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Last I checked Trump doesn't distribute the belongings of deported illegals to ICE officers, so I don't know what parallel you see.
Money is fungible. A salary can be used to buy many belongings.
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Are you seriously blind to the idea that paying people makes them more loyal to you? I guess i shouldn't have brought up the "roman" thing because everyone wants to focus on the specifics of that example instead of looking for broader commonalities throughout history. Like-- do you seriously think the democratic expansion of the administrative state wasn't buying the loyalty of the permanent bureaucracy? This is the exact same thing, except ICE is a literal army instead of a figurative one.
So what exactly do you really believe is the parallel? First, is the increased budget for ICE an increase in the salary of ICE agents or more funding to accomplish their task? Because the second wouldn't make them feel any extra loyalty. Do you also seriously believe that Trump is planning or hoping that ICE is going to stand on his side against... the US military? All other state law enforcement? Seriously, state what you believe Trump is doing here and listen to yourself, and then realize why everyone is telling you this is just TDS. He's just funding the main tool he has to do something a majority of americans explicitely wants him to do, and which fuels his popularity.
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I actually wonder if this is true. I have heard of a few scattered abuses of asset forfeiture by police, no idea how common it is, but I could imagine something similar for ICE.
That’s said I think the more compelling reason to be skeptical is that large government agencies don’t like to be bored. Personally I’m not that torn up about it although my personal ethics would prevent me from working for ICE (which is saying something because I wouldn’t mind working for most defense contractors or the CIA), but you could see an argument that ICE being given too many people will lead them to go above and beyond their mandate.
Not the immigration branch of ICE though. It does have HSI branch that does investigations and asset forfeitures. Curiously, nobody gave a hoot about it until Trump. Trump has this peculiar quality that once he does something people start noticing how big the government is and how much abuse is possible - only to immediately forget it forever once it's not about Trump anymore. Example: https://archive.ph/QiXfH - this is from 2017. For the last 8 years, how much high profile public discussion did you hear about this? I'd assume "none at all" is not too far off the target.
If you want to go that road, you have plenty of targets beyond ICE. THe FBI itself, the ATF, the DEA, the NSA, not to speak of the leviathan in the room that is the CIA... I mean, operation Fast and Furious alone is a horrendous example, if Hollywood made a movie where a government agency forces US merchants to sell weapons to drug cartels, and then tries to prosecute them for it and use it as a basis for trying to kill the Second Amendment - people would say it's cartoonish, hammy and bordering on libel. Yet it happened, and people generally just let it slide, shrugged it off. And there are many examples on the same cartoonishly evil level. So is there a danger in a powerful government enforcement agency to go rogue? You betcha there is. Is there anything special in Trump financing immigration enforcement to increase this danger? You'd have to work a bit harder to establish any basis for it. I mean, if you have a hardcore libertarian credentials going back to 1960s on opposing any budget increase for federal law enforcement - ok, kudos for remaining consistent. If that's the first time when you're asking this question, I'd have much harder time taking it seriously.
Think you mean https://archive.is/QiXfh for your link...
The link above works for me... I think it's the same site?
Fair enough, for whatever reason the .ph link flat-out wasn't working for me.
The archive guys had some feud with Cloudflare for a while about some arcane details of how DNS resolution should work, which unfortunately resulted in some of their domains not being resolved properly on Cloudflare DNS. Maybe it's what still is happening.
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Illegals don't really have the amounts of property that make that worth it. The processing costs on possessing their cars probably exceed the sales price, because they drive beatermobiles, and they live in shitbox apartments in the ghetto that somebody else owns and will just rent out for below market rates(you ain't gettin' full market rent for that). Is ICE supposed to be making a killing off some Android phones with cracked screens and jeans with holes in them? Heavily used work boots? A half-smoked pack of cigarettes?
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