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ICE (et al.) do not currently have any credibility that they would act moderately and reasonably. Have they apologised or even admitted error for sending innocent people to a foreign torture prison? Have they apologised for detaining someone for writing a milquetoast op ed? Have they apologised for calling people their agents have shot assassins and terrorists based on zero evidence?
Until they express that they have not been acting moderately, and express a desire to change, I don't buy that the protesters are doing anything but revealing abuses that were already happening. Yeah, these specific clashes with protesters wouldn't be happening. But I don't believe that they have any desire or intention to prevent equally egregious actions from happening when the cameras aren't on.
"ICE doesn't have any credibility because I believe in fake news"
That's more or less how that parses to me. "Sending innocent people to a foreign torture prison?" El Salvador was the murder capital of the world until Bukele locked up all the gangs, so now ICE can't deport illegal immigrants back to El Salvador because Bukele will put some in jail? Ridiculous, realize your own part in escalating this conflict because leftist rioters think we aren't allowed to legally deport people the easy way. ICE could be deporting convicted criminals straight out of jail, it would be the easiest thing in the world, all it takes is local officials cooperating with ICE -- oh, but that hurts leftwing bleeding heart feelings so we can't do that.
That is not what happened. Venezuelans, some of whom had not been accused of any crime and were in the middle of asylum cases, were deported to El Salvador with the understanding that they would be sent to CECOT, with the US paying El Salvador for this service. By all accounts "torture prison" is a perfectly reasonable way to describe CECOT, "concentration camp" is another word one could use and only be exaggerating a little. As far as I can tell, no official has apologized for this or outlined what steps will be taken to prevent something equally horrifying from happening again.
I'm not sure how the other two things I listed could be considered fake news either.
Call me a bleeding heart all you like, but this administration cannot be trusted to treat deportees humanely, and so, well I would generally agree that sanctuary city policies go too far, loosening them right now is a terrible idea.
It’s hard for me to have any sympathy for this position.
Tens of millions of illegal immigrants came into this country over decades, then President Biden enabled millions more. They made an app so anyone could apply for asylum and wait in the US while their claims processed (designed to take years if they ever even happened). Welfare, work authorization, no verification. Crime, gangs, murderers, pedophiles, sex traffickers, the works. People came pouring into this country. The worst of them are now sitting in jail cells across the country, known to local authorities. And we can’t deport them because bleeding heart liberals think it’s mean. We want to deport all the criminals, we want the murderers and pedophiles gone, and your actions are preventing us. You don’t want to cooperate with ICE, ok, then we are going to have to focus on deporting the illegals who aren’t sitting in jail cells. And some of them, I assume, are good people.
And we’re not going to give them all trials, they’re here illegally, deportation is their due process. Maybe in a gentler time we could have been nicer. That time is over because our immigration process was abused by the same bleeding heart liberals saying we can’t deport criminals. Cry me a river, give me a break. I don’t care if a few hundred Venezuelans with gang tattoos get deported to an El Salvadoran jail. It’s fake news of the media to suggest that we’re just kidnapping random legal immigrants and putting them in death camps.
Can Trump be trusted to deport immigrants humanely? No, because you made that impossible. This is what you wanted, this is what sanctuary cities are. We don’t have law anymore. We let in millions of immigrants and millions of criminals then said we aren’t even allowed to deport the ones who were so bad they still ended up in jail. Ok, what’s your next move? You can protest and riot in the streets and incite more bleeding hearts to pick fights with cops until more people get shot. Humane! As long as the bleeding hearts feel good.
But @Eleocharis wasn't even talking about the gentleness or lack thereof of the deportation process! The point is that the US specifically arranged for them to be shipped to the torture prison, as opposed to neutrally dumping them back in their home country and letting events take their course. "We shouldn't under any circumstances actively pay Bukele to put people in his torture prison" is pretty fucking different from "we shouldn't deport illegal immigrants back to El Salvador because Bukele might put some of them in the torture prison".
We couldn't deport them to Venezuela because Venezuela was run by Maduro, who refused to accept them.
