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Why would you even need mass arrests? What even are mass arrests and what do they have to do with honest immigration control? Actual immigration police work should 99% paperwork. You see it all the time with border control and passports. It's the whitest of white collar crimes. You check papers and hand papers to people telling them their papers are not in order, and occasional escort people to a holding place to expel them from the country. It's not dramatic. These are not hardened criminals, they're mostly middle aged schlubs living normal lives.
What you do is you send actual real officers of the law, not ICE paramilitary LARPers, to go where you think your intelligence has informed you someone has overstayed their visa, or never had a visa to begin with, then inform them and maybe put them in a car to take them to a jail or something. It's not rocket science. It doesn't need guns, let alone hidden secret police identities, tacticool gear, assault and aggressive belligerence, or any of this extra crap.
Like if i were an illegal immigrant in Japan, overstaying my visa or whatever, I would expect the police to knock on my door politely "Sumimasen, you must come with us." inform me I have brokent the law and eventually get me on a plane out of the country. Why is this hard?
Make themselves scarce where? These are immigrants. Not squatters or fantasy realm thieves. They can't live in the mountains or sewers to hide until the heat is down. The entire point of (mass) immigration is people need and work jobs to live. If you know enough to find someone that border crossed or doesn't have their papers in order, why wouldn't you be able to find them at their cousins? Why wouldn't you just tell their place of work, "inform us when they come back, they are breaking the law."?
For sure it could. What would be hard about it? But it won't. Because immigration control is a fake issue they don't really want to enforce.
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