[_V_]

As an non-American, this situation seems really crazy and is quite hard to understand for me. Why would anyone want to prevent deportation of someone, who is in the country illegaly?

Is this a cultural thing? Because I've heard that US immigration laws kind of suck (long waiting times etc), but I don't really see how this is a solution to anything?

The techical aspect I get of course - I use Waze & I'm glad when someone reports cop with a radar etc. But ICE is not really something, that should concern normal citizens, right? They don't normally interact with US citizens, so as long as you have some kind of ID, they can check that and that is the end of your interaction with them. Or am I missing something?

I'd honestly be glad, if someone could explain that to me, I'm genuinely interested in understanding what is going on.

[favflam]

You have never been accosted by police and assumed to be a criminal, especially in a country foreign to where you live? I think this experience would shed light on your question.

ICE is different from other police agencies. The "punishment" is deportation, which ICE insists requires no time in court in front of a judge to mete out this "punishment". And as we have seen with guy sent to the El Salvador gulag, "deportation" is not simply getting put on a plane back home. It means getting sent to a foreign prison or war zone (South Sudan).

So, you have a small risk of a catastrophic outcome when interacting with ICE. And you will have no recourse in court because ICE intends to make you disappear first. And for many Americans, this whole situation is an affront to American way of life (no due process, very nazi like behavior with the Florida concentration camp).

Lastly, the US is different from other countries because the states are partially sovereign. State law and federal law don't generally intersect and state/local police have no duty to enforce federal law. They aren't supposed to enforce federal law either. In other countries, there is typically a national police agency all police operate under and provincial governments operate under national law.

[_V_]

I have been checked like that as I travel a lot through the Europe. And atleast in my case I just showed them my ID, they ran it through the database and that was the end of it. It sucked, but it was a one-off, so I shrugged it off.

I would argue that deportation is not really a punishment. It is just ejecting you from a place you should not be in the first place - basically a state-operated bouncers. From the perspective of the citizen, I'd want people like that out - for my sake, and their. Because they will create gray economy & not pay taxes. And not only that - since they are in the grey zone of the economy, the people who will employ them can 1) really abuse them as they have no legal/work protections and 2) those companies can get quite a big advantage over other as they have much lower labor costs. Which in turn hurts companies that are employing legal workers, which in turn hurts tax revenue.

Regarding being sent to the active war zones - I always thought that US do have asylums for people esaping from war etc? Meaning those people should be able to get some permit to stay & therefore should not be affected by ICE at all - or is this not a thing in the US? For some reason I thought that this is a part of some kind of international treaty or something, that you cannot deport people who are escaping from war.

Regarding the El Salvador, I read quite a lot about CECOT and about (recent) history of El Salvador and to be frank, I totaly get why the people in El Salvador chose to do what they did. The amount of atrocities that local gangs were commiting was incredible and given the sheer amount of the gang members and their violence, there is really nothing "human" you can do. Granted, I have not visited El Salvador, so my information may not be 100% correct, but right now I shed no tears for the gang members in their gulags. We really are not talking about people that you can reason with.

I knew US states were partially sovereign, but I always thought that federal laws are applied country wide & are enforced like that on all levels. And the local laws are on top of those. I did not know that the local police does not/should not enforce federal law I thought that if you commit something like wire fraud, local police will be working with the FBI to catch you. But as far as I understand it, local police is not really involved in those deportations, right? I always saw ICE agents (= federal) running around & rounding people up.

Thanks for the comment & explanation

[carefulfungi]

Deportations can remove people who have been in the country for decades.

In short, being deported can destroy your financial safety, risk your personal safety, remove you from your social safety net, separate you from your family, and leave you in a country to which you have no recent connection and may not even speak the language.

We are a country, largely, of immigrants. Many of us (but perhaps a minority these days) believe that if you work hard, support your community, and live peacefully, you should be able to make your way to a better future in America. So in this way, mass deportation is also a conflict of values. Especially as the administration revokes naturalization and threatens birthright citizenship.

[_V_]

That's what I find so strange as a European - how can you be in country for decades & still function? Like getting a bank account, employment, medical assistance - all of this should be virtually impossible. Or atleast in the Europe it seems to be the case.

Of course, if US did not enforce immigration policies for decades, I can see why people are upset when they suddenly start being enforced. But on the other hand I'd also have to ask, why no government for the past 20 years did not bother to change those laws? I mean if the Democrat party (?) mostly stands for not enforcing these immigration policies, they certailny had their time in power, right?

And without getting into the details about whether deportations are right or wrong, it seems to me that most people that are protesting right now should actually aim their anger on the Democrat party who actually left everyone hanging. This administration (atleast from my "outsider" point of view) just does what they said they will do all along.

Or am I missing something? Thanks for your comment though, I honestly did not know that there was little to no enforcement of these laws for so long.

[carefulfungi]

> why no government for the past 20 years did not bother to change those laws?

There have been efforts by all presidents over the last 20 years to do so.

Obama increased the rate of deportations and doubled border patrols as part of a gambit to reach consensus on immigration reform. Congress didn't take up the offer. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/01/29/preside....

Trump (first term) put forward reforms that never passed the Senate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act).

Biden late in his term put forward an immigration reform package that Trump, as a candidate, guided his party to reject. https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/unraveling-misinformation-...

The US Congress is not an effective institution. It is captured by lobbying dollars. And the specific geographies each member represents in the House of Representatives have been organized to create partisan (far-left/far-right) districts that don't elect middle-ground candidates. Congress is more partisan than the country in general and also corrupted by financial influence. By design, the US Congress requires broad consensus to operate (bills need to pass the house, the senate, and then be signed by the president; to pass the senate, many bills need 2/3rds approval in practice). Congress has been largely unable to reach this broad consensus (on many issues, not just immigration) over the last many years.

