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This is a way of addressing the problem. If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie, and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly, I think this would reduce the violent sentiments against them tremendously. Don't turn your guys into Stormtroopers if you don't want people to start fancying themselves Jedi rebels.
(I'm not saying the Left's "thinking everyone is a Nazi" problem is unilaterally the Right's fault or anything. But in practical terms, that problem is not going to go away until the Right stops leaning into it.)
Sadly, I don't think that's realistic. First, because no matter how nice a face you try to put on it, deporting an illegal immigrant, especially if it seems like the border is going to be significantly harder to cross next time, is potentially a life ruining event for them. They are unlikely to ever have a life as nice as what they had in the US, whoever they were sending money to abroad loses out on life changing revenue as well. Even if the agent doing it is very nice and apologizes a lot, if the illegal immigrant thinks that maybe he/she could get out of it through violence and intimidation, then that will be on the table, especially if the timeline is extended because that's nicer. Or the enforcement can also be ineffective, because grabbing them and putting them in a holding facility is Stormtrooper-ish, so letting them out with a court date gives them more opportunity to disappear again. So anyway, if we assume that in either case, the illegal will consider anything to try and avoid deportation, at least shock and awe method doesn't give them time to talk themselves into or prepare themselves for those extremities.
And also, there's the problem that ICE is also opposed to organized criminal elements, like human smugglers, that are aligned with cartels. Cartels are be perfectly willing and able to terrorize ICE agents and their families.
I think if I were Immigration Czar I would try a scheme with ankle monitors. ICE agents identify you as illegal, you get tagged and a reasonable timeline to put your affairs in order and leave the country. If that time elapses, or the monitor mysteriously turns off - then you get detained.
This is true but seems like a very good argument for separating ICE into two different corps, one that fights organized crime and one that enforces immigration laws. Outside of Trump's rhetorical interest in acting like all illegals are violent gang members, it doesn't seem especially rational for them to have both jobs, precisely because very different approaches and MOs are proportionate when dealing with one group vs the other.
I'm missing some details, I'm sure, but this sounds flawed. Attempting to detain them after they made themselves significantly harder to track...I dunno, smells like self-sabotage to me.
As I said elsewhere in the thread my ideal mode of policing would involve a lot more low-scale police presence. The way I imagine it, as soon as something screwy is detected with someone's monitor, the nearest beat cop gets an alert and takes a look at the last known coordinates. Very different from "if you miss a court date then maybe possibly something gets done within seven business days".
I don't claim this system is foolproof, this isn't my job and it's only a sketch of an idea that I've kicked around in the back of my mind. But I'd be surprised if cleverer minds than me couldn't expand it into a functional system. I think there's a lot of untapped potential in this sort of system, due to the stigma associated with putting tags on minorities' bodies.
This all sounds overcomplicated for something that is essentially a very simple issue.
They already broke the law by coming in illegally, and the right thing to do is to make them go away. Letting them go free, monitored or not, especially after they've already been picked up by law enforcement, is just plain wrong. Your proposal would simply create more busywork and more opportunities for law enforcement failures and more incentives to immigrate illegally compared to holding on to them and shipping them off at the first opportunity.
No offense, but I get the feeling that you effectively want more immigration.
No, I want human beings to be as happy and comfortable as humanly possible. Open borders in a society that is not yet post-scarcity does not lead to that, therefore excess immigration must be stopped, but if we're going to regretfully turn people away we should try to be decent about it, because in an ideal world they should be able to stay if they want. Giving people time to collect their belongings and say goodbye to any acquaintances they might have made during their stay seems like basic decency.
I think of this in Rawlsian and golden-rule terms - were I in the position of an illegal immigrant who's been discovered, I would acknowledge that exiling me is within the rights, and in the best interests, of the body politic, but I would still regard a few weeks' grace period to put my affairs in order as something to which I would feel entitled regardless as a human being, being that two weeks more or less are not imposing a meaningful economic burden on the country the way my continued lifelong presence might (while they make a great difference to my own happiness). If defectors abusing that grace period to escape make it impossible to extend this basic kindness to arrestees who cooperate, then we need a system to crack down and disincentivize such abuse, so as to be able to once again extend that basic kindness to people who cooperate.
How do you square that with Murderers and Thieves that derive enjoyment from their actions?
In this hypothetical, your Ideal World is post-scarcity?. If yes and you would be comfortable with open borders for a post-scarcity USA, how important is the local culture to you?
In the usual utilitarian way - "as humanly possible" includes making trade-offs for the greater good, where we'll sometimes deny Bob what would make him happy because it would involve unacceptable discomfort to Alice. (In Thought Experiment Land you can consequently imagine a utility monster who can only derive pleasure from hurting other people, and who tragically can never be allowed to be happy in a just society; but in the real world, even seriously twisted people are capable of getting their kicks some other way than their preferred vice, and very few preferences for illegal things are truly fixed in a way that can't be satisfied by e.g. roleplay, so the question doesn't really arise.)
If we're talking about a post-scarcity USA in particular, where somehow the States have unlimited resources but the rest of the Earth hasn't caught up, then yes, you'd have a moral imperative to have open borders. I don't value the preservation of the local culture at zero, but human beings' lives come first. That's not a very likely scenario, although it's a morally instructive one and what I had in mind when I said that "in an ideal world" we would be able to take in all economic refugees. (Much as "in an ideal world" where I'm a trillionaire I would be able to give ten thousand bucks to every homeless person I meet without sacrificing an inch of my personal comfort and safety. This is, obviously, a casual, non-rigorous usage of "ideal world", since of course in a truly ideal world there wouldn't be homeless people in the first place.)
In an actually ideal, truly post-scarcity world… well, who knows? Such a world would have such fundamentally different dynamics from ours that I'd be surprised if we keep the same political system at all, never mind the specifics of immigration law. For one thing, if resource shortage is no longer a concern worldwide, is there even much demand for immigration to the US? Somehow I don't think people would be lining up by the million to flock to America and get minimum-wage jobs if they had guaranteed food, housing and healthcare back home. In that scenario, maybe the amount of people who want to move to the US per year shrinks to such an extent that concerns about alterations to the culture become negligible, and at that point it would be churlish to create artificial hurdles out of chauvinism.
Still, conceivably demand remains high and damage to the local culture per marginal immigrant remains constant, even if conditions back home are no worse for the would-be immigrants than in the US by objective metrics. At that point, certainly it would be morally acceptable to decide we want completely closed borders to preserve the "local culture". I don't really know which way I'd vote, but I would be fine with my fellow citizens voting purely based on personal preference and I would respect the outcome of that vote, whatever it may be. Weighing whether we'd rather preserve our local culture than allow safe, healthy, affluent foreigners maximal freedom of movement is a totally different question from the current state of affairs. Maybe the US splinters, with some states being open-borders and others not. I think it might well happen at an even smaller scale, with whole counties becoming vast gated communities some of which are outsider-hostile and others not. That seems like maybe the stablest equilibrium for Utopia.
But then again, would Americans be found to in fact care that much about immigrants' effect on "the local culture" in a world where "immigrants" aren't synonymous with "criminal underclass"? Where they aren't "taking our jobs"? How about if the native population is now immortal and at no danger of actually being demographically replaced? After all, a post-scarcity world is realistically a post-singularity one as well. And what are we even talking about at this point? It's unknown unknowns all the way down.
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