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?
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.
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?
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
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.
Actually what happened in the US court here is the US court attempted to interceded 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
"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.)
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?
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).
This has literally been declared not the case by the president, and being contested in court, and held as true by a significant percentage of the population. It’s not semantics - it’s become a point of national disagreement.
It also leaves out all mention of process. The issue here isn’t that the parents are choosing to bring their citizen children with them but that they’re being denied all ability to leave their citizen children with their citizen parent. This is the crux of the actual issue here.
It’s not the case already for foreign diplomats on US soil. If the Russian ambassador’s wife gives birth at a US hospital while visiting the embassy, the child does not get citizenship.
Mark my words, Trump is going to win that court case. It’s not far fetched at all to interpret “*
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof*” to mean people that have legally entered the country.
Less than half the population of the world live in birthright citizenship countries. Such countries as all of Eurasia except Pakistan, and all but a handful of African countries. Do those countries not have rational thinking people?
It's not a matter of rationality and logic. The executive believes the 14th amendment only applies to former slaves. They don't believe it's operable in the 21st century and they don't believe it applies to foreign nationals. They call such children "anchor babies". Courts don't agree with that, but the executive also believes courts don't have the right to limit the executive when it comes to matters of immigration.
I can understand why this level of pedantry is annoying but we are not dealing with good faith arguments here. They are power plays.
> "U.S Born" == "U.S Citizenship" would be the default assumption of any rational, thinking person
Not in trump’s america, not if they have their way, and this nonsense wordplay is part of it. Look at the statements around a third term; those arent jokes
"U.S. Born" and "U.S. Citizen" are the same number of words though, so it just seems like you're deliberately obfuscating. Maybe a better headline would be "Two Undocumented Families and Their American Children Deported by ICE." That way we'd save a word and make it unambiguous: these children are Americans.
But for interesting HN discussion... anyone got any juice on why this is happening. Is there orders going down the chain of command from the president to do this sort of thing. Was this behaviour always there but less reported before? Are they more emboldened by the current environment?
Every day across the world thousands of people are removed from countries around the world for violating immigration laws. Except in cases of where it coincided with criminality, it's always going to be very ugly, because it means somebody had built up a life for themselves somewhere and that is now ended due to them having been born in a different place and then overstayed their permission, or never received such, to stay somewhere else.
Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people? The parents were in the country illegally, and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright. Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough. That's not only completely unrealistic, but also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.
The phrase "solely one of birthright" suggests the diminishment of the citizenship of certain people. That is not how citizenship works: no one is less of a citizen than anyone else.
The most objectionable part here — by far — is not the deportation of the parents, but the deportation of citizens and the lack of due process.
The alternative being proposed is that if ICE is going to deport the parents of US citizen children, the parents should be given the opportunity to seek legal counsel regarding how they're going to ensure care for their children.
What you’re really saying is you want this family broken up for the rage bait. You want the picture of a child crying for their mother as the plane takes off for the views.
> the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright
Under the US Constitution, this is not a distinction. What you're looking for is just "the children's citizenship" without this qualifier that signifies nothing under the law.
The better alternative is to aggressively enforce employment laws against employers. Immigrants come here and stay here to work.
And then, what? Are citizens beating down the doors to do these jobs but getting out-competed by migrants? Are these the same citizens who are lining up to do sweatshop labor when manufacturing “returns” to the US?
If undocumented workers are finding productive work in an economy with low unemployment then the problem is that the government is not facilitating them gaining legal status.
The problem would be minimum wage and insurance requirements for employing citizens. There are plenty of citizens that would work those jobs but nobody would hire them because they cost too much. What you are arguing for is to continue allowing people to come here so employers can pay them less than a citizen is legally required to be paid. Once they become legal employers no longer want to employ them for the same reason they don't want to hire citizens.
The data seem to show that at the end of Biden's term, ICE enforcement actions were very low. But for some reason, the stats page doesn't show Trump's previous term. https://www.ice.gov/statistics
Looking at the most recent DHS yearbook (apples and oranges, but the best I can find so far) at https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook and scaling to match the curve at the ICE stats page, it looks like illegal immigration was way down at the end of Biden's term.
So maybe the influx was already slowed dramatically. I don't think it's possible to stop people from wanting to go to the US, except by making it worse that the places people are leaving. I don't think that's a worthy goal.
First, the US needs to resolve its issue of citizenship. It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time. Instead we defaulted to "anyone born in a US hospital is a citizen"
Then, as welfare, lack of law enforcement and border grew, the broken citizenship process became a larger problem that now we have to deal with.
To me, the answer to your question of what is the alternative is as follows: The sole act of breaking laws and cutting the line to come into the country, to then birth babies here for the pusposes of straightjacketing the host's own response seems like should not be allowed, full stop. The premise of becoming a US citizen cannot be grounded in 2 crimes being committed before you are a citizen (1 illegal entry, 1 lying about your asylum petition).
We then have the issue of citizenship. It cannot be that because you come out of a womb that happens to be passing by a US hospital, you are a US citizen. US hospitals do not have magic pixie dust that grant american-ness. The Swiss have the right model that you actually have to come from at least 1 national parent, to foster national unity. The Swiss have the longest-lasting democracy in the world for a reason. Ignoring this seems suicidal. In nature and history, no humans prospered without an organized tribe centered around shared history and values.
Then there are the cases of people that came here, all legally, and found a life worth having by contributing to society. There should be a path for them to be citizens. What that path looks like, I dont know. But that's a conversation worth having soon since they are paying the price for the crimes and abuse committed by the 1st group.
Let's remind ourselves of the text of the 14th amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
> It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time.
I think any clear reading of the 14th amendment shows that you are incorrect.
seems critical to make a determination on whether you are correct or not.
Take the act of a random french spy who goes to the UK for the purpose of defecting, without express permission of either government. Does that make him a subject to the UK crown? I think the historical outcome of such situation would be crystal-clear.
Why does the birthright status quo need resolving? Why is there magic pixie dust based on who your parents are? None of these are fundamental truths. The US and the Swiss just chose different laws.
The people that come here legally don't really build anything of significant value when you compare it to entire immigrant communities. Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Irish, you name it, they build vast amounts of culture and businesses that get integrated into America. Even if you give me 2 million of the smartest legal immigrants, they will pale in comparison to what large immigrant communities offer to the fabric of America. This is deeply American issue, you either get it or you don't.
Just Apu from the Simpsons is only possible due to our immigration. Just the very fucking iconic cartoon character. This is not from legal immigration. Taco Tuesdays, every Irish pub, like, it sounds silly, but what they offer America is ten fold. I do not care about the best and the brightest, give us your tired and poor.
The American right-wing reeks of elitism (soft language for racist/xenophobic) and it is the antithesis of the American spirit and dream. I'm not with it.
This will be one of my final posts on this topic because I believe we are only in month five, and have 3.5 years to go. I pray the midterms are a landslide, and I pray the next Democrat grants Amnesty. See you all on the other side, because to me this issue is no different than the anit-gay marriage bullshit from the 2000s that we wiped the table clean of once and for all. We are a nation of immigrants and we will be so until eternity.
> Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people?
I like how nobody has actually answered this question yet, and have only harped on your birthright comment.
The parents are in the US illegally, ICE deports people who are in the US illegally. Presumably the parents didn’t want to leave their USC kids behind so they brought them.
I guess possible options are
1. Allow illegal parents to designate USC kids a guardian who has legal US immigration status
2. Dont deport illegal immigrants who have USC kids (basically making birthright transitive to parents)
While plenty of people would prefer 2) there would be a lot less outcry if they were allowing 1) especially in cases where the kid already has a legal USC guardian like the one discussed here where the father couldn't even speak with the mother before her and his child was deported.
> what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent
There is a moral answer, the practical answer, and two popular answers, none of which are particularly satisfying.
The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless all or a large bloc of countries allow it in reciprocity, or at least countries with an EU-like agreement. It would make a lot of sense for all of North America to have an EU-like agreement, economically, militarily, and legally.
The practical answer: amnesty for parents of children who are born here, conditional on criminality aversion. Like a form of probation.
The right-wing propaganda answer: immigrants somehow took jobs they are unwilling to do and therefore, while we might crack a few eggs making the omelette, all immigrants must go. Authoritarians love this view.
The left-wing propaganda: all immigrants are noble victims of evil capitalist systems, and therefore any control over borders is inherently racist and fascist. This is clearly also unsustainable, and authoritarians love for their opponents to have this view.
To what degree do we let the people decide how their republic is structured?
Voters have rejected this sort of cosmopolitanism at the ballot box, repeatedly. To suggest that governments should open borders over the wishes of their citizens seems to simply be an object-level misunderstanding over the goals of statecraft.
> The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless ..
A strong no on this being "the moral answer". If people are permitted to vote with their feet maybe people are also permitted to build pickets around communities. That sounds more "moral" to me than entirely ignoring the wishes of the chosen destination's "people". IFF the destination is happy to welcome people who think their community better than their own and want to move over, then fine, that is a much better candidate for "the moral answer".
> and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright
My citizenship is solely that way too, even though generations of my ancestors were also citizens.
Unless you personally naturalized then your citizenship is solely by birthright. The vast majority of US citizens are this way. Insisting that this is somehow worth less in terms of legal protections is just frankly wrong.
Imagine you said this for other circumstances. "Well, a parent going to prison is always going to be hard for the family - better imprison the whole family!"
The issue is some ability to fight. For instance, I don’t think the child of a US citizen should be deported without consent of their citizen parent or a ruling against that parent. I’d like some assurance my own child won’t be disappeared to another country without my consent.
> Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough.
No, there are lots of immigration statuses between "illegal" and "citizen". DAPA, which was the Obama administration's policy, gave parents of US citizens a status where they could get temporary renewable work permits and exemption for deportation. This was not citizenship, or even a status that could allow someone to eventually become a citizen.
Most of those statuses are called "visas" and they have been around for a while. Obama's innovation was giving a weird form of status ("we know you broke the law and we aren't enforcing it") to people who broke the law when crossing the border. Most people with a non-illegal and non-citizen status are supposed to apply for that status before crossing the border.
This gets at another portion of the answer to the "what's your alternative suggestion?" question: I'd suggest Congress pass laws, rather than presidents making stuff up, illegally. This is clearly not a partisan point! Every president in my voting lifetime - Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden - has made up immigration law while Congress sat on its thumbs.
It's not quite that Congress has sat on its thumbs. Individual Congressmen have been (figuratively) screaming at each other. Committees are at each other's throats trying to get some sort of legislation to the table. Nobody can stand the possibility of giving the other side what they want -- at the insistence of their constituents.
The net result, of course, is identical to if they had all stayed home.
There have been many laws passed by Congress addressing immigration. It is against law to cross the border without authorization. This particular case exists as a result of not enforcing those laws. Pretty simple.
I think there has to be a reasonable solution that gives legal status to the guy who's been here for 20 years and is making a positive contribution to society, but doesn't allow someone to show up and exploit loopholes to stay forever.
I think a reasonable compromise would look something like this:
* Make it much easier for people to get temporary visas for the kinds of jobs where we need migrant workers.
* Provide a pathway to citizenship for people who have been in this country for a very long time and are contributing to society.
* Make it very difficult for people to come to the US without a visa - e.g. make people apply for asylum outside of the US. Stop issuing temporary protected status to huge blocks of migrants.
Unfortunately, political polarization has basically made it impossible for Congress to solve real problems.
Sure, the point is that the poster I was responding to said that the only way to avoid putting US citizen minor children in a position where they have to either leave the country, or stay in the country without their parents, is to effectively grant citizenship to the parents. My point is that that's a false choice, it would be possible to grant the parents a temporary, conditional status that's based on having minor US-citizen children. It's not an ideal solution, but it protects the constitutional rights of US-citizen minor children without granting citizenship to the parents.
