This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.
This might have been our experience from our bubble, but are these examples representative of the overall pattern? I suspect for every 1 kid pulled out of public school because of academic reasons like gifted programs, there are 10 pulled out due to religious reasons or vaccines or the gamut of anti-government reasons.
Nobody's saying they shouldn't be allowed to. We're just speculating about the reasons and I don't know if there's really any hard data showing which reasons are more prevalent.
The community got together, worked on a solution, that solution lead to arrests. A politically savvy prosecutor would not easily dismiss an organized community with proven ability to drive results.
Agreed. I think it's important to remember the lack of real "mass deportations now" when you see two things:
1) low Trump approval rating. Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)
2) protests against deportations. Why do dems simultaneously crow about their superior deportation numbers while condemning current efforts as heavy handed and cruel?
I think the answer to 2) is that the Obama administration scrupulously followed the law, actually targeted those with criminal records rather than grabbing people just based on their ethnicity, and didn't engage in practices like sending people to prisons in third countries such as El Salvador. I suspect you already know this, given your choice to draw a contrast between numbers and methods.
It's the untrained masked men with guns dragging people away because the computer said to, that's the new heavy-handed method that America has not seen before except in WW2 Germany and the Soviet Union.
Correct. "Once hired, ICE agents receive training before beginning fieldwork" [1].
That said, "unlike many law enforcement roles, no previous experience in law enforcement is required, and candidates do not need to take a pre-employment exam." And the training is minimal, as evidenced by the dismal deportation figures.
> so just normal law enforcement arresting people
Normal law enforcement is bound by laws and identifies itself. We do that to prevent abuses of power and to ensure that unidentifiable agents shoving Americans into unmarked cars is something that raises alarm, because there is zero assurance it's ICE versus e.g. foreign operatives or gangs.
> Oh no everyone its WWII Germany oh no I mean it's my political opponents governing
These processes are being kept under wraps because they're a massive expansion of state power. The kind conservatives and libertartians oppose. The narrow branch of MAGA that's distrating federal law enforcement isn't representative of any governing coalition.
Understanding why process matters is difficult for everyone when your guy is in charge. A good method is to imagine a left-wing President having these extralegal authorities and resources.
Here's a job posting for CBP: https://www.usajobs.gov/job/849185400
I'm having trouble finding the ICE requirements, my understanding is even less than CBP. The ones without firearms training won't have guns, fortunately.
Compare to state police officers, who go through half a year of academy. FBI needs a college education or two years work experience, and then they do another 1000 hours of training.
If you've ever watched real cops working, the difference in training / professionalism is obvious. They will identify themselves, and be familiar with the case history before dragging anyone away.
Here's one of the apps used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Fortify . ICE agents aren't psychic. There's a database of people who's legal status has expired, the database is not perfect. An ICE official decides who is guilty and issues a civil arrest warrant. The supervisor sends agents to where the computer has tracked them, and the agents arrests if the computer says so. There's no judge issuing the warrant before, or trying the case afterward.
These are a real changes in America, we have a right to speak about it, and it's reasonable to guard against these tools being turned on Trump's "enemies within" next.
> Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)
No. Most of it has to do with the fact that masked, unidentified ICE agents are abducting and disappearing people with no due process.
American citizens are being taken away. People who are here legally are being abducted and sent to countries they aren't from.
Of the deportations, Trump said they would be targeted toward violent criminals. Over 90% of those who have been rounded up have no criminal history.
Masked men with weapons who refuse to identify themselves are shooting people and lying about it, directly refuted by video others took of the event.
This isn't some case where "Americans are upset Trump isn't doing what he said!". This is a case where Americans are finally seeing the reality of what he is doing and are sickened by it.
Ah, I see how you perceive this situation. You think the Democrats manufactured a police state by flooding America with undocumented immigrants in order to get Republicans to go full gestopo in order to fix it. Some 5D chess move where the left is to blame for "forcing" the right into authoritarianism. And somehow the videos coming from communities within America are just "hysterics".
So just pure conspiratorial nonsense that absolves all blame from the perpetuator and abuser. Got it.
No, it’s not a police state in the first place. The belief that it is? Hysterics being fed by your media diet.
The videos that you’re seeing of people losing their minds over law enforcement actually doing their jobs?
Those videos are not evidence of a police state. A police state would have locked them up the minute they started their ridiculous, childish public tantrums.
They’re evidence of the hysteria people like you are driven to by the media you consume.
Do you not realize that outside your bubble, this is how you and your compatriots are perceived? Hysterical and fully disconnected from reality?
> The belief that it is? Hysterics being fed by your media diet.
You know nothing about my media diet, except that yours tells you all others are being fed hysterics.
> The videos that you’re seeing of people losing their minds over law enforcement actually doing their jobs?
Huh? No, these aren't reaction videos. These are videos of ICE violently detaining people they have no right to detain. I'm just going to completely ignore their "stop and frisk" style of fishing for undocumented folks and focus solely on them abusing American citizens.
Which they have done. Countless times. One time they hit someone driving to work in their car. Then they got out of their vehicle and violently ripped a lady out of her car--an American driving to work as ICE did an illegal U-turn in the road--and put their weight on her while they detained her.
That's a police state.
