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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33115 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Becky Burke, British Comic Book person returns home after 11 day ICE detention https://comicscene.substack.com/p/becky-burke-returns-home-after-us

The link isn't the best link, just the first. I googled the story and found dozens of articles that all say the same basic thing.

  • 28 yo travels America since January; ~50 days on a 90 day visa
  • At some point she tries to cross into Canada to go to Vancouver; The Canadians say no--you have the wrong visa and send her back
  • Upon returning to the other side of the border, the Americans say, "You were working on a guest visa, that means jail and deportation." Becky + Lawyers claim she was only doing 'chores' with a host family. 'Chores' are never defined, detailed or discussed.
  • 11 days in an ICE detention center; trauma for life and some great comic book material.
  • Red, red meat for Europeans looking to make hay with Trump. This story is (apparently) all over the UK right now.

I'm having a hard time establishing some of the facts, primarily, what comic works has Becky created. I can't find anything and none of the articles I've looked at link to anything. The closest I saw was that she has an Instagram account. So, is she a comic creator or just someone who lists it as her profession? I have no idea.

Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?

I'm confused by this. On one hand, Trump wants ICE to be extra hard-core and now naive Zoomers are getting swept up with bad Visas. Ok, that sucks. Shit happens. Perhaps in a kindler, gentler America we would have given them a tongue lashing and sent them home, now we jail them for a week and a half. Seems...unnecessary, but I guess the message is sent: don't come here and try to get away with doing work. Very bad!

On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place? I don't understand how doing 'chores' even registers unless she's been watched the whole time with an eye to catching her in the act of 'doing work.' I've heard of this happening with musicians or DJs who fly into Canada as tourists only to play a gig and get busted for working. I don't think it's great, but I get why it happens. Was Becky sketching the family as part of her 'chores'? Was she doing farm work? Was she cleaning dishes and sending Instagrams about it? Did she tell ICE she had been working? Like, what the heck happened? Is this another case of "lying to cops is the only rational response," and she got swept up in a dragnet fishing for gormless fools?

A separate article mentioned this recently happened to two other people (both females...coincidence?) who were arrested because they were possibly working on travel visas. One was a German tattoo artists, who, based on the scant evidence provided in the article, seems to have been travelling with her inking gear and also worked on a prior trip to the US. The third lady is an actress who somehow didn't have the right visa either and ended up in ICE detention for a few weeks. For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.

My instinct is that these are the horrifying yet rare circumstances that sell news copy but don't really say much about American immigration and customs enforcement. At the same time, I dunno...Trump, man. Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud? The information I accessed is so vague and so focused on the 'horrible treatment' I can't really get a picture of what happened, so I presume there's more going on and that if I knew what it was it would make me less sympathetic to the victim.

The British reaction to the Becky Burke story is driven by some misconceptions about US immigration law and policy which are widely shared among PMC Brits (and, I expect, PMC citizens of other 1st-world countries which are traditional US allies) because they reflect the way the US has actually handled travellers from rich, friendly countries over several decades.

In particular,

  1. PMC Brits think that they have a right to travel to any friendly country as long as they have the correct paperwork. (PMC Americans are the same, except that we are somewhat more likely than you to grok that we do in fact need to meet local paperwork requirements and obey local laws while travelling).
  2. "Working" in America is completely normal for young PMC Brits. Either engaging in legal work-like activities in WB (business visitor) status, or working legally on a F (student) or J (cultural exchange) visa. BUNAC is a long-standing scheme allowing (among other things - it is broadly reciprocal among several Anglosphere countries) British students to spend a summer working in the US on a J visa while only nominally complying with the rules for J visas. When my parents were students, they basically used BUNAC to travel across the US for a summer in a beater car picking up odd work like hoboes - and this was legal. (And in those days it was dead easy to get pick-up work if you were an experienced waitress with a posh British accent). The rules have been tightened up since then, but there is still an expectation that if you want to spend a summer working in the US, making it happen is just a matter of paperwork.
  3. There is no clarity about what work-like activity is legal in WB status and what requires a working visa. I worked, for pay, at Brookhaven National Laboratory for a summer in WB status - it was legal because academic visitors can receive per diem even in WB status, and the allowed per diem worked out to more than a British grad student stipend. A friend was refused admission for trying to do the same thing interning at a think tank - what he was doing didn't qualify as "academic", and therefore he couldn't receive per diem.
  4. Accordingly, we see working illegally as a paperwork screwup similar to trying to travel on an expired passport, not as a crime of moral turpitude. We expect that if we get caught it will be laughed off as we get the next plane home. And a lot of people have stories that confirm this - I know two people who were refused admission (the aforementioned intern, and someone who failed to declare a minor drug conviction), and in both cases they were on the next plane home after a few hours in the secondary inspection area, and never saw anything that looked like a prison cell. As far as I am aware, both had the event paperworked as a voluntary departure so they didn't become inadmissable for future trips as deportees.