How is that any different from granting parents citizenship. In some sense you presume birthright citizenship doesn’t make sense. Let us say an immigrant illegally comes into the country and becomes a robber. He in fact, just mugs people on the street. Clearly he’s a net negative, someone you want to deport. Now he has a child. Now by virtue of him having a child, we can no longer deport him, because then we make the child who’s a citizen less parent less. Also assume in this case the mother is some criminal too, to drive the point home.
The simpler, logically consistent solution would be that the child’s citizenship is only granted if the parents are citizens. (Or at least if parents are not illegal immigrants). Then when you deport the parents, you can legally deport the child too. It still is not a pleasant situation, there is no ideal solution here, except he should have never been let in at all, but once he is, these seem the only choices
The current administration has set targets for numbers of people deported(which ICE is currently behind on). That creates an incentive to skip due process in order to get more people deported more quickly (and the awareness that there will no consequences for doing so probably contributes as well)
And while trying to meet those numbers, they are being specifically told not to do mass raids of farms and other business in red states that will hurt Trump voters
Because it's always been happening. If they didn't already have this sort of abuse practiced they wouldn't be so good at it. The ACLU used to write basically the same exact pieces about the DEA
Maybe it's 10% or 20% more prevalent or worse, I can't say from my vantage point, but it's a difference of degree, not a categorical one. You read these stories and they read exactly like all the other stories of how all sorts of "criminals" have been abused by the system for years, especially when they have a political blank check to do do. Making it hard for people to get a lawyer, moving too fast for people to appeal anything or get outside scrutiny is exactly how these systems have always behaved when they feel like it.
Now it's ICE and not DEA or whatever but this is basically the level of abuse with which the authorities have always treated with.
It's nice that the public is paying attention now, but I have very little hope that it will actually lead to systemic changes.
No due process at the borders is a shame both now and before, but hopefully this time there is a willingness to change things. Probably not at the next swing of power.
It is genuinely an extremely difficult challenge to manage illegal crossings if every individual must be processed through the full U.S. legal system which has massive resourcing and backlog problems (3m+ cases).
Voters across the political spectrum have made it unmistakably clear — in poll after poll — that they are deeply dissatisfied with the current rate of illegal and asylum-seeking entries.
Is there a morally permissible way to enact their will?
I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
On one hand, sure, abuses by people in positions of power have always happened, so if you're just making a general argument that enforcement authorities abuse power, I mean yeah, human nature.
But this article is making some specific points:
1. Those who were deported were given basically zero access to even talk to a lawyer, and that in at least one case a habeas corpus petition was deliberately avoided by deporting the family at 6 AM before courts opened.
2. Multiple US minor citizen children were deported.
So, no, without more evidence, I'm not willing to believe that it's just some minor increase of degree. While yes, I'm sure there have been abuses in the past, the current policy seems hellbent on deporting as many people as possible, due process be damned, and that was not the policy in previous years. I'd also highlight that the current President has said, explicitly, that deporting people without due process is his goal: https://truthout.org/articles/we-cannot-give-everyone-a-tria...
In other words, I don't believe this is just an aberrant, abusive exception to the policy. It very much seems like this is the policy now.
>I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
Whether you like it or not, it has indeed been happening for a long time, and under multiple administrations from either party. If you're interested in the tragedy of it all enough to care, then go look these cases up instead of first accusing someone of lying because they might be smearing a politician that you preferred, and who isn't the current orangutan in the White House.
Trump's administration is notably and vocally hostile to illegal immigrants, to migrants and I suspect to immigrants in general, but it's mainly still using the tools and practices that have long since been refined by multiple federal agencies whenever opportunities for heavy-handedness presented themselves.
Because it's Trump's administration, and enough of the major media system is unsupportive of him (still, for now), the matter is gaining more attention. This attention is a good thing, but it shouldn't cloud one from considering the possibility that the bureaucratic defects and authoritarian inertia of federal policing exist beyond the confines of a single type of administration.
This is like the third or fourth response I've seen that keeps making the same assertion with no evidence to back up their position. So I'll be very clear on what I think is new and not just "more of the same":
1. The deliberate attempts to deny due process by scheduling deportations before filed writs can be responded to in court.
2. The deportation of US minor citizen children as a matter of policy.
If you have any evidence of the above by non-Trump administrations, again as a matter of policy, I'm all ears. Everything else is just "feels".
I guess the question is how frequent it's been. A big part of Trumpism is taking sketchy practices that used to be exceptional and turning them into standard operating procedure, and then claiming "oh look others did this before"
I mean, look at Hillary Clinton's emails, extorting of lawfirms, big tech, etc, his ignoring of court orders, etc. All are things that you can look at and say "he's not the first to do this" and be completely correct, but completely missing the point that he's doing it waay more aggressively.
No, this kind of deportation and treatment of prisoners/detainees has been happening forever. This exact behavior has been happening forever, not just a general idea of malfeasance. The current attention on it smacks of politics in a way that is also very inhuman. Remember the "kids in cages" saga?
> No, this kind of deportation and treatment of prisoners/detainees has been happening forever.
Another assertion without any justification or data.
> Remember the "kids in cages" saga?
Yes, of course, and that's the point. There was huge outcry then, and that cruel policy was implemented by the same person responsible for this policy. It doesn't make sense to say "this has been happening forever" and then bring up an example from 2017-2020. We are all well aware of Trump's view on immigration and the rule of law. The whole point is that Trump's policies are a huge aberration from what any other administration, Republican or Democrat, has put forth in the past 50 years.
Much as I detest the current administration, the parent comment is correct. While things under both Trump administrations did get mildly worse than they were under his Democrat predecessors, they were plenty bad under Obama and Biden as well.
> The story featured photos taken by AP’s Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. The caption refers to U.S. efforts to process 47,000 unaccompanied children at the Nogales center and another one in Brownsville, Texas.
I don't know how else you're supposed to handle 47,000 unaccompanied children when there simply aren't the facilities to hold them all, e.g. in foster homes. I think that is fundamentally different than deporting US citizens.
And yes, when it comes to Trump's first term, I don't really see anything wrong with keeping unaccompanied children in detention centers, at least temporarily. The much bigger issue I had was the specific policy of separating families.
I almost completely agree with you here. But it is striking that they didn't need to create any new agencies to do this. All the parts of it were in place. They were in place already for trump to use the first time, and they were still in place when he got back into power.
Due process and transparency on border & immigration interactions has been alarmingly bad for a long time now. Has this never happened before, hidden inside this apparatus? I'm not confident of that. This is certainly different in its scale and ferocity. But I see where they are coming from too.
The treatment part has happened for decades, Las Hieleras is one of many examples. But the deporting citizens part hasn’t happened for about 70 years since Operation Wetback which was nearly an identical playbook of today.
Mass visa revocations happened about 50 years ago since the Iran Hostage Crisis. And a few other events over the 20th century reflect well with today like Japanese internment camps. CECOT out does Gitmo and Angel Island, but damn, we just do a lot of fascist and unjust stuff as a nation.
The 1880’s resulted in us switching our attention from Native Americans to immigrants and we never really let off the gas on that front.
The interesting thing about this parallel, is that the "final solution" in Germany was final because it was not the original solution.
Originally they wanted to, well, deport the undesirables to some far off country, initially to Madagascar if memory serves.
Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
Watching this unfolding from afar is interesting, because I can do so with some healthy detachment. If I lived across the pond I would be pretty desperate right now.
>Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
The holocaust also required mass incarceration and deportation, except that the huge undertaking of deportation was towards death camps in occupied territories instead of some foreign land. On the first point above, I caution against thinking that it would be much easier; it wasn't really, they just decided that they wanted to kill the people they considered undesirable after all.
On the second point, it's worth noting that the efforts at expulsion partly failed because many other countries, despite knowing of the brutal repression being suffered by the jews (and others but the jews in particular) decided to stonewall most avenues of exit from Nazi domains. Deportation would have still been terrible, but at least it would have put millions of eventual victims outside the reach of gas chambers and death squads. Such as it was, a sort of tacit complicity of indifference didn't allow that to happen, by others who weren't even necessarily supporters of the Nazis.
In either case, be careful about calling evil people practicing evil ends incompetent. In so many ways they were very competent at far more than simple bravado, and underestimating the capabilities of barbaric monsters is always dangerous for future lessons.
Unfortunately, if this follows history, the safest thing to do is to not do anything, blend in, and wait for external help. Afaik, only a handful of Germans who resisted survived. But, I don’t see any help for us coming anytime soon.
Yeah, there are some possibilities. For example, if a strong resistance leader emerged. But, are there any good candidates for that role? I can't think of any.
Things like this are stopped by movements, not individual heroes. There are almost certainly organizations in your area already working against this. No one is coming to save us. But if anyone does it is the people who were already trying to, bolstered by people like you who see it now. Get in there.
I appreciate the wishful thinking, but it's not going to work without a strong leader. Humans just don't work like that. Without a leader, we'll get 'Occupy Wall Street' level effectiveness with worse consequences.
Seeing as how this article is talking about the deportation of US citizens, I'm going to question what exactly you mean by "here illegally".
Expanding the argument: I've just decided that you are illegally, and will thus be deported. As there is no due process, my word is law, have fun wherever you end up I literally do not care.
Does that seem fair? And before arguing "well this wouldn't happen, I'm not here illegally", again, this is an article about the deportation of US citizens. Children no less.
But their parents aren’t. Parents can be deported. So let’s imagine they did that. We’d have an article how cruel they stole / kidnapped a child from their parents. Would that be better?
Having a child doesn’t automatically provide a legal cover for staying and not getting deported. Maybe that’s a risk the parents didn’t know about?
No, that is a false dilemma. the right (and constitutional) thing to do is give all these people the due process and access to legal representation that they are entitled to, and work out a legal solution to all these conflicting concerns.
read the habeas petition for VMS (the two year old). The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
> The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
Right, I think that's the issue here it's not that the parents should be automatically allowed to say, it's that they were not given a chance in court to allow for that process - to find a relative.
There is a complication in the case because the provisional custody was canceled then renewed and transferred to Trish Mack.
> Also on April 22, 2025, V.M.L.’s father executed a Provisional Custody by Mandate under Louisiana Revised Statutes § 9:951, temporarily “delegat[ing] the provisional custody of” his two daughters to his U.S. citizen sister-in-law, who also lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The Mandate was notarized by a valid notary public in the state of Louisiana
> On April 24, 2025, the mandatary named in the Provisional Custody by Mandate terminated the agreement for personal reasons,
> V.M.L.’s father and Next Friend Petitioner Trish Mack executed a new notarized Provisional Custody by Mandate, delegating custodial authority to Ms. Mack
That sounds like something where due process is supposed to come into play. The best of a series of bad alternatives are worked out in a steady manner by a court system, rather than a hopped up racist at the border bragging about the president being in their corner.
I'm all right with changing that rule - anchor babies means we get two people and one them is brand new. Considering people are the most valuable resource, I think we should take all the potential anchors possible - let's give both parents citizenship automatically if they are parents of a citizen.
Let's fast track Aunts and Uncles too - maybe we can get the whole family.
> let's give both parents citizenship automatically if they are parents of a citizen.
Yeah that might work. Wonder if there is any legislative effort on that front. I guess with the current congress it won't happen, so perhaps nobody is trying.
What's the point in arguing about what-ifs? The children were deported. In real life. There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
I am not sure what you're arguing for? Take the children away in real life and hand off to a random foster family. Sometimes they can stay with aunts or uncles. Sometimes there are no aunts or uncles.
> There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
Ok, so what should we discuss about the article? To help the conversation move along it's easier to say "here is what I think" as opposed to tell someone "don't think or say that!" and leave it a that.
> What's the point in arguing about what-ifs? The children were deported.
Anyone arguing in what-ifs agrees with the deportation but can't be that blatantly racist on here. Ignoring this specific case allows them to muddy the waters. Anyone playing Devil's Advocate consistently are usually part of the devil's party.
How do you know they are "illegally" shielding people? Was there any kind of process to figure this out?
Also, a few days back, you made the same point and someone furnished you links where legal migrants are being caught in a net. This is not an argument in good faith.
> When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Technically Secretary Clinton called half of her opponent’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” So 0.25 of the voting population at most.
