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Sure. I support efforts to prosecute people who are actively trying to incite violence against ICE agents who plausibly could succeed at inciting said violence. I don't think I'm unusual in that opinion, even for people on the left.
I don't see much evidence that anyone is even attempting to prosecute the people breaking those laws, though. It feels like one of those "we've tried nothing and now we're all out of ideas" situations.
I don't support ICE intentionally saying "well, normal legal channels didn't work so we have to go full stormtrooper" when they haven't even tried normal legal channels. Having masked people in unmarked vehicles who refuse to identify themselves snatching people off the street should not be the first resort.
That's not how this works. The heightened threat against ICE is removed and then their legal risk mitigation strategies can be stood down.
But yes, they absolutely should be cracking down on and arresting the doxxers if the legal means allow them to do so. If they can't for whatever reason, then the protective strategies remain. Then federal laws should be passed against stochastic support of crime.
It shouldn't be 'law enforcement personnel must accept the exposure of themselves and their families to physical harm while they're alone and exposed at their homes because they decided to work for ICE'. Clearly this will lead to intimidating people into not working for ICE. Which means border enforcement ceases to exist and Antifa achieve their political ends through the threat and use of violence (eg domestic terrorism).
I think this is a case of "if your risk tolerance is literally zero you can't do anything".
We should take reasonable efforts to ensure the security of federal employees like those at ICE. Such as prosecuting people who actually break existing laws of the land in ways that endanger those employees.
There are limits, though. If the risks are higher than people are willing to deal with for the $50k / year we pay ICE agents, we should first try paying more. There are quite a few jobs that expose you to more risk than ICE agents face, and we are able to find people for those jobs. We're a rich country, we can afford to pay people. For a baseline, cops in San Francisco make $115 - $165k / year in base salary, often much more with overtime. If we're not paying at least that much for the apparently 4 digit number of people securing our borders, we shouldn't complain that we can't find people who will tolerate the risk.
What we should not do, before we have seriously attempted "prosecute people who break the law" and "pay people what they're worth", is shred the constitution. And "pass federal laws against stochastic support of crime", if I'm understanding your proposal correctly, amounts to shredding the constitution.
And if you ask the HSE people responsible for those jobs what this risk of injury should be, they will say "zero", and do absolutely everything in their power to reduce it to that level in terms of procedures that they can identify/control. I strongly doubt that OH&S sees ICE much differently than other employers in this regard.
Considering that there are literally targeted hit attempts happening on ICE agents right now, I must say that the risk of being shot for an ICE field agent seems much higher than that of them dying of COVID, given that they trend young and healthy -- and yet...
And they will be wrong about that, because we live in a world where tradeoffs exist. I think this "if you knew a risk was nonzero but didn't eliminate the risk, you are culpable for anything that goes wrong" mentality drives a lot of the sickness of our civilization.
or at least enough to cover their asses, yes.
ICE agents are mostly young and in shape. Their risk of dying of COVID is pretty much zero. If we're spending any significant energy on trying to make sure ICE agents don't die of COVID (beyond "here's a vaccine, it's free under your benefits plan if you want it") we're being stupid and should stop. I expect vehicle collisions are at least 100x more dangerous to ICE agents than COVID, probably a lot more than that.
To be clear, I do support coming down as hard as possible on anyone who tries to kill a law enforcement agent (including ICE) and any of their actual accomplices. But murder-suicides are just really hard to deal with and I don't think trying to come up with ways to disincentivize them is likely to be fruitful.
Yes -- but they run every workplace in the country, including ICE.
Yes -- and we made them (and everyone else) wear masks all the time a few short years ago. Now they want to wear masks to mitigate a larger risk, and you are telling them "no I don't like the aesthetics of govt agents in masks"? Get outta here.
The ambush attack at the ICE office a few weeks ago was not a murder suicide -- it was a targeted raid, and the the people doing it had a (fairly bad) plan for getting away with it.
