[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.

[dragonwriter]

> Right, the “Alien Enemies Act”. Trump used that to target members of a specific gang

There is virtually no evidence for many of the people targeted that they were members of that or any other gang, and the standarss used for that designation were laughable.

Had the courts not quickly shut down the Administration contention that expulsions under the act were not subject to challenge, it obviously would have been used much more extensively as a way to sweep up anyone the Administration wishes to deport.

[db48x]

While that is a valid complaint, don’t move the goalposts. The original comment was:

> 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?

In other words, this guy thinks that Trump is using this act to boost the number of deportations. But the gang doesn’t have enough members to make a dent in the statistics. 35k illegals are being removed from the country every month and no gang has 35k members, or even 3k. They might have three dozen.

And I’ll reiterate that if lots of people are angry at Trump because they think that he’s using some ancient obscure law against _every_ illegal immigrant then they are suffering a misperception of what has actually been going on. If this is the reason for the sudden protests against ICE then it is a very bad reason indeed.