Moreover this framing of El Salvador's prisons as a "torture prison" is inherently a little dishonest. Define "torture". In Sweden they would call American prisons torturous because we don't give criminals Xbox and weed. Singapore still uses the cane. El Salvador had a massive gang problem, the highest murder rate in the world, they put all the criminals in jail. That's bad, apparently. Now we're not allowed to deport gang members there because liberal journalists say it's inhumane, we're more enlightened than that. Why do I have to accept this characterization of Bukele's jails as "torture prisons"? It's a prison, it's not supposed to be fun.
"Deliberately inflicting serious physical pain on an individual" seems like a good, no-frills definition that avoids relativistic semantic creep where any less-than-maximally-homely prison can be called a "torture prison". I am not trying to play language games here, I am talking about the thing where CECOT detainees are allegedly beaten to the point of injury on a regular basis - not even as a punitive measure for specific documented misbehavior within the prison, but at the whim of the prison staff, including an hour-long beating meted out to all newcomers. You don't have to be a Scandinavian hyper-altruist to think that this is barbarous conduct that the US should on no account be condoning, let alone subsidizing.
(I'm not a fan of corporal punishment as it exists in Singapore, but that's still a different story. Caning over there is an actual judicial sentence, carried out in an orderly, controlled way with proper healthcare provided to the convict afterwards. This may not be our civilization, but it's recognizably a civilized process with limited scope. And even then, I still think the US paying Singapore to cane people would be a step too far.)
If you want to argue that the reports of the beatings etc. at CECOT are fabricated, well, color me skeptical, but that's a factual disagreement I can live with. If the reports are accurate, however, I don't think there's anything hyperbolic about calling it a "torture prison".
Well, tough. Where was the famous Trump bravado then? The principled thing to do in the face of such an unreasonable demand, IMO, was clearly to call Maduro's bluff and just fly them to Venezuela anyway. If Venezuelan authorities don't want to take them into custody, just set'em loose outside the airport. If my neighbor's aggressive dog hops over the fence and starts causing property damage in my yard, it's not actually up to him whether I toss the dog back over to his side of the fence. That's just… ridiculous. Particularly if I'm a zillion times stronger and wealthier and influential than said neighbor. (It'd certainly take something more than an Official Refusal from him for me to even consider paying out of my own pocket to place the dog into the custody of some third party, never mind whether that third party would abuse the dog or not.)
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I thought their home country refused them, as would be sensible for known criminals
From what I remember from reading on Kilmar - when you apply for asylum, you generally also apply for 2 other forms of protection. One is based on torture, one is based on nonrefoulment (dont return peoole to dangerous counties). But basically when you apply for asylum, you can also say "dont return me to my home country becauase theyll torture me". And sometimes you are able to get orders to not be deported to a certain country, even while being denied asylum. Which basically means (until recently, maybe?) they get to stay. So it might be that as much as home country not taking them.
I think what was happening with both Kilmar and CERCOT was that Trump admin was basically playing hardball. People were getting a bunch of nonrefoulment type protections from being returned to their home country, the bar to get that was lower, and then they could more or less just stay. And trumps response was to say "ok, maybe we cant send you back to Venezuela, but instead we can send you to a third counry, like South Sudan or El Salvador." The chance of being sent to south sudan or rwanda or whereever would nuke incentives to apply for certain protections.
In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he was sent back (deported) with a bunch of other El Salvadorans who were sent back to El Salvador. He had a nonrefoulment order that was not respected, which was a fuckup on the part of DHS. If they'd done it by the book he's likely have been detained in the US until the US came up with the Guatemala idea. The Venezuelans, as far as I can tell, were not deported -- they were sent to CECOT to be detained there (still titularly in US custody), seemingly as part of some sort of hardball the US was playing with Maduro, and after Maduro agreed to take them back they were sent from CECOT to Venezuela.
As for CECOT being a torture prison, who knows? There's stories from prisoners, but you could interview prisoners in any maximum security US prison and get similar ones. Some of them would likely even be true, because prison sucks, prisoners suck, and prison guards generally suck too.
At the very least, I don't think it's disputed that prisoners in CECOT are in horribly crowded cells and do not have any right to visitation or communication with the outside world.
