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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28119 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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ICE goes after specific people who have a final order of dismissal from an Immigration judge. When they do so, they often find other illegal immigrants living in the same area or working at the same business, as that is the nature of these things. Oftentimes these people also have final orders of removal. And so it goes.

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:

The first and foremost priorities of this administration are the rule of law, due process and courtesy. You will only arrest persons for deportation on which you have positive ID and a warrant signed by a judge. If any unidentified person claims that they are a US citizen in English or Spanish, you will not detain them unless they are interfering with your duties. If this means that we only deport a tenth of the illegals we would deport under a more robust regime, that is the price of freedom.

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).

First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented.

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.

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.

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.

Sooner or later ICE will have to go after more central examples of illegals: Joses in restaurants and hotels, on farms and construction sites.

It's possible that by that time the anti-ICE movement will have discredited itself so much that no one will care.

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?

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.

First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented.

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.

So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?

Cities that voted Harris tend to be sanctuary cities. In sanctuary cities ICE has to do more work.

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.

I think the bulk of it is the backlog of individuals with final orders of removal that are still here.

To my knowledge, there is no rule that you can not deport someone if you had arrested them without sufficient probable cause.

This is actually being litigated right now. I suspect you are right about where the law end up.

That certainly is a narrative. Going to stick with the factual bit at the top:

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.

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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