Families disappeared and isolated without legal access; one child with cancer deported without medication and pregnant mother deported as well
New Orleans, LA - Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.
ICE detained the first family on Tuesday, April 22, and the second family on Thursday, April 24. In both cases, ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
As a result, the families were completely isolated during critical moments when decisions were being made about the welfare of their minor children. This included decisions with serious implications for the health, safety, and legal rights of the children involved–without any opportunity to coordinate with caretakers or consult with legal representatives.
These actions stand in direct violation of ICE’s own written and informal directives, which mandate coordination for the care of minor children with willing caretakers–regardless of immigration status–when deportations are being carried out.
Both families have possible immigration relief, but because ICE denied them access to their attorneys, legal counsel was unable to assist and advise them in time. With one family, government attorneys had assured legal counsel that a legal call would be arranged within 24-48 hours, as well as a call with a family member. Instead, just after close of business and after courts closed for the day, ICE suddenly reversed course and informed counsel that the family would be deported at 6am the next morning–before the court reopened.
That family filed a habeas corpus petition and motion for a temporary restraining order, which was never ruled on because of their rapid early-morning deportation.
In the case of the other family, a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs. In addition, one of the mothers who was deported is pregnant, and ICE proceeded with her deportation without ensuring any continuity of prenatal care or medical oversight.
These actions represent a shocking – although increasingly common–abuse of power. NOLA ICE has inflicted harm and jeopardized the lives and health of vulnerable children and a pregnant woman. The cruelty and deliberate denial of legal and medical access are not only unlawful, but inhumane.
Teresa Reyes-Flores, Southeast Dignity not Detention Coalition (SEDND) - “ICE’s actions show a blatant violation of due process and basic human rights. The families were disappeared, cut off from their lawyers and loved ones, and rushed to be deported, stripping their parents of the chance to protect their U.S. citizen children.”
Gracie Willis, National Immigration Project - ”What we saw from ICE over the last several days is horrifying and baffling. Families have been ripped apart unnecessarily. These mothers had no opportunity to speak with their co-parents to make the kinds of choices that parents are entitled to make for their children, the kinds of decisions that millions of parents make every day: “what is best for our child?” We should be gravely concerned that ICE has been given tacit approval to both detain and deport U.S. citizen children despite the availability and willingness of U.S.-based caregivers who, only because of ICE’s own actions, cannot find or contact them.”
Alanah Odoms, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana - “Once again, the government has used deceptive tactics to deny people their rights. These outrageous actions must be condemned. We as a nation are better than this. These families deserve better. They must be returned.”
Fatima Khan, Louisiana Organization for Refugees and Immigrants (LORI) - “ICE’s actions today go far past the typical inhumanity of their detention operations in Louisiana. They ignored their own protocols on legal access and protecting children’s rights to enact an expedient deportation they know to be unlawful. Not only that, they disappeared these families before any U.S. Court could stand up for its children. We should all be mortified.”
Erin Hebert, Ware Immigration - “Deporting U.S. citizen children is illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral. The speed, brutality, and clandestine manner in which these children were deported is beyond unconscionable, and every official responsible for it should be held accountable.”
Homero López, Jr., Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (ISLA) - “These deplorable actions demonstrate ICE's increasing willingness to violate all protections for immigrants as well as those of their children. These types of disappearances are reminiscent of the darkest eras in our country's history and put everyone, regardless of immigration status, at risk.”
Mich P. Gonzalez, Sanctuary of the South - “A government agency that sequesters and deports vulnerable mothers with their US citizen children without due process must be defunded, not rewarded with an additional 45 billion dollars to continue at taxpayers’ expense. These families were lawfully complying with ICE’s orders and for this they suffered cruel and traumatic separation. If this is what the Trump administration is orchestrating just three months in, we should all be terrified of what the next four years will bring.”
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From what research I've seen, the phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported.
This in no way excuses any of the other issues like not allowing contact with legal advocates / attorneys.
Difficult to describe them as choosing to do anything:
> ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
What would they do, leave their child in an ICE facility and hope that somehow word gets back to family to go get them?
By Terr_ 2025-04-2618:20 Especially when the same politicians and agencies pushing the whole cruel scheme have a past history of permanently losing hundreds of children. [0]
"Leave your 2-year-old with the angry government man who will totes ensure they are reunited with your spouse" is not a choice that exists.