And your media diet didn't show it to you. Your media diet is feeding you propaganda by means of telling you "everything is fine, it's hYsTeRicS".
> Do you not realize that outside your bubble, this is how you and your compatriots are perceived? Hysterical and fully disconnected from reality?
Your head is in the sand, but I understand you honestly believe this nonsense. But you're factually wrong.
The US police state is obvious to most Americans and the vast majority of the world. Any global polling--or interaction with people from other countries, which I do daily--will show you that.
You are in the minority, blaming what's happening here on hysterics. You are wrong.
The only question is whether, two years from now, you’re going to reevaluate your own neurosis and realize how hysterical you’ve been, or if you’re just going to sign on to the next hysteria.
We’re fine, the US is fine, law-enforcement is fine, and immigration enforcement is fine.
You’re not a bastion of freedom and the last line of defense against fascism. You’re just a confused kid throwing a tantrum. Don’t believe me? Fine. See you in a couple years.
Well-stated. Our prior solutions to internal enforcement of previous Border misses no longer work given that the scale of border "misses" exploded after deliberate non-enforcement.* Now larger-scale internal enforcement is needed. Sucks for all of us.
*Worse than non-enforcement, the feds actively blocked/destroyed Texas border protections.
Yeah the emerging 'The Bullwark' wing of the democrat party. Never trumper republicans trying as hard as they can to move the right flank of the democrat party into the bush era republican gradient so that they can pretend that they didn't lose their own party.
Seriously. Where were all these people when the Democrats overreached into every aspect of our lives?
Apparently the only criticism is an accusation of hypocrisy for calling themselves the party of small government. Nothing wrong with the actions themselves apparently! Lol.
Plenty of people complained and wanted all government overreach to stop - this is an even more dire situation, propped up by people who directly lied and said they were not interested in this (which they obviously are, and they are liars.)
Why are you complaining about people's concerns instead of the actual problems created by those in power?
Because it feels like theater for party politics instead of genuine concern. I expect these people to go quiet when Democrats come into power and start doing the same things.
The same things? You mean effectively making money laundering legal, crashing the government and starving the poor, ending health care benefits, stealing directly from the coffers, pardoning sex pests and criminals as they continue to commit crimes, ramp up terrorist action against american cities, drop bombs on boats with no justification, roll back our environmental protections to invest in dead end energy projects, double down on crony capitalism, make it so corporations either bend the knee by directly giving money to the president or have their business ended with tariffs, and generally do everything they can to rob us blind and you say "oh it's all the same!"
The president is sending the troop into cities on made up offenses, he's posting to social media shitting on american citizens, he's doing death threats on sitting politicians, this is not the same you absolute twat.
I have plenty of criticisms for the democrats (who I do not consider my party) but both sides bs is just uncritically accepting the republican framing of the problems they are causing, I don't need to spend my time complaining about the party in power effectively nowhere.
The problem is that the "both sides are bad" people just uniformly vote Republican. Its the cope of understanding that your side is batshit insane, so you have to pretend that the current state of affairs doesn't actually matter, and the problem goes deeper in the goal of normalizing your party.
The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
I've been voting third party for a long time. When both sides are bad (in different ways) it is the only choice left. (The third party isn't all that great either, but they are better and hopefully they send a message that people care)
No because the statistics are counted. People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change. Long term it isn't a bad strategy, but it does mean you have to accept whoever wins (though in rare cases a third party has won) for today. If one candidate isn't too bad I will vote for them.
In my case I've decided on criteria is has not held this office for more than one term (that is I give you two terms no matter what office you are running for) because no matter how much I agree with you I don't want anyone to spend too long in government.
I consider third parties running in Presidential elections to be joke candidacies but what you’re saying is just the whining of whoever lost the election that was influenced by third party voters. Would have been the same result if the third party voters didn’t vote btw.
People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change.
Kinda like how the Libertarians got ~3% of the vote 2016, and over the following years the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire was taken over by groypers and the national LP endorsed Trump in 2024? I mean, in an ideal polity you'd be right, major parties would pay attention to where they're losing votes at the margin to inform their policy decisions. But we live in a far-from-ideal polity where the two major parties systematically undermine minor party candidates at anything above the county level.
When faced with reality over the past decades, and the historically good record that Democrats have had, versus historically bad record that Republicans have had, versus the unproven record that any 3d party had,
and considering what was at stake in the 2024 election,
you either voted for sanity (especially given that Kamala was the most milquetoast unoffensive candidate ever which would have been MILES better than what we have now), or you voted for insanity, because lack of vote for Dems means you were giving Trump a chance to win.
The democrats have a bad record too. The record is bad in different areas, but both have plenty of reasons not to support them. You have to make a choice, (not voting is a choice) and there are not good ones, the question are any not so bad that you are willing to support them.
I'm a "both sides are bad" person and I almost always vote Democrat. I might revise this if Newsom is the nominee however, he seems determined to stoop to Trump's level. Also if the GOP nominates another Romney, I will almost certainly vote Republican in order to reward them for that choice.
This is your cope to justify your side's righteousness. Many people recognize how awful both parties are and do not vote republican. Every socialist/leftist/communist falls into this category.
Wait, are you saying mass surveillance is a good thing?
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