[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.