[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/16/us-lasting-harm-family-s...
By ashoeafoot 2025-04-2615:322 reply [flagged]
They wouldn't let these kids have toothpaste the last time they did this.
By SauciestGNU 2025-04-2617:222 reply Subdermal tracking implants then? Although I wouldn't put it past these drooling sadists to start cutting things out of their prisoners.
By mystraline 2025-04-2618:40 Yes, and that was with Obama and 'children in cages'.
Trump is only turning the screws that were firmly installed by all previous presidents and congresses. The only real shock to this immigration action is the blitzkrieg of immediacy, horror, and flaunting violating court orders.
Courts don't have police to enforce judgements. The executive branch does. Hard to enforce finger-wagging. (And well, hello arrested judge day yesterday)
By shadowgovt 2025-04-2618:01 Hn, as a forum for discussion, is fundamentally not equipped to rationally discuss America going this far off the rails.
It is far better suited for less difficult topics, like yet another web framework being developed or some 2% improvements in database access efficiency. For discussing real problems that impact human beings existentially, face-to-face conversation is vastly superior.
They would transfer custody to an individual who was allowed to remain in the US. This had been organized in the case of at least one of the US citizens deported (expelled?) here.
The mother and child were in custody, the father was not, and was prompt in acquiring legal counsel, arranging this, and suing, leading to exceptionally clear circumstances in this case. This is the docket for the lawsuit: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69940863/v-m-l-v-harper...
The mother was also technically able to speak with the father, though monitored, for less than a minute, and they were interrupted when the father attempted to give a number for the attorney to the mother.
To be clear, I'm not defending any of ICEs actions here, I'm saying that they kidnapped this child who had arrangements made to remain in the US despite ICEs best (also almost certainly illegal) attempts to prevent that from happening.
By wslh 2025-04-2615:39 Easy to explain, traumatic to experiment.
By woggy 2025-04-272:47 [flagged]
By JumpCrisscross 2025-04-2620:21 > phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported
This is what ICE alleges. They're a uniquely uncredible witness among government agencies [1][2].
A judge found the father's allegations worthy of meriting "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process," an act which is itself illegal [3]. That is far more credible.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/court-cases?issue=ice-and-border-patrol...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/ice-immigration-arrest-trial-cont...
[3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
By tailefer 2025-04-2616:21 And I suppose Sophie had a choice too.
The actions by ICE in this and other cases are beyond defensible. If they have a case, let it be heard in open court with adequate counsel. Stop playing the silly reindeer games with people's lives.
That would be one way to make America great again.
You are detained and a guard brandishing a machete presents you with a choice: he’ll either cut off your right hand, or cut off your left.
Being right handed, you choose your left, and he lops it off.
Was it really your choice to have your left hand cut off?
By tomrod 2025-04-2617:47 Aye. BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) is a framework to evaluate this with.
There are more egregious cases, of course.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/us/politics/us-citizen-de...
A post elsewhere about the details said ICE found the two-year old was unable to 'describe her status in full, intelligible sentences', so deported, even though her father (not deported and not consenting to his child's expulsion) wanted her left with him.
From my experience with two-tear olds, I guess ICE was technically correct.
edit - typo
By BriggyDwiggs42 2025-04-2623:44 I think that’s the same case. Was that intentional?
In at least one of the cases here:
The father explicitly did not want the child deported with the mother, had informed ICE of that, and initiated legal proceedings to that effect [1].
The mother and US citizen child were held largely incommunicado. They were not given access to a lawyer, and communication with the father was monitored, and upon the father attempting to give them the phone number for an attorney the phone was taken from the mother. Then promptly put on a flight out of the country
When a judge attempted to contact the mother, while the mother and child were still in US custody: The US did not respond for an hour presumably so that it could remove the mother and child from US custody prior to responding.
> The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that. [2]
And that's a quote from the Trump appointed very Trump leaning [3] judge.
All actual evidence we have here is that the child was intentionally deported (expelled?) against the parents wishes. Certainly against one of the parents wishes.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
[3] See prior rulings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Doughty#Notable_rulin...
Note that it's advised for a single parent traveling internationally with their children to carry an letter from the other parent granting permission, because it may otherwise be interpreted as an attempt at international kidnapping and you may be prevented from traveling. The US government itself says this: https://www.usa.gov/travel-documents-children
Yet here they are deliberately moving a child internationally against the express wishes of at least one of the parents.
