Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements

If they don't, they can still do that, but anything they find will likely not be usable in court and you'll have a straightforward civil rights case.

However, today, every segment in the pipeline of judice -- LEO to PA/DA[1] to judiciary to BoPs -- is utterly subverted ideologically. What happens in this pipeline -- especially regarding a 4A case -- will have little to do with justice, but rather who you are, who is trying you, and what court they manage to pick. And of course the hands and eyes of the whole system is the Executive Branch, now in lockstep[2] at the Federal Level.

Reactionaries will insist to their dying day that the opposing ideology did this first, so today they have the right to do it back harder.

What this means is that it doesn't matter what your rights are, or who has what paper. Because who's taking your case? Where will it go? How long will it take?

In one sense, the reactionaries are right: an opposing ideology HAS been doing this, for a long time. But it's not hollywood or the academy or the commmunists or the legions of wokedom. It's your boss, and your boss' boss. Using their cushion of money to avoid any kind of criminal and civil responsibilities by simply waiting out everyone else in court. They're the ones who broke the ground here, and the post-GWoT security state drove a bus through it, as if Keanu Reeves was at the wheel.

Anyway at this late hour in our accursed year of 2026 . . none of it matters. Doesn't matter who started it, doesn't matter what side you happen to like or not like. Same result: the laws on paper will not protect you. Don't make the possibly fatal mistake of thinking they will. Think like a guerilla, think like Snowden.

[1] But not quite with every SAO, a hairline fracture in the cathedral of oppression we've voted to have built all around us.

[2] Or at least as much "lockstep" as can be bought with the current executive's level of competence. The Dominionists and the Dark Enlightenment sorts are the beating heart of intelligence in the reactionary wing today, and they are still mostly staying in the background, waiting for the collapse.

>I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read

I guess I'd ask if you're really sure about that as a threat model? The fact is that such things are really really rare, particularly for anything white collar-ish. They get press precisely because they're unicorns. The "lawful" bit as well, one of the whole things here is that it's, at best, very dubiously lawful at all; they've been able to skirt that question so far via keeping it all secret and trying to hide from individual suit. Can't do that if a warrant from a local magistrate judge is needed and a private residence is raided though.

In contrast "you can beat the rap but not the ride" seems less dramatic but a lot more common, and in particular more than actual jail all the little ways the government has tried to fuck with people (like putting them on travel lists) that are opaque and much more difficult to even prove are the result of an organized scheme. I'm personally more worried in the near future about "chilling effects at a scale", not hundreds of activists in gulags but millions of people who get pressure in terms of financials or tax investigations or pressure on employers or always getting pulled in the security lines and on and on, and then some sizable fraction change their behavior as a result. It feels more concretely productive and practical to focus on making sure the government would have trouble both scaling and hiding unconstitutional behavior.

Although it may still be possible that some jurisdictions will emerge, even within the US, that have the capacity to preserve basic civil liberties for their residents, whether via tacit agreement or overt paramilitary enforcement.

I wouldn't bet my kids' childhoods on that happening, though.

They also see it like an insurance payment. Kick some amount to both sides in the hope that they leave you alone.

And I also think of it as pretty esoteric to the mainstream, TBH.

Sometimes they miscalculate. Mitch McConnell once had to filibuster his own bill because he didn't mean for it to pass.

I’d actually be OK with a symmetric response to this, in fact, I WOULD LOVE a symmetric response: law enforcement can’t use AI to track citizens and we can’t use AI to track them.

… but there is a lot of 1st and 4th amendment shenanigans going on with all of this and I can’t even guess where it will land.

Your point is that immigration laws don't sufficiently take into account an illegal migrant's economic status (i.e. make reasonable accommodations for those in poverty or desperate circumstances), which is a totally fair perspective.

But that doesn't affect OP's initial question/observation, since countries other than the US also apply their rules uniformly, which disproportionately affects the poor.

The people that ICE are rounding up today already have an active removal order, and they are actively fleeing law enforcement (for the most part).

People have also been offered incentives to self-deport. The ones left are actively breaking the law and are more or less fugitives.

Personally, I would prefer to not have federal police forces and we could use state police to deport people, but both sides of the aisle are making a lot of cash building up the police state.

We don’t want the full population of every failed or economically-languishing state (including ALL kinds of people, including the worst elements that exist in every society) to show up overnight and move in, which is what has happened in many western countries including the US with asylum claim abuse.

It’s rapidly turned high-trust societies into low-trust societies because that’s how those who come here from low-trust societies operate by default. People who have been here and know what a proper society looks like don’t like this.

