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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   27876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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From January to October of last year, only 170 US citizens were detained by ICE as reported by ProPublica. Of those 170, many were arrested for interfering with ICE operations. Compare this with 234,211 removals (I don't have data on arrests or detentions, but I can assume the number of arrests/detentions is greater than removals. The "US Citizen arrest rate" is at most 0.07% of the ICE arrestees, probably much smaller due to fact that there are more detentions than removals.

It's interesting that you preceded this little tidbit with examples of four non-ICE being accused of ICE. How many people accused of being ICE actually were ICE? If you're implying that a certain false positive rate is acceptable, at least show that the behavior you're complaining about is above that rate.

The irony of you mentioning "equivocation" further down this thread, as any equivocation—to the extent that it eventually occurred—was initially enabled here when you made this comment and the false equivalence it contains. You discuss ICE and anti-ICE false positive rates as if they're different sides of the same coin, yet:

ICE false positive: ICE was wrong in incorrectly arresting someone.
ICE true positive: ICE was right in correctly arresting someone.
Anti-ICE false positive: They were wrong in harassing someone that had nothing to do with ICE.
Anti-ICE true positive: They were wrong in harassing an ICE officer off-duty or wrong in obstructing an ICE officer on-duty.

There's not a "positive" for which anti-ICE can be in the right. Furthermore, ICE is right X% of the time and wrong (1-X%) of the time, whereas anti-ICE is wrong 100% of the time.

There's not a "positive" for which anti-ICE can be in the right. Furthermore, ICE is right X% of the time and wrong (1-X%) of the time, whereas anti-ICE is wrong 100% of the time.

That's simply a value judgment that doesn't get us anywhere. Being anti-ICE is only "wrong" when the activity in furtherance of that position breaks the law. You may not like the fact that people are protesting, recording their activity, or warning the community of their presence, but all of these things are both legal and constitutionally protected.

Is it really constitutionally protected to warn a felon of the presence of the police? Like let's say Alice gets a phone alert that a white murderer who killed three black kids escaped from prison. Alice sides with the murder because she's a white supremacist. Alice later sees several police cruisers on a nearby street. Worried that her favorite convict is nearby and will be returned to prison, she starts blowing a whistle and making a ruckus to help the convict escape.

That is constitutionally protected speech?

There's a review on the history of such speech in section 2(a) of this paper.

Ok, but the standard is Brandenburg and Brandenburg says you can't incite imminent lawless action. Evading the police is lawless action, and alerting criminals to police is inciting them to flee.

In your example Alice isn't inciting lawless action, the murderer is going to try to escape regardless. At best, she's aiding or facilitating it, which isn't squarely covered by Brandenburg.

If you care to read the section aptly titled The Existing Crime-Facilitating Speech Cases is a fairly comprehensive survey of cases on it.

Would you like to specify which case you think matches Alice's example? Because the ones that match most closely take my side, for instance:

Haig v. Agee concluded that an ex-CIA agent's "repeated disclosures of intelligence operations and names of intelligence personnel" were as constitutionally unprotected as "'the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops,"' at least when the disclosures were done for "the declared purpose of obstructing intelligence operations and the recruiting of intelligence personnel."'

and

Several federal circuit cases have held that speech that intentionally facilitates tax evasion, illegal immigration, drugmaking, and contract killing is constitutionally unprotected.

At most your source is saying there's a complex history of caselaw here and the Supreme Court hasn't ruled on this action specifically.

The very next sentence is

But the Court didn't explain the scope of this exception-it spent just a few sentences on the subject-and in particular didn't discuss whether the exception reached beyond threats to national security. And the following year, the Court held in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware that knowingly publishing the names of people who weren't complying with a boycott was constitutionally protected, even though some people who weren't observing the boycott had been violently attacked, and the publication clearly could facilitate such attacks.

I agree, the caselaw is complex and there isn't a definitive ruling one way or the other. In particular, I don't think Brandenburg is deciding here, it's just an unresolved question.

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