By LorenPechtel 2025-04-272:12 Good point. Certainly looks like kidnapping to me.
A mother’s wish, written/formal or not, for her child will always override that of a father. Fair or not, that’s what happens in the US courts.
By gpm 2025-04-2615:52 Actually what happened in the US court here is the US court attempted to intercede while the mother and child were still in US custody and ICE ignored the court until they had successfully removed the mother and child from US custody. As a result the court never got to learn the mothers wishes at all.
(Also not true, but that's besides the point)
By lokar 2025-04-2616:10 She was initially unaware the child could remain. When she found out she wanted the child to stay.
Or at least that is what some reports say. It’s confusing. Fortunately we have a system to due process to figure these issues out.
Unfortunately the current regime has decided that all due process is subject to their discretion.
By BobaFloutist 2025-04-2622:38 > Fair or not, that’s what happens in the US courts.
That's also not actually true. Mothers tend to get custody because both parties are more likely to agree to give them custody (or the father is more likely to cede custody).
If it comes to an actual legal battle, fathers are actually more likely to win custody than mothers.
By ffsm8 2025-04-2615:52 While true, kinda irrelevant?
By miltonlost 2025-04-2614:281 reply Oh wow, what a choice! Imagine, having a gun to your head and saying "but i had a choice!" In no way can you say that these people, given no legal advocates, chose to bring their children, or at least freely chose.
Being eventually forced to decide whether to leave your child behind or take them with you out of the USA is a direct consequence of the choice to illegally enter the country.
Are you suggesting we never deport parents under any circumstance? Having a citizen child is not some get-out-deportation-free card.
By paulryanrogers 2025-04-2616:11 No one is saying parents cannot be deported. Rather that ICE clearly engineered the circumstances to ensure the child and mother were deported without any practical opportunity for the child to stay.
Entering the US without permission is a civil offense, not a crime in the way most people think of them.
By didgeoridoo 2025-04-2616:591 reply You’re thinking of visa overstay (a civil offense). Unauthorized entry is a criminal misdemeanor. Re-entry after deportation rises to a felony.
This is like claiming that getting conscripted into the Russian Federation Armed Forces is a direct consequence of entering illegally
So is their life forfeit now, and the respective goverment absolved of responsibility?
By tomrod 2025-04-2617:57 Such a society that chooses that has no respect for the rights of an individual.
By remarkEon 2025-04-2619:50 Conscription was, and probably still is in places around the world, a consequence of illegal entry or for a number of different offenses. It isn't here in the United States so I'm not sure what your point is.
By BobaFloutist 2025-04-2622:42 Actually yeah, I think having a minor citizen child should probably automatically make you a citizen, or at the very least a legal permanent resident (but that's stupid, let's just stick to citizen).
By exe34 2025-04-2615:58 Did a judge rule on this alleged "illegally"? Elon Musk also entered the country illegally to work by pretending to be a student, and somehow he got given the keys to the treasury.
Americans are extremely cruel.
The real solution to this is to end jus solis.
Separating children from parents is incredibly cruel, inhumane, even.
> The real solution to this is to end jus solis.
No, that's a step down a terrible return to pre-Civil War policy. We should be actively fighting against enslavement and for due process, not throwing our hands up and saying "well, guess we can't [bring them back from El Salvador, have a sane policy with respect to families, have people's rights to citizenship and legal residence respected]".
You got a source for that? I've hear otherwise about some of the parent's decisions for their US citizen children.
By lostdog 2025-04-2618:52 ICE is supposed to keep records, and the courts are supposed to create a transparent record in the case of a dispute.
But ICE hid the evidence and prevented the courts from looking into it.
By rsfern 2025-04-2615:23 The habeas petition for VMS (the two year old) indicates the father (who was not detained at the time of the filing) transferred provisional custody rights to a US citizen relative, and that communications with the mother (who was removed along with their US citizen child) were cut off when he tried to share their lawyers contact info
PDF: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
One thing I don’t understand is how this is even a choice the parents have the legal right to make, assuming their US citizen children do not have passports (I don’t know if the answer to that is publicly known). Can a child legally be taken out of the country without a passport and some kind of verifications?
