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Okay I'll bite. Here's my issues with some of your points.
ICE isn't in the business of detaining every person they encounter without identification. This rule presumably wouldn't apply to people detained for e.g. obstructing law enforcement - just to people detained as part of immigration enforcement. In which case ICE should have some idea who they are before detaining them.
Why isn't this a problem for every other type of law enforcement? You're trying to conjure up an absurd situation that in practice would not be an issue. You simply have to have reasonable guidelines for when ICE agents are required to give their badge number and when they aren't.
Or by, I dunno, investigation? Properly legislated, this is simply preventing profiling, which is discrimination and should be illegal.
Great, Republicans should make it apply to everything.
These demands are only unreasonable if you assume the least charitable implementation, rather than treating them as what they are - the first round of negotiations.
Okay, this immediately makes me think this would be a problem. Because every single time I've heard "that will never, ever happen, don't be absurd", guess what? It happens.
You honestly think the same people who are handing out whistles, co-ordinating groups, and driving around after ICE vehicles won't find some way to be nuisances on this? Really? The people screaming abuse, recording video, and passing around handy tips as to what is and is not legal (even if that is totally wrong)?
You have a much higher opinion of the reasonableness and law-abiding nature of the activists than I do.
As I mentioned elsewhere, protestors are literally already doing this. They are accosting suspected ICE personnel and demanding their identification. So what exactly are you afraid is going to happen?
Besides, the original claim was that this is 'completely unreasonable'. The only person being unreasonable is Nybbler, acting as if a policy change would occur with literally zero guidance, that protestors could 'hack the system' by DDoSing agents during an arrest, like it's a video game and they can chain-stun them.
Watch my brilliant policy mind at work... "ICE does not have to identify themselves during an active arrest." Or how about this one... "ICE only has to provide a badge number to someone they are detaining or officially interacting with."
The point of this proposal, in case it didn't occur to you, is so that people can hold individual officers to account when they misbehave. This is an obvious good.
No, in fact it did not occur to my tiny, cramped, suspicious, cynical mind. Not when we have things like the church incident where a mob turned up after identifying (as they think and perhaps in fact) an ICE manager as one of the pastors. Not when people are sharing online lists of "This is the home addresses of ICE agents". Not when you get malicious compliance of this sort:
You really can't imagine that, for instance, a group of "citizen observers" wouldn't mob an ICE agent demanding his ID? Pretending they couldn't hear the answer? "What's that, hmmm?" "No, no, who are you, how do we know you're legit? What's your badge number?" "Sorry, what was that?" "Can you repeat that?"
And if said agent tries to arrest them or push past them? "Help, help, I'm being assaulted! Vicious unprovoked attack! State violence!"
Well, how nice to know all the protesters will be well-behaved, law-abiding, and will not be screaming abuse and frothing at the mouth. Oh, wait:
No way this could turn nasty, with a bunch of self-appointed vigilantes deciding to turn up and 'encourage' the presumed ICE nark to leave.
In other words, rather than rebutting what I'm saying, you point to instances of protestors behaving badly and sarcastically imply this means ICE should not be held to a standard for their behavior.
This is what-about-ism at its worst.
I'll cop to sarcasm because that is my besetting sin in commenting, but I've been burned one time too many over "this will NEVER, EVER, happen AT ALL IN ANY WAY so shut up shut up shut up with the objections" and then we get "that thing that never happens just happened again".
So I don't expect a random mob of protestors who think they are the White Rose but are, in fact, misery tourists (see our pal who did some light protesting in the morning with his missus then they toured the museums in the afternoon) to behave like sensible, disciplined groups when they're high on hysteria over "we are fighting the Nazis!!!" and I don't expect well-meaning regulations to be workable when the rubber (bullets) hit the road. Some bunch of activists are going to spend a lot of time finding loopholes in the regulations that will let them engage in "I'm not touching you!" provocation.
And then somebody else is going to get shot. Just like Good and Pretti. For the same stupid reasons on both sides.
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Sure. A standard. Not these unreasonable-on-their-face ones, which have obvious failure modes which you're trying to pooh-pooh away as if the anti-ICE side will be at all reasonable, which it is clear from their behavior they will not.