So from this perspective, it looks like

  • Becky didn't know precisely what was legal in terms of chores-for-lodging, and didn't feel the need to check
  • She thought the worst that could happen when she got caught was being put on the next plane home
  • Throwing her in the general population of an ICE detention centre for 11 days is an insult to both her personal dignity and our sense of our rights as a US ally because it is treating a Brit like a random third world peasant.

And of course the story has legs because it fits into the (accurate) narrative that the Trump administration is no longer treating the UK as an important ally.

Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs

If so, I am fine with this. Working on a visa that doesn't allow it? A few days in detention then deported with a ban on returning. Good riddance.

Overstaying a tourist visa to work and live in America indefinitely is a common method of illegal immigration. She's (presumably) doing the popular illegal activity of violating her visa terms.

Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working". It seems the letter of law may prohibit it, but that's absurd and clearly not the same thing as people who sneak in to get actual paying jobs. The standard for deportation should be proving that the individual received wages for something, not just that they did vaguely work-like activities in their free time.

We are on a few layers of speculation at this point, but I believe the issue is she may be an illegal maid or nanny. If she admits to past illegal work on a tourist visa then CBP may be skeptical of her story about staying for months with people she never met before and also ""helping"" out around their home.

I get that we don't want law enforcement dragging your European friend to a detention center because they helped clean up after hanging out with you. But we do want them identifying illegal nannies and deporting them. Such as probably this woman.

Doing housekeeping in exchange for room and board is "working", even if no wages are received.

Nah. Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working".

Nah. Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working".

No, it's not, which is why you don't need to extensively research before you come if "washing dishes" is tourism or working. The fact that Burke. by her own family's admission, was trying to find out the loopholes around working versus tourism makes me suspect she was working for a 'host' family and getting money in exchange, e.g. au pair or something similar. I'm guessing here, but she may have gone legitimately on a visa for au pair work back in 2023 and this time round decided she could skip all that paperwork, do some 'guest work' for a 'host family' on the side and get spending money while on her tourist visa, and if questioned then fall back on "oh I'm staying with friends/friends of friends, and I just help out round the house as a thank-you'. Except the plan didn't work out for her.

The ESTA is for tourists only. For work or study a specific visa is required. Becky did a lot of research before she went and what she had planned was classed as tourism. This was accepted when she entered the US on 7th January. It was also accepted in 2023 when she spent two weeks in San Francisco, with a host family. On the 26th February, US border officers suddenly decided staying with host families and joining in with household chores was now classed as work. Our US Immigration Lawyer said they got their definition of work wrong.

This one is so conceptually difficult. It's super easy to let the economist's mindset take over and view everything as "exchange" or "working". When we got married, my wife lived in the US with me but was not legally able to work for a period of time. I was also required by the government to support her. Of course, since I was working and she wasn't, she's not going to just sit around and drink mai tais all day. She made some meals, did dishes or laundry or whatever. Just stuff around the house to keep herself occupied, while also obviously doing other things, too. Is that "working"? Should we deport every single one of those people who legally come here, on a legal path to being authorized to work, if they so much as lift a finger to put their spouse's dishes in the dishwasher one time? I have to imagine that most people think obviously not.

On the other hand, there are obviously schemes in place where people essentially hire a housekeeper under the table. Distinguishing between different types of situations and what "counts" as "working" is extremely hard in general.

