[hn_throwaway_99]

> No, this kind of deportation and treatment of prisoners/detainees has been happening forever.

Another assertion without any justification or data.

> Remember the "kids in cages" saga?

Yes, of course, and that's the point. There was huge outcry then, and that cruel policy was implemented by the same person responsible for this policy. It doesn't make sense to say "this has been happening forever" and then bring up an example from 2017-2020. We are all well aware of Trump's view on immigration and the rule of law. The whole point is that Trump's policies are a huge aberration from what any other administration, Republican or Democrat, has put forth in the past 50 years.

[giraffe_lady]

I almost completely agree with you here. But it is striking that they didn't need to create any new agencies to do this. All the parts of it were in place. They were in place already for trump to use the first time, and they were still in place when he got back into power.

Due process and transparency on border & immigration interactions has been alarmingly bad for a long time now. Has this never happened before, hidden inside this apparatus? I'm not confident of that. This is certainly different in its scale and ferocity. But I see where they are coming from too.

[margalabargala]

Much as I detest the current administration, the parent comment is correct. While things under both Trump administrations did get mildly worse than they were under his Democrat predecessors, they were plenty bad under Obama and Biden as well.

You're talking about bringing up examples from 2017-2020; it turns out, plenty of the examples that were brought up back then, were in fact from the Obama years. Example: https://apnews.com/article/a98f26f7c9424b44b7fa927ea1acd4d4

[hn_throwaway_99]

Let's look at your own link:

> The story featured photos taken by AP’s Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. The caption refers to U.S. efforts to process 47,000 unaccompanied children at the Nogales center and another one in Brownsville, Texas.

I don't know how else you're supposed to handle 47,000 unaccompanied children when there simply aren't the facilities to hold them all, e.g. in foster homes. I think that is fundamentally different than deporting US citizens.

And yes, when it comes to Trump's first term, I don't really see anything wrong with keeping unaccompanied children in detention centers, at least temporarily. The much bigger issue I had was the specific policy of separating families.

[margalabargala]

Yes, I fully agree with everything you're saying.

My point is more that I'm not sure exactly how much of what ICE does can particularly be attributed to the administration, on account of the same sorts of stuff happening under every administration, and the waters getting muddied by things being presented in false contexts, which is what I was trying to show with the link I posted.

The family separation policy was horrible, but it was yet another piece of cruel dehumanization on the cruel dehumanization pile that was already there. Secretly revoking student visas and then snatching that person off the street by masked plainclothes officers like happened to Rumeysa Ozturk is cruel and awful, but also, the personnel who did that and their attitude did not appear overnight; ICE is has ICE has always been, and all that changes is the length of the leash given by the President.

What I object to is the implicit framing of what was happening pre-Trump as being fine and correct, and it's only what Trump is doing that's beyond the pale. But I am glad that it's opening people's eyes to what is happening and hope that by shining light on it, perhaps post-Trump we can move to something better than pre-Trump.

[reseasonable]

The treatment part has happened for decades, Las Hieleras is one of many examples. But the deporting citizens part hasn’t happened for about 70 years since Operation Wetback which was nearly an identical playbook of today.

Mass visa revocations happened about 50 years ago since the Iran Hostage Crisis. And a few other events over the 20th century reflect well with today like Japanese internment camps. CECOT out does Gitmo and Angel Island, but damn, we just do a lot of fascist and unjust stuff as a nation.

The 1880’s resulted in us switching our attention from Native Americans to immigrants and we never really let off the gas on that front.