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I have no idea what this is meant to mean. Is it unreasonable to assume that a Hispanic person who doesn't speak English very well is vastly more likely to be an illegal immigrant than a white person with a pronounced American accent?
It's not unreasonable. But there are laws, and at least previously a societal consensus, that you should not have to deal with random police harassment because of your basic demographic characteristics. One of various things that the right has seemingly decided are less important than deportations.
I think those laws are based on crimes where you are far less likely to throw a stone and hit someone who should be arrested. There are only so many carjackers in the world, and most murders are from people close to the victim.
The percentage of people here who are committing a misdemeanor by illegal entry or by overstaying a visa and changing their address without notifying DHS is between 4 and 8%. These misdemeanors become felonies quickly by repeated offenses or stacking against other crimes often necessary to keep a low profile.
So just taking a random sample of the US, 1 in 12 will be here unlawfully.
However, the people here unlawfully are not randomly distributed. They are mostly not Western Europeans, for instance, while a large portion of the United States population still is Western European. They are mostly Mexican, Venezuelan, and Central American. Though the exact number is difficult to nail down, let's be generous and say 2/3s of the people here unlawfully are Hispanic.
Hispanic people make up approximately 20% of the US population. If 5% of the total US population is Hispanics here unlawfully, and Hispanics are 20% of the population total, the odds of any given Hispanic being here unlawfully is 1 in 4.
Now, most Hispanics are here lawfully. Some have family ties to the land well before the land was American. Of the Hispanics here lawfully, most speak very good English, having been raised in the United States or present for decades. Most have little to no accent.
Of the Hispanics here unlawfully, some actually have really good English! Some are DREAMERs. But people who only arrived recently do tend to keep a strong accent for a while.
I will try to give generous estimates. Let's say 50% of Hispanics with strong accents are also here unlawfully.
So if you have someone in the country who is Hispanic and has a strong accent, there is a 1 in 2 chance of them being here unlawfully.
There are ways to make the odds even better. For example, there are certain places someone here unlawfully is likely to be. Using this knowledge, the odds are greater than half that a given Hispanic with an accent is here unlawfully.
If a police officer has located someone who has a more-than-half likelihood of having committed a specific crime, wouldn't you want that officer to at least question that person? Especially if you already have a database of many of the people who have committed that crime, and it's just a matter of checking if that person is on the database.
It's not at all like questioning every black man for a murder, when the majority of black men are not murderers. The only reason to compare them is because the magnitude of the problem is left out in these conversations.
I could quibble with your numbers but that's besides the point, it doesn't fundamentally change anything if the real ratio is 1 in 4 or whatever.
As I said in another reply, there are certainly situations where you might want to change laws and norms to deal with problems that are too bad and too intractable to address otherwise. Everything is mutable if you have enough societal consensus.
But the difference between illegal immigration and many other crimes is that some substantial fraction of the population is not in favor of deportation regardless of how the person is found. You could probably find various different numbers, but first one I found from before ICE was in the news is this: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/americans-views-of-deportations/, which implies that some 40% of Americans think that illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes shouldn't be deported.
So to answer this:
If that crime is illegal immigration, with no other crimes alleged, no I don't want them questioned. The police don't have any right to know who I am while walking down the street, and the immigration hawks don't get to just run roughshod over established practice because they decided that their specific cause is soooo important.
32% of US Adults believe that EVERY illegal immigrant should be deported.
51% believe some should be deported. I'm in this group myself. Of the people in this group:
44% of this 51% believe that all illegal immigrants who arrived in the last four years should be deported. This most cleanly describes my views as well - I really didn't care too much about the situation until the Biden Administration began drawing people in by the millions and stopped deporting people with final orders of removal. Before then, I would have said the biggest change that needed to be made is expanding the immigration court system until every case can be processed within a year.
.44*.51 = 22% of US Adults. Plus 32% gets to 54% of Americans who think that at least criminal immigrants and those who arrived since Biden took office should be deported.
So if anything you were selling your position short. Or there might be some other data point you were looking at?
What percentage of support would you need to see before you would agree my point that, if you have a reasonable suspicion that someone committed a crime, (and a 1:4 or 1:2 likelihood should count as reasonable suspicion) it's perfectly fine and legal (as was recently confirmed by the SCOTUS in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo) to take five minutes out of someone's day to ask some basic questions?
