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Demonstrating that a minority of Democrats can do what a majority of Republicans (plus the President) can't do -- shut down a department of the US government. The Republicans, of course, were utter fools when they allowed DHS funding to be separated, because they lost all their leverage.
Most of these demands are entirely unreasonable under the circumstances.
Uhh, if someone ICE suspects is an illegal alien doesn't have ID, how is ICE to verify they aren't a US citizen without ever detaining them? Just "trust me, bro"?
What, like in the middle of a contested arrest? To every protestor who asks? (and if you think they won't DDOS enforcement that way, you haven't been paying attention)
Learning from the anti-gun people, are they?
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
Given the bad faith from Tim Walz, entirely ridiculous.
The second might be reasonable if applied to everything. As a special pleading to protect leftist protestors, it's unreasonable.
Police ARE paramilitary, and making them more uniform wouldn't make them less paramilitary. I'm fairly sure other civil enforcement is at least as varied as ICE, so this is BS anyway.
Several of the things they're objecting (e.g. stopping people who they suspect are aliens) to are authorized by statute, so this is exactly a minority getting to change the law.
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.
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.
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