It turned out that those peoples, given opportunities and in a system with functioning institutions, actually weren't violent, stupid or culturally incompatible and in fact thrived, integrated, built communities, grew the economy and contributed to society.

Something for you to consider.

Statistically this is false. No amount of hand picked undocumented drunk drivers will change this. A large majority of undocumented immigrants follow the law closer, aside from the obvious immigration laws.

So yes, if it quacks like a fascist duck, it's a fascist duck.

"The idea that illegal immigrants need to be deported comes from a view that those jobs should go to American citizens or from a view that browns don't belong in the USA"

Calling everybody a racist who wants laws enforced is weak. Immigration laws are made necessary by a welfare state I happen to not support. The conversation has literally nothing to with race or racism. We're talking about the laws that govern the country and whether we should enforce or ignore them.

What do you think? Do you have any profound insight or ideas to share?

I love to see your source on this one. I personally haven't seen this policy stance from any Democrats.

By what metric does the Democratic party want “as many illegal immigrants as possible” and why would they be deporting so many people if that were the case?

It's not about the outcomes of something taken in isolation, it's about the actions taken in order to achieve it, and when those actions continually run counter to achieving the stated goal.

So the response article examples are missing half the context needed to make it's claim:

* The hospital only curing 2/3 of cancer patients being simply a failure to achieve it's true mission of 3/3 cures would rely on knowing it is taking action in earnest to actually cure all patients.

While we can assume that for an obvious hypothetical, if for instance a whistleblower leaked evidence showing that 1/3 patients were being intentionally withheld care, the hospital responded it was an accident, but then evidence came out proving they still did this, then POSIWID would apply.

In a real-world, non-hypothetical example:

ICE keeps deporting American citizens. Every time this gets reported on, they insist it's a mistake. They keep doing it.

Insisting that adverse behavior is an accident/mistake/incidental, but then continuing to do the bad thing yourself, is the purpose of the axiom.

How do you do this in a way that preserves the leverage that business owners have over undocumented workers? Those people form a pretty strong coalition with the people who think all immigration is bad for ... other reasons, so this is pretty much a non-starter politically.

Without a current visa of some kind though, you are deportable, mostly at the whims and mercy of the government. But you wouldn't be committing a crime and deportation is not a criminal punishment.

When you do crimes, you get criminally punished (hypothetically) citizen or not (jail, fines, etc).

Whether the government can, should or must carry out a deportation are all truly separate considerations, often with distinct, case-by-case answers.

And with all this in mind, pause for a moment and sit with the fact that thousands of people who have committed no crime at all are getting grabbed off the street and incarcerated indefinitely by ICE and subjected to ghastly conditions

If you're not rich enough to lawyer up, spend five figures fighting through the kangaroo administrative process and then another five sticking it to them in real court a civil infraction is actually worse in a lot of ways because those pesky 4th through 8th amendments don't really protect you all that much. There's a lot of judicial precedent from the past 100yr that basically waters down your rights when a bureaucrat is after you rather than the cops.

Somewhere between half and a solid majority of undocumented immigrants came through ports of entry and have overstayed their visas. Again, this is not a crime

Or perhaps there is a semantic game, but it's coming from the other direction - from those who would demagogue immigrants in order to portray them all as scary, evil criminals

The social contract is: the President isn’t above the law. Right now and as long as he’s President, that contract is breached. So do immigration laws matter? I don’t know, because the plain text of the Constitution says those who swear an oath to the Constitution and foment insurrection against the US shall be barred from office. And yet, an insurrectionist is the executive right now, enforcing laws against people he doesn’t like and waiving laws that make him rich. So then why should immigration laws matter at this time? And under what authority?

The main point though is that the "problem" of seasonal farm workers staying in the US illegally is to some extent artificially created by attempting to strictly enforce the border. Before that they were able to come work freely and would happily return to their home country because the process of getting into the US for the harvesting seasons was (relative to the modern process) easy, safe and cheap so there was no reason to stay in the US. Why would they, their wages would go farther in their home countries and that's where their families were and they would be able to cross back for the next major harvest they wanted to participate in.

If they werent white, they wouldnt have been allowed to naturalize at all, as the law forbad non-white naturalization

To give just one example, Lambeth is the council in London with highest immigration and also the lowest vote for Leave in the Brexit referendum

> Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:

citation needed

> The type and character of the immigration matters

No it doesn't. That's a self justification for anti immigration sentiments. Half the city of London and the NHS are immigrants (or obvious descendants of) and you wouldn't have any trouble finding anecdotes of being racially targetted. I was on a train today at Waterloo where a south african man was talking loudly about how you "cannot find a white face in the NHS anymore". The type of immigration does not matter

> Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK

What a stupid counter argument. Frankly you can catch brit guys harassing girls from the smoking area of any Spoons the soon schools are off. Considering Prince Andrew's behaviour one would argue those immigrants are adoption british values.