This is leaving aside the fact that most Americans answering this survey have no clue that pretty much all Illegal Immigrants, whether they came over the border or overstayed a visa, have committed criminal acts. Conduct related to “unlawful presence,” like eluding inspection, is a criminal misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on the second offense, and the two often go hand in hand. People who overstay visas are often committing crimes. For example: anyone who is here on a visa is required to notify DHS within 10 days of a change of address; failure to do so is a criminal misdemeanor. Those who stay in the country and work here without a visa are also usually committing crimes like document fraud, identity theft, or tax fraud to obtain employment and/or be paid under the table.
Overwhelming support. You can relax other priorities in desperate situations. But I think the fact that ~50% of the population supports a party that does not support much more restrictions on illegal immigration is strong evidence that this is not a desperate situation where we need to start giving up civil rights.
I just want the administration to chill out. Pass some laws to change the asylum system. Make it harder for employers to use illegal labor. Ramp up ICE staffing in sustainable ways. Whatever. None of those are big issues even if I wouldn't actual agree with those policies. But stop pretending we are in some crisis where where the world is going to end if you can't deport millions of people immediately. If it was actually such a crisis people would not be taking to the streets to defend their own neighbors who are supposedly having such a negative effect on them.
I never suggested giving up civil rights. You are acting like asking someone likely to have committed a crime, based on a group of factors which includes but is not solely ethnicity, is against civil rights. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled clearly and recently and specifically about this and said ICE's policies here are within the bounds of the Constitution.
Here is where the crisis is coming from:
Politically, when immigration laws are selectively not enforced, specific political parties can basically import their electorate. Instead of a Democracy, where the people choose their leaders, we are in an Anti-Democracy, where the leaders chose the populace. The United States has a few unique political considerations:
The first is that the apportionment of representation is based on the number of people in an area, not solely the number of voters, citizens, or lawful residents.
The second is that we do not have voter ID for national elections. To vote, someone must check a box claiming they are eligible. Many people check this box who are not eligible, either on purpose or accidentally. Many of these people vote.
The third is Birthright citizenship. If someone is born on US territory, they become a citizen. Even if they are raised in another country, they can enter at the age of 18 and vote in our elections.
Basically, the point I am trying to make here is that immigration is a national issue. Even if every immigrant went and stayed in California, it would not affect only California. The rest of the country would be impacted politically by the change. The courts have ruled again and again that immigration is a Federal concern.
Then there are the economic considerations. Let's look at a small example: Non-domiciled CDLs are a mess. Truck driving is an actually good job for people without college education! This is a job Americans love to do! If I wasn't college-tracked from Kindergarten and had terrible eyesight, I would have loved to be a truck driver. I simply adore going on long cross country drives.
During 2021, the price of shipping went way up. Full truck load routes that cost 4k went up to 6k almost overnight. Fuel costs increased, cost of living increased, and truck drivers needed to be paid more. I'm not an industry insider, but I do book a lot of full truckloads and I saw it happen.
Then - suddenly - shipping prices went down. Not because we had deflation and the old truck drivers didn't need to be paid more. Because new truck drivers were brought in from outside America. Ones who could be paid less because they weren't supporting a lower-middle class life for their American family. Ones who could be paid less because they were fudging their insurance paperwork. Ones who could be paid less because they fudged their log books and spent an illegal amount of time on the road.
The American truck drivers started going out of business. They could not compete against this influx of immigrants committing fraud left and right. The Biden administration meanwhile would not investigate this fraud, because they were trying to lower inflation, and bringing down shipping costs help with that.
Meanwhile, news reports about immigrant truck drivers who cannot read traffic signs in English killing people on the roads has become a weekly occurrence.
Meanwhile, the shipping services we procure at our business have decreased in quality rapidly. It is really sketchy and unavoidable. We pay for full truck loads because we need to have product delivered to a specific place at a specific two hour window. We have had multiple cases in the past three years where one person picks up the load from our warehouse, then they swap drivers and we cannot contact the new driver. We have had multiple cases where the driver just goes missing for days after the delivery was supposed to take place. We've called the police to report inventory as stolen. We've had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to compensate for the unreliableness of truck drivers.