By pessimizer 2025-04-2615:403 reply I think the US government seizing the birthright citizen children of undocumented immigrant parents is an extreme position.
That’s a strawman argument that I would never advocate, and completely ignores my question.
Alternatives include arranging legal custody for the child and to stay in the US with a relative (as one family was attempting), or finding a legal way for them to leave the country with their parents.
Instead, it seems the government is rushing to illegally remove these children before the courts can intervene
What’s the non-extreme option, if the plan is to kick out the non-citizen parents of US citizen children?
What happens is a single parent is sent to prison? The state takes care of the children.
The same happens to US citizens who have/bear children in other countries. Moreover some will do much as assume the children do not have local citizenship but US citizenship despite being born in that non-US country.
Only few countries give birthright to children born on their territory.
By LorenPechtel 2025-04-272:17 I don't think the lack of documentation is a barrier to deportation. All that matters is that the country they are being deported to agrees to take them. But this has been rather routinely violated by ICE in the past--they are a totally criminal organization. (They would deport people by shoving them into Mexico--never mind if they are actually Mexican or not.)
By s1artibartfast 2025-04-2615:59 Should it be removed for the USC children? Can they return freely without visa?
> From what research I've seen, the phrasing here should be that non-citizens were deported and chose to bring their US citizen children with them. The children themselves were not deported.
That seems deliberately Orwellian. What's the "not deported" scenario you're imagining? Literally abandoning your child in a jail somewhere?!
It's not like these folks are in hotels, or have access to phones or family.
I mean, yikes. Is that really what we've come to in the discourse on this site? Putting scare quotes around "deported" to pretend that it's only "other issues" that are problems?
By ModernMech 2025-04-2615:22 Not ironically, yes, that's where we are. I remember when we would say such things about a school of children being gunned down. "Really?? That's where we are now as a society? How did we let this happen?"
We let it happen by not saying "enough" when the last thing happened. If a school of kids gets gunned down and a society lets that slide, that society becomes one more tolerant of violence against children. We said we were powerless to stop that, so here we are now, bringing violence against children as a matter of federal policy.
By low_tech_love 2025-04-2620:45 Honest question, does it have to be done this way? Or could they wait maybe 2 extra hours until the child was safe? It seems to me that they are cowards who prey on those weaker than them and are too afraid to face those of their “own size”.
> And she was given the choice to get separated or keep the child.
Representing that as a "choice" is precisely the Orwellian part. I'm guessing you don't have kids.
> The only Orwellian thing is she was lied to by Democrats that she could lead a safe life in the US. That’s on you.
This cannot be overstated. I wish I had a thousand up votes to give you. Democrats made a promise they knew would never hold up just for the votes. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and these people who were lied to by Democrats are the ones paying the price.
This is not accurate, though I have found that people who steep in rightwing propaganda tend to repeat these type of talking points.
The Rawlsian veil ethic applies here.
EDIT: RE - the knee-jerk downvotes. I appreciate that people pointing out authoritarianism can be painful if you are embracing it. Cognitive dissonance is never a fun thing to work through, and having done it a few times I sympathize with the struggles you face or may be facing.
By mariodiana 2025-04-2619:381 reply I'm not going to downvote you. But Rawls never applies. Rawls is a big scam. At root, it is relativism wrapped up in the august raiment of state-of-nature social contract theory, whatever his protests to the contrary; and the relativism in this case is what "feels right" to him and his fancy neighbors living in Cambridge.
By tomrod 2025-04-2620:57 Rawls is just an extension of the golden rule, and anyone who is against treating others how they themselves would wish to be treated is probably someone who shouldn't have authority over others.
By pavlov 2025-04-2614:49 Next year it's going to be:
"Two Undocumented Families and Their U.S.-Born Accomplices Deported by ICE"
And the following year, you won't need to include the undocumented families anymore. (And they won't be telling anyone about the citizens who were disappeared, so this headline won't get printed anyway and its formulation doesn't matter.)
By tomrod 2025-04-2615:05 So the US born children get to come back of their own accord, right? We're going to afford them the rights that every citizen of and person in this country has, like due process, right? We haven't forgotten the promise of the US to the world, to respect rights even when doing things people don't like, right?
Because if we have, that's an unmitigated bad.