This seems a very silly way to look at it. Say I travel to Canada, and I have a cousin there. He lets me crash on his couch because he is my cousin. We have dinner together. I offer to help with the dishes, because, after all, I'm the one who got half of them dirty so it's only fair. Am I "working" for my cousin? Is he paying me by letting me sleep on his couch? Of course not. My cousin would have let me stay over even if I'd bailed out on the washing dishes; in fact he wouldn't have needed help with the dishes if my presence hadn't gotten extra dishes dirty. Even to the extent that my track record of being a helpful houseguest might be a factor in him allowing me to stay, it's not as if he'd let a perfect stranger come to his house in exchange for that minimal amount of "housekeeping", or as if there's some citizen he would be paying normal wages for that work if I hadn't stepped up. Come on. In no universe should this be any kind of violation. It's pure chicanery.

(Or are you saying that, while the above is innocent, we need to outlaw it anyway in order to 'catch' some rampant problem of criminals who are in fact becoming unauthorized housekeepers for perfect strangers in exchange for room and board in the US? I suppose that would be less insane. But also, fuck it. Letting some people functionally enslave themselves on the margins is worth not outlawing basic politeness as a houseguest. To the extent it might be happening, I still don't believe it's a blight on the economy that warrants making regulations such a PITA for ordinary people who want to pull their weight with their hosts.)

I’m not inclined to take the story charitably simply because in a lot of cases where lawyers are involved and the terminology in vague, it’s because it’s not particularly helpful to the client. If she were helping with farm work, or cleaning the house or something of that vein, even if she’d instagrammed it, it’s something that you could explain. If she uploaded a comic or a piece of art from America, that’s something you can’t easily get away with because you are a professional artist uploading art sample for purchase. I can’t say as to what the ICE officer saw, but given that the defense is extremely vague on the point, it’s probably more than just washing the dishes twice a week.

That's certainly how it reads to me as well. I might otherwise be sympathetic, but maybe she really did do some work for money.

Mostly stories like this are reassuring. Any crackdown on abuse of the immigration system is going to produce false positives. If there were no stories like this, then that would be an indication that it's all fake. The ICE agents involved in egregious cases of bad judgement should be reprimanded appropriately, but I applaud their zealousness.

The scale of the problem in many Western countries is so severe that at this point there is no appropriate response that won't look extreme and even tyrannical. That is an unfortunate byproduct of the last 3 decades of wholly extreme and reckless immigration policies and enforcement sabotage.

It is not false positives. Nobody could possibly mistake an European tourist for a central example of the kind of illegals Trump voters want out.

This rhymes with revoking permanent residency for foreigners who use speech in a way contrary to the goals of the Trump administration. The message clearly is: We might not get rid of all the woke snowflakes with US passports, but it is open season on any lefty foreigners who are only allowed to be here at the pleasure of wise King Donald.

Why is it a problem at all?

For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.

That's not impossible, but it seems more likely that these are people that are motivated to assume that any negative interaction at the border is proof that Trump's america is fascist, and would be calling the news immediately if it happened.

I'm not going to assume that these people also made this happen on purpose so that it can be used against the administration and/or raise their public profile, but I'll point out that it's also possible. Couple of weeks in detention to become internationally known is a deal many people would take, especially since the left tends to reward its martyrs and turncoats handsomely (though we'll see if perhaps cuts to some organisations might make them less free with the rewards).

The Venezuelan gang members deported to a for hire prison in El Salvador with no judicial review (or in defiance of judicial review) is honestly a lot more frightening than this story. This Becky story just sounds like something that can happen in any country. When visiting our offices in Asia, HR would counsel me very carefully to say I'm not "working", I'm "meeting". I doubt if I slipped up at those borders I'd have a very pleasant return flight experience. Especially if I was already inside for months and got refused a weekend getaway to a neighboring country.

The El Salvador prison thing though. You could imagine the Trump administration just disappearing people they find annoying. The only cover they have right now is that most of them probably were gang members.

You could imagine the Trump administration just disappearing people they find annoying.

We could also imagine Trump wearing just a tutu, which would also be unseemly. Is there any particular reason to substantiate imagination?

wearing just a tutu,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_von_H%C3%BClsen-Haeseler

During a formal evening function, (General) von Hülsen-Haeseler appeared dressed in the pink tutu and rose wreath of a ballerina, dancing for (Kaiser Wilhelm II) and his assembled guests. ... the general bowed, collapsed and was pronounced dead after hasty medical attention

Because the history of government shows that when it has the powers to disappear people, it tends to use those powers against those most annoying rather than those it was intended to disappear.