This was completely unheard of before 2022. Even if a truck broke down, we would quickly have a freight company volunteer to swap out the trailer onto a new truck to try to get close to our needed delivery date. Communication was good, service great.
The basic bones of this story has repeated itself many times. Industry starts to get expensive (partly due to government regulations and inflation costs out of the industry's control). Corporations begin importing sketchy immigrants with the government's help or complacence. Immigrants undercut local jobs by ignoring the regulations that made business expensive in the first place. Service gets shittier, there are hidden costs borne by many, and Americans are out of jobs.
I disagree, and seemingly so do the Dems proposing these changes.
Ok so the median voter is 3% further left, big whoop. Immigrants are not automatons who just vote for whoever wants more immigration. Hispanics only voted a little more for Harris than Trump, and I'm quite sure that would flip if the Republican Party would stop courting the votes of actual racists. The CBP agents who killed Pretti were Hispanic!
Biden's immigration policies were very unpopular and there is quite a broad base of support for restricting immigration. There is plenty of political capital to change things. That's probably why Trump won. There isn't some pro-immigration conspiracy. My preferred policies are unpopular. New illegal immigration has basically stopped. The anti-immigration side is winning. Nothing here warrants the performative cruelty, the wanton disregard for human rights, the dishonesty, the disregard for the legal system that we are seeing from the administration.
Ok, illegal immigrants in the trucking system are causing problems. I don't believe that the solution to that is stopping random Hispanic people going about their day on the streets of Minneapolis.
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I think this comes back to the fact that what the left wants from a police force is fundamentally incoherent:
If a young black man gets shot dead in the ghetto, the odds are overwhelming that the perpetrator was another young black man, and thus the best way to ensure that the perpetrator faces justice for his crime is for the police to aggressively investigate young black men who the victim knew. Is this "racial profiling" (or more accurately, "demographic profiling": the "young" and "man"* parts are almost as important as the "black" part)? I guess so. But I'm not persuaded that the right of young black men not to be questioned by the police automatically supersedes a murder victim and his family's right to justice, and refusing to properly investigate a crime solely because it might "inflame community tensions" is exactly the kind of attitude that led to Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and so on. It's just one of many trade-offs that come with living in a free society. Of course it's not the fault of any young law-abiding black men that they belong to a demographic which commits a disproportionate amount of violent crime (esp. violent crime within their own demographic group) and I don't want them being harassed morning, noon and night, or their civil liberties persistently violated, on that basis alone. At the same time, denying police the right to exercise their own judgement and use statistical heuristics in pursuing lines of investigation because it might result in some hurt feelings seems like a recipe for a) a dramatically reduced murder clearance rate and b) a vastly higher murder rate, once murderers realise it'll be much easier for them to get away with their crimes.
And this isn't just a "he whose ox is gored" situation, where I'm indifferent to this topic because it'll never affect me or anyone I care about. My uncle (Irish, like me) lived in Britain at the height of the Troubles, and was routinely questioned by police officers whenever there was a bomb scare (his bright red hair made him difficult to miss). His sister once cited this example (in a debate about present-day racial profiling) and said it was outrageous, but personally, I didn't really understand the complaint. During the Troubles, most Irishmen were not in the IRA, but most (if not all) IRA members were Irishmen. Whenever a bomb scare was called in on the British mainland, it was usually done by an Irishman. Of course there are familiar examples of miscarriages of justice in the period (the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four), but I'm not persuaded that the investigative method is fundamentally unsound. If the IRA calls in a bomb threat, it's reasonable to assume the perpetrator is Irish. If a man goes to a crowded place and bellows "Allahu akbar!" before attempting to blow himself up, it's reasonable to assume he is Muslim (and consequently that he is a member of an ethnic group disproportionately likely to practise Islam).
*Indeed, everyone accepts that most murders are committed by men, and I'm sure the police, knowing this, will much more aggressively investigate known acquaintances of a victim who are men than those who are women. Is this "sexual profiling"? Is it fair that men will attract disproportionate attention from the police on the basis of their basic demographic traits? As Rob Henderson recently noted, nobody interprets the overrepresentation of young men in prisons as evidence of ageism on the part of the criminal justice system.