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The problem is that if you want to actually get through the ~8M folks that need to be deported at 500-700K a year, you need a durable political coalition that can actually keep it up for 10-12 years.
That won't happen if you piss off enough of the marginal bleeding hearts that there is no way to do it. A paroxysm of 4 years of Trump's ICE (which he's already pulled back on, less than 9 months out) won't actually accomplish your goal.
People seem to forget that outsmarting your opponents is an allowed move in politics. Try harder not to be outsmarted.
Actually I think the Right could lean in to due process as a meme here -- especially with regards to folks who have had asylum denied, had their chance to appeal to the BIA and already ignored a final order of removal.
And yes, for those folks, deportation is the right next step. For those at other stages, they deserve some notice and a solid (5 days? 10 days?) chance to self-deport.
Sorry, your enemies were never going to just let you do it. "Bleeding hearts have a veto so we have to do what they want!" You'll do things the "moderate" and "humane" way and then they'll say it still isn't good enough and you need to do better. This is how you lose before you even try.
Everything Trump is doing right now is the moderate option. This is all right and just. We are going to deport illegal aliens and criminals no matter how many blue voters say we aren't allowed because it's mean.
Midterm elections are in 9 months. One way to lose is by declining to try, but another way to lose is deciding to try really hard, fucking everything up badly in a highly legible way, and being booted out of your position.
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Politically moderate and factually moderate are different things.
And yes, of course the median voter has a veto, that’s representative government. The point was doing it without losing the median voter and without getting outsmarted by your opponents.
Of course a party or a politician can decide to just go balls out for a few years and get whalloped. But it won’t lead to a long term accomplishments.
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What do you consider would be the non-moderate option?
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It seems to me as an external outlier that quite a few of the 'heartbreaking story of peaceful productive illegal immigrant removed stories' are these people, though. Cases where they entered the USA in 2005 or whatever, have explicitly run through all of their options for appeals over the course of a decade and have then wandered off the reservation till occasionally picked up on the current day. Even the OP mentioned with the Grandma who had explicitly received a final order of removal.
Also hasn't a soft-amnesty and opportunity to self deport also been provided with an additional payment to those who take it up?
I feel like those are the least sympathetic such cases. People that were ordered removed by the Obama administration and just refused, well, even Obama was in favor of deporting them (and his clip of 3M over his 8 years is comparable enough to Trump's run rate of 500K a year).
The most sympathetic cases are something like "immigrant goes to ICE appointment, has existing status yanked and is arrested right on the spot".
Granted some large proportion of those existing legal statuses were Biden-era bullshit, I'm not defending that they were justified, but a lot of those folks did have a valid-on-paper withholding of removal. And while the left doesn't acknowledge it as legitimate, the same law that makes it possible for the Biden AG to grant WoR also justified the Trump AG revoking WoR on the spot. Still, it's bad look as compared to giving them notice that WoR is being revoked, a chance to try the process and appeal through the BIA and ultimate removal if they ignore their legal duty to leave.
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Ah yes, those bleeding heart liberals worrying about things like due process and the rule of law and, uh, preventing torture.
I guess don't be surprised that people actually believe in these things and are willing to put their lives on the line for them. Sure seems like it would be a lot better to, say, propose a bill to change laws around asylum etc., but for some reason those who are currently in power don't seem interested in doing that.
Yeah that's how they get you, first they say it's just about basic due process and preventing torture, then suddenly we're not allowed to deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. The bleeding hearts who let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants are now concerned about the rule of law. We're not acting out this inverse morality play anymore. Let's deport this shadow society of tens of millions of criminals who are outside the rule of law first.
Who is saying that we can't deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. Who specifically? When?
That’s what sanctuary cities do — convicted criminals sit in jails that are not allowed to coordinate with ICE. That’s the whole policy. When their sentences end, they’re released. The federal government is not given notice or record. On top of that you now have liberal judges and jurisdictions considering immigration status as a condition for leniency in sentencing — you can’t give illegals the same sentences as Americans because that could lead to them being deported.
Citation fucking mega needed. I think you are lying, or delusional.
Delusional lie. You live in a fantasy world of your own made up strawmen and twitter outrage bait.
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European courts have been known to say this.