There are literally thousands of years of human governance to pick from, but I will confess being curious which four under which government you think are most relevant for judging Donald Trump's inclination to disappearing people.

To be clear, I don’t think Trump is particularly likely to start disappearing journalists to an el Salvadoran gulag, and wouldn’t particularly mind it if that was where it ended. But establishing this as a power of the president will likely end with democrats doing it to people I do care about.

Maybe general distrust of government and (healthy?) paranoia that once a government has some capability, it will eventually find a way to use it in evil ways. I'm sure all five principled libertarians that exist in the world have been doing that kind of thing long before Trump, so it's not like it's unprecedented.

Is your argument that dispensing with due process is fine because Trump has only rendered bad people to an El Salvadoran prison AFAWK?

My position is that you are still crying wolf, and replacing 'racist' with 'fascist.'

Any bayesian update?

https://abc7.com/post/president-trump-suggests-tesla-vandals-should-face-20-years-jail-sent-el-salvador/16064219/

Stronger thanks to your expectation that that a story in which Trump is not dispensing of due process should provide a bayesian update that Trump is dispensing of due process.

Particularly given the form of delivery is the common TDS failure mode on the taking Trump seriously versus literally divide, which has been an archetypical form of crying wolf about Trump intents for a decade.

Wait what. If you don't think due process was already dispensed with in the first batch of people who were deported directly to a foreign prison without judicial review I'm not sure what continuing to exchange information here will accomplish.

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Well, According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio El Salvadore President Bukele has offered to hold American Citizens. From a BBC article quoting Trump on the deal:

On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he would embrace the idea but questioned its legality.

"If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat," he said during an executive order signing ceremony in the Oval Office. "I don't know if we do or not.

"We're looking at that right now, but we could make deals where we'd get these animals out of our country."

Which would seem to indicate Trump's willingness is conditional on legality, not merely annoyance. And legal deportations are typically not considered just disappearing people.

Given the many unlawful actions the Trump admin has already taken I see no reason to treat his legality concerns as anything more than a fig leaf.

There are many types of illegal things, of which I am fairly sure you would concede are neither equivalent to or predictive of other illegal things. I am also fairly sure you would even concede that Biden did some illegal things as well. I am not convinced you would take them as evidence of specific accusations of willingness to disappear political annoyances... and Biden actually was part of (at least) two administrations that targeted political opponents.

Ok, but in this specific case the US government defied a court order to deport people. It is also the government's stated position in that lawsuit that their authority to declare someone a deportable alien enemy under the AEA is unreviewable by a court. "We are allowed to deport anyone we declare a deportable alien under the AEA and no one is allowed to say otherwise" is a recipe for government deportation of American citizens without any due process. They've even got a country lined up to deport them to!

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I'm having a hard time establishing some of the facts, primarily, what comic works has Becky created. I can't find anything and none of the articles I've looked at link to anything. The closest I saw was that she has an Instagram account. So, is she a comic creator or just someone who lists it as her profession? I have no idea.

I believe her portfolio is here. It helped that a bunch of news articles described her both as "Becky" and "R.E." with the latter being what's on her site.

I think the reason for her deportation is much simpler: the administration's quotas for deportations and arrests are sufficiently high they cannot be filled with criminals alone. It turns out that finding criminal gang members who are here illegally and don't want to be found is hard. Finding otherwise law abiding folks who might have committed technical violations (or for whom pretexts can be manufactured) is much easier!

When I looked for R.E. Burke, I found this and this.

Interesting. I went and tried searching "R.E. Burke" (without the quotes) on all of Bing/Google/Startpage (my default) and all returned stories about the cartoonist.

Yeah, I had to dig deep just to find the wrong people. I couldn't find anything about Burke's actual books until y'all posted it.

On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place?

She was caught by cbp at the border. The part where they ask you a bunch of questions and you know if you answer wrong you're gonna have a real bad day.

The fact that she got denied entry to Canada of all places probably meant that the CBP agent asked her extra hard questions.

I don't understand how doing 'chores' even registers unless she's been watched the whole time with an eye to catching her in the act of 'doing work.'

She self incriminated by admitting she already did work in USA, and planned to do more. The conversation might have went like this:

Agent: So what do you do on your typical day?