By miltonlost 2025-04-2614:401 reply This is less accurate. It erases the US citizenship of the children by being born here with the 14th Amendment, and subtly implies that they AREN'T citizens and are just "U.S.-Born" as if the 14th Amendment didn't apply (like Trump wants).
By lostdog 2025-04-2619:06 February 29th, 2027, the so called "Hacker News" is declared a criminal and illegal site. The wartime powers delegated to the Supreme President allow him to imprison domestic enemies and remove them. Gradus_ad is right in the middle of explaining the difference between "begging" and "panhandling" to the hobo he is harrassing, when disguised agents grab him off the street for commenting on a criminal site. He is whisked off to a correction facility in Hungary (it is now illegal for this publication to call them "gulags") and never heard from again. Luckily the agents who disappeared him say everything was handled legally!
By tomrod 2025-04-2618:07 The rule of law requires due process and following court orders.
Declaring a fake 'invasion' and implementing authoritarianism under the guise of emergency powers was already done in Rome, and decidedly is not the rule of law.
By wat10000 2025-04-2618:09 We don’t consistently enforce speed limits but the rule of law held up fine. Why does this have to be enforced absolutely?
By darksaints 2025-04-2618:261 reply I sincerely hope people like you get sent to a Salvadoran torture gulag the next time you drive over the speed limit. Because we absolutely understand no circumstances can afford a breakdown in the rule of law.
By Der_Einzige 2025-04-2620:212 reply I’m so tired of how when fascists operate in the open, the attempt to throw back their rhetoric to them is always perceived as “weak”, “beta”, and incompetent from the public at large. Feels like some SCP object of right wing reaction exists in this country.
There’s never any kind of “extreme” movement designed to stamp this shit out in the USA. It ends up being kids wearing red who have never done pushups or other hard exercise before, mixed with a healthy dose of spooks making absolutely sure that these organizations never gain any real power.
A whole lot of authoritarian bootlickers in this thread who are ready to sell out their countrymen to CECOT themselves deserve to spend some time in a torture prison like that - because there is nothing else in this world that will convince them of the utter inhumanity of such a place.
But you know, “so much for the tolerant left” and all that. Fuck this stupid, tyrannical, authoritarian, reality.
By freen 2025-04-2618:04 I seriously doubt you are of sufficient “in group” status to avoid the gulag.
I hope that it is never decided that you are a terrorist/enemy combatant/whatever and shipped off without due process to an American concentration camp. (Auschvits wasn’t in Germany either).
Oh, you are a citizen? “Home Grown” so to speak? Trump explicitly said that he needs five more concentration camps in El Salvador just for people like you.
Six months ago I would have endorsed wide-scale deportations, but after seeing the consequences—families swept into jails, plain-clothes officers ambushing people on their way to work or school, and communities living in constant fear—it’s clear that indiscriminate removals are neither practical nor just. This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs. Watching longtime neighbors dragged off for minor infractions, the policy feels capricious, and that perception of unfairness only accelerates the broader corrosion of civil liberties. A sound path must still secure the border, yet focus enforcement on genuine threats and offer law-abiding residents a transparent route to legal status, so safety is preserved without sacrificing the freedoms.
Serious question: how did you envision "wide-scale deportations" playing out, prior to these events?
I think the most common of human mistakes is to think that because something is easy to say, it is easy to do.
Once you actually dig in to how to accomplish something you find the devil in the details and complexity in places you didn't realized it exists. I would not believe someone is an experienced programmer unless they understand this idea in their bones.
I think so many people here, with the benefit of hindsight, are accusatory, but they've committed this very same type of error themselves.
I am vehemently against this administration, but feeling like something must be done about border violations is reasonable and thinking there is a way to do that is reasonable. I personally don't think it's the best use of resources, but I think it is reasonable to want some kind of border with meaningful enforcement.
What is not reasonable is thinking this administration would do it in good faith, rather than as a means of power grabs against the legal system, but some people aren't capable of taking heed of warnings, and must experience consequences before they understand. Some people aren't able to think through "where is the public plan that explains this" and realize that if it's not there, if there is only the concept of a plan, then that's someone vying for power, not someone attempting to solve a problem.
When people come back to reality and choose to be grounded in it, that should be celebrated rather than persecuted even if they materially caused damage by their ignorance and lack of thought. Game theory requires punishment/defection against those who don't cooperate, but it also requires forgiveness for those who repent.