But if that sounds worse than anything uttered by this administration, you’re not listening closely. I’m Canadian and we’ve been called “one of the nastiest countries.”
> We're not deporting "undesirables", just those who flooded in here illegally.
Ironically you say that in the comments section of a US citizen being held prior to deportation. Maybe those pesky children are flooding in there illegally?
> if we didn't have people trying to illegally shield them from ICE.
If only those annoying people weren't trying to hide Jews from the SS back in the day eh?
> Equating that to Nazi Germany is disingenuous and completely off the mark.
By all means, proceed. I am watching from afar with amusement as the US descends into banana Republic status with a sprinkle of old school European fascism now that the ICE is basically acting like Stasi or Gestapo from years past.
I wonder what you would consider to be enough for the comparison to not be disingenuous anymore. Perhaps when the ovens are burning in some Central American death camp.
Why then are people with legal visas being detained or having their visas revoked if it is just those who "flooded here illegally" under threat?
Clinton said that many Trump voters were deplorables. Trump said that many immigrants are not human. Now I know which sounds more like the Nazis to me.
> "The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals,'" said Trump, president from 2017 to 2021.
> When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Here’s Trump straight-up uding white nationalist rhetoric:
> Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.
Now, it’s telling that you’re pretending not to have heard your guy say things like that while his administration is sending people to concentration camps without due process but are still upset about something from a decade ago which you are misrepresenting.
Here’s the full quote, which is notable because she identified the specific behaviors she considered deplorable AND explicitly called for sympathy for the large group of people who are motivated by problems in their lives rather than bigotry. Also note that she’s talking about half of the third of the country which votes for him.
> You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
> But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
That makes quite the contrast where he looks worse the more of his speech you read while her speech looks better in context and makes it clear that while he hates people based on who they are, she reserved judgement based on what they do.
>When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Lol. That was three campaigns ago, and she was correct, and you guys are still whining about it like a bunch of snowflakes. Let it go. Hillary Clinton can't hurt you anymore.
The end goal was world domination, as in owning whole world. So, they would eventually come to Madagascar too.
Majority of Jews killed in Hocaust were not Germans. They were from conquered countries.
So, while there was some Madagascar plans floating and while they tried to deport as many German Jews (majority of who were atheists, considered themselves Germans etc) in first stages, they were aware there is going to be showdown later on anyway.
I too have noticed the same language coming out of folks here, folks that have had accounts for over 10 or 15 years. They were always here, but now they emboldened and they are doing their best to make sure that overton window stays very very open on the right.
Your last statement is correct. They are just emboldened by the current political environment. Any law enforcement has a problem where all they see is criminals all day everyday, now we know they aren't always criminals, but that's their view point. There should be sufficient checks and balances to ensure that due process is still upheld. What we're seeing now is the lack of checks because law enforcement feels they will never be held accountable for violating due process. This, while likely not a direct order of the president, it is an environment that his rhetoric has fostered. Even in the cases where the supreme court has said, unanimously, that people have been deported improperly this environment causes those in positions to correct it to ignore the courts.
I support the general idea of expedited deportation of those here illegally, those without valid documents to be here, I don't automatically have a problem if there is greater restrictions on entering or issuing new visas, but I have a major problem with violating due process and these kind of mistakes that's are a result of lack of due diligence.
The courts need to get more heavily involved here. It's easy to blame the president but short of some directive telling people to violate the law the blame is misdirected (until it's election time). The blame needs to be on those individuals doing this thing or seeing it and ignoring it. This is where the courts need to totally strip away default qualified immunity, especially for immigration officers. Because qualified immunity allows them to just say they were following orders without them having to evaluate if what they are doing is legal or not.
I believe if qualified immunity was gone a lot of this nonsense would stop. They would make sure that anyone who was deported was meant to be deported.
I have a friend who is here legally awaiting an asylum hearing, been waiting for 5 years. They were stopped by police for a valid reason and, from what was described the police had probable cause, but the charge itself is very minor. Because she's documented waiting asylum they contacted immigration, for no reason. There was no probable cause to think she was in violation of her immigration status, but they still contacted them and they requested she be held. So now she detained and there's probable cause to do so but it's immigration so they can.
This is where no qualified immunity would make these officers think twice. They know they have no probable cause to continue to hold her beyond the initial charge. Without qualified immunity they would understand that continuing to hold someone after a judge has allowed their release means that they would lose their house their life their future. So I really think we need to end to qualified immunity across the board. Have the people who are supposed to protect us and be responsible for their actions.
Without qualified immunity, no one in their right mind would want to work in law enforcement. LE would become an easy target for malicious litigation where the cost/effort to defend would, itself, be the weapon, regardless of whether or not the lawsuits were won.
LE personnel would have to get insurance, like doctors, which would be crazy expensive and, considering their pay scale, unaffordable.
I don't like some of the implications of qualified immunity, but I understand why it's there and needed.
I think the only real solution to LE abuses is criminal accountability and prosecution. We already have the laws and processes in place to make that happen. It's hindered by the tribal nature of the human condition and I'm not sure you get around that very easily, at least, not at scale.
The suffering is the point. The current administration thinks that by publicly treating anyone vaguely foreign horribly they will be able to end the allure illegal immigration. I guess the dirty secret is that this sort of stuff has been happening, the difference is that now the government wants everyone to know about it
Except that’s not the situation here and you left a key option out.
D) the child remains with the legally resident / citizen parent or their immediate families
In these cases they have legally resident parents, just not the one who the child was with when snatched without due process. They’re being denied the ability to coordinate the handoff of the child to the other parent or family who can take responsibility. ICE is not allowing the families to coordinate the child’s care - they’re isolating the parent from their broader families, denying due process, access to legal representation, and unilaterally deporting US citizen children who have other options but were denied the ability to access them.
In the United States our constitution assures -all people- due process and basic human rights. There is no carve out that if you’re visiting the country or otherwise not a citizen that you can be summarily detained, deprived of liberty, and handled however the government chooses including extraordinary rendition to third countries for indefinite imprisonment without recourse. Nothing that is happening is allowable, or even defensible because however you feel about immigration - every action being taken could be taken to tourists, students, or other guests if allowed under the premise only citizens enjoy protections.
And in these cases, even citizens are being given no deference - and the fact they’re toddlers should be even more frightening.
Here’s a quote from the release that basically implies ICE is murdering one child summarily:
“””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.“””
So, the headline as written dramatically understates the situation, and the proposed dichotomy is false. There are many other options, spelled out in the law and regulation and requirements - even constitutionally - and they’re being ignored as an apparent matter of political policy.
Except it’s not, because it’s not the parents but “a parent” being deported, and b) was phrased fallaciously to imply the child would be left alone without legal care givers.
Why is a) bad? Have you considered d) pass a different law? Why are you pretending the law is some immutable thing that we always need to follow, regardless of the situations an unjust law might place someone in if followed?
What about the threat of jail? Is the US punitive system not effective? In many ways I'd rather be an immigrant than a citizen if the punishment for crimes is deportation rather than detention... as long as I'm not being sent to country that has also suspended their constitutional right to due process.
Nah, lies, propaganda, and an incoherent strategy for Biden leading to limited window with Harris lost the last election.
There was a perfectly cromulent immigration plan ready to be voted on by Congress before Trump threw a tantrum because it would have hurt his election chances.
DEPORTING US CITIZENS is the logical choice? Logical to deport children to someplace they have never been and they don't have citizenship to? It's still illogical, evil, unconstitutional, and cruel.
> "Deports" is wrong word for removing a citizen. "Expels" would be more appropriate.
While this is true, the use of what's technically the wrong word highlights that the wrong action is being applied.
The action is a deportation. The targets are people who must/shall not ever be deported. Therefore the headline immediately gets attention for concisely describing a violation.
I think what happened here is that the parents were here illegally. The children just had to accompany the parents. I find it quite possible that the children will be allowed back in once they no longer have to depend on their parents.
The reports of no due process or little to no due process for citizens[1], that is the main point to my understanding. Due process for [1] would at least include making sure the proper documentation was in order so they could easily return in the future, making sure any health care needs could be meet in Honduras or any other critical needs, (not all the details are in but) the father in [1] wanted the child to stay in the US, but they were deported anyway.
I am not seeing all the details I want, but given the reports of 4 year olds having to defend themselves without representation it is easy to believe these reports of no or little due process for child citizens.
I have to wonder what horrors and shames ones pathway of life must have taken to think a person existing in a space is summarizable as illegal. A person cannot be illegal. They cannot exist in a space illegally. They could enter a space illegally. They could be unauthorized to be in a space. But by simple fact that they exist in the world, if the law makes them illegal to exist, then that law is unjust and should be considered void ab initio based on the very few common similarities among coherent moral frameworks.
From a practical perspective, as parents and tutelaries of children who have citizenship, they should be allowed to stay as guardians and join the US society. We have so many who thumb their nose at culture in the US, whether the right wanting to commit genocide against the outgroup under the guise of MAGA or the left self-shaming because they know the US can be morally better, but of all people, immigrants, especially undocumented and unauthorized immigrants who risk everything and worked outside standard pathways just for the chance to be at the periphery of US society, vulnerable to the predators and outlaws that inhabit that domain, they should be given extraordinary respect and consideration -- which is what we grant all persons who are in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction (which is geographically defined).
> A person cannot be illegal. They cannot exist in a space illegally.
I don't know if this is true, it seems more like a situational demand that you're making but giving it the tone of a fact that you're pointing out.
If you break into my house, and I shoot you while you're doing it, I won't go to prison. So either you're illegal, or I've become so extraordinarily legal that I can shoot people with impunity. Whatever has happened in that hypothetical, I do not think it is unjust. If you also do not, you don't agree with your own premise.
Maybe if you make it rhyme, it will slip past people's reasoning skills better.
> I have to wonder what horrors and shames ones pathway of life
You don't know anyone here. Your self-regard is off the charts.
You are correct. People watch too much TV and think this is out of the ordinary. If the children were kept here we'd be weeping about kids being separated from their parents.
This just dishonest. In the past, the rule of law applied. The law is not perfect or kind, but there was a process where people could defend themselves and egregious violations of U.S. law like this would be avoided. It wouldn’t be the child being “separated from their parents”, it would be the family choosing to go together OR the family choosing to have their child live with relatives.
The case we heard about yesterday illustrates the difference. A judge Trump appointed raised the alarm not just because due process is being violated but because a two year old’s father was pleading with the court to let his daughter live with him. Prior to this administration, nobody would have blinked an eye at a U.S. citizen switching custody to a U.S. citizen parent, and it’d save the government a lot of money to let that happen.
That's an unfortunate incident. As per my understanding, the father can technically go get the child back while the child is under the age of 16, using just the child's US birth certificate, but only through the land border. I understand that this can be difficult since traveling from Honduras to a US-Mexico land border crossing could not be too easy.
In fact I looked this up recently, and “deportation” has historically been used in the sense of “dispossession”, i.e. expelling citizens. For example the notorious deportation of defeated Jews to Babylon.
But nowadays that “deportation” so often connotes “repatriation” we’ll need to make those distinctions. And people seem to be completely unaware: we’re in a Year of Ordinary Jubilee!
There are already words for that: banished, disappeared, forced exiled, concentration camp victim... just reuse terms already used to describe crimes done by nazis and other fascist goverments.
The purpose of this evil is to spread fear, provoke a response and get publicity, push and prod the system for weakness/loyalty, condition their supporters to accept these atrocities as normal and necessary, and to communicate the blueprint by example, as it gets repeatedly acted out in public. The message is this is how we're operating, so if anything looks weird to you, trust the plan because we're on the same team (wink wink). I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing domestic terrorism and public lawlessness go unpunished if it's directed towards immigrants, journalists, judges, and other 'enemies'.
Bondi -- an outrageously partisan hack who is destroying the DOJ -- reached peak irony when she stated that "no one is above the law" in talking about that case.
Donald Trump and his administration are on an absolute crime spree[1]. Insider trading, launching shit-coins and engaging in self-dealing, completely disregarding both the constitution and the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.