When investigating a crime, it is perfectly reasonable to investigate people who have some connection to the crime, and mostly it isn't a huge problem if there is profiling in choosing which of those people to investigate.
It's also perfectly reasonable in most cases for the police to use statistical evidence in looking for and deterring crimes, if doing so in ways that do not impose any real cost on a person (say driving patrols, something that is more valuable in higher-crime neighborhoods).
It is not reasonable to randomly stop people because they are statistically more likely to have committed a hypothetical crime. You can't stop young black men just to see if they might have stolen goods in their pockets and you don't get to stop hispanic people just to see if they might not be legal immigrants.
I wouldn't say I'm a total hard-liner on this, it's more reasonable to investigate people with a more tenuous connection to a crime when problems are more impactful and more intractable. The Troubles is a good example, El Salvador's gang problem is probably another. It is inappropriate to use similar tactics on something that a large percentage of the populace doesn't even think is a big problem, and certainly so in a community where a majority of the people who are supposedly being impacted by the problem would prefer you weren't enforcing it at all!
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Who cares about 'vastly more likely'? We don't arrest people for being 'likely' to commit a crime. This is basic stuff, I can't believe I have to explain it.
Sentence, ideally no. Arrest, yes, though the bar is high. Suspect/investigate, all the time.
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Police do not only arrest people who have already been found guilty in a court of law. There would be no criminal justice system if that were the case.
Here is a video of local police responding to a car crash. They detain a witness for the sole reason that he refused to leave his name and contact information with police, then keep him detained under suspicion until they get a clear picture of the accident.
ICE isn't arresting people for "being 'likely' to commit a crime." They are arresting people for being likely *to have already committed a crime." We know millions of people have committed the misdimeanor of coming into the country unlawfully. The crime has been committed, they are investigating and making a suspect list.
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We don’t arrest people but we do question them for being “likely” to commit a crime. See the original quote:
Nothing here about arresting people based on ethnicity
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People who care about actually stopping the thing in question. It's a huge point of data that we're supposed to ignore, what, just because it gives you warm and fuzzy anti-racist feelings and you don't care about immigration enforcement anyway?
Hispanic people are more likely to be illegal immigrants, therefore what? We round up anyone who speaks Spanish and run them through processing? But then we'd be missing other groups like the Somalis, so to be safe let's round up anyone browner than Marco Rubio. You know, just to be safe.
The thing you're missing is a concept called 'probable cause'. You can't round people up because they're statistically more likely to be in an offender class. At least you can't in America - authoritarian dictatorships actually do this all the time.
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Not the person you're replying to, but as far as I'm concerned, that is neither here nor there. I care very much about the enforcement of anti-rape laws, for example, or indeed laws against cold-blooded murder; but even if some reliable statistics should show that in a Bayesian sense, the culprit is more likely to be black than white, I would still take the principled stand that the police should not be allowed to let that statistic enter into the identification of suspects.
Why not? Because it's wrong. Because it's wicked and counter to the fundamental dignity of Mankind. Because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes far out of proportion with the actual statistical fact, which if unchecked may be used to excuse vast-scale mistreatment of POCs as it was in the past. Because it is an insult to the memory of all black victims of slavery and segregation. A hundred reasons. I could talk about utilitarian concerns and the greater good, or I could talk about the moral necessity of making racist heuristics taboo for the sake of human dignity and civilization - I think these are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing from different paradigms.
At the end of the day, yes, we're "supposed to ignore" this "huge point of data" for the same kind of reason that the government isn't supposed to install telescreens in every home. Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong.
Racism works. It’s efficient.
How was it efficient for 2 decades 70 year old ladies had to take their shoes off at airports when we could have just racial profiled every Muslim male for additional screening? Then everyone could leave for the airport 30 minutes later because airport security did not exists for them. And here’s the thing about racial profiling it’s better for Muslim men too. Since they are about 1% of US airport passengers they would have a security guard screen that thoroughly for 10 minutes which still saves them 20 minutes of their day.
Suicidal empathy like you described worked as an argument 5 years ago. Today people just want a society that functions well.
