[Upas]

I think the key difference is the usage of face masks and plainclothes - as far as I can tell, from various different news articles - ICE agents weren't concealing their identities en masse using face masks under Biden and Obama.

Based on historical examples of secret police, plainclothes and face masks on Federal Agents by default could definitely make people think that we are "approaching a police state".

[db48x]

I guess it could be purely a misperception that will vanish mysteriously in four years.

[popularrecluse]

So real reporting of happenings from news outlets that don't comport with your desired reality : misperception. Got it.

[db48x]

I’m not sure exactly what you mean. It’s an objective fact that ICE was removing almost 3× as many people per month this time last year, but that nobody cared at the time. If it’s all about perceptions rather than the objective reality then that makes some sense.

All the president has to do is to make a few speeches about how tough on illegal immigration his administration is going to be and people’s perceptions will shift enough that they suddenly care. Now that someone cares enough to start making threats against federal officers, the officers start wearing masks and bullet–proof vests. This apparently causes perceptions to shift even more and people start thinking we live in a police state.

But the reality is that they’re doing ⅓rd of the work. They’re literally arresting fewer people. If anything, that makes it _less_ of a police state than before. And the law that ICE is upholding was passed last amended in by Congress in 1996, so it’s not like Trump has suddenly given them a new job to do.

So yea, I would say that it’s a misperception. The perception doesn't appear to agree with the objective facts.

[tomjakubowski]

> It’s an objective fact that ICE was removing almost 3× as many people per month this time last year

It is? What is your source for this?

According to TRAC's published stats, in May 2024, ICE booked 8,451 people into detention. In May 2025, ICE booked 23,662 people into detention.

https://tracreports.org/immigration/detentionstats/book_in_a...

[db48x]

I should probably have said “removed” rather than “arrested”, since not every person removed gets arrested. I am using the DHS’s own statistics <https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2022/table3...> which cover every year from 1892 to 2022. For Biden’s term and Trump’s current term I used estimates found in news reports though I don’t have the links in front of me. The estimate for Trump’s current term was just for the first four months of the year.

[colpabar]

I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?

But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them. Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people? I also remember when that psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem tweeted "suck it" when a group of people who were trying to use legal means to not get deported got deported. Fuck her.

You say it's a misperception, but I think we are all perceiving it exactly as they want us to. They are going to do whatever they can get away with by any means necessary and fuck you if you try to get in the way. Some people just think that's bad.

[db48x]

You might have confused two different things. There's been a bit of a fight over whether the President can intervene in Iran and Yemen recently, since Congress hasn’t declared a war. But that has nothing to do with immigration.

> psycho dog-killing-enjoyer kristi noem

If you want anyone to take you seriously then don’t call people names. State your claim without ad hominem attacks or other obvious fallacies.

[dragonwriter]

> I get what you are saying, honestly, I too wonder why if so many deportations occurred under both obama and biden, why didn't anyone seem to care? Why weren't judges trying to block that from happening?

Because the Obama and Biden administrations were not going out of their way (which the Trump administration both is and is publicly flaunting that it is) to avoid providing due process under the terms of existing case law, defying "you must not deport person A to country X" orders of courts.

> But then I remember that trump is invoking the ancient "war powers act" to do them.

"Alien Enemies Act", the War Powers Act is much newer and unrelated, but not all of the controversial deportations are attached to that.

> Why didn't obama or biden have to do that if they were able to deport so many people?

The Alien Enemies Act provides a pretext for deportations with less process than traditional deportation process under regular immigration law (in fact, until the courts ruled otherwise, the Trump Administration was claiming, and treating it as if, it allowed no process at all once the act was invoked and the executive branch designated the target as an alien enemy.)

[db48x]

Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang, not every single illegal alien from every country. So a few dozen or a hundred people, not 35k people per month. If people conflate the two and think that every single illegal alien has been declared an “Enemy Alien” according to that act then that could explain why nobody cared last year. But if that’s true then it is also another case of a gross misperception of reality on the part of the people who suddenly care enough to protest and/or send death threats to federal officers.