The US is currently a lawless banana republic with the dumbest autocrat in history. That's the one saving grace: This herd of absolute imbeciles are so catastrophically stupid -- a cluster of plastic-faced Fox news clowns -- that they are bound to destroy everything so completely that they are overthrown out of necessity. Will the US survive this? Given that it voted for this rapist, charity-stealing moron twice, hopefully not. The fractured nations that come out of this hopefully have a better path.
[1] Ignoring that he is giving the most laughably corrupt pardons in history, to outrageously guilty thieves, fraudsters and human effluence. Trump's grotesque abuse, and quite literal selling, of pardons should be the impetus for whatever husk remains of the dissolved United States to abolish presidential pardons.
I read an article that starts with this proposition [1]
> The real question, however, is not how America lost its way. We know the mechanics of it. It lost its way in large measure because Donald Trump, a Pied Piper of malice, led it astray, though one can’t lay all of that or even most of it on Trump. The American people, nearly half of those who voted, in their infinite wisdom empowered Trump to do so. They were looking for a Trump, yearning for a Trump, to do so.
> They wanted a Trump to destroy the nation. They hoped he would destroy the nation both by sowing chaos and discord and by supervising a demolition of our institutions and values. So the real question we should be asking is why so many of our fellow Americans desired this, and what deep proclivities Trump drew upon to prompt the nation, at least a good part of it, to self-immolate. What does Trump give them?
Having read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a young person, this is reminiscent of a fascist playbook.
Except that it seems that social media are in effect creating a culture of resentment, projection of weakness and failure onto others and driving it for profit with unfiltered echo chambers.
The cause and effect seems to be playing to a vengeful base in order to keep legislators in line until their branch and the judicial branch are rendered impotent.
Exploring the parallels with Nazi Germany, the amassing of data was paramount.
> DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say [2]
Further,
> TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TEXTED COLLEGE PROFESSORS’ PERSONAL PHONES TO ASK IF THEY’RE JEWISH [3]
> The school later told staff it had provided the Trump administration with personal contact information for faculty members.
> The messages, sent to most Barnard professors’ personal cellphones, asked them to complete a voluntary survey about their employment.
> “Please select all that apply,” said the second question in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, survey.
> The choices followed: (including) “I am Jewish”; “I am Israeli”; “I have shared Jewish/Israeli ancestry”; “I practice Judaism”; and “Other.”
Data?
IBM provided Germany with tabulating equipment to manage "undesirables" [4] [5]
The notion of cultural supremacy resonates with some in Silicon Valley, land of big and targeted data.
When they separate undocumented children from their families in the first Trump term and did not bother to leave a paper trail so that these families could be reunited so it would take years if ever for these children to be returned to their parents, not one person in the entire chain of command was punished for it. When there are zero consequences for doing wrong, we should not be surprised the wrong doing continues. Same with Bush Jr using private servers to hide his administration's emails - now every GOP administration is going to use this tactic with whatever technology permits it like Signal is being used to bypass laws for record keeping today because no one holds them to account and no one will.
I honestly cannot. There is almost nothing worse than losing your kids. It might be worse than death. The humane solution is to allow a deported parent to keep them.
So basically create a huge incentive to drag very sick kids through the darien gap and cartel land with no real plan for foid and housing of their kids? If i did 1% of that someone would call cps to take my kids.
Due Process is being denied to US citizens, who are being removed from the country without the opportunity for them or their parents to consult an attorney.
> According to a Migration Policy Institute report, the deportation system dramatically changed over the past 19 years - moving from a judicial system prior to 1996 where most people facing deportation had immigration court hearings, to a system during Obama's administration where 75 percent of people removed did not see a judge before being deported.
You have to understand that most what you read about online about this administration is not written in good faith and reported honestly. Everything is unprecedented and a constitutional crisis. Really unforgivable when basic questions in an LLM can provide you meaningful context
Can I point out that this administration has gone out of it's way to flaunt it's disregard for the law and constitutional norms? Is anyone buying that the US can't pressure El Salvador to get back someone it wants? Anyone in doubt that it's a backroom deal in defiance of due process?
There's a reason why trust in the ruling administration is so important, because otherwise the system breaks down. Any time any questions pop up about how the law is being violated, Tom Homan breaks down crying about how the real crime is how children are baking to death in the heat of the sun, that children are being raped by cartel members... like what do you even say to that? Its easy to see why people are able to commit acts of great cruelty if they've convinced themselves that it's a neccesary evil for the greater good.
And it is unprecedented for modern times and it is a constitutional crisis on an almost daily basis.
I think it's important to know exactly what happens in these cases to not be vulnerable to counterarguments. It seems in addition to the cruelty of selectively enforcing laws, it is clearly illegal - so we can fight these actions in court.
AI is not a reliable source for legal matters. There are so many examples of it making up precedent it’s basically a meme at this point. Posting its response is not helpful. I’d have thought hacker news contributors would understand that.
If what chatgpt said is incorrect, I would love to know. Are you not interested in the legal details of these cases so we know what can be fought under current law and not? The cruelty of the actions should be judged harshly, and in the longer run we need to reform immigration law so they are not possible, but knowing what can currently be fought legally matters to me.
Aside from whether it is correct in this particular case or not, it’s just bizarre to me that you would post what AI told you. It’s like you’re a booster for dead internet theory. So in addition to half the internet consisting of AIs arguing with each other, we now have to deal with people telling us what AI said.
If it's mind boggling to you I would ask chatgpt, it's mind boggling to me that you don't care whether it is correct...
But if you generally think chatGPT produces garbage, I guess that makes sense. I disagree, to me it's a good initial query, replacing google. As with google before, it is not authoritative (e.g AI may hallucinate, or google may land you on some SEO bs page), but I don't tend to dismiss its use outright.
> If what chatgpt said is incorrect, I would love to know.
Fact checking LLM copypasta takes orders of magnitude more effort than producing it. How about you do the homework rather than making it everyone else's problem.
From the article, we don't really know what happened to the children in terms of process. All we know is that the parents were not allowed to communicate.
I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know this is completely wrong.
There is a conspiracy theory that “anchor babies” will help undocumented parents avoid deportation from the US.
As far as I can tell, the usual thing that happens when undocumented parents of a US citizen are deported is that they have to give the child to a citizen relative to raise, or they take the child with them.
It seems to be extremely rare, though “prosecutorial discretion” can allow for a parent to remain in the US. There is no guarantee; an undocumented parent can and is often deported later, sometimes for minor crimes. I couldn’t find any stats about how often this happens but immigration consultants stress to their clients that they can’t rely on it.
If the undocumented parents have been in the country for 10 years they can apply for relief for deportation but that is capped at 4,000 cases annually. If the child remains in the US until they become an adult, and can plausibly sponsor a relative, then they can also apply to reunify with their parent. The deported parent may have to spend a minimum of a decade outside the US.
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?
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.
How do you arrange this when not allowed to speak with anyone?
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.
You do seem to be defending the actions by asserting that it was the parents decision rather than an action forced by ICE.
The term is deported whether you like it or not.
fwiw expelled doesn’t sound any better for a rhetorical euphemism. What you’re trying to do by attempting to change the terminology is transparent.
Is it really "deported" without a court ruling? I thought it was human trafficking?
Easy to explain, traumatic to experiment.
Wear a airtag at all time?
Should it be removed for the USC children? Can they return freely without visa?
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?
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
> it seems the government is rushing to illegally
That's the last 4 months really.
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...
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.
Actually what happened in the US court here is the US court attempted to interceded 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)
While true, kinda irrelevant?
You got a source for that? I've hear otherwise about some of the parent's decisions for their US citizen children.
You got a source for that?
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...
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
[flagged]
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.)
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.
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).
"U.S Born" == "U.S Citizenship" would be the default assumption of any rational, thinking person.
You can add more words to say the same thing but it only ends up being annoying.
This has literally been declared not the case by the president, and being contested in court, and held as true by a significant percentage of the population. It’s not semantics - it’s become a point of national disagreement.
It also leaves out all mention of process. The issue here isn’t that the parents are choosing to bring their citizen children with them but that they’re being denied all ability to leave their citizen children with their citizen parent. This is the crux of the actual issue here.
It’s not the case already for foreign diplomats on US soil. If the Russian ambassador’s wife gives birth at a US hospital while visiting the embassy, the child does not get citizenship.
Mark my words, Trump is going to win that court case. It’s not far fetched at all to interpret “* and subject to the jurisdiction thereof*” to mean people that have legally entered the country.
Less than half the population of the world live in birthright citizenship countries. Such countries as all of Eurasia except Pakistan, and all but a handful of African countries. Do those countries not have rational thinking people?
It's not a matter of rationality and logic. The executive believes the 14th amendment only applies to former slaves. They don't believe it's operable in the 21st century and they don't believe it applies to foreign nationals. They call such children "anchor babies". Courts don't agree with that, but the executive also believes courts don't have the right to limit the executive when it comes to matters of immigration.
I can understand why this level of pedantry is annoying but we are not dealing with good faith arguments here. They are power plays.
> "U.S Born" == "U.S Citizenship" would be the default assumption of any rational, thinking person
Not in trump’s america, not if they have their way, and this nonsense wordplay is part of it. Look at the statements around a third term; those arent jokes
"U.S. Born" and "U.S. Citizen" are the same number of words though, so it just seems like you're deliberately obfuscating. Maybe a better headline would be "Two Undocumented Families and Their American Children Deported by ICE." That way we'd save a word and make it unambiguous: these children are Americans.
<<Insert Rage>>
But for interesting HN discussion... anyone got any juice on why this is happening. Is there orders going down the chain of command from the president to do this sort of thing. Was this behaviour always there but less reported before? Are they more emboldened by the current environment?
Every day across the world thousands of people are removed from countries around the world for violating immigration laws. Except in cases of where it coincided with criminality, it's always going to be very ugly, because it means somebody had built up a life for themselves somewhere and that is now ended due to them having been born in a different place and then overstayed their permission, or never received such, to stay somewhere else.
Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people? The parents were in the country illegally, and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright. Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough. That's not only completely unrealistic, but also a complete slap in the face to the millions of people who try to migrate legally and are refused entry.
The phrase "solely one of birthright" suggests the diminishment of the citizenship of certain people. That is not how citizenship works: no one is less of a citizen than anyone else.
The most objectionable part here — by far — is not the deportation of the parents, but the deportation of citizens and the lack of due process.
The alternative being proposed is that if ICE is going to deport the parents of US citizen children, the parents should be given the opportunity to seek legal counsel regarding how they're going to ensure care for their children.
no one is less of a citizen than anyone else
This is not true - a citizen by birth can become the president, a naturalized citizen cannot.
that's true, so basically they deported somebody that one day could become President!
They deported someone with (supposedly) more rights than Elon Musk.
While true, I believe op was talking about with respect to the protections afforded by the law.
While true, one thing OP could be talking about is the spiritualism implied by that rule, and whether it finds catch in the American psychology.
What you’re really saying is you want this family broken up for the rage bait. You want the picture of a child crying for their mother as the plane takes off for the views.
US hospitals do not have magical pixie dust to grant US citizenship.
This is why birthright as a legal concept is a diminishment of citizenship for all those who hold it.
Parents pass on the shared history, values, and national culture to their kids. Parents are those who give value to US citizenship.
Not coming out of a belly, that happens to be inside a US hospital.
> the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright
Under the US Constitution, this is not a distinction. What you're looking for is just "the children's citizenship" without this qualifier that signifies nothing under the law.
The better alternative is to aggressively enforce employment laws against employers. Immigrants come here and stay here to work.
And then, what? Are citizens beating down the doors to do these jobs but getting out-competed by migrants? Are these the same citizens who are lining up to do sweatshop labor when manufacturing “returns” to the US?
If undocumented workers are finding productive work in an economy with low unemployment then the problem is that the government is not facilitating them gaining legal status.