Soering v UK
Whatever the hell this is.
Also this if the headline is to be believed.
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I mean you can decide that your goals are so important that you can just steamroll any objections. I think most people have enough of a view of history to know where that tends to end up (30 thousand dead Iranians in the streets anyone?) but I guess you think this time is different? I'll stick with liberalism and democracy, thanks.
People who think like you have plenty of power within the system right now to make changes in the direction you want. Every time the Vice President of the United States blatantly lies about the motives of someone who the government just killed, you lose some of that power. Seems like everybody would be better off if that power was used to pass a law tightening the asylum process rather than kidnapping random minorities off the streets of Minneapolis.
Liberalism and democracy is deporting tens of millions of illegals, as the law says we will, as voters repeatedly affirmed they wanted. That’s why it’s called illegal!
What a useful reply that seriously engages with my arguments.
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I don't think it actually works like this, though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but federal immigration statutes require serious offenders to serve their terms here in full for local offenses before they can be subject to deportation. ICE can't just legally take some guy who's just been convicted of murder or rape and deport him. What sanctuary cities do, if what I've just researched is correct, is not cooperate with ICE detainers, which are requests to hold somebody up to 48 hours after their release once they've served their sentence.
Which, fair, if you want to criticize blue states for that, I think it's totally a valid point of argument. But if your contention is that we should instead be able to eject somebody from the country the moment they're convicted of rape or murder or drug smuggling or what have you, that's a problem with federal law, and one that Congress, not sanctuary cities, is actually capable of tackling. As far as I know, Jose Ibarra, the murderer who killed Laken Riley, is still sitting in a Georgia prison, and will be for the rest of his life. And there aren't any sanctuary jurisdictions in Georgia.
It's 8 USC 1231(a)4.
If every one was going to languish in prison eternally, though... well, someone would complain about wasted tax dollars, but it wouldn't get that much of the Red Tribe's dander up. The problem's that a far greater number end up revolving door inmates.
Sometimes. Most sanctuary cities/states will comply with ICE detainers for "serious felons" being released from prison, specifically, though the dividing line there gets messy since many sanctuary cities also have standing policies by their prosecutors to "consider the avoidance of adverse immigration consequences as a factor in reaching a resolution". They usually won't for those completing a jail or noncustodial sentence, and will almost never do so where they've arrested an illegal immigrant and choose to not bring charges. Many will also refuse to notify the feds on finding undocumented immigrants and some specifically prohibit releasing immigration-related information: this is probably illegal where enforced by law, but it still happens.
I strongly suspect the federal law making this illegal is unconstitutional under general principles of state sovereignty and anti-commandeering.
The Supreme Court acknowledged something similar in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) when they stated that state officials could help enforce the federal Fugitive Slave Act "if they choose... unless prohibited by state legislation." By implication, a state may legislate to prohibit officials from helping enforce federal laws; Northern states quickly took them up on that implication. I don't believe any court directly addressed any requirements for notification, but it seems to go with the general principle.
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I'm not speaking on the legality of this because I don't know and don't care what the current legal situation is. But, this seems perfectly reasonable to me. If their asylum cases had not been resolved in their favor, what makes them entitled to be in the United States? The impression I get from comments like this is that our asylum/refugee system has essentially worked like this: get to the border somehow, say magic words that trigger asylum/refugee case (that you are fed by activist organizations that coach you), get let into the United States with some maybe-in-future court date that might resolve your asylum case years down the line. Until then, you basically have free run of the country and can disappear trivially.
Frankly this system seems absolutely ridiculous. I don't know why we accept asylum seekers at all, there's no reason for it. And the faster we can dismantle this absurd system and start deporting the people abusing it the better.
The United States accepts asylum seekers because of laws such as the Refugee Act of 1980, which was passed into law by legitimately elected democratic representatives.
Perhaps you should petition your elected representatives to change the laws to do so. Until then, the United States has offered people a legal process to be allowed to live in a country, and if they are taking part in that process exactly how they are supposed to, it is obviously not legitimate or moral to suddenly deport them to a torture prison because you don't like what the laws say.
