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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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start giving up civil rights.

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 never suggested giving up civil rights.

I disagree, and seemingly so do the Dems proposing these changes.

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:

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.

I disagree, and seemingly so do the Dems proposing these changes.

Honestly, I feel like that's coming from a place of not knowing how normal police work happens. It's also a legally fraught position, given that the SCOTUS ruled otherwise.

It's pretty normal for someone likely to have committed a crime to be stopped and have their ID checked. It's incredibly normal and actually statutorily required for an non-citizen to need to keep their identification and visa documentation on them at all times, with the expectation that they may need to produce said documentation at any time. A strong accent is actually a very strong indicator of someone being a recent immigrant - as strong as someone with a bloody knife walking away from a murder scene! If the recent immigrant is here legally, they are statutorily required to keep documentation on their person and present it. If they are here illegally, then the stop was justified. If they are in the 1% of American citizens with a strong accent, then they have a funny story to tell and can then move on with their day.

Basically I don't see anything justifying the response from the left to very normal police work.

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.

This is not in the data.

In fiscal years 2015 and 2016, ICE recorded 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions (book-ins), and four mistaken removals.

During those two years, ICE made a mere 239,645 arrests, meaning the 54 mistaken detentions alone produced an Obama error rate of 0.0225% — about one mistake for every 4,444 arrests.

Overall, the error rate under Obama was 3.36 times higher than under Trump.

During the course of Obama’s two terms, from 2009 to 2017, 56 individuals died in ICE custody.

That administration didn’t publish clear detention totals, but the closest available figures show about 498,646 detentions and deportations over five fiscal years, an average of roughly 99,729 per year.

If that annual rate held throughout the entire administration, ICE processed about 797,834 individuals.

Under that estimate, 56 deaths translates into a rate of 0.007% — roughly one death for every 14,314 detainees.

By comparison, the rate last year under Trump was slightly lower: 0.0054%, or one death for every 18,594 detainees.

Both those figures are substantially below the average death rate for the detainee age group.

By the numbers, Trump's ICE is going a fantastic job at not harassing ordinary Americans compared to Obama's ICE. Trump's ICE is doing a fantastic job at keeping detainees alive.

The legal system is not being disregarded by Trump, every court order has been obeyed.

The performative cruelty and dishonesty is coming from the left, who is terrifying minorities into thinking that ICE is some kind of collection of racist loose cannons who are just yeeting people out of the country without due process. Who lie about the authority ICE was given by Congress and the whole process of being arrested for breaking criminal immigration laws. This terror campaign by the Leftist news media and politicians has been cruel, dishonest, and has directly lead to the deaths of two Americans and will surely lead to more deaths if it continues.

The legal system is not being disregarded by Trump, every court order has been obeyed.

Clearly we are living in different information environments.

Last week, Minnesota’s chief federal judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, threatened to hold the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in contempt, accusing ICE of violating 96 court orders in January alone — more, the judge noted, “than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/06/minnesota-immigration-crackdown-court-strain-contempt/

I'm not going to spend the time finding links for all of these but some other examples of ridiculous behaviour:

  • Paying El Salvador to keep people in a torture prison
  • Lying to the court that Costa Rica was unwilling to accept Abrego Garcia in order to try to punitively send him to Africa
  • Detaining a student for writing a milquetoast op ed
  • Detaining people in such density that there is not enough room for them to lie down, and in e.g. bathrooms
  • Not allowing members of congress to inspect ICE facilities
  • Leaving the cars of people they arrest unlocked and running in the middle of the street
  • Spraying pepper spray at protestors from the car window while driving by
  • Calling people their agents had just shot terrorists and assassins based on zero evidence
  • Releasing people from custody outside in Minnesota without winter clothing
  • ...

I would prefer that the government didn't do things like this. I don't think these things were happening in previous administrations...but if they were there's no time like the present to develop a conscience.

Did you look at your article? One judge claimed 96 court order violations, without compling a list or presenting his source for the number. He then retracted that statement when the government followed his court order.

The article also provides evidence of the court system being used to limit the federal government's ability to follow its congressional mandate, but that is something that I think will need to be proven in a year or so when the SCOTUS takes a crack at some of these topics.

Paying El Salvador to keep people in a torture prison

When the courts said to stop, they stopped. I don't like that this happened, but they did listen to the court order when the court said to stop.

Detaining a student for writing a milquetoast op ed

Detaining a student for violating the terms of their visa. There ought to be more people detained for violating the terms of their visas.

Detaining people in such density that there is not enough room for them to lie down, and in e.g. bathrooms

Yeah, this happened under Obama a lot. Biden spread the problem around, sending migrants to non-profits with deplorable conditions. For example:

“They haven’t cleaned a thing in the time it’s been set up,” the worker reported. “There is [expletive] smeared on the floors. We have begged their admins to have a cleaning service come in but they refuse. Say the 5-year-olds can clean themselves.”
“Everyone on my floor has lice,” the report continued. ”They treated them then [put] them back in the same dirty sheets.”
“I thought one of the girls was pregnant,” the worker said. “The clinic refused to see her. Kids have 100 fever and aren’t seen by anyone. It’s bad.”

We receive far more people spuriously applying for asylum at the border than we can house safely. We should have far more safe, clean facilities where we can detain people when they cross the border while we evaluate their immigration cases. Hopefully we can agree on that.

Not allowing members of congress to inspect ICE facilities

You need to make an appointment ahead of time. Or do you think any congressman can show up at any Federal prison unannounced and be welcomed in?

Leaving the cars of people they arrest unlocked and running in the middle of the street

I don't like that but I doubt that's official policy and I would like to see evidence that this happened before commenting further.

Spraying pepper spray at protestors from the car window while driving by

I assume that you saw this in a small video clip, devoid of context or other angles. I also hope you had confirmation it was ERO that did it, and it wasn't another police department or something. Lots of police departments have been accused of being ERO/ICE in the past year.

Calling people their agents had just shot terrorists and assassins based on zero evidence

I don't like this, but some of these are just, "Politicians released inaccurate press briefings to try to make themselves look better," which you have to admit are not at all unique to this administration or department.

I don't know what to call Good and Pretti, but "terrorist" is not actually completely crazy given that they coordinated with a vast network of people on encrypted channels to share training, tactics, and then be deployed in coordinated roles designed to prevent Federal Law Enforcement from enforcing Federal Laws. By terrorizing/driving fear into the hearts of the law enforcement.

Releasing people from custody outside in Minnesota without winter clothing

If they are arrested without winter clothing then that makes sense. There's no positive duty for them to provide winter coats to people. What do the local police do if they detain and then release someone who wasn't wearing a coat at the time?

I'll be honest I think we've neared the end of what we're going to get out of each other usefully in this discussion. These mostly seem to me like super weak excuses, for things that are mostly the direct result of an environment within immigration enforcement that is deliberately prioritizing deportations over basic human decency. I'm sure you don't see it that way but I have a hard time understanding why.

All I see is a subset of the right, including several very highly placed people in the administration, who have completely lost their minds about an issue that is not particularly different than the myriad of political issues that are constantly being discussed, and don't really care who they hurt in the process of solving it.