The problem would be minimum wage and insurance requirements for employing citizens. There are plenty of citizens that would work those jobs but nobody would hire them because they cost too much. What you are arguing for is to continue allowing people to come here so employers can pay them less than a citizen is legally required to be paid. Once they become legal employers no longer want to employ them for the same reason they don't want to hire citizens.
Agree and proper border control which the previous administration failed to enforce. Step 1 is stop the influx.
The data seem to show that at the end of Biden's term, ICE enforcement actions were very low. But for some reason, the stats page doesn't show Trump's previous term. https://www.ice.gov/statistics
Looking at the most recent DHS yearbook (apples and oranges, but the best I can find so far) at https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook and scaling to match the curve at the ICE stats page, it looks like illegal immigration was way down at the end of Biden's term.
So maybe the influx was already slowed dramatically. I don't think it's possible to stop people from wanting to go to the US, except by making it worse that the places people are leaving. I don't think that's a worthy goal.
Not enough. Some immigrants come and stay to commit crimes.
First, the US needs to resolve its issue of citizenship. It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time. Instead we defaulted to "anyone born in a US hospital is a citizen"
Then, as welfare, lack of law enforcement and border grew, the broken citizenship process became a larger problem that now we have to deal with.
To me, the answer to your question of what is the alternative is as follows: The sole act of breaking laws and cutting the line to come into the country, to then birth babies here for the pusposes of straightjacketing the host's own response seems like should not be allowed, full stop. The premise of becoming a US citizen cannot be grounded in 2 crimes being committed before you are a citizen (1 illegal entry, 1 lying about your asylum petition).
We then have the issue of citizenship. It cannot be that because you come out of a womb that happens to be passing by a US hospital, you are a US citizen. US hospitals do not have magic pixie dust that grant american-ness. The Swiss have the right model that you actually have to come from at least 1 national parent, to foster national unity. The Swiss have the longest-lasting democracy in the world for a reason. Ignoring this seems suicidal. In nature and history, no humans prospered without an organized tribe centered around shared history and values.
Then there are the cases of people that came here, all legally, and found a life worth having by contributing to society. There should be a path for them to be citizens. What that path looks like, I dont know. But that's a conversation worth having soon since they are paying the price for the crimes and abuse committed by the 1st group.
Let's remind ourselves of the text of the 14th amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
> It has been proposed that the US citizenship model was always like the Swiss model - you could only be a citizen if you were born of at least 1 citizen (naturalized or otherwise). For reasons I'm not clear, this has not been strictly enforced for some time.
I think any clear reading of the 14th amendment shows that you are incorrect.
IANAL, but interpretation of:
"and subject to the jurisdiction thereof"
seems critical to make a determination on whether you are correct or not.
Take the act of a random french spy who goes to the UK for the purpose of defecting, without express permission of either government. Does that make him a subject to the UK crown? I think the historical outcome of such situation would be crystal-clear.
Are only people with at least 1 naturalized citizen parent the only people subject to the jurisdiction of the United States?
And people with the consent of the US immigration laws to be lawful visitors of the country
Why does the birthright status quo need resolving? Why is there magic pixie dust based on who your parents are? None of these are fundamental truths. The US and the Swiss just chose different laws.
The people that come here legally don't really build anything of significant value when you compare it to entire immigrant communities. Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Irish, you name it, they build vast amounts of culture and businesses that get integrated into America. Even if you give me 2 million of the smartest legal immigrants, they will pale in comparison to what large immigrant communities offer to the fabric of America. This is deeply American issue, you either get it or you don't.
Just Apu from the Simpsons is only possible due to our immigration. Just the very fucking iconic cartoon character. This is not from legal immigration. Taco Tuesdays, every Irish pub, like, it sounds silly, but what they offer America is ten fold. I do not care about the best and the brightest, give us your tired and poor.
The American right-wing reeks of elitism (soft language for racist/xenophobic) and it is the antithesis of the American spirit and dream. I'm not with it.
This will be one of my final posts on this topic because I believe we are only in month five, and have 3.5 years to go. I pray the midterms are a landslide, and I pray the next Democrat grants Amnesty. See you all on the other side, because to me this issue is no different than the anit-gay marriage bullshit from the 2000s that we wiped the table clean of once and for all. We are a nation of immigrants and we will be so until eternity.
> Like in this case, what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent that you think could be agreeable to most people?
I like how nobody has actually answered this question yet, and have only harped on your birthright comment.
The parents are in the US illegally, ICE deports people who are in the US illegally. Presumably the parents didn’t want to leave their USC kids behind so they brought them.
I guess possible options are
1. Allow illegal parents to designate USC kids a guardian who has legal US immigration status
2. Dont deport illegal immigrants who have USC kids (basically making birthright transitive to parents)
> 2. Dont deport illegal immigrants who have USC kids (basically making birthright transitive to parents)
Birthright is somewhat transitive. US citizens can sponsor family members for a green card once they’re 18.
While plenty of people would prefer 2) there would be a lot less outcry if they were allowing 1) especially in cases where the kid already has a legal USC guardian like the one discussed here where the father couldn't even speak with the mother before her and his child was deported.
> it's always going to be very ugly,
It doesn't have to be as ugly as what is described in the article.
> what do you propose as an alternative with a precedent
There is a moral answer, the practical answer, and two popular answers, none of which are particularly satisfying.
The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless all or a large bloc of countries allow it in reciprocity, or at least countries with an EU-like agreement. It would make a lot of sense for all of North America to have an EU-like agreement, economically, militarily, and legally.
The practical answer: amnesty for parents of children who are born here, conditional on criminality aversion. Like a form of probation.
The right-wing propaganda answer: immigrants somehow took jobs they are unwilling to do and therefore, while we might crack a few eggs making the omelette, all immigrants must go. Authoritarians love this view.
The left-wing propaganda: all immigrants are noble victims of evil capitalist systems, and therefore any control over borders is inherently racist and fascist. This is clearly also unsustainable, and authoritarians love for their opponents to have this view.
To what degree do we let the people decide how their republic is structured?
Voters have rejected this sort of cosmopolitanism at the ballot box, repeatedly. To suggest that governments should open borders over the wishes of their citizens seems to simply be an object-level misunderstanding over the goals of statecraft.
> The moral answer is open borders. Both capital, which is generally freer than people are, and people should be able to vote with their feet. However, this is unsustainable unless ..
A strong no on this being "the moral answer". If people are permitted to vote with their feet maybe people are also permitted to build pickets around communities. That sounds more "moral" to me than entirely ignoring the wishes of the chosen destination's "people". IFF the destination is happy to welcome people who think their community better than their own and want to move over, then fine, that is a much better candidate for "the moral answer".
> and the children's citizenship was solely one of birthright
My citizenship is solely that way too, even though generations of my ancestors were also citizens.
Unless you personally naturalized then your citizenship is solely by birthright. The vast majority of US citizens are this way. Insisting that this is somehow worth less in terms of legal protections is just frankly wrong.
Imagine you said this for other circumstances. "Well, a parent going to prison is always going to be hard for the family - better imprison the whole family!"
> That's not only completely unrealistic
I don't see how it's unrealistic.
The issue is some ability to fight. For instance, I don’t think the child of a US citizen should be deported without consent of their citizen parent or a ruling against that parent. I’d like some assurance my own child won’t be disappeared to another country without my consent.
> I don’t think the child of a US citizen should be deported without consent of their citizen parent or a ruling against that parent.
Think it should depend on custody. US courts don't just always favor the custody of the citizen parent.
> Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough.
No, there are lots of immigration statuses between "illegal" and "citizen". DAPA, which was the Obama administration's policy, gave parents of US citizens a status where they could get temporary renewable work permits and exemption for deportation. This was not citizenship, or even a status that could allow someone to eventually become a citizen.
Most of those statuses are called "visas" and they have been around for a while. Obama's innovation was giving a weird form of status ("we know you broke the law and we aren't enforcing it") to people who broke the law when crossing the border. Most people with a non-illegal and non-citizen status are supposed to apply for that status before crossing the border.
This gets at another portion of the answer to the "what's your alternative suggestion?" question: I'd suggest Congress pass laws, rather than presidents making stuff up, illegally. This is clearly not a partisan point! Every president in my voting lifetime - Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden - has made up immigration law while Congress sat on its thumbs.
It's not quite that Congress has sat on its thumbs. Individual Congressmen have been (figuratively) screaming at each other. Committees are at each other's throats trying to get some sort of legislation to the table. Nobody can stand the possibility of giving the other side what they want -- at the insistence of their constituents.
The net result, of course, is identical to if they had all stayed home.
There have been many laws passed by Congress addressing immigration. It is against law to cross the border without authorization. This particular case exists as a result of not enforcing those laws. Pretty simple.
Exactly. People forget, but the first selective enforcement edict (on illegal immigration) came from HW Bush.
I agree with you.
I think there has to be a reasonable solution that gives legal status to the guy who's been here for 20 years and is making a positive contribution to society, but doesn't allow someone to show up and exploit loopholes to stay forever.
I think a reasonable compromise would look something like this:
* Make it much easier for people to get temporary visas for the kinds of jobs where we need migrant workers.
* Provide a pathway to citizenship for people who have been in this country for a very long time and are contributing to society.
* Make it very difficult for people to come to the US without a visa - e.g. make people apply for asylum outside of the US. Stop issuing temporary protected status to huge blocks of migrants.
Unfortunately, political polarization has basically made it impossible for Congress to solve real problems.
Sure, the point is that the poster I was responding to said that the only way to avoid putting US citizen minor children in a position where they have to either leave the country, or stay in the country without their parents, is to effectively grant citizenship to the parents. My point is that that's a false choice, it would be possible to grant the parents a temporary, conditional status that's based on having minor US-citizen children. It's not an ideal solution, but it protects the constitutional rights of US-citizen minor children without granting citizenship to the parents.
How is that any different from granting parents citizenship. In some sense you presume birthright citizenship doesn’t make sense. Let us say an immigrant illegally comes into the country and becomes a robber. He in fact, just mugs people on the street. Clearly he’s a net negative, someone you want to deport. Now he has a child. Now by virtue of him having a child, we can no longer deport him, because then we make the child who’s a citizen less parent less. Also assume in this case the mother is some criminal too, to drive the point home.
The simpler, logically consistent solution would be that the child’s citizenship is only granted if the parents are citizens. (Or at least if parents are not illegal immigrants). Then when you deport the parents, you can legally deport the child too. It still is not a pleasant situation, there is no ideal solution here, except he should have never been let in at all, but once he is, these seem the only choices
The previous time the big mad that Obama was (supposedly) not born on the US soil, now the problem is that someone was born in the US.
Is there an acceptable way for POC to get citizenship anymore, if it's not by inheritance and it's not by being born in the US?
A quarter of US citizens are not white. Maybe POC isn't the best term to use here.
5mil for a gold card and expedited path to citizenship I’ve heard.
The current administration has set targets for numbers of people deported(which ICE is currently behind on). That creates an incentive to skip due process in order to get more people deported more quickly (and the awareness that there will no consequences for doing so probably contributes as well)
And while trying to meet those numbers, they are being specifically told not to do mass raids of farms and other business in red states that will hurt Trump voters
Because it's always been happening. If they didn't already have this sort of abuse practiced they wouldn't be so good at it. The ACLU used to write basically the same exact pieces about the DEA
Maybe it's 10% or 20% more prevalent or worse, I can't say from my vantage point, but it's a difference of degree, not a categorical one. You read these stories and they read exactly like all the other stories of how all sorts of "criminals" have been abused by the system for years, especially when they have a political blank check to do do. Making it hard for people to get a lawyer, moving too fast for people to appeal anything or get outside scrutiny is exactly how these systems have always behaved when they feel like it.
Now it's ICE and not DEA or whatever but this is basically the level of abuse with which the authorities have always treated with.
It's nice that the public is paying attention now, but I have very little hope that it will actually lead to systemic changes.
Yes, nothing much changed law-wise.
No due process at the borders is a shame both now and before, but hopefully this time there is a willingness to change things. Probably not at the next swing of power.
