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Throwing in a quick post because I'm surprised it hasn't been discussed here (unless I missed it!), Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago sets up "ICE-free zones" in Chicago.
This comes on the heels of Trump sending in the national guard after Chicago PD apparently wouldn't help ICE agents under attack. I haven't read all the stuff about this scenario, but on the surface level it seems pretty bad, I have to say.
There's a video clip where that mayor is saying that Republicans want a "redo of the Civil War," amongst other incredibly inflammatory things. The Governor of Illinois is apparently backing the mayor up.
This refusal to help ICE and even outright claim that you're fighting a war with them I mean... I suppose Democrats have been doing it for a while. This seems... bad. I mean sure you can sugarcoat it and point to legal statues and such, but fundamentally if the local governments of these places are going to agitate so directly against the President, I can't blame Trump for sending in the national guard.
Obviously with the two party system we have a line and such, but man, it's a shame that our politicians have fully embraced the heat-over-light dynamics of the culture war, to the point where they really are teetering on the brink of starting a civil war. Not the social media fear-obsessed "civil war" people have been saying has already started, but real national guard vs. local pd or state military type open warfare. I just don't understand going this far, unless the Mayor of Chicago thinks that he can get away with it and Trump will back down.
Even then, brinksmanship of this type seems totally insane!
I suppose Newsom in CA has been doing it too, now that I mention it. Sigh. I hope that we can right this ship because man, I do not want to have to fight in a civil war I have to say. Having studied history, it's a lot more horrible than you might think.
Trump brought this on himself.
There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty. Masked and armed bouncers dragging people away at gunpoint has horrible optics. There are documented cases of people being deported to random nations, a few people have been disappeared (from public tracking, limiting a family's visibility into where a loved one is) and there's a general allergy to due process. Horrible optics.
"Cruelty is the point". I didn't believe it during Trump 1. For Trump 2, I believe it.
Here are the 'job requirements' for a deportation officer.
Literally randos.(I retract my statement, I was wrong here)There is reason that police & military training take time. Using a gun for law enforcement is a heavy responsibility. ICE is picking untrained civilians, giving them guns and asking them to go be bounty hunters.Democrats are justified in believing that this will select for bottom-feeder men with anger problems looking to get the high of having power over someone else. Given that most illegal immigrants are brown, I can see why democrats would believe that the average ICE agent is a raging racist too.
If Democrats believe what they claim to believe, then their actions are in line with those values. ICE agents look like an angry paramilitary that a dictator would deploy against his populace. People believe what they see. Democrats are cherry picking, but the cherry picked images are still real images.
It may be treason. It may not. An accusation must be validated by a supposedly neutral arbiter. In your characterization, when the state oversteps its powers to oppose the federal govt, it is treason.
Now, both parties have operated in a maximally oppositional manner since Obama was elected. The adversarial nature has only gotten further amplified with every subsequent President. Given the way laws are written, both parties fight it out in the massive grey area between words. States vs Federal tussles are the most common form of inter-party warfare. This is business as usual. The system leaves it to Courts to decide what the bounds of this grey area are.
As with all accusations in the US, until the supreme courts weighs in, it isn't formally treason. Given that no one have been convicted of Treason since WW2, I think you're being hyperbolic.
I'm confused. Trump is consistently the first one to raise the temperature and to lower the bar for acceptable discourse. I don't want to sound like a kid. But, he started it. Only now, the democrats are responding.
Trump is the President and central figure to America's current polarization. If there is a civil war, it will be because of him. As the one in power, the onus is on Trump to reduce the temperature.
There's a million ways he could have implemented the ICE program completely ineffectually. This way is delivering at least some level of results, and there is no reason to believe that any other plausible method would deliver better results.
This has been a bipartisan pattern throughout the last decade, pretty clearly as a result of collapsing federal authority. Gun laws are routinely enforced this way, and have been for decades. COVID mandates were very clearly enforced this way. Trans ideology was enforced this way.
What job requirements would seem more appropriate to you? Can you point to some examples of how low recruiting standards have resulted in bad outcomes?
As you say, "An accusation must be validated by a supposedly neutral arbiter." I disagree that Democrats are justified in such a belief. On the other hand, I can point to recent cases where federal agents promulgated official orders to violate their core mission to better discriminate against Reds.
I think you overestimate the sociopolitical "pull" maintained by the courts, including the Supreme Court. We are more than a decade into lesser courts, and local, state and federal officials operating in open defiance of rulings they disagree with.