Illegal: Just hange around, maybe draw some comics, and help out around the house a bit.

Agent: How you you help out?

Illegal: Clean up, do the dishes, tend to the garden

Agent: You're about to have a real bad day.

Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud?

This happens all the time in tons of countries. Go watch one of those border security shows in canada, uk, australia. They dramatize it but pretty much this is an open and shut case.

Of course getting forcibly deported in chains is probably new trumpsauce, but everything before that has been standard SOP for decades.

got denied entry to Canada

I was denied entry to Canada some years ago. The border guard filled out the opposite of the answers I gave, gave me a paper with them, ignored my protestations along with coworkers, then locked me in a room for 4 hours before denying me entry. There were 3 y/n questions on a paper, whether I knew anyone and I don't recall what else.

Why, do you know?

Border police is what happens when you have police with almost no checks. It’s often pure anarcho-tyranny for its own sake. You can wave through literal millions of third world immigrants enough to cause total demographic change. But as long as the police makes one random English backpacker suffer for minor procedural violations (and often not even that), everyone feels good.

Illegal: Clean up, do the dishes, tend to the garden

Agent: You're about to have a real bad day

If that would actually count as work when caught then I think we have an issue with the definitions being used. I had a friend over from the UK myself last year for about 2-3 weeks, he stayed in my spare bedroom and I made him clean up after himself (obviously) and he helped me with a few chores like doing dishes and vacuuming throughout because he was temporarily living there and when you're living with someone you help do the things. I made meals sometimes, he did sometimes. Sometimes I did the driving, sometimes he would. And hell I left the house at one point to get groceries and left him in charge of my niece when she was spending the night over. Because again that's all just part of being with a person living in their space.

I don't think any reasonable person would hear "you can't work on this visa" and understand it to cover basic chores like that.

There's also the anarcho-tyranny angle: If the official definition is so broad that no one would use it this way in good faith, yet they may use it this way in bad faith, the government can pick and choose violators.

Vacuuming and babysitting are both things that people often hire workers to do. It might be ok if it's incidental, but if you had a routine where he did these things, it could easily be seen that you are accepting the labor in kind in exchange for the room.

Remember that your friend is a guest and you are the host. You are not roommates from the perspective of the law, as he is simply on holiday and staying over at your house instead of a hotel. Personally, I would never ask a guest to do something like vacuum the house.

Other activities such as driving a car and making meals are likely fine as they are acceptable leisure activities to do under the visa, and the fact that you benefited from them is incidental.

Vacuuming and babysitting are both things that people often hire workers to do. It might be ok if it's incidental, but if you had a routine where he did these things, it could easily be seen that you are accepting the labor in kind in exchange for the room.

Remember that your friend is a guest and you are the host. You are not roommates from the perspective of the law, as he is simply on holiday and staying over at your house instead of a hotel. Personally, I would never ask a guest to do something like vacuum the house

I get the logic but I still believe that to be way too broad. We split basic home living tasks because he was occupying the space for the duration. When I went to visit him a few years ago I did the same there and we split the chores because I was occupying a space and leaving behind the typical household mess of dirt on a rug or dishes needing to be cleaned. This is what we see as polite, we're best friends and we don't want to impose as a guest just as much as we want to be a good host for each other.

Other activities such as driving a car and making meals are likely fine as they are acceptable leisure activities to do under the visa, and the fact that you benefited from them is incidental.

Doesn't that apply to other tasks like vacuuming or dishes? You benefit from cleaning up the space you live in so you don't have to be in a dirty space. I don't see how driving a car or making meals is any different when those are both also potential jobs people pay for.

Doesn't that apply to other tasks like vacuuming or dishes?

You have to keep in mind that the system (which includes but is not limited to the law) exists to target a particular kind of behavior, and in this case, it's importing maids without paperwork. Driving doesn't have that connotation, but if you said "gardening" or "picking fruits", that would also be eyebrow raising to the trained border agent whose entire job is to pattern match you to the bad categories.

I've been in countries where it's good advice not to disclose you have a local girlfriend over at a rental, not because sex out of wedlock is strictly speaking illegal, but because it's how local law enforcement prosecutes prostitution.