It is genuinely an extremely difficult challenge to manage illegal crossings if every individual must be processed through the full U.S. legal system which has massive resourcing and backlog problems (3m+ cases).
Voters across the political spectrum have made it unmistakably clear — in poll after poll — that they are deeply dissatisfied with the current rate of illegal and asylum-seeking entries.
Is there a morally permissible way to enact their will?
My guy will do better with the power they never destroy.
> Because it's always been happening.
I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
On one hand, sure, abuses by people in positions of power have always happened, so if you're just making a general argument that enforcement authorities abuse power, I mean yeah, human nature.
But this article is making some specific points:
1. Those who were deported were given basically zero access to even talk to a lawyer, and that in at least one case a habeas corpus petition was deliberately avoided by deporting the family at 6 AM before courts opened.
2. Multiple US minor citizen children were deported.
So, no, without more evidence, I'm not willing to believe that it's just some minor increase of degree. While yes, I'm sure there have been abuses in the past, the current policy seems hellbent on deporting as many people as possible, due process be damned, and that was not the policy in previous years. I'd also highlight that the current President has said, explicitly, that deporting people without due process is his goal: https://truthout.org/articles/we-cannot-give-everyone-a-tria...
In other words, I don't believe this is just an aberrant, abusive exception to the policy. It very much seems like this is the policy now.
>I don't like this kind of response because it's basically kind of an assumption, and you don't really give any evidence for it.
Whether you like it or not, it has indeed been happening for a long time, and under multiple administrations from either party. If you're interested in the tragedy of it all enough to care, then go look these cases up instead of first accusing someone of lying because they might be smearing a politician that you preferred, and who isn't the current orangutan in the White House.
Trump's administration is notably and vocally hostile to illegal immigrants, to migrants and I suspect to immigrants in general, but it's mainly still using the tools and practices that have long since been refined by multiple federal agencies whenever opportunities for heavy-handedness presented themselves.
Because it's Trump's administration, and enough of the major media system is unsupportive of him (still, for now), the matter is gaining more attention. This attention is a good thing, but it shouldn't cloud one from considering the possibility that the bureaucratic defects and authoritarian inertia of federal policing exist beyond the confines of a single type of administration.
This is like the third or fourth response I've seen that keeps making the same assertion with no evidence to back up their position. So I'll be very clear on what I think is new and not just "more of the same":
1. The deliberate attempts to deny due process by scheduling deportations before filed writs can be responded to in court.
2. The deportation of US minor citizen children as a matter of policy.
If you have any evidence of the above by non-Trump administrations, again as a matter of policy, I'm all ears. Everything else is just "feels".
I guess the question is how frequent it's been. A big part of Trumpism is taking sketchy practices that used to be exceptional and turning them into standard operating procedure, and then claiming "oh look others did this before"
I mean, look at Hillary Clinton's emails, extorting of lawfirms, big tech, etc, his ignoring of court orders, etc. All are things that you can look at and say "he's not the first to do this" and be completely correct, but completely missing the point that he's doing it waay more aggressively.
> extorting of lawfirms
When did that happen previously?
No, this kind of deportation and treatment of prisoners/detainees has been happening forever. This exact behavior has been happening forever, not just a general idea of malfeasance. The current attention on it smacks of politics in a way that is also very inhuman. Remember the "kids in cages" saga?
> No, this kind of deportation and treatment of prisoners/detainees has been happening forever.
Another assertion without any justification or data.
> Remember the "kids in cages" saga?
Yes, of course, and that's the point. There was huge outcry then, and that cruel policy was implemented by the same person responsible for this policy. It doesn't make sense to say "this has been happening forever" and then bring up an example from 2017-2020. We are all well aware of Trump's view on immigration and the rule of law. The whole point is that Trump's policies are a huge aberration from what any other administration, Republican or Democrat, has put forth in the past 50 years.
Much as I detest the current administration, the parent comment is correct. While things under both Trump administrations did get mildly worse than they were under his Democrat predecessors, they were plenty bad under Obama and Biden as well.
You're talking about bringing up examples from 2017-2020; it turns out, plenty of the examples that were brought up back then, were in fact from the Obama years. Example: https://apnews.com/article/a98f26f7c9424b44b7fa927ea1acd4d4
Let's look at your own link:
> The story featured photos taken by AP’s Ross D. Franklin at a center run by the Customs and Border Protection Agency in Nogales, Arizona. One photo shows two unidentified female detainees sleeping in a holding cell. The caption refers to U.S. efforts to process 47,000 unaccompanied children at the Nogales center and another one in Brownsville, Texas.
I don't know how else you're supposed to handle 47,000 unaccompanied children when there simply aren't the facilities to hold them all, e.g. in foster homes. I think that is fundamentally different than deporting US citizens.
And yes, when it comes to Trump's first term, I don't really see anything wrong with keeping unaccompanied children in detention centers, at least temporarily. The much bigger issue I had was the specific policy of separating families.
I almost completely agree with you here. But it is striking that they didn't need to create any new agencies to do this. All the parts of it were in place. They were in place already for trump to use the first time, and they were still in place when he got back into power.
Due process and transparency on border & immigration interactions has been alarmingly bad for a long time now. Has this never happened before, hidden inside this apparatus? I'm not confident of that. This is certainly different in its scale and ferocity. But I see where they are coming from too.
The treatment part has happened for decades, Las Hieleras is one of many examples. But the deporting citizens part hasn’t happened for about 70 years since Operation Wetback which was nearly an identical playbook of today.
Mass visa revocations happened about 50 years ago since the Iran Hostage Crisis. And a few other events over the 20th century reflect well with today like Japanese internment camps. CECOT out does Gitmo and Angel Island, but damn, we just do a lot of fascist and unjust stuff as a nation.
The 1880’s resulted in us switching our attention from Native Americans to immigrants and we never really let off the gas on that front.
>anyone got any juice on why this is happening.
Their skin color and national origin is offensive to the president and the percentage of the country that voted for him.
All of the above?
As my wise but now throughly dead German grandmother said:
”Do you think the nazis appeared out of thin air? No they were everywhere just waiting for someone to enable them with a label and an ideology.”
I suspect something analogous is happening here and it’s similarly not pretty. Hopefully it’ll get nipped in the bud quickly.
My fellow citizens scare me more than the government does.
The interesting thing about this parallel, is that the "final solution" in Germany was final because it was not the original solution.
Originally they wanted to, well, deport the undesirables to some far off country, initially to Madagascar if memory serves.
Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
Watching this unfolding from afar is interesting, because I can do so with some healthy detachment. If I lived across the pond I would be pretty desperate right now.
>Managing mass incarceration and deportation is a difficult task however, and these people (both then and now) are not exactly competent at anything beyond bravado.
The holocaust also required mass incarceration and deportation, except that the huge undertaking of deportation was towards death camps in occupied territories instead of some foreign land. On the first point above, I caution against thinking that it would be much easier; it wasn't really, they just decided that they wanted to kill the people they considered undesirable after all.
On the second point, it's worth noting that the efforts at expulsion partly failed because many other countries, despite knowing of the brutal repression being suffered by the jews (and others but the jews in particular) decided to stonewall most avenues of exit from Nazi domains. Deportation would have still been terrible, but at least it would have put millions of eventual victims outside the reach of gas chambers and death squads. Such as it was, a sort of tacit complicity of indifference didn't allow that to happen, by others who weren't even necessarily supporters of the Nazis.
In either case, be careful about calling evil people practicing evil ends incompetent. In so many ways they were very competent at far more than simple bravado, and underestimating the capabilities of barbaric monsters is always dangerous for future lessons.
Unfortunately, if this follows history, the safest thing to do is to not do anything, blend in, and wait for external help. Afaik, only a handful of Germans who resisted survived. But, I don’t see any help for us coming anytime soon.
Then honor demands that we die. I think there are still other outcomes possible but if that's how it is that's how it is.
Yeah, there are some possibilities. For example, if a strong resistance leader emerged. But, are there any good candidates for that role? I can't think of any.
Things like this are stopped by movements, not individual heroes. There are almost certainly organizations in your area already working against this. No one is coming to save us. But if anyone does it is the people who were already trying to, bolstered by people like you who see it now. Get in there.
I appreciate the wishful thinking, but it's not going to work without a strong leader. Humans just don't work like that. Without a leader, we'll get 'Occupy Wall Street' level effectiveness with worse consequences.
While it may not have been your intention, the language in a couple sentences of your reply doesn’t leave much room for a continued discussion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché
I suspect it won’t come. The US embedded itself in everyone else’s business and is now withdrawing so we all have our own problems to deal with.
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Seeing as how this article is talking about the deportation of US citizens, I'm going to question what exactly you mean by "here illegally".
Expanding the argument: I've just decided that you are illegally, and will thus be deported. As there is no due process, my word is law, have fun wherever you end up I literally do not care.
Does that seem fair? And before arguing "well this wouldn't happen, I'm not here illegally", again, this is an article about the deportation of US citizens. Children no less.
> US citizens. Children no less.
But their parents aren’t. Parents can be deported. So let’s imagine they did that. We’d have an article how cruel they stole / kidnapped a child from their parents. Would that be better?
Having a child doesn’t automatically provide a legal cover for staying and not getting deported. Maybe that’s a risk the parents didn’t know about?
No, that is a false dilemma. the right (and constitutional) thing to do is give all these people the due process and access to legal representation that they are entitled to, and work out a legal solution to all these conflicting concerns.
read the habeas petition for VMS (the two year old). The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
PDF: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.21...
> The child has a US citizen relative and the father seems to have transferred provisional rights of custody to them.
Right, I think that's the issue here it's not that the parents should be automatically allowed to say, it's that they were not given a chance in court to allow for that process - to find a relative.
There is a complication in the case because the provisional custody was canceled then renewed and transferred to Trish Mack.
> Also on April 22, 2025, V.M.L.’s father executed a Provisional Custody by Mandate under Louisiana Revised Statutes § 9:951, temporarily “delegat[ing] the provisional custody of” his two daughters to his U.S. citizen sister-in-law, who also lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The Mandate was notarized by a valid notary public in the state of Louisiana
> On April 24, 2025, the mandatary named in the Provisional Custody by Mandate terminated the agreement for personal reasons,
> V.M.L.’s father and Next Friend Petitioner Trish Mack executed a new notarized Provisional Custody by Mandate, delegating custodial authority to Ms. Mack
That sounds like something where due process is supposed to come into play. The best of a series of bad alternatives are worked out in a steady manner by a court system, rather than a hopped up racist at the border bragging about the president being in their corner.
I'm all right with changing that rule - anchor babies means we get two people and one them is brand new. Considering people are the most valuable resource, I think we should take all the potential anchors possible - let's give both parents citizenship automatically if they are parents of a citizen.
Let's fast track Aunts and Uncles too - maybe we can get the whole family.
> let's give both parents citizenship automatically if they are parents of a citizen.
Yeah that might work. Wonder if there is any legislative effort on that front. I guess with the current congress it won't happen, so perhaps nobody is trying.
Parents are not stupid. The parents knew and chose to take their chances.
What's the point in arguing about what-ifs? The children were deported. In real life. There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
> The children were deported. In real life.
I am not sure what you're arguing for? Take the children away in real life and hand off to a random foster family. Sometimes they can stay with aunts or uncles. Sometimes there are no aunts or uncles.
> There's no need for hypothetical scenarios, focus on the actual point of the article and thread.
Ok, so what should we discuss about the article? To help the conversation move along it's easier to say "here is what I think" as opposed to tell someone "don't think or say that!" and leave it a that.
> What's the point in arguing about what-ifs? The children were deported.
Anyone arguing in what-ifs agrees with the deportation but can't be that blatantly racist on here. Ignoring this specific case allows them to muddy the waters. Anyone playing Devil's Advocate consistently are usually part of the devil's party.
How do you know they are "illegally" shielding people? Was there any kind of process to figure this out?
Also, a few days back, you made the same point and someone furnished you links where legal migrants are being caught in a net. This is not an argument in good faith.
