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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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