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While I have no first hand experience of ICEs operations, I am skeptical.
First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented. Oh, sure, you might catch and deport a few foreigners who overstayed their student visa, but generally the government is unlikely to have a complete list of all the people who illegally crossed the border and try their best to stay out of the governments databases.
Then, I have to say I am somewhat confused. I would assume that ICE would enforce deportation warrants nationwide. So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?
In your opinion, when Vance announced that ICE would go 'door to door', what he meant was that they would politely ask around the neighborhood if anyone had seen a person on their wanted poster?
I mean, technically it is possible that Noem told her department:
Would this be in character for the Trump administration? Fuck no. Trump bombs whom he wants to bomb, invades whom he wants to invade. His administration lies boldly and blatantly, he wields the justice department as his personal cudgel to bash his enemies with while pardoning his allies (or people willing to pay him). He bombs shipwrecked sailors. How many Venezuelans died in his kidnapping operation, again? Who cares, nobody gives a shit about brown foreigners. What is holding him back from invading Greenland are not moral considerations, but merely strategic ones. When ICE shot Good, Noem wasted no time to transparently slander her as a domestic terrorist.
Last year he hired on a lot of new ICE agents, paying good money for a job with rather few requirements. Of course the MAGA militia cosplayers joined in droves, finally a salary and a badge for doing what they wanted to do for a decade. Do you think these will have procedural doubts about rounding up all the day laborers looking for work at Home Depot? "If it turns out one of them is a citizen, we just let him go, no big deal." To my knowledge, there is no rule that you can not deport someone if you had arrested them without sufficient probable cause.
Trump is aware that he was elected on a platform to deport illegals, and he is very willing to deliver on that. The people who care about snowflake topics like due process are not his voters. And these will cry Nazi no matter what he does, so there is point to playing nice for him. Most administrations would be embarrassed if the SCOTUS ruled 9-0 against them after they claimed that there was nothing to do about someone they had sadly deported to some foreign megaprison without due process "due to an administrative error". But most administrations also have voters who care about such things.
Of course, this extrapolation from my Gestalt impression (which is based significantly on what Trump actually says and does, not what the 'lying mainstream media' reports, btw) does not have to correspond to the truth, exactly. Perhaps Trump's ICE is keeping precisely in the same procedural bounds as Biden's ICE.
Still, in the fog of war, where any and all statements could be lies (perhaps all of the reports of Native Americans getting arrested as illegals are fake news, perhaps Noem had secret proofs that Good was planning a bomb attack, perhaps the Ayatollah has decided that the best way to deal with the protesters is to embrace human rights and due process), extrapolation of character is a useful heuristic (so Noem was likely talking out of her backside, the Mullah regime is likely cracking down on protests without any giving a damn about human rights, ICE is occasionally arresting a Native American for matching their target racial group, and the left might invent another of such incidents for anyone which happens).
Like they say about robbing banks, because that's where the money is. Blue-voting cities are the ones with the most visible levels of "we're a sanctuary city! we have all these activist organisations for undocumented persons!" If I'm going to be looking for easy finding of illegal immigrants, where do you think I'll head to first? Tom Johnson's produce farm out in the boondocks (where indeed there's likely to be undocumented workers, same in meat processing plants, but it's also probably going to be tougher to identify/arrest them), or the George Floyd Memorial Centre and Legal Aid Provision for Persons of Irregularity?
Gosh, how very reassuring it is to know that the people who created the category of "domestic terrorist" never, ever, used it to slander people! It's all a lie, yeah maybe sure something in the letter could be interpreted that way but really now, are you going to believe us or them?
Was Good a domestic terrorist? Ask the people who created the term. I don't think it was useful then or now, but it's been put into use and you really can't complain if the tools you created to bash your enemies then get used in turn to bash you when your enemies get their hands on them. I think she was a damn fool who fucked around and found out, she didn't deserve to be killed, but neither did the ICE agent deserve to be put in that position by someone thinking she could larp as the Maquis and nothing would happen because she was one of the Good Guys fighting the fascist nazi tyrant's stormtroopers, and every movie assured her that bad things don't happen to the Good Guys fighting the nazi fascist stormtroopers.
I mean to me the biggest hole in her hagiography is that nobody to my knowledge has ever tried to explain how the wonderful mother who dropped her kid off at school on her birthday ended up in her car blocking traffic and accosted by ICE agents to the point where she is trying to drive away. She clearly put herself there for some reason, and did so understanding that something was going down. So where is she getting that information? Why did she think she personally needed to be there? Why did she think to block traffic?