> When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Technically Secretary Clinton called half of her opponent’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” So 0.25 of the voting population at most.
But if that sounds worse than anything uttered by this administration, you’re not listening closely. I’m Canadian and we’ve been called “one of the nastiest countries.”
> We're not deporting "undesirables", just those who flooded in here illegally.
Ironically you say that in the comments section of a US citizen being held prior to deportation. Maybe those pesky children are flooding in there illegally?
> if we didn't have people trying to illegally shield them from ICE.
If only those annoying people weren't trying to hide Jews from the SS back in the day eh?
> Equating that to Nazi Germany is disingenuous and completely off the mark.
By all means, proceed. I am watching from afar with amusement as the US descends into banana Republic status with a sprinkle of old school European fascism now that the ICE is basically acting like Stasi or Gestapo from years past.
I wonder what you would consider to be enough for the comparison to not be disingenuous anymore. Perhaps when the ovens are burning in some Central American death camp.
Why then are people with legal visas being detained or having their visas revoked if it is just those who "flooded here illegally" under threat?
Clinton said that many Trump voters were deplorables. Trump said that many immigrants are not human. Now I know which sounds more like the Nazis to me.
> Trump said that many immigrants are not human.
I am very much not a Trump fan, but I need to see a source for that claim.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-expected-highlight-mu...
> "The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals,'" said Trump, president from 2017 to 2021.
"Alien" is something Trump has said multiple times.
The first I heard it was in the debate with Harris (that she "wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in jail").
Really? Immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” is straight from Hitler’s playbook, and it definitely wasn’t a Clinton who said that.
> When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Here’s Trump straight-up uding white nationalist rhetoric:
> Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions [and] insane asylums. We know they're terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.
(https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis-post/watch-the-nationa...)
Now, it’s telling that you’re pretending not to have heard your guy say things like that while his administration is sending people to concentration camps without due process but are still upset about something from a decade ago which you are misrepresenting.
Here’s the full quote, which is notable because she identified the specific behaviors she considered deplorable AND explicitly called for sympathy for the large group of people who are motivated by problems in their lives rather than bigotry. Also note that she’s talking about half of the third of the country which votes for him.
> You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
> But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCHJVE9trSM
That makes quite the contrast where he looks worse the more of his speech you read while her speech looks better in context and makes it clear that while he hates people based on who they are, she reserved judgement based on what they do.
>When Hillary called half the nation "deplorables", that was closer to Hitler rhetoric than anything I've heard out of this administration.
Lol. That was three campaigns ago, and she was correct, and you guys are still whining about it like a bunch of snowflakes. Let it go. Hillary Clinton can't hurt you anymore.
The end goal was world domination, as in owning whole world. So, they would eventually come to Madagascar too.
Majority of Jews killed in Hocaust were not Germans. They were from conquered countries.
So, while there was some Madagascar plans floating and while they tried to deport as many German Jews (majority of who were atheists, considered themselves Germans etc) in first stages, they were aware there is going to be showdown later on anyway.
I too have noticed the same language coming out of folks here, folks that have had accounts for over 10 or 15 years. They were always here, but now they emboldened and they are doing their best to make sure that overton window stays very very open on the right.
Your last statement is correct. They are just emboldened by the current political environment. Any law enforcement has a problem where all they see is criminals all day everyday, now we know they aren't always criminals, but that's their view point. There should be sufficient checks and balances to ensure that due process is still upheld. What we're seeing now is the lack of checks because law enforcement feels they will never be held accountable for violating due process. This, while likely not a direct order of the president, it is an environment that his rhetoric has fostered. Even in the cases where the supreme court has said, unanimously, that people have been deported improperly this environment causes those in positions to correct it to ignore the courts.
I support the general idea of expedited deportation of those here illegally, those without valid documents to be here, I don't automatically have a problem if there is greater restrictions on entering or issuing new visas, but I have a major problem with violating due process and these kind of mistakes that's are a result of lack of due diligence.
The courts need to get more heavily involved here. It's easy to blame the president but short of some directive telling people to violate the law the blame is misdirected (until it's election time). The blame needs to be on those individuals doing this thing or seeing it and ignoring it. This is where the courts need to totally strip away default qualified immunity, especially for immigration officers. Because qualified immunity allows them to just say they were following orders without them having to evaluate if what they are doing is legal or not.
I believe if qualified immunity was gone a lot of this nonsense would stop. They would make sure that anyone who was deported was meant to be deported.
I have a friend who is here legally awaiting an asylum hearing, been waiting for 5 years. They were stopped by police for a valid reason and, from what was described the police had probable cause, but the charge itself is very minor. Because she's documented waiting asylum they contacted immigration, for no reason. There was no probable cause to think she was in violation of her immigration status, but they still contacted them and they requested she be held. So now she detained and there's probable cause to do so but it's immigration so they can.
This is where no qualified immunity would make these officers think twice. They know they have no probable cause to continue to hold her beyond the initial charge. Without qualified immunity they would understand that continuing to hold someone after a judge has allowed their release means that they would lose their house their life their future. So I really think we need to end to qualified immunity across the board. Have the people who are supposed to protect us and be responsible for their actions.
Without qualified immunity, no one in their right mind would want to work in law enforcement. LE would become an easy target for malicious litigation where the cost/effort to defend would, itself, be the weapon, regardless of whether or not the lawsuits were won.
LE personnel would have to get insurance, like doctors, which would be crazy expensive and, considering their pay scale, unaffordable.
I don't like some of the implications of qualified immunity, but I understand why it's there and needed.
I think the only real solution to LE abuses is criminal accountability and prosecution. We already have the laws and processes in place to make that happen. It's hindered by the tribal nature of the human condition and I'm not sure you get around that very easily, at least, not at scale.
> anyone got any juice on why this is happening.
Because Trump is an abject racist with a white nationalist policy who ran on deporting what he finds to be undesirable. It's not hard.
The suffering is the point. The current administration thinks that by publicly treating anyone vaguely foreign horribly they will be able to end the allure illegal immigration. I guess the dirty secret is that this sort of stuff has been happening, the difference is that now the government wants everyone to know about it
While the 3 minors are US citizens, their parents are not and the parents can be deported because they are in the country illegally.
That means you have the following options:
a) deport nobody, i.e. you don't apply the law
b) deport just the parents. What do you do with the minor children? Separating them from their parents (different countries) would be cruel.
c) deport the entire family, including the US minors. Since they have US citizenship, they can always return to the US.
Except that’s not the situation here and you left a key option out.
D) the child remains with the legally resident / citizen parent or their immediate families
In these cases they have legally resident parents, just not the one who the child was with when snatched without due process. They’re being denied the ability to coordinate the handoff of the child to the other parent or family who can take responsibility. ICE is not allowing the families to coordinate the child’s care - they’re isolating the parent from their broader families, denying due process, access to legal representation, and unilaterally deporting US citizen children who have other options but were denied the ability to access them.
In the United States our constitution assures -all people- due process and basic human rights. There is no carve out that if you’re visiting the country or otherwise not a citizen that you can be summarily detained, deprived of liberty, and handled however the government chooses including extraordinary rendition to third countries for indefinite imprisonment without recourse. Nothing that is happening is allowable, or even defensible because however you feel about immigration - every action being taken could be taken to tourists, students, or other guests if allowed under the premise only citizens enjoy protections.
And in these cases, even citizens are being given no deference - and the fact they’re toddlers should be even more frightening.
Here’s a quote from the release that basically implies ICE is murdering one child summarily:
“””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.“””
So, the headline as written dramatically understates the situation, and the proposed dichotomy is false. There are many other options, spelled out in the law and regulation and requirements - even constitutionally - and they’re being ignored as an apparent matter of political policy.
Your option d looks to be much like the option b in the post you replied to
Except it’s not, because it’s not the parents but “a parent” being deported, and b) was phrased fallaciously to imply the child would be left alone without legal care givers.
Why is a) bad? Have you considered d) pass a different law? Why are you pretending the law is some immutable thing that we always need to follow, regardless of the situations an unjust law might place someone in if followed?
Instead of processing immigration applications fairly for everyone, we just should let people who break the rules get away with it?
Having deportation as an actual threat, reduces the amount of people who attempt to break the rules since they know there are consequences.
What about the threat of jail? Is the US punitive system not effective? In many ways I'd rather be an immigrant than a citizen if the punishment for crimes is deportation rather than detention... as long as I'm not being sent to country that has also suspended their constitutional right to due process.
Until a new law is passed, the government and courts have a duty to follow the current law.
d) Follow due process and allow the immigration judge to determine
e) Amnesty if living here for awhile and not causing a ruckus.[0] US is huge, it needs more people not less.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
E was what the Democrats have offered and it lost them the last election
Nah, lies, propaganda, and an incoherent strategy for Biden leading to limited window with Harris lost the last election.
There was a perfectly cromulent immigration plan ready to be voted on by Congress before Trump threw a tantrum because it would have hurt his election chances.
d) Give them access to legal counsel and a judge who can all help make this decision on a case-by-case basis and in accordance with the law.
DEPORTING US CITIZENS is the logical choice? Logical to deport children to someplace they have never been and they don't have citizenship to? It's still illogical, evil, unconstitutional, and cruel.
Its post hoc logical, if you want to justify the actions of an autocratic regime and don't have an ethical foot to stand on.
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"Deports" is wrong word for removing a citizen. "Expels" would be more appropriate.
> "Deports" is wrong word for removing a citizen. "Expels" would be more appropriate.
While this is true, the use of what's technically the wrong word highlights that the wrong action is being applied.
The action is a deportation. The targets are people who must/shall not ever be deported. Therefore the headline immediately gets attention for concisely describing a violation.
I think what happened here is that the parents were here illegally. The children just had to accompany the parents. I find it quite possible that the children will be allowed back in once they no longer have to depend on their parents.
The reports of no due process or little to no due process for citizens[1], that is the main point to my understanding. Due process for [1] would at least include making sure the proper documentation was in order so they could easily return in the future, making sure any health care needs could be meet in Honduras or any other critical needs, (not all the details are in but) the father in [1] wanted the child to stay in the US, but they were deported anyway.
I am not seeing all the details I want, but given the reports of 4 year olds having to defend themselves without representation it is easy to believe these reports of no or little due process for child citizens.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/25/us-citizen-deportat...
> here illegally
I have to wonder what horrors and shames ones pathway of life must have taken to think a person existing in a space is summarizable as illegal. A person cannot be illegal. They cannot exist in a space illegally. They could enter a space illegally. They could be unauthorized to be in a space. But by simple fact that they exist in the world, if the law makes them illegal to exist, then that law is unjust and should be considered void ab initio based on the very few common similarities among coherent moral frameworks.
From a practical perspective, as parents and tutelaries of children who have citizenship, they should be allowed to stay as guardians and join the US society. We have so many who thumb their nose at culture in the US, whether the right wanting to commit genocide against the outgroup under the guise of MAGA or the left self-shaming because they know the US can be morally better, but of all people, immigrants, especially undocumented and unauthorized immigrants who risk everything and worked outside standard pathways just for the chance to be at the periphery of US society, vulnerable to the predators and outlaws that inhabit that domain, they should be given extraordinary respect and consideration -- which is what we grant all persons who are in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction (which is geographically defined).
> A person cannot be illegal. They cannot exist in a space illegally.
I don't know if this is true, it seems more like a situational demand that you're making but giving it the tone of a fact that you're pointing out.
If you break into my house, and I shoot you while you're doing it, I won't go to prison. So either you're illegal, or I've become so extraordinarily legal that I can shoot people with impunity. Whatever has happened in that hypothetical, I do not think it is unjust. If you also do not, you don't agree with your own premise.
Maybe if you make it rhyme, it will slip past people's reasoning skills better.
> I have to wonder what horrors and shames ones pathway of life
You don't know anyone here. Your self-regard is off the charts.
What does this "had to" mean? Was it "forced to" or was it "chose to"? Seems like the former.
You are correct. People watch too much TV and think this is out of the ordinary. If the children were kept here we'd be weeping about kids being separated from their parents.