By PoignardAzur 2025-04-2619:271 reply I strongly disagree with your framing. Yes, policies can have unintended consequences and immigration policy in particular is a minefield of obvious solutions having terrible results... But that's not what we're talking about.
When OP says "I was for wide-scale deportations until I saw people I like being deported", it's not a case of unintended consequences, it's a case of "When I voted for the leopard party I didn't think the leopards would eat the faces of people I like!"
Unintended consequences means things like "criminality increased because immigrant communities lost trust in the police".
But come on. "Families swept into jails, plain-clothes officers ambushing people on their way to work or school" is how deportations work. Being surprised by that is like being surprised that the death penalty means people get executed.
This isn't a failure of epistemology, it's a failure of empathy. OP just didn't think that the people getting deported would turn out to be people with moral value.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-04-2620:133 reply > When I voted for the leopard party I didn't think the leopards would eat the faces of people I like
This isn't a good-faith interpretation of their comment.
There are plenty of illegal immigrants with a criminal record. Trump's pitch was to deport them. There was also a pitch that strongly hinted at deporting basically anyone who isn't white, and I think this appealed to the racist fifth of Americans [1], but plenty of people were messaged the first part with the second being segregated to rallies, NewsMax, Twitter, et cetera.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/resources/stories/poll-finds-suppo...
Good question. I still think it's unfair for these people to stay here, when legal refugees spent waiting years or decades for permission to enter often in bad conditions in refugee camps. The issue here is officials keep rounding up students on legal visas and parents who’ve lived here for years—exactly the people the article labels “families who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities.” Where are the fresh arrivals?
By low_tech_love 2025-04-2620:091 reply So basically you came to the same conclusion as everyone else who is against this (and who I assume you would consider to be your political opponents): that even though it sounds good and reasonable on paper (as a populist concept), in practice it is invariably used for arbitrary exercise of power.
Here is the thing: hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions, but you chose to put in power the people who like easy solutions. I hope it’s never late to learn a lesson.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-04-2620:252 reply > hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions
There's actually a simple solution to illegal immigration: go after the employers. We don't because we want to have our cake and eat it too. (Same reason these raids aren't happening on farms in red states.)
By recursivegirth 2025-04-2620:43 I think people often forget that even though these people came here illegally, a majority of them submit themselves immediately to authorities to enter into the immigration court. Nine out of ten times, they are just given a future court date and released on their on recognizance legally into the United States (typically with some restrictions on movement).
Why? Because that's how the system was legally designed to work. You want them to stay here, because some % cases are valid (a lot surrender at ports of entry). So then you must ask yourself, what went wrong? Cartels figured out they could break the system by overwhelming it, yet we had a clear cut way to solve it.
The parties politicized the topic by not doing anything about it... and now here we are.
Question: When Obama/Biden supported legislation to hire more immigration judges to work through the backlog of cases, did you support the legislation as well?
There are for more just ways to handle this. These people are tyrant oligarchs, and need to be treated as such. Today's it's "those people", tomorrow it will be "your people".
https://immigrationimpact.com/2015/05/21/bi-partisan-house-b...
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/31/biden-immigration-courts-de...
Exactly—plenty of people said exactly what would happen. Why did you not believe them? Will you believe them in the future?
>Will you believe them in the future?
An underdiscussed frustrating aspect of this whole era is that there is never any true retrospection. There is no adjustment in the credibility of the people who predicted exactly how things would play out or the people whose predictions ended up being incredibly wrong. If there is a lack of consequence for being wrong, it ends up meaning there won't be any consequences for maliciously lying in the moment knowing it's only a matter of time until they are proven wrong because when that day comes, they have already moved onto some other lie and the cycle continues.
By like_any_other 2025-04-2621:09 [flagged]
By chrisulloa 2025-04-2619:02 seriously can't believe anyone thought it would happen any other way
By JeremyNT 2025-04-273:42 I too am curious.
This isn't really a surprise [0]
[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/846/this-is-the-cake-we-bak...
By selimthegrim 2025-04-2619:00 I’m sure they thought it was like the Boondocks Catcher Freeman master’s version of slavery where they were all in the fields playing games and hanging out with pre-packed picnic baskets, waiting for the expedition
By camgunz 2025-04-2622:49 I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are hawkish on immigration: the right's been demagoguing it for... forever? You hear all kinds of total bullshit like they drive down wages or they eat fuckin dogs or whatever.
