But now we aren't talking about intelligence services anymore. ICE truly is Stasi for America, employing tactics such as "isolating them, depriving them of sleep and using psychological tricks such as threatening to arrest relatives." (From Wikipedia about Stasi.)
This year ICE will also become the "armed wing of the Party" thanks to fresh funding.
Grandpa: "It was a very controversial time, yes. Lots of people doing what they believed was best."
Grandchild: "Did ICE ever go after you?"
Grandpa: "I worked for the--it was only office--I mean, I was unemployed then. Yes, that's right! Tricky economy, don't you know. Only odd-jobs. I lived in a place where those things weren't happening. In fact, most of us didn't really know about it until it was all over. You remember that, right dear?"
Mother: <frustrated death-glare> "...Come along, let's wash your hands before dinner."
If not, and if you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch. The director said "It was like I went to Germany 40 years after WW2 and found out the Nazis had won".
There was an "anti-communist" massacre in Indonesia in 1965. The killers were sanctioned by the government who remained in power/are still very powerful nowadays. (When a reformist president said "maybe we can look at this part of the country's past", the rumour was, the army was going to let protesters (who are still gung-ho communist-hating) protest near the presidential palace, and not intervene if/when they invade it.
This documentary follows one old killer and his "journey" from being able to talk about it casually until he ends up meeting his conscience.
Here he is in the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZqEzIEWzPk
And the full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q
-- Norm MacDonald
The administration's kept them on side with culture wars red meat so far...
But the further ICE / police militarization goes, the more awkward the situation with right-wing militia types is going to get.
MAGA was chanting "president of peace" only a few months ago, and did anyone complain about Venezuela? Not a peep. They thrive on logical contradictions.
It might not be the right door, but that doesn't matter to them.
Apples and oranges, though, and it's all fruit.
interesting that the ICE is performing that hallmark of 20th century - mass removal of "undesirable" people from society and placement them into the camps without criminal charge and judicial oversight, etc. thus totally undermining the main contract between government and society - due process.
At this point in time, it's not apparent if the current regime will prevail. Thus, it's time for brownshirt tactics. When Presidential/King/Dictatorial power is fully consolidated, States' Rights are just a memory, and all nonloyal judges are fired, it's time for the disciplined Career Bureaucrats to join ICE.
This is why you hear about old grannies being arrested and deported and random immigrant workers with no criminal history being nabbed.
Basically, ICE is a group of bounty hunters and they have no qualms about breaking the law if it leads to a nice payday.
I understand their recruitment incentives are out of this world, but have not found reliable source for per-deportation incentives, and want to make sure I argue with 100% factually supported data.
They go after immigrants without a legal basis to be there, which by definition of the word and law means they are in fact not law-abiding and _illegal_immigrants.
Just because you don't like a law doesn't mean it's not lawful to enforce it.
If we say there are ~~11 million under documented immigrants, there are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions that e.g. Were legal until the orange orangutan decided otherwise. There are people under ambiguous laws and people in tricky cases.
This is the equivalent to saying everybody who went 57mph in 55mph zone is a criminal and should be executed.
Life has nuance.
If you add up the budgets of all the various "police" forces in the US, how much money is spent each year keeping the domestic population in line?
I'm interested, as it seems that lots of groups in the US have their own overlapping police force rather than relying on "the" police. Apart from the total budget, it would be interesting to see a list of all the various police type forces at work in the US.
Check out Indeed.com and search for IT gigs in Northern VA or MD or DC, or a couple other federal-ish locations.
Lots of "180k for 6 month contract supporting DHS client deploying next gen cameras"
— Sent from my Palantir employee device
(Satire, if not obvious.)
The argument was, yes it's legal to put a tail on a person when they're out in public because that's just a cop observing a person of interest out in public. But electronic trackers are something quantifiable different due to the ease of tracking many people without having to use manpower to do it. It's the thin-edge of mass, casual surveillance of the population.
In other words, putting a tail on someone should be manpower intensive because that's a check on police power, they have to really want to track someone to invest potentially several officers' time to it full time, whereas sticking a bug on a car is something they can do to dozens of cars per day per officer.
Of course now they don't even have to do that because our police state has normalized centralized cctv camera databases, license plate trackers that continuously track the movement of every vehicle in a city into a database. Now they're doing the same with facial recognition.
Now it's even a felony in Florida to do anything to block license plate trackers from tagging your vehicle (so you can't obscure your plate in a way that leaves it readable to humans but not to the automatic tracking software). No doubt we'll have such laws for facial recognition software soon as well.
Police were always allowed to bug a vehicle with a court order. They weren't allowed to just casually bug random people's cars because that's mass-surveillance. Now mass-surveillance is completely normalized. Every citizen is treated as a potential criminal and surveilled into a database.
(for context this is not partisan - I consider myself a libertarian, but at least the Democrats don't hate my country)
A good friend of mine who also works on tech is utterly disconnected from current events. Whenever I offer a discussion or say “hey did you hear about X?” his response is always skepticism that such a thing could occur. He has a newborn and now he’s even more disconnected (somewhat more understandable given the child).
It seems like a lot of people in tech are like that, or increasingly like that. I have a diverse stable of publications, journalists, subject matter current events podcasters, and other sources in my feed readers and my circle. Sitting between these things, it seems like there is a widening gulf.
Unfortunate timing of this article going live... Some of that seems quaint now.
Allegedly, the agent shot in self defense, but the shot was taken after the car started moving away from the agent.
The woman was identified as a 37 year old US citizen. She was not part of any ICE protest groups.
It was.
> In order to hit the driver, he would have been standing at the front of the car off-center.
He was.
Vehicle was moving forward, in a right hand turn, moving past the officer, but not towards/at the officer. The car did make it past the officer, without harm to the officer.
That's not self-defense, that's murder.
And ICE does not have the authority to detain a citizen for a traffic violation, any more than I do.
If you want to revise your assessment to include the creation of this problem by having a lax border, I can agree with you somewhat. We should not require border police far away from the borders. But we do require it now, because certain malicious politicians let in a bunch of people illegally.
Despite the fact that I suspect this scheme is in play, we do actually need to get these illegals out. I believe they have let welfare leeches, common criminals, foreign military, and terrorists all through the border to make sure that we would need federal help to get them out. Rejecting federal solutions now is not the answer. The answer is to let them solve the problem and insist that things go back to normal afterward.
If those federal solutions are not intended to solve unauthorized residency but instead to put us in a permanent authoritarian state where we don't have an afterward where we have the power to insist on things?
That's the greater threat than "illegals" at the moment IMHO.
Federal authority is in fact required to evict people who were allowed to enter in bad faith. There's no getting around that. You either let them stay and suffer higher crime, worse job market, and worse government benefits, or you make them leave. Many Democrats have come out and said that they will not comply with federal law. Now there are Republicans at the top so maybe the law can finally be enforced.
This is another theory as to why the massive illegal and fraudulent legal immigration under pretense of asylum was allowed: https://www.conservapedia.com/Cloward_and_Piven_Strategy Another one is the mere fact that in a democracy, there is always an incentive to expand the voter rolls. There is even this motive on a state level, because seats in Congress are apportioned according to census data that includes all people residing in each district/state. It's very easy to understand that importing millions of people and trying by any means to legalize them and defeat immigration enforcement is one way to try to steal a country. It's treasonous and if we allow this threat then we will not have a country few years from now.