This just dishonest. In the past, the rule of law applied. The law is not perfect or kind, but there was a process where people could defend themselves and egregious violations of U.S. law like this would be avoided. It wouldn’t be the child being “separated from their parents”, it would be the family choosing to go together OR the family choosing to have their child live with relatives.
The case we heard about yesterday illustrates the difference. A judge Trump appointed raised the alarm not just because due process is being violated but because a two year old’s father was pleading with the court to let his daughter live with him. Prior to this administration, nobody would have blinked an eye at a U.S. citizen switching custody to a U.S. citizen parent, and it’d save the government a lot of money to let that happen.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/25/us-citizen-deportat...
That's an unfortunate incident. As per my understanding, the father can technically go get the child back while the child is under the age of 16, using just the child's US birth certificate, but only through the land border. I understand that this can be difficult since traveling from Honduras to a US-Mexico land border crossing could not be too easy.
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No, deporting means sending someone back to their country of origin. You can't "deport" someone from their country of origin to some other country.
> "Deports" is wrong word for removing a citizen.
In fact I looked this up recently, and “deportation” has historically been used in the sense of “dispossession”, i.e. expelling citizens. For example the notorious deportation of defeated Jews to Babylon.
But nowadays that “deportation” so often connotes “repatriation” we’ll need to make those distinctions. And people seem to be completely unaware: we’re in a Year of Ordinary Jubilee!
There are already words for that: banished, disappeared, forced exiled, concentration camp victim... just reuse terms already used to describe crimes done by nazis and other fascist goverments.
The purpose of this evil is to spread fear, provoke a response and get publicity, push and prod the system for weakness/loyalty, condition their supporters to accept these atrocities as normal and necessary, and to communicate the blueprint by example, as it gets repeatedly acted out in public. The message is this is how we're operating, so if anything looks weird to you, trust the plan because we're on the same team (wink wink). I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing domestic terrorism and public lawlessness go unpunished if it's directed towards immigrants, journalists, judges, and other 'enemies'.
It's already started. Remember all those pardons for the Jan 6 terrorists?
theyve started arresting judges too, rip.
Bondi -- an outrageously partisan hack who is destroying the DOJ -- reached peak irony when she stated that "no one is above the law" in talking about that case.
Donald Trump and his administration are on an absolute crime spree[1]. Insider trading, launching shit-coins and engaging in self-dealing, completely disregarding both the constitution and the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.
The US is currently a lawless banana republic with the dumbest autocrat in history. That's the one saving grace: This herd of absolute imbeciles are so catastrophically stupid -- a cluster of plastic-faced Fox news clowns -- that they are bound to destroy everything so completely that they are overthrown out of necessity. Will the US survive this? Given that it voted for this rapist, charity-stealing moron twice, hopefully not. The fractured nations that come out of this hopefully have a better path.
[1] Ignoring that he is giving the most laughably corrupt pardons in history, to outrageously guilty thieves, fraudsters and human effluence. Trump's grotesque abuse, and quite literal selling, of pardons should be the impetus for whatever husk remains of the dissolved United States to abolish presidential pardons.
Including crypto scams it looks no different from previous administration with a disabled president
From the way things are going now, the previous administration had a perfectly able president.
The value of citizenship is being eroded each year, with governments increasingly keen to strip people of citizenship [0].
First they came for the terrorists, then they came for the dual citizenship lesser criminals.
We're getting a glimpse of who's next. The Dutch government wanted to strip citizenship from people convicted of a crime with an "antisemitic element"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/26/how-idea-of-st...
"First they came for the terrorists," Probably the least thoughtful appropriation of Niemöller's speech I've ever seen.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3081/
Of course the administration was lying when it said they would only target “criminals”.
Of course it’s impossible to know who “really” is a critical mastermind. (Comic book lives) /s
Everyone should pay attention and amplify these stories of targeted non-criminal families, because the “radical left” is next. Joking/not-Joking
Here’s another family in Washington state,
“A high schooler stays back as his family, separated by deportation, returns to Guatemala”
APRIL 26, 2025 WEEKEND EDITION SATURDAY
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/26/nx-s1-5330896/a-high-schooler...
The target only criminals, they just didn’t tell who they see as criminal.
Why the deliberate atrocities?
I read an article that starts with this proposition [1]
> The real question, however, is not how America lost its way. We know the mechanics of it. It lost its way in large measure because Donald Trump, a Pied Piper of malice, led it astray, though one can’t lay all of that or even most of it on Trump. The American people, nearly half of those who voted, in their infinite wisdom empowered Trump to do so. They were looking for a Trump, yearning for a Trump, to do so.
> They wanted a Trump to destroy the nation. They hoped he would destroy the nation both by sowing chaos and discord and by supervising a demolition of our institutions and values. So the real question we should be asking is why so many of our fellow Americans desired this, and what deep proclivities Trump drew upon to prompt the nation, at least a good part of it, to self-immolate. What does Trump give them?
Having read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as a young person, this is reminiscent of a fascist playbook.
Except that it seems that social media are in effect creating a culture of resentment, projection of weakness and failure onto others and driving it for profit with unfiltered echo chambers.
The cause and effect seems to be playing to a vengeful base in order to keep legislators in line until their branch and the judicial branch are rendered impotent.
Exploring the parallels with Nazi Germany, the amassing of data was paramount.
> DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say [2]
Further,
> TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TEXTED COLLEGE PROFESSORS’ PERSONAL PHONES TO ASK IF THEY’RE JEWISH [3]
> The school later told staff it had provided the Trump administration with personal contact information for faculty members.
> The messages, sent to most Barnard professors’ personal cellphones, asked them to complete a voluntary survey about their employment.
> “Please select all that apply,” said the second question in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, survey.
> The choices followed: (including) “I am Jewish”; “I am Israeli”; “I have shared Jewish/Israeli ancestry”; “I practice Judaism”; and “Other.”
Data?
IBM provided Germany with tabulating equipment to manage "undesirables" [4] [5]
The notion of cultural supremacy resonates with some in Silicon Valley, land of big and targeted data.
'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook [6]
Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk 'Hijacking' Republicans to Control Entire US Government [7]
PDF of their letter. [8] 630K
[1] https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/the-agonizing-work-of-art-tha...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-building-master-database-imm...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2025/04/23/trump-eeoc-barnard-colum...
[4] https://allthatsinteresting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2/3
[5] https://allthatsinteresting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2
[6] https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...
[7] https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/07/silicon-valley-whistleblo...
[8] https://america2.news/content/files/2025/02/Musk-NRx-Memo-Fe...
When they separate undocumented children from their families in the first Trump term and did not bother to leave a paper trail so that these families could be reunited so it would take years if ever for these children to be returned to their parents, not one person in the entire chain of command was punished for it. When there are zero consequences for doing wrong, we should not be surprised the wrong doing continues. Same with Bush Jr using private servers to hide his administration's emails - now every GOP administration is going to use this tactic with whatever technology permits it like Signal is being used to bypass laws for record keeping today because no one holds them to account and no one will.
Crimes and atrocities will continue to be committed as long as there are no consequences for them. Period.
I weep for my once great, free, and democratic country.
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Downvoted/flagged trolling. Of course people can think of a better right thing to do in this case.
I honestly cannot. There is almost nothing worse than losing your kids. It might be worse than death. The humane solution is to allow a deported parent to keep them.
Ok, let's try some empathy and humane thinking: you don't throw out either of them in that case.
So basically create a huge incentive to drag very sick kids through the darien gap and cartel land with no real plan for foid and housing of their kids? If i did 1% of that someone would call cps to take my kids.
The incentive already exists. But this case is about US citizen kids, not kids brought in. So concentrating on that:
> The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities
> Both families have possible immigration relief
The current actions did not make sense and didn't make anything better or solve any problems.
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Due Process is being denied to US citizens, who are being removed from the country without the opportunity for them or their parents to consult an attorney.
From Claude
> According to a Migration Policy Institute report, the deportation system dramatically changed over the past 19 years - moving from a judicial system prior to 1996 where most people facing deportation had immigration court hearings, to a system during Obama's administration where 75 percent of people removed did not see a judge before being deported.
You have to understand that most what you read about online about this administration is not written in good faith and reported honestly. Everything is unprecedented and a constitutional crisis. Really unforgivable when basic questions in an LLM can provide you meaningful context
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/speed-over-fairn...
Can I point out that this administration has gone out of it's way to flaunt it's disregard for the law and constitutional norms? Is anyone buying that the US can't pressure El Salvador to get back someone it wants? Anyone in doubt that it's a backroom deal in defiance of due process?
There's a reason why trust in the ruling administration is so important, because otherwise the system breaks down. Any time any questions pop up about how the law is being violated, Tom Homan breaks down crying about how the real crime is how children are baking to death in the heat of the sun, that children are being raped by cartel members... like what do you even say to that? Its easy to see why people are able to commit acts of great cruelty if they've convinced themselves that it's a neccesary evil for the greater good.
And it is unprecedented for modern times and it is a constitutional crisis on an almost daily basis.
Is anyone buying that the US can't pressure El Salvador to get back someone it wants?
Nope, America has become so weak under the new rule that now when El Salvador says something America has to shut up and obey… It is what it is… :)
That's about non-citizen immigrants. What does it have to do with deporting US citizens without due process?
The issue isn't about the administration. It's about that this can happen.
You just advocated for deporting U.S. Citizens without trial simply because they're related to someone who committed a misdemeanor.
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Kinda mind boggling to me that you would ask chatgpt and then post the answer as if that adds something to the discussion.
I think it's important to know exactly what happens in these cases to not be vulnerable to counterarguments. It seems in addition to the cruelty of selectively enforcing laws, it is clearly illegal - so we can fight these actions in court.
AI is not a reliable source for legal matters. There are so many examples of it making up precedent it’s basically a meme at this point. Posting its response is not helpful. I’d have thought hacker news contributors would understand that.
If what chatgpt said is incorrect, I would love to know. Are you not interested in the legal details of these cases so we know what can be fought under current law and not? The cruelty of the actions should be judged harshly, and in the longer run we need to reform immigration law so they are not possible, but knowing what can currently be fought legally matters to me.
Aside from whether it is correct in this particular case or not, it’s just bizarre to me that you would post what AI told you. It’s like you’re a booster for dead internet theory. So in addition to half the internet consisting of AIs arguing with each other, we now have to deal with people telling us what AI said.
> Aside from whether it is correct
If it's mind boggling to you I would ask chatgpt, it's mind boggling to me that you don't care whether it is correct...
But if you generally think chatGPT produces garbage, I guess that makes sense. I disagree, to me it's a good initial query, replacing google. As with google before, it is not authoritative (e.g AI may hallucinate, or google may land you on some SEO bs page), but I don't tend to dismiss its use outright.
> If what chatgpt said is incorrect, I would love to know.
Fact checking LLM copypasta takes orders of magnitude more effort than producing it. How about you do the homework rather than making it everyone else's problem.
From the article, we don't really know what happened to the children in terms of process. All we know is that the parents were not allowed to communicate.
Usually at least one of parents is allowed to legally stay to take care of a kid.
I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know this is completely wrong.
There is a conspiracy theory that “anchor babies” will help undocumented parents avoid deportation from the US.
As far as I can tell, the usual thing that happens when undocumented parents of a US citizen are deported is that they have to give the child to a citizen relative to raise, or they take the child with them.
It seems to be extremely rare, though “prosecutorial discretion” can allow for a parent to remain in the US. There is no guarantee; an undocumented parent can and is often deported later, sometimes for minor crimes. I couldn’t find any stats about how often this happens but immigration consultants stress to their clients that they can’t rely on it.
If the undocumented parents have been in the country for 10 years they can apply for relief for deportation but that is capped at 4,000 cases annually. If the child remains in the US until they become an adult, and can plausibly sponsor a relative, then they can also apply to reunify with their parent. The deported parent may have to spend a minimum of a decade outside the US.
it is cruel. the cruelty is the point.