The real tragedy is that immigration is probably the reason we've outpaced other OECD nations in economic growth recently, and more to the point, immigrants almost always drive wages up. TL;DR: immigration is practically all upside.
The second part of this is that immigration and border enforcement is often pretty cruel, just by nature. You're talking about turning kids back into some Central/South American social system, breaking up families, etc. You only hear about it now because the Trump admin perversely rejoices in trumpeting the cruelty, but it's only slightly more gross now than it usually is. Until Trump, the right used to leave this part out.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/how-does-immigration-affect...
By like_any_other 2025-04-2620:561 reply [flagged]
By JumpCrisscross 2025-04-2621:101 reply > could as well blame this as a necessary consequence of that prior neglect
The endgame for this policy is a Democrat President detaining abroad--solely on executive authority--January 6th types, and other violent criminals on the right. (Or worse, nonviolent agitators.) Habeas corpus predates the Magna Carta [1] for a reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus#Origins_in_Engla...
By neilv 2025-04-274:46 Assuming that this is truthful about your changing perceptions (not just a familiar astroturf tactic of "I used to think X, but now Y"), that's really commendable.
It seems we don't learn and revise much lately; we mostly just get angry and try to score points against the opposing team.
By yibg 2025-04-2620:17 This makes it sound like an unintended consequence, rather than the goal. “Papers please” is the desired end state.
By sjducb 2025-04-2619:21 Well done for changing your mind. Most people would find this post impossible to write.
The arguments that changed your mind are important information. If we want to change the minds of fence sitters then focusing on these arguments should be the priority.
You make an interesting “right-wing” case against mass deportation of immigrants.
> This approach diverts resources from pursuing violent offenders, erodes faith in the rule of law, and forces the whole country toward a “papers-please” surveillance culture, where everyone must carry ever-stricter IDs.
By MyOutfitIsVague 2025-04-2619:372 reply There is no evidence of illegals voting in any significant number at all. GOP voter suppression had a far bigger effect than a minuscule number of illegals trying to vote for whatever reason.
They count toward the electoral college in the census. There is some recent analysis that suggests non-citizens give a ~20 seat advantage to 'blue states' in the house and electoral college. I'll see if I can dig up the source.
They don't have to vote to provide an electoral advantage.
By lazyeye 2025-04-2621:34 [flagged]
Where are these alleged twelve million newcomers? If they really poured in to tilt elections, we’d see a sudden demographic spike, yet officials keep rounding up students on legal visas and parents who’ve lived here for years—exactly the people the article labels “families who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities.” So where are the fresh arrivals this narrative depends on?
> in order to sway voter demographics in their favour
[citation needed]
By dragonwriter 2025-04-2717:501 reply Its interesting you said "citation needed" on that part; I would have focused first on the completely bogus estimate of the number of illegal entries that occurred during the administration, which is about 6 times the actual estimated amount, and in the neighborhood of (a little above) the high-end estimates the total undocumented population.
But, yeah, the whole thing is just repeating partisan propaganda with no factual basis.
Try commonsense. Politicians trying to improve their electoral prospects is not fringe conspiracy theory.
> No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The states are responsible for providing equal protection of the laws to everyone here. The states need to stand up and fight ICE.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-04-2620:291 reply > states need to stand up and fight ICE
We honestly need a Democrat governor to grow a pair and begin arresting ICE agents unlawfully detaining and kidnapping people. Then let the FBI and Bondi escalate it into a full-blown states' rights issue.
By Der_Einzige 2025-04-2620:361 reply I’m so tired of how pussy democrats are. The moderate wing is so dominated by corporate money that they’ll never do it and just let American fascism happen.
The left in America is ran by geriatrics (Bernie) or unelectable young people (AOC). None of them have the guile to do what you’ve said (or rather to pressure and call for the governors to do that).
The left has a pussyfooting problem. The left is beta, and has surrendered the aesthetics of power to the right again and again throught history (and the only times that they keep it they end up becoming as bad or worse than what they are fighting)
Basically we are fked.
By tremon 2025-04-2817:14 So... we're blaming everyone except for the people who played (and are playing) an active role in this fascist takeover?