Racial profiling is good because it improves net happiness in society.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a reply to what I typed. What I wrote: "Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong." You: "But it works! It's efficient!"
Your argument basically breaks down to just saying it’s wrong. A very typical leftist response of the variety “these are human rights so we can’t debate these things”.
Since racial profiling works and is very efficient at reducing crime or terrorism that means it’s a “true” model of the world.
I think it’s very hard to describe something as both “wrong” and “true”.
Because racial profiling “works” it also means that you are willing to allow some obvious bad things to happen if we don’t do it - more young black men killed by black men, a TSA that pats down Asian girls, more expensive ICE operations, etc. how can you describe something as wrong if it reduces bad things in the world?
I disagree. 24/7 totalitarian surveillance of all citizens at all times would also "work", far better than racial profiling. I am absolutely confident that it would drastically reduce the murder rate. But we still shouldn't do it. It'd be a bad thing in itself, an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on hundreds of millions of people 24/7 - in the same way that perpetually being looked on as possible criminals/rapists/illegal immigrants every day of their lives is an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on the tens of millions of non-white American citizens. (Similarly, parents should not be monitoring their children every second of their life beyond their toddler years, even if that does result in slightly more children who get run over crossing the street.)
In other words:
I think that the cost of normalizing racial profiling would in fact amount to more bad things than its implementation would prevent. Above I spoke of the distributed psychological harm done to all POCs from having to live in a society where it is normalized, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. The horrors of slavery, segregation and lynchings are not so far behind us that we should laugh off the chance that reintroducing racial stereotypes into the Overton Window would allow for their return in force. Not in five years, but in fifty? A hundred? Slippery slopes exist. Give the ape brain's anti-outgroup bias an inch and it will take a mile, far in excess of what can be rationally justified.
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The counterargument is that you are not really reckoning with the real-world costs of the politics you are advocating. You position is that you are content with a larger number of innocent people raped and murdered because you find it morally distasteful to make assumptions about individuals, even when they are warranted. It's a fairly extreme position, so you can't expect to win the argument by declaring the other side is "wrong" as though that is fully explicatory.
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It should be pointed out that Israeli airport security includes racial profiling so the 70 year old ladies are not as scrutinized, yet their policies have largely escaped outrage.
Discrimination by Ashkenazim against Mizrachim does not line up with any US protected groups, so western SJWs (who are either American or have American-addled brains) don't care about it. (See also widespread blindness to anti-gypsy racism in Europe). But given the demographics of Israeli airports most of the people hit by racial profiling of "people who look like Arabs or Muslims" will be Mizrachi Jews, and Ashkenazi-on-Mizrachi racism certainly used to be a live political issue in Israel.
I do not think that TSA can distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims by sight*, and the people who support racial profiling against "Muslim" flyers are the kind of people who are just fine with generalised government harassment of brown people in the US, which is what it would turn into in practice. There are enough white ethnic Muslims (Chechens, Albanians etc, including Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev), fair-skinned Arabs who could pass with some makeup (including Mohammed Atta), white converts, and ADOS/Black British black converts that an organised jihadi group would have zero difficulty recruiting people who would not be profiled to actually set the bombs off.
* Note that traditional dress of Islamic cultures is not a good tell for "likely jihadi" because jihadis don't wear traditional dress while blowing things up. The 9-11 hijackers wore business suits, and the 7-7 bombers in London wore sportswear. They also shave their beards.
I support profiling by sex and age. Both German and Australian airport security profiled me when I was a military-age man, and were right to do so.
"Try our free ribs for expedited security clearance"...
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Yes this is true. I simplified with just spot the Muslim and profile them at the airport. It seems like the Israelis have a system that works.
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We actually do arrest people for having 'likely' committed a crime. That's what "probable cause" is. And as @LotsRegret points out, we sometimes do detain people on an even lesser standard even if we think they haven't committed a crime yet (the original "articulable suspicion" case, Terry v. Ohio was about a robber casing a target, IIRC)
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It isn't required to arrest someone, you can detain them pending investigation as long as you have reasonable articulatable suspicion, then you can arrest them with probable cause.
