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The arresting of illegal immigrants bothers me not at all. And there is actually a point to making the arrests seem maximally scary, namely than illegal immigrants are not morons and are too numerous to deport all of them. But a scary deportation regime makes the act of illegally immigrating seem like a worse value proposition for those currently not in the US who are considering hopping the border, much as Biden's aggressively pro-immigrant stance made it seem like a good deal. Even if both administrations are actually deporting similar numbers they will have much different rates of new offenders.
All that said, I do not like the idea of the ICE agents being masked, it makes it too easy for bad actors to pretend to be cops. That erodes social trust in a way I find unnecessary and concerning. Their actual actions seem fine though.
I put this in my edit, but your comment stood out to me:
What are your thoughts on the selective pressure this will have for illegal immigrants? My first thoughts were that it would select for:
Probably a general success, then, because "economic migrant" is probably the lowest position on even the left's list of "immigrants who should move to the front of the line".
In this case I think "selecting for criminals and actual refugees" is 100% upside.
In the case of criminals, they were coming anyway under a more gentle/permissive structure. Some economic migrants are discouraged, some smaller number of criminals are also discouraged, but no one is being encouraged to come who wasn't coming before. So even if the population of illegals is worse, there is no new damage (new criminal migrants relative to status quo ante).
And a population of illegals which is all cartel members and actual refugees is much easier to police. Without a bunch of bogus asylum claims the legit ones are easier to work through, and without a large population of otherwise unobjectionable illegals for the really bad apples to blend into authorities can more easily find them and will not have as much pushback from liberals worried about the damage to the less objectionable population that no longer exists.
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