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Oh no, that's actually why they need the masks. Or at least, that's how it should be justified since the people who are anti-enforcing-immigration-law are also in large degree the people still worried about the uncommon cold.
cute
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How much risk is reasonable risk. This idea is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but there’s just no definitive answer to “when does the risk get bad enough that cops or ICE or political figures are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?” ICE is subject to serious doxxing and real-time tracking, they’re being shot at, their home addresses and thus their families’ locations are publicized thus meaning that a radicalized idiot with a gun could show up at their house, their kids’ school, or anywhere else they go. Police might get a guy they tried to arrest mad enough to try something, but it’s actually pretty rare and there are no databases or tracking apps telling people where law enforcement is at every moment. There are no public figures that refer to cops as Gestapo or quote Anne Frank every time the local beat officer arrests someone.
If ICE were treated like local cops and given the support given to cops, sure, I get the idea that you should accept risk, and that you should be able to be identified. In tge current circumstances, asking for that means that you want these agents and their families dead. Because in this particular environment, that’s tge clear and obvious result of demasking agents while they’re being shot at, doxxed with public databases, the rhetoric compares their work to Nazis rounding up Jews, and there are apps to real time track them still available for download.
"How much risk is reasonable" is a good question. I think a reasonable baseline to look at is private sector occupations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the number of violent deaths broken down by industry (NAICS code, specifically), and the Census Bureau gives total numbers of employees by industry. Dividing the one by the other we find that the most dangerous "normal" occupation is NAICS 485 "transit and ground passenger transportation", with 392975 employees and 25 violent deaths (out of 72 total deaths on the job). I think if working on immigration enforcement at ICE is around the danger level of driving for Uber but your agents fear for their lives anyway, the problem is with the perception of danger rather than with the danger per se.
This is the wrong question to ask. Consider the following questions:
How I hope you answered all of these questions was "optimizing policy to address perceptions of danger is a fool's errand". This is particularly true in cases where triggering a destructive reaction is the point of the violence but even in cases where it's not, setting policy based of feelings of danger is still not productive.
That said, the US government should come down as hard as possible on people who attack law enforcement agents who are doing their job. The US government generally does a pretty good job of this already, I am not particularly worried there, but it's worth emphasizing that it is good and important.
That said, if someone is willing to take their own life to cause harm, we should go after those accomplices that actually exist and actually materially helped. Witch hunts for someone who is still alive who can be blamed, though, will not reduce the chances of further people looking to suicide-by-terrorism (and will likely hurt to the extent that the witch hunt increases the perceived glory of the person who wanted to be a martyr).
Side note, not important
Funny you should say that because just yesterday the top story on HN was find SF parking cops, which took advantage of the fact that all parking tickets in San Francisco were published online in real time to make a map of where parking tickets were being issued across the city, and who was issuing them, in real time. The site has been taken down but the city is still publishing that data.
Not really an important consideration, the set of people who want to suicide by cop and the set of people who are willing and able to go through the inconvenience of taking slightly complicated actions like "look at where parking tickets are being issued to find out where the officers writing the tickets are" (or the corresponding action for other agencies, which I will not elaborate on) is basically an empty set. I just thought it was funny timing.
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The thing is that you need lots of ICE agents to deal with all the illegal immigration. Making them so expensive that there aren’t enough of them to scale to immigration is effectively an amnesty by the back door.
Apparently there are only 6500 ICE agents in the entire country. Even paying them $200k / year would be $1.3B / year. That's $4 / year / US citizen. I would happily pay 10x, maybe even 50x that amount to live in an alternate reality where everything is the same except ICE does their job in a boring, effective, and professional manner.
So, what's your plan for getting 4-5 self-deportations for every forcible deportation?
And what penalty gets assigned when leftist rhetoric against ICE becomes even more extreme in response?
That's not a policy goal I have so I haven't thought deeply about this, but probably something like "require employers to actually use the e-verify system we built 30 years ago to solve this problem, then do some high profile prosecutions of employers who failed to do so". Economic migrants are generally here for economic reasons. If the jobs go away the people who came here because there was work will leave.
I don't expect that'd fix any of the problems that the red tribe currently blames on immigrants but I bet it would lead to a bunch of undocumented workers leaving the US.
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