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The "atrocities" this is supposed to stop are cases where US citizens who did not provide ID and were believed to be an illegal alien that ICE was looking for were arrested and detained until they were identified. This would allow any actual alien to avoid detention by refusing to identify themselves.
Because they're not required to tell their badge number and last name to anyone who asks.
Sure it would. Protestors would go up to ICE agents and ask their badge number, over and over again, just so they could film it when the ICE agent quit answering because he had something else to do.
The least charitable implementation is what to expect.
I can see how, again, you could imagine a poorly worded rule that would have this consequence. But any reasonable implementation would provide the necessary protections so that before someone is locked up in a detention center, ICE would be required to do due diligence on the person. Obviously anyone, US citizen or not, who refuses to give their name would not be protected by this. How could you imagine it otherwise? But there are cases where a US citizen told ICE who they were but were still arrested and taken to a detention center, and had to call a lawyer to get out. That's obviously unacceptable!
Again, any reasonable implementation - in fact scratch that, literally any implementation - would provide guidance on when and where ICE agents need to identify themselves. Seriously, how do you imagine this stuff works? Not to mention, your horror situation doesn't even rely on the new rule, protestors literally already do this!
It’s not obviously unacceptable. I’ll fine with spending a day a month in ICE lock-up while they verify my identity. I’ll gladly do my time to help ICE out.
I would gladly wear a masks if I thought it would prevent COVID or get a vaccine if I thought they worked. Or lock myself at home to stop the spread (I actually locked myself at home a week before any lockdowns began).
It’s unacceptable if you think the mission is wrong or would fail. It’s not unacceptable if you think it passes costs-benefit analysis.
Sorry, that's insane. I'm not going to dignify it by treating it as an argument.
Your response is wildly disproportionate to the suggestion, which (to be clear) is that ICE should make checking someone's citizenship part of standard operating procedures for immigration enforcement arrests so that US citizens aren't arrested and detained when they shouldn't be. It's already the law that they cannot detain US citizens for immigration, once they know that person is a citizen they are required by law to be released - this is literally just saying 'hey, you have to check if they're a citizen'. It's a procedural remedy to a mistake ICE has been repeatedly caught making. Your cost-benefit analysis is so off the rails it's laughable.
It isn't. Currently they sometimes arrest people believing they are not citizens, then they verify their citizenship, and they let them go. The "remedy" would be they somehow have to prove they are not citizens before arresting them. Which is like saying you have to convict someone before arresting them, which is entirely backwards.
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I don't think you really appreciate the extent to which many people really, really hate illegal immigration. 'I will endure a high and probably unnecessary cost on a regular basis just to prevent even the possibility of making it slightly harder for ICE to do their job over the next few years, until the illegal immigrants are all gone' is a valid position, even if your cost-benefit analyses don't work out that way.
Broadly, people are well-aware that the Left is the party of pro-bono lawyers and suspiciously-well-instructed activism. It's not that weird that people on the right have started refusing point-blank any restraints that are likely to turn out to be a tripwire or a trojan horse. Personally I'm not sure whether I think giving ICE absolute carte blanche would help or hinder them in the long run, but I can believe the former. It works fine in Japan.
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Yes, now protestors can ask ICE agents for their ID, but if the ICE agents don't give it, they've done nothing wrong. If they were required to give it, protestors could and would do exactly as I said, and the agents or ICE itself would be in trouble if they didn't answer.
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Profiling obviously works, when we abolish it cops can't stop teenagers in the hood while we all pretend it's fine that the TSA gives extra pat-downs to grandma. You profile everyone relentlessly every day of your life, it's drawing patterns from observations, it's how cognition works. Throw infinite quantities of money down a blackhole because AI keeps profiling and the principled anti-racists say it shouldn't be allowed to do that. I think this attitude is anti-civilization, if we have to jump through hoops to act on information everyone obviously knows is reasonable, what are we even doing here? We know where the illegal immigrants are coming from, we know what they probably look like. Sorry for anyone mistakenly detained for five minutes while ICE works through the exceptions, it's a minor inconvenience we promise, until the lawyers get involved. Along similar lines, we can't kill criminals anymore, because activists made the death penalty so expensive, so now they say we should just get rid of it entirely. No thanks, let's profile all the illegal immigrants so we can deport them faster and have a country again, I can put up with a little racism in the process.