Yes but it was contingent on a good faith application and used in a world with far more poverty and random bloodshed. Decades of concept drift, deliberate gaming of the system and the inherent tendency of a judicial system to continuously swing more permissive as cases accumulate have then produced the current metagame.
The vast majority of these asylum applications are simply contigent on the processing timeline being so long (due to the sheer weight of frivolous applications) that you can easily apply without any real expectation of actually getting it then frolic around randomly whilst you wait. This is playing out consistently across essentially all developed Western democracies
This really seems like a case where you should petition your elected representatives to change the laws. If our legislators actually started legislating that would help a lot with the current power struggles between the judicial and executive branches, and maybe having their constituents getting on their case for failing to legislate would help with that.
Yes but inevitably like all issues of this nature the stack of asylum seekers will be sifted until a small core of genuine and/or sympathetic applications will be surfaced then the entire narrative will be forced to pivot around them despite massive grift outside of it. Plus Trump's team is already running into random vigilante judges in farflung circuit courts attempting to adjust whatever they pass.
I think this is a symptom of the things where the legislative branch refuses to legislate, leading to a power vacuum which both the executive and the judiciary branches try to fill.
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As I said in the post you're replying to:
Yes but that is a vast oversimplification and at best all it can do is briefly reset the current issue.
I don't really see how. America is perfectly capable of setting whatever asylum laws it likes including a complete refusal to consider any asylum-seekers.
The anti-immigration side has tons of political capital to spend on changing the system in the way they claim to want. Instead they are squandering it by electing idiots to live out their fascist dreams of hurting people who are not doing anything wrong.
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Democrats seem to get to just ignore immigration laws they don’t like (sanctuary cities), it seems regrettable but reasonable for Republicans to do the same.
Sanctuary cities have been the subject of various legal challenges which have generally determined that cities and states are not compelled to enforce or assist with federal immigration law.
Again, it would be completely reasonable for the Republicans, who control the legislative and executive branches and have a favourable Supreme Court, to change how the asylum system works. They aren't doing that!
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what specific features of CECOT that distinguish it as a torture prison?
That inmates there report things such as:
"Four guards grabbed me. And they beat me until I bled, to the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall; that was when they broke one of my teeth." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/men-on-beatings-in-salvadoran-prison-after-deportation-from-us-60-minutes-transcript/
Yeah, but what did he do?
Why are you asking me a question that is both readily answered by reading the linked article and completely irrelevant to whether CECOT can be characterized as a torture prison?
No, it is not readily answered by the linked article. What did the guy do before the guards attacked him?
In the US, I could imagine a similar one-sided story getting told. Left out would be the detail of what happened immediately before: the prisoner attacking another prisoner with a shank, an attempted rape, or just giving the guard a funny look. Not going to say it's always a justified reason. But things happen from causes. What happened before is always an important dimension.
I am also very struck that the Biden administration held him for six months while investigating his asylum claims. The Biden administration CBP, "just looked at [him] and told [him he] was a danger to society." The reporter takes at face value that he's never had a traffic ticket and this means he never did wrong in his life. But again, things tend to have causes. It seems unlikely to me that these awful things just keep being inflicted by several different authorities to a totally innocent person.
The phrasing of the article implies that it happened immediately upon arrival. If you want something different, here's one where it is explicitly happening immediately due to an inmate expressing that they could not keep their head low due to a spine problem: https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/11/12/you-have-arrived-in-hell/torture-and-other-abuses-against-venezuelans-in-el
I mean he presumably had some tattoos or something implying a gang connection. That is perfect justification to detain him during the asylum process. You can choose to believe that people in CECOT are only being beaten after doing something wrong but I do not find that credible.
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What specifically did Eleocharis assert do you think is fake news?
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If it's Abrego Garcia he's referring to, ICE actually DID admit error.
To be clear, what happened is that a lawyer, against instructions, admitted that it was an error, and was fired for it. I do not believe that the official position of the administration has ever been to admit that error, although I could be wrong.
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This is merely a function of what gets reported on. The vast majority of arrests and deportations around the country are conducted peacefully, with fewer officers, and without any bright lights or fanfare. ICE are moderate and reasonable in all places except where they face immoderate and unreasonable opposition.