The fact is that systems of law do not constrain human will, individually or collectively. "Treason" is a word invented by humans, applied by humans, and assessed by humans. If the argument here is that Democrat local and state officials probably won't be charged, convicted and sentenced for Treason for the things they're doing right now, I'll readily agree with you. But the fight that is happening right now is more likely to grow than to gutter out, and there does not appear to be an obvious point where it will stop. Blue Tribe has acted for decades as though it is above the law, and it turns out those actions have consequences.
It is certainly true that Trump started raising the temperature, if one carefully defines "raising the temperature" to exclude everything Democrats have done to raise the temperature over the last decade or more. Trump is essentially a copy of Bill Clinton. His cabinet and associates are full of former high-tier democrat figures. His policies used to be entirely normal within the democratic party as recently as a decade ago. Red Tribe has slaughtered numerous sacred cows to assemble their current coalition, essentially capitulating to broad swathes of the Democratic policy platform. The democrats have only moved further left in response, and have made both unconscionable government repression and large-scale, organized lawless violence core aspects of their political program.
The democratic party announced their intention to use mass immigration to secure a permanent majority Twenty years ago. It turns out that this was not quite the silver bullet they expected, but Reds are assessing future cooperation in terms of intentions, not results, and Blues have made it abundantly clear that further cooperation with them leads to no livable future for Reds.
Reds are not going to back down because there is no retreat available to us. We decline to be reduced to second-class citizens in our native country. We decline to be victimized by the full power of the Federal Government. We decline to uphold rules that are enforced only to our detriment and never to our benefit. We decline to maintain systems that exist only to oppress us.
No justice, no peace.
This is factually false. E-verify is a thing. If you want to stop people who are not authorized to work from working, then mandating that employers actually check that their employees are authorized to work for them seems like an obvious step to take.
If you haven't even taken the step of mandating the use of e-verify for all employers, I don't believe you when you say "but we have to disappear people, it's the only strategy that could possibly work".
The
eVerify mandate[edit: sorry, not eVerify, but a card check] is old enough to vote; while it doesn’t apply to literally every business, it applies to almost all of them. Even outside of the error mode where every other Presidential administration unlawfully issues bulk work permits and mugs about standing to the courts, or shut down compliance audits, several Blue states have undermined it by the letter of the law and destroyed it in practice, and it’s biggest impact has been a burst of SSN fraud.E-Verify is also old enough to vote. It's just not mandatory at the federal level. It is mandatory in some states, so it's not like it's a half-baked system which wouldn't work at scale. It exists, and it works in practice, but it's still not mandatory everywhere. As far as I can tell nothing is preventing Congress from passing a law to make it mandatory, other than "congress has decided it no longer needs to do its job".
Anyway, I'm looking at the examples you gave:
Congress is doing its job of being partisan. Democrats do not want E-Verify to work, so they oppose legislation that would make it work. That isn't not doing your job, its just doing your job in a way that gets stagnant results. The fact that large numbers of Democratic voters prefer a functioning E-Verify, and overwhelming numbers of Republican voters prefer it is of no moment if they do not punish at the polls non-compliance with that desire. Republican voters have carried out that displeasure via Trump, Cotton, etc. Democrat voters have not punished this specific non-compliance with their expressed policy desires, so the elite Democratic party position remains unchallenged in law until enough voters get angry to put 60 yes votes in the senate.
Or they get rid of the filibuster.
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Illinois prohibits employers from using eVerify to any extent not mandated by the federal government, prohibits local jurisdictions from doing anything not mandated by the federal government (even for their own employees!), and requires employers to notify employees within 72 hours of receiving notification of an i9 audit.
California prohibits employers from complying with federal administrative warrants ("Documents issued by a government agency but not issued by a court and signed by a judge are not judicial warrants. An immigration enforcement agent may show up with something called an “administrative warrant” or a “warrant of deportation or removal.” These documents are not judicial warrants"), and from voluntarily providing any employment information. If you're willing to call the current state of eVerify a fishing expedition, that's on you, but I'm not going to take it seriously.
That, again, seems fine? My impression is that the stuff about voluntary vs involuntary search is that it mainly has to do with what evidence is admissible in court - law enforcement agents are going to be able to go where they want whether or not your cooperation is voluntary.
And in terms of documents, documents that are actually relevant to work eligibility are already covered as things that employers should cooperate with if there's an administrative warrant. My understanding is that what you can't do is hand over the Workday login to ICE and invite them to go on a fishing expedition unless you are compelled to do so.
All that said I am not a lawyer, maybe I'm reading the law wrong? ChatGPT agrees with my interpretation when I ask it, but it also agrees with your interpretation when I ask it.
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