If you were a Spanish-speaking Hispanic citizen you would feel differently. If you were routinely stopped by ICE until you could prove your citizenship, solely on the grounds of what you look like, you'd be rightly furious.
ICE should not be rounding up people who look like they could maybe be illegal and demanding papers from them. That's insane! And blatantly illegal! You cannot detain someone on the grounds of 'looking Hispanic in public'.
There's a huge difference between you treating someone differently based on assumptions you make from their appearance, and law enforcement openly targeting people for the same. It's a totally different standard.
Tell us honestly, if you were out shopping for groceries, for instance, and a police officer stopped you and said something like, "We are looking for a group of car jackers, some of whom match your description. Give me your license so I can make sure you're not one of them."
Would you freak out, try to ignore the police, tell them they have no right to do this? Complain about racial profiling because someone who appears like you will also likely share your race, so race is likely one of the criteria they used to single you out?
Or would you maybe get a little tense, a little nervous that there will be a paperwork mistake, but give them your license, get cleared, and then move on with your day?
If this happened once a year, do you think people would be sympathetic if you complained or would it just seem like a funny story?
If it happened every day, I would see where there is room for complaint.
I have yet to see a story like, "I get stopped every day for my ID." I don't think I've seen someone complain about it happening to them more than twice.
I think the real complaint is, "Some of these people have removal orders they've been ignoring and are going to show up on the database as such when asked for ID."
With a side helping of, "Leftists have terrified minorities into thinking that ICE is going to lock everyone up on the basis of skin color, they're not even checking if you are a citizen or have an unexpired visa. This makes what should be a routine, quick, painless check into something horrifically scary. We will ignore that it's our fearmongering that made it so."
Just to be clear, your argument is 'profiling doesn't happen that often, so stop complaining about it'?
It's wild to me how many people are biting the bullet on 'yes let's just racially profile people' despite the fact that it's illegal to do so.
No, that would not be my argument.
I've been talking to a lot of people across a lot of comment chains, so forgive me if you've heard this before:
ICE’s policy is that no one can be lawfully taken into custody, or even questioned, on the basis of skin color. Ethnicity is never on it's own a sufficient basis for probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. However, several factors when taken together can create reasonable suspicion:
the types of job they worked (people unlawfully present disproportionately work in certain kinds of jobs)
presence at particular locations (people unlawfully present are disproportionately found at certain places, like car washes and construction sites)
language and accent (people unlawfully present disproportionately speak languages other than English, or speak English with a heavy accent)
apparent race or ethnicity.
The Supreme Court agreed with ICE on this assessment that in combination (though not in isolation) these factors can create reasonable basis for a Terry Stop. That using these factors in combination does not count as simple "racial profiling" and does not violate anyone's constitutional rights.
Refusing to cooperate with a Terry Stop, refusing to roll down your window, show ID, get out of the vehicle when asked, etc, are all things that will get you arrested, whether it is ICE or your local beat cop who's trying to talk with you.
For example, here is a video of local police responding to a car crash. They detain a witness for the sole reason that he refused to leave his name and contact information with police. This is actually really normal! Refusing to identify yourself to law enforcement, even in absence of suspicion of committing a crime, will get you detained.
Being questioned in a lawful and constitutional Terry stop can be annoying if it happens once in a while. If it happened every day, that would be a cause for concern that maybe Terry stops are a bad precedent. That is the point I was making here.
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Just to be clear, this is not happening. Race is just one factor of four that ICE uses to have reasonable articulable suspicion for their Terry stops.
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I don't think any one random guy is gonna be stopped all that often, and if he is, oh well he can just have his ID ready. Not exactly a large cost to society. Seriously whatever moral feeling you're having here isn't universal or assumed, you still have to give actual reasons why bad things are bad.
If one random guy is stopped all the time he SHOULD have redress... but is this actually happening? Not so far as I can tell. The US citizens detained seem to be either protestors who were arrested for something other than immigration, people who were mistakenly thought to be targeted illegal aliens, and people who happened to be around where ICE was raiding looking for other illegal aliens. None of those seem likely to be repeated.
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