I suspect she’s a part of some larger group, one that sees itself as “the resistance”. And I think this is the real story— that a lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum are being radicalized and weaponized by groups of political activists pushing fear porn and the idea of them as “the rebellion” as in Star Wars. And until the swamp of radicalization is drained, there’s always a reserve army of ideologically possessed people ready to act on that perception of reality they’ve been fed in their echo chambers. It’s hard to do because the groups are generally smart enough to stay just inside the lines of acceptability while heavily implying the things that would drive people to actually go do something about the “bad guys” of choice. That’s what the fascism narrative is about — every child over four knows Nazis are evil, and has heard the hagiography of those who “resisted” — often with the costs removed. Calling someone a Nazi in the post WW2 era is like telling a bunch of medieval peasants that someone or some group desecrated the host at the church. The point is to create the hatred and ultimately the violence while keeping their hands clean by not saying “attack those people”.
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This is one of those cases where euphemisms are confusing the issue. Minnesota is far from the southern border.
Most of these cases are going to be things like visa overstays, green card holders / visa holders who had their status pulled because of a conviction, asylum claimants who lost their case but never left. People who had TPS status pulled for some reason.
Obama and Biden had programs called "administrative closure" or "parole" where the deportation case was closed without actually granting them real legal status or deporting them.
There's just a lot of complexity in US immigration. Many, possibly most, of the "undocumented" are in fact highly documented with extensive paper trails.
Someone somewhere at an ICE field office is literally doing TPS reports. Hope they remember to use the new cover sheets.
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Exactly. Actual honest to god 'carried into the country by a coyote or completely undetected and stayed completely off the radar' cases are rare especially above the Mexican border states.
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This sounds like the streetlight effect to me. The words "we deported X illegals" might sound good to Trump's electorate, but realistically they wanted him to start deporting the illegals "dat took deir jerbs", not random-ass schoolteachers that lost their green card over speeding 20 years ago. This will run out of this kind of low-hanging fruit quickly anyway.
Sooner or later ICE will have to go after more central examples of illegals: Joses in restaurants and hotels, on farms and construction sites. And you can do this only by raiding the place and detaining every worker until they or their employer can prove their legal status.
They won't. First of all, this would go against the demonstrated raison d'etre of ICE. Namely, their fascist tacticool LARP. You don't need guns, secret "police," and general military gear to go to a hotel to check the employee directory. The revealed preferences in actions and very real investment is the opposite of unsexy but effective work. Whatever ICE's real purpose is, it has something more to do with blowing millions of taxpayer money on making a spectacle, picking fights with Americans, or making armed citizen resistance against state violence ineffective (note for the confused in the audience, this would be pointless for real immigration enforcement).
Second, if they wanted to do this they would have already. Are their lots of farms and hotels using over the border illegal immigration in Minnesota? No, of course not. The cruelty is the point. The ICE LARP, in part, exists to channel useful idiots away from the real reasons of white demographic replacement with ostentatious displays of cruelty to brown people and symbolic acts against "the Left/Liberals" as a symbol of "something is being done" without obviously doing anything substantive. It exists to do the exact opposite of something substantive and effective.
"The right wing," as much as it is a real thing, exists to simp for and be useful tools to elite capital (and Jews) that benefit from cheap, therefore often third-world from low IQ areas, labor. To actually hurt the pocketbook of capital would go against the very funding base, closest thing it has to an intellectual base (who do you think is doing Heritage?), and purpose defining "the right" has - especially mainstream right. The capital holding elite would sooner perma close the American Republican party and just try to start a new one.
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I think the Trump base just likes to feel like something's actually done, and both sides are happyish to dance around the cheap labor manufacturing/agricultural illegals in the South for as long as possible since there's too many competing interests. However stuff like the Somali fraud (Yes they're mostly legally in the country) is relatively easy optics for ICE to go after since it's very very very hard to defend their actions
Except what can ICE to do them if they are legally in the country?
It appears that there are some Somali visa overstayers (thought that's not really impacting the core issue that much) but it functions to keep the issue alive in the public's minds.
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Nothing yet. The trick will be to nail them on fraud, de naturalize , and then deport.
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This is honestly the most baffling part of the american immigration system to me.
In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.
If a business is found to be hiring illegal immigrants, they are fined.
Sure. There are some dodgy businesses who hire undocumented cousins from India. But these businesses are tiny, and the problem is also tiny.
I just don't understand why the US doesn't implement this policy. Like all of the associated issues here would be solved over night.
I'm pretty sure you need to prove you're not an illegal immigrant to study or get a driver's licence here. Why is this not the solution for the States? It puts the pressure on businesses and is totally politically palatable.
Starting in 2015 California has been issuing driver's licenses to illegals. They also illegally issued 17000 commercial driver's licenses to illegals, according to the Federal Department of Transportation.
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Suppose there is a Hotel X in Australia, and instead of hiring cleaning workers directly, they outsource to another company -- Dodgy Cleaning Services, Inc. Who is responsible for immigration compliance - the hotel or the cleaning service or both?
