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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.
A comment below compared this to enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. I actually had the same thought, and wanted to expand on it.
Lets get this out of the way first: I don't think they are morally equivalent, escaping human slavery is not the same as escaping a crappy country. Being sent back to a crappy country is not the same as being sent back to a crappy country.
Where they are similar is in the political situation at hand. The fugitive slave act was meant to bring a recalcitrant north in line with the south's slavery policies. Now the divide is more between cities and rural, and the different policy preference is on immigration levels. In both cases local enforcement is needed everywhere to maintain the policy. In both cases the different policy preferences means that some areas are just not interested in carrying out the law enforcement needed.
Slavery is perhaps about 80-90% of why the civil war started. These kinds of issues do have the power to tear a nation apart. But I don't think immigration will do it. Not because of the geography of the situation. Sometimes civil wars have clean geographic dividing lines like north and south. But plenty of modern examples just have a pervasive insurgency hiding in plain site among civilians.
The reason I don't think immigration will be a lynchpin for a civil war is that most civil wars have competing groups of elites vying for power. And there are no elite groups in America that actually want to limit immigration. Academics don't want that. Business owners don't want it, immigration is great economically. Politicians don't truly want it (as someone else pointed out Trump is very conveniently ignoring the many illegal migrant farmers that keep food prices down).
No, the FSA was meant to bring the recalcitrant North in line with what they agreed to in the Constitution.
Article IV, Section 3
If the North didn't want to return fugitive slaves, then they shouldn't have agreed to it in the first place. If they changed their mind, they should change it via the constitution instead of lawlessly defying federal authority, authority which they themselves agreed to and submitted themselves to. These concessions were necessary for the South to continue in union with the North in the first place.
The morality of slavery is irrelevant, because unlike the Constitution, it is not agreed upon between all parties.
Northern defiance of the constitution is why the civil war started. The South, correctly, thought the North couldn't be trusted to abide by their own agreements.
The constitution was a political document. The distinction you are making seems meaningless to me.
I'd describe the divide on preferred gun policy or preferred speech rights in the same way.
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Thank you for speaking the core truth
He's not just ignoring them, he's telling us (and them, and the Americans who pay them) he's ignoring them. Also hotel workers for some weird reason... maybe because he owns hotels? Lmao
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