If you don't want trouble, avoid having the shape of a criminal in the eyes of bureaucracy, and doubly so when crossing borders. Otherwise you'll end up in some column about "upstanding citizen slipped on the 'I am a terrorist' button and is sent to misclicker jail".

Is that fair? No, not really, but when borders are involved you may often have no recourse because false negatives are much worse than false positives.

Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?

I'm going to guess she was doing au pair or nannying work. If she didn't go through an agency and wasn't approved, then that's a no-no. It could be that the host family tried to claim the wages they were paying her as expenses, or some other thing that triggered "hey this person is working on a tourist visa". Reading the family's claims, I'd bet that back in 2023 she did get in to work legally as an au pair (the host family in San Francisco) and this time round she thought she knew the ropes and could do it without going through an agency, as she wanted to work while on a tourist visa (after all, if you're just visiting as a tourist, why would you need to research about what does and doesn't count as work?):

Did she break the rules of the ESTA?

The ESTA is for tourists only. For work or study a specific visa is required. Becky did a lot of research before she went and what she had planned was classed as tourism. This was accepted when she entered the US on 7th January. It was also accepted in 2023 when she spent two weeks in San Francisco, with a host family. On the 26th February, US border officers suddenly decided staying with host families and joining in with household chores was now classed as work. Our US Immigration Lawyer said they got their definition of work wrong.

This is how most illegals from these parts end up in the USA; go on a tourist visa, find a job, deliberately over-stay and hope you won't be picked up. She was just unlucky (or dumb).

Ciara, who arrived in the U.S. before President Trump took office, said she was on a J-1 visa, which allows for educational and cultural exchange, but working illegally on the side. "There is a bit of a safety net" for Irish people in the hospitality industry, she said.

...But immigration attorneys have told CBS News that it would be naive for Irish undocumented people to believe that they may be immune to deportation.

"When Irish people come here, they come on what we call the visa waiver program, so that allows them to come to the United States without going to the consulate in Dublin, and they can come in for 90 days and stay for 90 days, and so most of them [who are undocumented] overstay," John Foley, a Boston-based immigration attorney told CBS News.

I'm surprised no-one has pointed out that if ICE are going after white European illegals, then the Trump directive can't be called racist 😁

I think it was Au Pair work too; eg chores, babysitting in exchange for under the counter 'pocket money', room & board and cultural exchange. Western governments have traditionally turned a blind eye to this sort of thing for a while, to the point were people doing it expect that it won't be targeted. Unfortunately for them, the current political climate happened.

Also, I agree with others that both: A - the rejection from Canada triggered additional US BCP scrutiny; and B - there is a possibility that either her artist work or political views didn't work in her favor.

Something that isn't really focused on is why Canada rejected her for 'au pair' work. Details are (deliberately) vague.

She seems to have tried to cross the border on an American tourist visa, got told "no you need one specifically for Canada" and was sent back, and maybe that triggered ICE as looking like "someone trying to enter US from Canada without proper paperwork".

I could then see her getting questioned about how she was supporting herself, giving an answer about working for host family/families, and then oops but you're not here on an au pair visa, you're here as a tourist, and that sets the ball rolling.

But so far we're only getting her family's side of the story, and of course they're not going to say "yeah actually she intended to overstay her visa and be there as an illegal", so who knows what the real story was? Maybe when she came as a tourist, she was also trying to scout work as a comic artist there and that's what got her in trouble also, if she was selling art or doing commissions or looking for freelance work from publishers.

Lots of things could be behind the scenes, we don't have all the information yet.

Everyone is lying constantly about the purposes of all immigration laws and law enforcement all the time. Debating it in public is more or less completely pointless.

These kinds of public displays of gratuitous kafka-esque cruelty are meant to scare current immigrants and potential immigrants, as they realize the power that the Federal Government has to fuck with them at will. This is leading a lot of green card holders I know who are from non-shithole countries to "jump before they push me" and consider moving home.

This kind of "enforcement" will have no impact on the job market, but it publicly displays to people that they aren't safe from stupidity and cruelty, and that they should rethink immigrating to or remaining in the USA. Deport 50 criminals and you deport 50 criminals; imprison one rando for doing the dishes and you terrify dozens into self deportation.

