anyone who looks like they may speak Spanish even if no crime has been committed,"
There are two parts to it in my view.
First, sure, I understand where you are coming from. At the same time I find this argument a bit problematic because if the numbers on border crossings from South America are true, and majority of those that crossed through are from South and Central America, who do you think ICE is going to look for? Tall, blond, white people from Norway (and I am not saying that there are no people who are out of status from Norway)?
Second, while Trump and co claimed that they will go after "only after criminals", and ICE arrests a bunch of people who may be not criminals in the hardcore sense of killers, etc., but they do arrest a significant amount of those as well. I do not understand this -- if the person crossed the border, are they supposed to get a pass just because? Why?
They should do some actually police work. This kind of "Papers, please" approach to immigration enforcement is dystopian. If you genuinely feel that illegal immigration is a problem that needs to be fixed, attack it systemically. Go through government, business, and housing records, find people who aren't here legally, and then go detain them. Don't just round people up based on nothing but their ethnicity and make them prove their innocence to you. It's inherently unAmerican, at least according to the ideals we like to claim we have (even if our history often falls short of those ideals).
>but they do arrest a significant amount of those as well.
Then arrest those people who commit crimes. If these people are guilty of something, why is ICE the one rounding them up? Why isn't the FBI or local police? If this is all motivated by a desire for lower crime, why are we treating it as an immigration issue instead of a crime issue?
> They should do some actually police work. This kind of "Papers, please" approach to immigration enforcement is dystopian.
Why it’s dystopian? It’s literally how it’s done in other places as well.
I agree that the government has to go through and punish those who employ illegal immigrants too to disincentivize unauthorized employment, but it doesn’t have to be only one avenue.
> Why isn't the FBI or local police?
I do not know where you live, but lately crimes in the US in many jurisdictions are not prosecuted, and repeat offenders are not punished. Coupled with the fact that many cities forbid their local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration, I am not sure how can local police do anything.
If an illegal immigrant committed a crime it is a failure of both local LEO and immigration. It doesn’t have to be only one.
I think a couple of these points are getting mixed together.
On the “crimes aren’t prosecuted” issue: that’s a broader criminal justice question, not really an immigration one. Whether someone is a citizen, documented immigrant, or undocumented immigrant, the question of prosecution policy is the same. If people think prosecutors are being too lenient, that’s something to take up locally through elections, town halls, etc. Immigration status doesn’t really change that dynamic.
On sanctuary policies or limits on local cooperation with immigration enforcement: the argument many cities make isn’t “ignore crime,” it’s “local police should focus on crime.” When local law enforcement is seen as an arm of immigration enforcement, it can discourage victims or witnesses from reporting crimes at all. So the policy goal is usually public safety, not shielding criminal behavior.
And on the last point: I agree. if an undocumented immigrant commits a crime, sure, there can be both a criminal justice component and an immigration component. But it helps to be clear about what problem we’re actually trying to solve. If the concern is crime, then that’s primarily a policing and prosecution issue regardless of who commits it. If the concern is immigration system design, then we should look at whether data actually shows disproportionate criminality among immigrants before framing it as an immigration enforcement failure.
Just a handful of examples from last year. As a resident of Minneapolis I can assure you it is much, much worse than these few examples.
Are you not familiar with Liam Conejo Ramos? Or Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Just two other high profile cases, but this is far more prevalent than any reporting has outlined. Three of Liam’s classmates were also “mistakenly” shipped to Texas and returned. At least one of his classmates, a documented asylum seeker like the rest, is still in Dilley.
This guy had an order of removal, so he seems to be a valid person to detain and deport, no?
Edit: the more I read about it, the more I am convinced he is not a "literally everyone" case.
He was in the US for 20 years, and had no green card. He has work authorization, which means he probably got it as part of the i485 application to get a green card due to his marriage. Other publications report that he came to the US on a tourist waiver visa program, and overstayed. So, what was his status all these years?
No wonder the trust in media is all time low -- this article did a sloppy job to paint a specific picture, and this picture has a bunch of holes in it.
> We lock up innocent people all the time, as the court system is imperfect. That doesn't make something the Gestapo.
Correct. The methods, the scale, and the targets do. Refusing to ever show any identification or proof of orders at all when that definitionally makes them a secret police does. Repeatedly violating federal court orders does (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46965333). Repeatedly violating habeas corpus rights does. Assaulting people in the streets merely for witnessing does. Let us not forget that a woman was violently shoved backward to the ground while she was backing up in the lead-up to the killing of Alex Pretti, and the government's immediate response was repeated shameless lies and hiding or destroying evidence, just like they did with the killing of Renee Nicole Good, just like they did with the killing of Geraldo Lunas Campos, just like they did with Alberto Castañeda Mondragón, ... The list doesn't end.
It's very weird of you to just ignore all of that.
Land cruisers are almost collectors items now in the Middle East. Transcends across wealth and status. Doesn't matter if it's a middle class office worker with a large family, a soccer mom living in the Palm or a filthy rich oil sheikh with an arsenal of sports cars stored away in his garage - they all have Land Cruisers (or the Prado).
I might actually just get into the hobby of collecting Land Cruiser models, and maybe a few Japan-exclusive Toyota models.
Europe has already lost the tech race - their cloud systems that their entire welfare states rely upon are all hosted on servers hosted by American private companies, which can turn them off with a flick of a switch if and when needed.
When the welfare state, enabled by technology, falls apart, it won't take long for European society to fall apart. Except France maybe.
The point is, treasury accounts are not designed to manage crypto. So that's another layer of money management that startups have to deal with, when they could simply ignore it using a treasury account.
But of course, YC being YC will fund another startup which will help other startups manage their stablecoin portfolios...
Also note that in most jurisdictions, you cannot pay employees with crypto, stable coins or not. Nor can you pay suppliers. Or AWS/GCP/Azure.
This is literally a textbook example of, in YC's words, a solution in search of a problem.
Yep, China was on a massive and insane growth trajectory prior to Xi. Xi's policies and constant banging of war drums at Taiwan's door has cost China massively in terms of foreign investment and even knowledge transfer opportunities (by the ever-gullible West).
Western powers were never going to let China rise peacefully. As soon as China started designing phones instead of just manufacturing them, the west become much more "China bad". Had nothing to do with Xi.
That's representative democracy for you. Heck, even China faces the same issue, but they get to make it a competition between provinces, on who can win the favor of the emperor. Helps for them that the emperor has supreme authority though.
No, that's the incentive this specific system creates. There are democratic systems which do not suffer from such hyper localism. Such as the German mixed member proportional system.
Sounds like a narrow interpretation for representative democracy:) Maybe I'm stretching/mangling the golden rule but "do unto others as one would like others to do onto Mainers."
I have a strong suspicion the majority of those folks are Republican. Matthew Yglesias did a write-up on this some months back, where the data showed that in counties where Democrats aggressively helped people obtain ID documents, those initiatives backfired apparently as seen by lower D-skews in those counties.
So it actually works in favour of Democrats that for lower level elections, more people aren't registered to vote. While for federal elections, it goes the other way around, what with all the gerrymandering and hindering.
This is Gestapo all over again.
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