If the media would report on every altercation where ICE officers professionally deescalated a situation, every instance where they peacefully detained a convicted criminal, or reported all the successful operations conducted with the cooperation of local law enforcement, then ICE would have all the credibility.
There is really very little evidence that ICE is actually doing a bad job, but just that they make mistakes when repeatedly put in very difficult and dangerous scenarios, but would the local police, national guard, or any other law enforcement agency do better in the same circumstances? That is really not clear at all, but the media is making it seem so. The BLM riots killed more than 2 people, and yet very many good people kept supporting those. In fact, one might say they've only killed 2 protesters so far! Is that high or low relative to the circumstances they are working with? I don't really know, but I also know the truth doesn't matter to anyone. The question is just whether those deaths can be used to pursue political goals. ICE are just losing the propaganda war, because they're outmanned and outgunned.
That seems like a far more principled defense than actually justifying some of this stuff.
Instead you have Homan and Bovino talking out of their asses.
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If ICE owned up to mistakes, apologized, and indicated that they would try to do better, I would agree with you. But I see them doing exactly the opposite, do you disagree?
I believe that negative press attention is currently the only thing actually restraining them.
Restraining them from what? Were they unrestrained until they decided to go to Minnesota? Are they unrestrained in Mississippi where by most accounts they are going about their business without much incident? Where they have been unimpeded they don't seem to need much restraining. I have seen little convincing evidence that ICE has been operating particularly egregiously. There are many stories, but many are misleading when you look into the details. Some mistakes are inevitable, and the problem they are trying to put a dent in is very very big. If they didn't make some mistakes, then I'd know they weren't trying.
I don't like having federal agents out there asking people for their papers; I don't like the idea of having ICE run massive enforcement operations in American cities. I don't like any of it, and I am suspicious of all federal authority. I really would prefer a world where none of this was necessary. I probably would enjoy the company of the vigilantes more than the ICE agents. This is all a clusterfuck at least 30 years in the making, but we are where we are, and the Great Immigration Enforcement Defection cannot go unanswered, and it sucks. It risks major civil conflict that could, in the worst case scenario, spiral into the destruction of the entire union, but that risk is still better than the alternative.
Frankly, I am not sure ICE or the administration has anything to gain by admitting mistakes much less apologizing, because I don't think that would earn them any good faith or leniency. Both sides immediately stake out maximally extreme interpretations of events to see what they can get away with. When push back occurs, both sides quietly shift their arguments but never acknowledge changing their mind about anything. They're essentially bartering, trying to get the best "deal" that serves their interests and goals. Conceding ground on anything just gives your enemy an advantage. Reality is negotiable and truth is for dorks. The right has been learning from the left.
From, for example, deporting people directly to a foreign torture prison. I fully believe the decision-makers would still be doing things like that if not for negative press attention.
None of the things I initially listed can be characterised as mistakes. Sure, agents can make bad decisions in the heat of the moment, agents can be acting on bad information, whatever. But deporting people to CECOT is a policy, not a mistake. Somebody made the conscious decision to detain Ozturk over an op ed, and to continue to detain her long after it was clear she had done nothing wrong. High-ranking officials made the decision to refer to Good as a terrorist and Pretti as an assassin. Someone decided that 42 days was an appropriate training period for new ICE agents. Somebody made it policy that agents shouldn't wear uniforms, but should wear masks. Somebody decided that they were going to investigate Good's widow.
Those are the things that need to be owned up to to convince me that the administration wants to maintain the rule of law, human rights and so on. As far as I can tell they don't actually think those things are more important than mass deportation, so they will of course never be able to credibly convince me that they do.
This one specifically seems fine to me? It’s possible that she committed solicitation to commit a crime of violence by telling Renee, “drive baby drive,” while an ICE agent was in front of her car. Probably not, but you’d want to at least kick the tires and ask for an interview.
That's fair, probably shouldn't be in that list. It's clearly not being done in good faith though when they are not investigating the ice agents involved.
Good's widow is on camera committing a clear offense. The ICE agent singular has an adequate argument for self defense and I can't really see what you'd try pinning on the other guys who didn't shoot.
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