So your friends had no problem with the previous administration going after and locking up people for explicitly political reasons, even keeping some in prison without trial for years, but stricter enforcement at ICE leading them to lock up one bpd girl making sad pictures about her arrested development for a week and a half and that's gratuitous Kafkaesque cruelty justifying moving country?

Did the previous administration do that to random travelers and immigrants, or are you referring to something else?

Because, yes, if I were an immigrant, stricter enforcement at ICE would be a bigger concern for me than virtually anything else when deciding where to live.

Right so their opposition to Gratuitous Kafkaesque Cruelty is entirely who whom.

I never even said they opposed it. Merely that they were frightened of it happening to them.

I might or might not oppose Stop and Frisk but I know it's not happening to me either way. If it started happening to me in my town, I might consider moving, whether or not I opposed it in principle.

Both sides can play anarchy-tyranny.

On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place?

"Canada sent you back, did we miss something?" seems like a straightforward trigger for additional scrutiny.

Or maybe the border agent had just read that story about the UN judge getting convicted of slavery in the UK and was exceptionally paranoid about what "chores" might mean.

the UN judge getting convicted of slavery in the UK

The what

Associated Press: UN judge from Uganda is convicted in the UK of forcing a woman into slavery

A British jury on Thursday convicted a United Nations judge of forcing a young woman to work as a slave after tricking her into coming to the U.K.

Prosecutors said Lydia Mugambe made the Ugandan woman work as her maid and provide childcare for free.

Mugambe, who is also a high court judge in Uganda, was studying for a doctorate in law at the University of Oxford when the offenses occurred. According to her United Nations profile page, she was appointed to one of the global body’s international courts in May 2023.

Prosecution lawyer Caroline Haughey told jurors during the trial that Mugambe “exploited and abused” the victim, deceiving her into coming to the U.K. and taking advantage of her lack of understanding of her rights.

Prosecutors said Mugambe arranged for a contact in the Ugandan High Commission in London to get the woman a visa, under the guise that she would be working in the household and office of the diplomat. Once she arrived in Britain, she was taken to Mugambe’s home and made to work as an unpaid nanny. Her passport and visa document were taken away from her.

The victim eventually sought help from a friend, which led to police becoming involved.

Mugambe, 49, denied the charges. Jurors at Oxford Crown Court convicted her on all four charges she faced, including an immigration offense, forcing someone to work and conspiracy to intimidate a witness.

There were gasps from the public gallery as the verdicts were read out, and the court was cleared after Mugambe appeared unwell. She is due to be sentenced on May 2.

“Lydia Mugambe used her position to exploit a vulnerable young woman, controlling her freedom and making her work without payment,” said Eran Cutliffe of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime Division. “Thanks to the victim’s courage in coming forward it has been possible to bring Ms. Mugambe to justice and be held accountable for her actions.”

Reuters: Ugandan UN judge convicted in Britain after 'slavery' trial

Lydia Mugambe was appointed in 2023 to be a judge of the U.N. International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, which performs functions of previous tribunals relating to war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Holy shit, wow.

Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?

Given how 'chores' were equated to labor, emotional and otherwise, and thus unfair/uncompensated wage disparities in past media epicycles, I am unclear if I am supposed to be upset that that this does or does not conflict with a worker visa on grounds of work.

exactly

Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs.

If we wanted to write a law saying "you can use a non-work visa to work, as long as the industry or the quantity of work makes it laughable that they're taking someone's job", we could have. I hope the reasons why not to have such a law are obvious.

I think the text of the laws in question largely date from a time with well-defined "work" and "not work" life spaces, but they're hardly unique to the US. If you're a laptop-class worker, can you "check your email" while on vacation somewhere? I can appreciate that there is a line somewhere before your host country should at least expect you to pay income taxes and such, but a small amount of de minimus work seems pretty harmless.

I follow a number of professional artists on social media, and at least once have seen a post lamenting that following the letter of the US tourist visa meant they couldn't paint a canvas, even for fun, while visiting (a high profile makes legal scrutiny more likely to appear too).

On the other hand, I don't have a specific threshold of "reasonableness" in mind. I'm open to hearing ideas, but "no" is at least a clear answer, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to personally leave work at work when I'm on vacation.

Wouldn’t the line be some sort of contractual obligation for some sort of pay? If I’m doing chores to be nice, then there’s no obligation to do so and no expectation of getting anything in return. If she’s watching children and keeping house in return for something— education, shelter, or money, that’s pretty clearly work. Making something you sell is work, making something and giving it away isn’t.