Or better yet, suppose an Australian family hires a contractor to make some improvements to their house. Who is responsible for immigration compliance? The homeowner or the contractor?
The contractor. This isn't a hard question.
I don't think it's as simple a question as one might think. For example, in the United States there is a lot of precedent that with respect to some types of laws, the hotel is potentially responsible for compliance.
Anyway, assuming that compliance responsibility falls solely on the contractor, this seems like a straightforward workaround for immigration compliance. Instead of directly hiring illegals, use a dodgy contractor. If the dodgy contractor gets fined, they just close up shop and re-open under a new name somewhere else.
Combine this with the fact that the American economy is to a large extent dependent on the labor of illegal aliens, and it's easy to see how we can get into a situation where people get away breaking the rules.
To an extent I am speculating, but I am pretty sure that in the United States, things like going out to eat at a restaurant; hiring a crew to do yard work; or going on a week's vacation in Las Vegas would be very noticeably more expensive but for this kind of cheating.
The devil is in the enforcement, as ever.
If there's a huge problem with outsourcing illegal-intensive labor to Dodgy Contractor Inc, it's making things fairly simple: target all the dodgy staffing agencies. In theory like 99% of the work is already done to make it impossible to earn an income in this country without the government being aware of it. And that's what frustrates a lot of people about illegal immigration, even those who are pro-immigration: that the government doesn't use the information and powers that it has to enforce the laws that are on the books.
With fines or with criminal prosecution?
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You are just assuming things will happen in such a way as to make this whole thing complicated. Which, to be fair, it has happened in that way until basically now. But it doesn't have to. Like there is a workaround in your telling of events because the government creates one, which it doesn't have to. If you assume the government actually wants to accomplish its stated goals then this isn't really a conundrum. Just send the dodgy contractor to prison. Its not that hard.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not necessarily easy. If you look at Dodgy Contractor, Inc.'s personnel files, I assure you that there will be some evidence that they made an effort to comply with the requirements. Ok, so if you go back and look at their photocopy of Jose's green card, it might become apparent that he actually used the green card of Jose's second cousin Juan. The nominal head of Dodgy Contractor, Inc. will tell the authorities that he relied on Maria to review the papers, and well, maybe she screwed up. At that point, how do you convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that this guy intentionally conspired to violate immigration laws? Especially since the nominal owner might not be the actual owner. So the assistant US attorney assigned to the case (and 50 others) recommends pushing for a plea deal of 6 months in prison. Dodgy Contractor, Inc. is shut down. The Hotel is SHOCKED to learn that they had illegals working for them. The next week, they hire Sketchy Contractor, Inc. and we Americans keep getting our trips to Las Vegas with hotels costing only $120 a night.
By the way, I'm not saying that it's impossible to enforce immigration laws. I'm just taking exception to the idea that it's simple and easy.
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Well, Russia is a heavily bureaucratized country, but companies still hire lots of illegals because they are cheaper. As long as you have cash or can convert the money on your account to cash plausibly legally, you can hire them. All it takes is the low probability of your company being raided.
Russia is also full of corruption, which helps.
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I'm going to get another 20 replies saying "it's cheaper to hire illegals" and I understand that.
I'm saying that if you are pursuing a policy to remove all of the illegals from the country, rather than making ICE do it in possibly the least efficient way you could think of, it's easier to just do the workplace check. It's easily advertised as pro-American by a president like trump, who can push it as a policy to give jobs back to Americans.
It's not like Trump is worried about shaking up the stock market or pissing off lobby groups.
The problem isn’t wholly illegals. There are a whole group of people who on the merits are illegal but on procedure are here temporarily until their status is adjudicated. Then there are problems like the Somalis who are here legally but are just a drain. We need to cut off welfare without running afoul of the 14th.
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Trust me, smart conservatives know. This is why many conservatives who actually care about immigration are pissed at Trump. If he simply mandated e-verify, and actually fined businesses who hired illegals, the illegal immigration problem would shape up quite quickly. And with a lot less partisan fanfare, likely.
It's deeply unfortunate that he failed to do so, and I don't have a great understanding of why.
Small business owners who employ illegals are the corest of the core constituency of the Republican party. Exploiting illegal labour requires entrepreneurial spirit, mild evil, and to be working in a sector that is already Republican-dominated (mostly farming or construction).
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That's the huge problem which leaves both sides open to charges of hypocrisy: some sectors of the American economy are reliant on cheap, disposable labour. They can't/won't get the natives to do that anymore, so they need a constant flow of immigrants willing to take on hard, dirty, uncertain work. This is going back decades, my teen years were blighted by every local talent show where someone with a guitar did Deportees (a song from 1948 by Woody Guthrie).
The hypocrisy of the right about economic exploitation is easy to see, the hypocrisy of the left less so: but they are de facto defending the permanence of a serf class for manual labour in order to keep their nice lifestyle of abundance going.
