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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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a) All of this is necessary because of Sanctuary Policies that the Police Don't Co-Operate with DHS, so ICE Must Go Looking For The Criminals. Why don't they hang out outside the county jail and question people on their immigration status there on their release? Why don't they hang out at the courthouse - recall, a judge was just convicted of obstruction for preventing ICE from arresting someone at a hearing, they can sit in the gallery and question everyone's immigration status at the end of every hearing! You would be much more likely to arrest people guilty of criminal acts if you did this, than going door to door and getting into fights with protestors.

The jails are under guidance, at least in MN to scout for this and inform detainees of ICE presence. They are barred from courtrooms regularly. And to put a point on it, your plan is totally inefficient. Most places wont have who your are looking for unless you already know, which you dont because no one is sharing information with you.

3000 agents is still a tiny force. And apprehending fugitives is extremely time intensive.

By way of example:

The Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force (GLRFTF) began operations in April of 2003 and was among the first Regional Fugitive Task Forces to become fully operational following the Presidential Threat Protection Act of 2000. The GLRFTF has partnership agreements with over 90 federal, state, and local agencies and has 7 fully operational offices. The Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force has successfully apprehended over 117,700 fugitives since its inception and has made an extraordinary impact on the apprehension of the region’s most dangerous and violent fugitives, always striving to make their communities safer.

20 Years. 90 agencies. Barely over 100k arrests. The way modern law enforcement works is largely by normal warrant processes. A guy does a crime. He either goes to court to address it, or he doesn't and a warrant is issued. Then he, being a criminal, does something stupid like blow a red light. He is then arrested and brought to the judge that he skipped court on. That normal process doesn't work for ICE in Minnesota. As a result they have to do GLRFTF level work for every illegal in the state. The GLRFTF does not deploy resources for normal crimes. Its basically only for murder, attempt murder, armed violence, and sex crimes. Everyone else, your retail thieves, your car thieves, simple robbers, drunk drivers, all you gotta do is not violate a traffic law for the duration of the statute of limitations and you can get away with a felony. Now, you, being a felon are unlikely to possess that skill, but you can try!

Minnesota is basically forcing ICE to treat immigration enforcement like other police agencies treat Criminal Sexual Assault, and then also letting people harass them while they try to execute that mission, which with the GLRFTF would typically involve at least 1 team of 2 officers sitting on a location, often multiple teams of 2-3 sitting on multiple locations for multiple days. Which obviously would be frustrated in purpose by people surrounding the police cars and blowing whistles. Not exactly conducive to finding a guy evading arrest. Imagine if every pedophile had a defense force of people at his home, his mom's house, and his sisters house blowing whistles whenever police were there. He's probably not getting arrested anytime soon.

And that is the current situation in Minnesota. Minnesota also should be viewed as both an outlier, and a pilot program. Many states are sanctuary states, but many of them also have police forces in quiet rebellion that actually do let ICE know, just on the down low. But ICE will have to take on California and New Mexico sometime in the future, and it was likely decided to try to figure out what could possibly work in a very leftist state with a very modest goal before going after the big fish.

as a non American, I unironcally think the best way for ICE is only enforce the immigration law in cooperative states, focus on state with support

this will force illegal immigrant to move to non-cooperative states, basically the "free NYC migrant bus" policy on a larger scale

Then as soon as the Democrats take power again, they return.

Bad idea for many reasons, including that the children of illegals would still eventually be supported by federal dollars for both school and welfare. But most of all, this just inflates the census numbers for sanctuary states, granting them more votes in the electoral college and more congressmen in congress.

birthright citizenship is certainly something that is uniquely American that I completely forgot about when I write my comment

forgive my ignorance, why is US counting non-citizens for electoral college and house seats after abolition of slavery?

The relevant clause in the constitution reads:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The three fifths clause now being stricken as slavery was abolished.

The 14th Amendment seems unambiguous at first glance.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

Trump did attempt to exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment base in his first term, but before any illegal-free numbers could be published (which was necessary for adjudication of the legal issue) he left office and Biden returned to the old policy.

From an outside perspective, this seems unambiguous in the way that, illegal should be counted, as the wording distigush between a person and a citizen, which is totally fucked.

This should be changed, I am sure tourists and legal foreign students do not count, right, right??

I am sure tourists and legal foreign students do not count, right, right??

The Constitution doesn't explicitly address this topic. But an initial draft of the Constitution used the word "inhabitant", and the first Census-related law passed by Congress used "inhabitant", "usual residence", and "usual place of abode". So the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the government is allowed (but not required) to include temporary absentees (federal employees, such as soldiers, who are living abroad for their jobs) in the population of a state. The same logic presumably applies to the exclusion of temporary residents (such as tourists and foreign college students).

The Biden executive order linked above reflects this practice, explicitly using the words "usual place of residence", though Congress has not bothered to put similar language into the currently-applicable law.