SA and harashment has never been a priority for british police. The Sarah Everard investigation ended with a 300 page recommendation and evaluation of the MET that found ignoring working class women as a massive issue, and no reforms have been done since.

Similar the tommy robinson protest against small boats mentioned "protecting women" which your video comment alluded to, except 60% of the participants had Domestic abuse records. Being against immigrants because you wanna monopolise abusing women is not really a good proposion for the future of your country

> You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own

Yeah I remember the 2010s when the euros where coming over and all those romanians, and polish and spanish all came to be waiters and do other non skilled jobs (ignore their participation in industries like construction, Software, nursing). I also remember in the 80s and 90s when all the Bangladeshi and indians came with their low skill jobs (ignore Brick Lane being revived, or Rishi Sunak becoming a billionaire through the british education system). Damn how I hated living in Brixton in the 60 with all those Jamaicans that came in the windrush generation, all that lovely food and music scene was unbearable.

But you know my irish parents when they came in the 30s, with their low skill to a council house in Bermondsey they had to hide their accent to not be attacked by "proper brits"...

Its been the same fucking discourse for 100 years, and every single new immigration pattern is "the wolf is coming", don't you lot get tired of being wrong?

> Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades.

That is not true. Popular democratic concerns have been addressed with immigration controls and requirements. What goverments have done is protect demographic collapse and labour concerns because people care about the economy growing and pensions being paid.

South Korea had 0 immigration and currently is tittering on demographic collapse. The country could literally disappear because of so few kids. Japan isnt far off. Do you see the british or american people ready to work into their 80s? Do you see british women ready to have 4 kids each? If the answer is no, then immigration is basically the only solution. Govs have kept it at the minimum acceptable for people to not complain, but as sytemic issues compound (like lack of housing) people look for easy solutions to complicated problems and pointing at brown people is easier than figuring out how we solved housing in 1919 with the council house goverment scheme and yet now people are spending 46% of salary on rent in London.

IMO, Republicans like the status quo because the business class enjoys exploiting workers they can threaten with deportation, and they enjoy it as a rallying cry for their voting base.

There was a post here about a year or so ago about a guy on Facebook being arrested for incredibly benign posts [1]. It's the clearest example of violating one of our foundational laws of this country. Yet the police get away with a slap on the wrist as taxpayers pay for their abuse of power. American police are powerful and are not subject to the same level of scrutiny or justice as average individuals. They can selectively ignore laws and constitutional rights as is.

[1] https://abc7ny.com/post/tennessee-man-jailed-charlie-kirk-po...

The issue is we don’t run our country that way. We do apply it on a spectrum. So as long as that’s the status quo, I will expect them to back off on things that don’t need strict enforcement. You don’t need to eject every single undocumented person with impunity. It is not productive or ethical.

Or "No, we won't be turning that plane around."

I think you mean selectively enforcing some immigration law.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/10/immi...

Only Trump has really done this. ICE was created in the wake of 9/11 and didn't exist before then.

Before Trump we had Bush and Obama presiding over ICE - the 9/11 aftermath heavily influenced both of their administration policies on deportation (in both cases, pretty hardline).

Before ICE, deportation was mostly a matter for lawyers and judges, and not full of smashed car windows and gun fights, by chuds that make mall-cops look like Marines by comparison.

The weaponization of ICE against political enemies is new and dangerous

We can certainly blame congress for not doing reform, but also it's really hard. The immigration system is probably the most complex legal and bureaucratic regime in the country

But I'm pleased you live up to your profile name.

All best,

You keep using the term authoritarian but I don't think you actually know what it means.

And they were go to example of important free speech for years. The gauge was always defending nazi free speech, never defending communist free speech, radical feminists free speech or whoever else free speech.

Your question supposed to determine authoritanianism shows the same fallacy - nazi and other fascists wont count as an authoritarian. If I think all women should be locked at home and be under control of husbands, you wont count me as authoritarian either.

ICE was created in 2002 as part of the notorious Homeland Security Act. Do you think immigration law was just... not enforced before that?

Hint: Immigration law was previously handled by an agency called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, with customs enforcement being handled by US Customs. ICE has shown complete disregard for the Constitution, a common issue with the agencies created by the Homeland Security Act.

Dismantling ICE does not mean stopping border enforcement. It means decentralizing that power and devolving immigration enforcement to agencies better equipped to handle it while protecting the rights of American Citizens.