The problem is you have to enforce immigration law consistently, nationwide. Otherwise the non-compliant businesses gain a substantial competitive advantage.
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But it costs those Australian businesses collectively billions of dollars in (direct and indirect) labor costs. Hiring illegals would be significantly cheaper, after all. Which is why the Americans don't do work permit checks. Every push for legislation like that would be met with intense lobbying from employers in the stereotypical sectors (farming, construction, hotels, ect.).
But it certainly also helps that a faction of the blue tribe is also opposed to work permit checks, for different reasons.
I obviously understand that's the situation. I'm saying it shouldn't be.
It solves 100% of the issues re: immigration conversation. Australia has a ruthless immigration policy, and far more immigrants per 100k than the USA, Germany or Britain. And we have far less politicised immigration conversation.
An Australian can reliably depend on virtually every man woman and child they meet to have either been thoroughly vetted by a government bureaucrat or a slob from accounting.
We have something like 30% of people in country born overseas (compared to less than 15% for German, UK and USA) but consistently poll pretty high for our happiness with immigration.
Yes, most of our immigrants are east asian, British or Kiwi, as opposed to African or Middle Easterners, but still.
If it costs businesses money to be forced to hire Australians, and wins back some social cohesion, it's just such an easy policy to pursue in my mind. American politics being dependent upon the random industry association lobbying some spineless boomer in the senate is so foreign to me.
"Stop hiring people who aren't supposed to be in the country" should be the short work of a year of policy making. If you're against it, you're against hiring Americans, right? If you're against it, you're funding illegal immigration. In another world the libs could even have pushed this policy to get back at the capitalists.
My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that Tony Abbott basically forced through hardline illegal immigration restrictions against huge protests from both sides of the isle right before immigration massively ramped up due to easy travel. The problem is that the numbers are so big in other countries, and the use of migrants so structural, that getting from America’s ‘default yes’ to Australia’s ‘default no’ is extremely difficult. Though IMO Trump should definitely do this.
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Maybe I'm just so much more black-pilled than you are. If you're changing something and "it costs businesses money" that automatically means not only is this not an "easy policy", it's going to be an uphill battle. No matter where you are, one of the political parties will be "pro business", and this party will fight you. Because this is actually important. There's actual money on the line. "Social cohesion", "anti immigration vibes", "campaign promises", ect. are all pretty much irrelevant once the wrong people lose money.
And if the same change also, at the same time, disadvantages minorities and/or people struggling with paper work, elements from the other side of the isle will also fight you.
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It's possible that by that time the anti-ICE movement will have discredited itself so much that no one will care.
Or, that if the anti-ICE movement is in power, that they might be tempted to spend political capital to make them legal (such that they can't be targeted again as they have been this time). Which is arguably the revealed preference of the Trump admin anyway.
What good is retaining their illegal status, if enforcing it somehow "reveals the preference" for revoking it?
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I find it difficult to believe that this question is being asked in good faith.
ICE is being deployed to so-called "sanctuary cities" like Minneapolis and NYC for the same reason federal troops were deployed to Alabama and not Idaho when it came time to enforce desegregation. A state that is already complying with federal law does not require federal troops to enforce compliance.
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Completely undocumented immigrants that entered the country secretly are actually a decent minority plus the whole sanctuary city setup means that there's a natural impulse to cluster into certain areas.
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Cities that voted Harris tend to be sanctuary cities. In sanctuary cities ICE has to do more work.
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I think the bulk of it is the backlog of individuals with final orders of removal that are still here.
This is actually being litigated right now. I suspect you are right about where the law end up.
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That certainly is a narrative. Going to stick with the factual bit at the top:
Many get put into databases once they are arrested for crimes inside the US. Others are caught on the border, start the process of removal proceedings, but are released on bond while their case goes through court. Congress explicitly gave ICE the power to revoke bond or parole, at any time, for any reason. Hope that helps!
Edit: I guess there was another factual claim there. ICE is not targeting sanctuary cities as punishment for voting blue. Most arrests take place in cooperative jurisdictions, like Texas, where 110 out of 100k non-citizens are arrested. In sanctuary Illinois, that number is 21 out of 100k. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/12/11/ice-jails-update/#:~:text=Impact%20of%20strategies%20to%20block,remain%20lower%20than%20other%20states. ICE arrests in cooperative jurisdictions are easy, they just show up to the jail and it's done. ICE arrests in non-cooperative jurisdictions make more noise and take more manpower.
Exactly. Enforcement in Blue Areas is noisier since the local power structures are trying to actively resist ICE participation, meaning that ICE needs more boots on the ground instead of just picking up those who are already collected.
Also people are conflating illegal immigration with 'coyote land border crossings', there's a ton of people who are just visa overstayers and originally entered reasonably.
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