[_V_]

Thanks for the clarification! I don't really watch US politics up close that much so this is a new info for me.

But if these things are true, it means that political representation in the US is utterly broken and needs to be somehow re-shaped. I mean the fact that there were attempts to do something for past 20 years and nothing has been done (effectively) is just mad. Right now you seemingly have some kind of status quo, that can be shifted to one side or another through executive orders, right?

That's insane, it seems that after 250 years or so you basically ended up with a crossover of a monarchy and corporatism.

From the outside the congress seems really extremely polarized to me - either extremely conservative people (10 commandments in every classroom, no abortion, no universal healthcare etc) or extreme progressives (no difference between man/woman, cannot tell what a woman is etc). There seems to be no "sane" middle grounds on the US political scene - or atleast it is not visible to the outside.

I kind of feel for you, that actually really sucks. And the worst part is that I personally don't really see any "non-messy" way to change this system because it is controlled by the very people you would need to get rid of in order to make it actually work. And all of them will fight for the status quo, because many of them have been part of the system for so long, that they could not survive by doing anything else.

[carefulfungi]

When thinking about the complexity of the United States it might be useful to compare it to Europe as a whole. The US is physically larger. The EU has 1.5x the population. Spain, Germany, Italy, and Hungary are four very different places. As are California, Ohio, Alabama, and Alaska. Does it feel strange to you that there aren't EU-wide social or health insurance programs; or that Hungary has different politics from Luxembourg; or that Greece and Germany have different economies? It is a very sloppy analogy. However, it is closer to comparing like orders of magnitude.

[_V_]

I'm thinking about the US in the similar manner as the whole EU, and this is probably the source of my misunderstanding.

I'm not surprised by the fact that California has a different politics to for example Florida (I hope I picked good "extreme" cases there ). That is, as you said, very similar to the EU - you have extremely conservative Poland/Hungary and you have very liberal France (for example). But in EU the federal enforcement mostly works through the local governments and is not a completely separate entitiy.

In the EU we really don't have "federal law" in the same manner you seem to have in the US. When the EU passes a law, all states implement it locally (even though the local implementation may vary) and the local law enforcement enforces that law. We don't really have a federal ICE for example, it is always a thing that is handled by the local state. (Well, perhaps there is an official part of the Europol that handles immigration, I have never really heard about it nor have I seen anyone).

We don't have a "federal" EU army, too. Every state has its own armed forces, that are completely independent (well, chain of command-vise) to the others.

Another difference is - as you pointed out - that we are much more densely populated (like 3 times the population density). That's why some of the things we said really surprised me, because you cannot really escape others in the EU. Almost anywhere you go, you are at most 30m by car to some form of "civilization" (for example city/village with working internet and a pub). Btw even though this might be a little bit of an exaggeration, it is not a big one

[NoThisIsMe]

> no difference between man/womnan

For the record, nobody says or believes this. We believe one should be free to change their gender, eg a woman should be free to live as a (trans) man. That's an entirely different thing than saying the man/woman dichotomy doesn't exist.

[_V_]

That was, of course, a little bit of an exaggeration just to paint a picture. And it was not that important to the overall argument, that's why I formulated it so lazily (I wanted to sum things up in few words).

However if we'd go in there, I think there are many people on this side of the argument that really believe/push the extreme version of this. Atleast that's my impression. But since we had for example biological males competing with biological females in strenght-based sports, I'd say this impression is not that inaccurate.

That is, atleast for me personally, an insane thing. Even though I personally fully believe that trans person should be able to live freely their live, I think there are some limitations simply because of that dichotomy and sports are one of those few examples of things trans person should not automatically be able to do and it should be strictly on the case-by-case basis.

But maybe I'm wrong - I'm of course very open discussing other points of view. These sensitive topics are rarely discussed in a civil manner online, so I'd be honestly glad to do so, because I really want to try & understand what drives people on this side of the argument.

[seethedeaduu]

And that sex is not an immutable property but rather something that can be changed with medical transition.

[refurb]

> As an non-American, this situation seems really crazy and is quite hard to understand for me. Why would anyone want to prevent deportation of someone, who is in the country illegaly?

As someone not born in America, I find the politics surrounding it quite odd as well.

I've lived in 5 different countries so far (ranging from developed to developing), including the US, and what makes the US stand out is the lack of immigration enforcement. It's wild that you can enter the US illegally (or overstay) and, until recently, live your entire life without much concern. You can be employed illegally, go to school, get a bank account, pay taxes, and even be charged with a crime, serve a sentence and be released, without anyone bothering to see if you're in the country legally.

Every other country I've lived in takes immigration seriously. If caught in the country illegally, you're deported very quickly and pretty much banned for life from coming to the country again. Police and the courts enforce immigration laws, employers face serious penalties for hiring people in the country illegally.

And practically nobody in those countries bats an eye. They see it as normal as enforcing any other law.

[_V_]

You can be charged, sentenced and then *released* as an illegal without anyone notifying ICE? Wow, that's wild!

So the federal justice system & laws are completely separate from the local law and one does not talk to the other? I always thought that these things are more interconnected.

In my country I know for sure, that these systems are interconnected so if you are for example checked during a traffic stop, the police officer can immediately see whether you have a valid permit to stay. And if you don't they will immediately arrest you & hand over to the immigration enforcement.