Not an immigration lawyer, but I am fairly certain you can come to US for business purposes on the waiver program. You just can't be paid paid or compensated by US entities for your time and services.

otherwise everyone coming to the US as a conference attendee wouldn't be able to use the visa waiver program

It is worth noting that for short-term travellers the US has "visa waiver business" (VWB) and "visa waiver travel" (VWT) programs. VWB can accept honoraria (montary payment) for giving guest lectures (limited to 5 presentations in a 6 month period). VWT cannot enter the country with the goal of receiving payment, but they can still give guest lectures and accept payment if the honorarium was offered and arranged after they entered the US.

I was under the impression that honoraria were a small deal, maybe $300 for a seminar (the legal limit in Korea), but the University of Washington has procedures to cover honoraria of over $10,000, and host visiting scholars for up to nine days. Maybe I need to get on the professional seminar circuit.

Yeah, this is about how I felt about the tattoo lady too. Charging people money to tattoo them is obviously work, it should not have been permitted.

Then again, I'm kind of a bleeding heart type and so I would probably not throw these folks in an ICE detention center if they agreed to just fly back where they came from. Certainly not for 11 days.

Charging people money to tattoo them is obviously work, it should not have been permitted.

Was she charging people? OP just said she was carrying her gear. I don't see why she should be forbidden from doing it for free, as a hobby, even if she gets paid for it at home. I feel like the line here ought to be "did they get paid", not "were they doing things that other people might get paid for in other circumstances", particularly when it comes to artists.

Sure. That is the applicable standard, but it's not the right posture.

At the same time, the decision has to be made on whether she is to be allowed entry, so we don't know with confidence what she will do after being admitted. Some CBP guy has to, on the balance of available evidence, figure out if she is likely to violate the law or not.

So you're right about the line, but wrong about the tense.

Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud?

Speaking as a somewhat lefty, artist-adjacent type, who could not be described as an activist but has lots of Trump-critical words published under my real name, I am much more reluctant to come to the states under a Trump administration and probably won't visit my extended family members there during this administration (I normally come every year, and normally turn up for remote work duties at least a bit while visiting). Whether most Motte readers would see that as constituting evidence of damage to international relations, or a welcome impact of the new anti-foreigner vibes, I don't know.

To add my anecdote to this, I am vastly more likely to come to the states under the Trump administration. This is because the Biden administration made it illegal for me to visit as a non-citizen non-immigrant from October 2021 to May 2023 via Presidential Proclamation 10294.

The reason this didn't negatively affect US international relations should be pretty obvious. Our home countries also wanted to discriminate against us, so why would they get upset at the US joining in on the hate?

Couldn't you just go in June 2023 or September 2021?

Yeah, if I had a time machine I could use to send past me information about when Biden is going to randomly shut the borders to me, I could go in September 2021. But I don't have one.

What about June 2023 to November 2024?

Sure. Still leaves me more likely to visit the US under a Trump administration than Biden, since the latter still came with extended periods of time where it's illegal for me to visit when I might want to. A lot of people, including me, want to visit a country at a specific date, for a specific thing, not just plan to do so at any time including years later. If I want to visit in 2022 but can't, the most likely outcome isn't that I'll delay it until June 2023, it's that this visit will just never happen.

That might be true for you, although I'm unsure about the vagueness of "a lot of people." Obviously we're talking about larger trends for the general public - if you think that a travel ban for some small number of people for a year and a half will have had more of a chilling effect than all of the news hysteria about the recent ICE detainments then you aren't living in reality.

if you think that a travel ban for some small number of people for a year and a half will have had more of a chilling effect than all of the news hysteria about the recent ICE detainments then you aren't living in reality.

Not living in reality? Okay. How much are you willing to bet that you are living in reality, and I am not? Let's set the terms to whether 2025 will have less visitors to the US than an average of 2021-2023. If you disagree with those terms for not decoupling a chilling effect from broader trends, then explain how you intend to decouple both effects to measure them otherwise and, if I think the method is viable, we can bet on those instead.

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I was also banned from going to the US but no one would wrote up my sob story, but I also didn't break the law by entering the US so no real story to write up.

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