SmirkingRevenge
Joined 12 years ago
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Member since
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Recent submissions
Comment · 9 hours ago
Comment · 22 hours ago
Ah yes, the old, "I'm reasonable and you're not" surrender
Comment · 1 day ago
You don't really know the law and aren't seriously grappling with it or the many discretionary elements within it. Here's a good start for you though, from yesterday's NYT:
As they have now seen, at least as far as Samuel Sey goes, deportation isn’t simply a matter of following the rule of law. It’s a policy choice rooted both in legal mandates and in acts of presidential discretion. And this president is using his discretion in a way that harms Americans and American national interests.
American immigration law is a mess. The system is overly complicated and often internally contradictory. But one thing is clear — the rule of law does not require mass deportation. It does not mandate that a man like Sey has to leave the country.
And it certainly doesn’t require his detention, away from his family, while the system adjudicates his case.
First, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2023 case, United States v. Texas, the president has considerable “enforcement discretion over arrests and prosecutions” and that discretion “extends to the immigration context.” This means the president “retains discretion over whether to remove a noncitizen from the United States.”
This isn’t a new principle. More than a decade earlier, in a 2012 case, Arizona v. United States, the court held, “Federal officials, as an initial matter, must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all."
Comment · 1 day ago
"Realistic" you say, as you offer yet another metaphor completely disconnected from the reality of the issue under discussion, because you don't know enough about it to actually discuss it directly
You can't speak coherently about the actual facts and realities of immigrants or the immigration system, despite the vast ocean of facts and stories you can use to educate yourself
But hey... imagine a cop, the pope and a bear walk into a bar ... therefore deport, or something. Think about it!
Comment · 1 day ago
I have no idea what you're even trying to say here
When you have to reach for such increasingly strained and indirect metaphors to talk about an issue instead of dealing with the issue directly on it's own terms, it's a tell you don't actually know much about it all
I can see in your other replies you've really latched onto this "it's not a punishment" line, that you literally just "learned" a couple of replies ago from me (as if it's some magical auto-win button). You're making it up as you go along
And you've even gotten that wrong. I said deportation isn't a criminal punishment. To put it another way, deportation doesn't imply some wrongdoing or a guilty verdict from a judge or jury
But it can be just as consequential as a criminal punishment though, so it's not something to be done lightly without very good reasons. It's drastic, life-altering, sometimes life-destroying, grave and serious thing
To bring it back to some real facts here: There are estimated to be over a million households in the US where an undocumented person is married to a citizen. Many of them have children who are US citizens. Deporting the spouse/parent utterly destroys families, there's no morally justifiable reason to go after these people, except in rare, exceptional cases.
Comment · 2 days ago
Here we are, still fighting with illusions created by the term "illegal immigrant". Legal/illegal is a false binary.
Millions (if not most) of the immigrants who have arrived here in recent years entered through ports of entry or presented themselves to Border Patrol to initiate the immigration process, and have pending immigration cases or asylum claims working their way through the courts. All perfectly legal. Guess what bucket they fall into?
And what exactly are we trying to deter in those cases? Nothing that should be deterred in the first place.
Want to deter illegal border crossings? Sounds good, but we're already pretty good at it. Apprehension rates have been pretty consistent over the years (before and after Trump)
What problem are we actually solving with more "deterrence"?
Reducing the backlog in immigration courts? Fair enough. I agree that's a problem worth solving. But the solution is straightforward: increase the system's capacity to process cases in a timely manner by hiring more immigration judges and implementing a few easy legal reforms.
Instead, we're building a nationwide network of detention facilities, pouring a military-grade budget into an immigration enforcement agency with serious accountability problems, and incentivizing aggressive enforcement through high quotas and broad discretion. The predictable result is the kind of situation we're seeing now, where ICE detains people as they show up for their damn naturalization ceremonies and is quickly turning itself into a domestic military/spying agency.
It's deterring immigration, period.
Net migration has turned negative for the first time in decades. The total US population declined for the 1st time in history in 2025. If that's not turned around, and fast, we're cooked.
Comment · 2 days ago
Same here. I think the programming language and project size/complexity probably have a lot to do with it
The code I own professionally has LOC in the 6 figures, and it's near impossible to hit weekly quota unless I'm running a bunch of experiments on the side or using Fable for everything
Probably a different story when the codebase is much larger
Comment · 2 days ago
Thankfully, for most people, such simplistic notions die at first contact with an actual real-life mass deportation campaign as they witness the wrecked homes and families they leave behind.
Most of these immigrants aren't islands unto themselves, they are here b/c they have ties here, or have even spent their lives here, and you're ripping them away from their families. Many of the dreamers they're trying to deport right now haven't lived in their "home" country since they were toddlers
That sort of thing leads sensible people to ask themselves, "what good is actually being done here?"
This is why immigration went from a winning issue to a losing issue with Republicans in the span of 2 years.
Comment · 3 days ago
> That is it, you said it.
Said what? That deportation isn't a criminal punishment? Oh no, you got me! Checkmate I guess.
I'll answer as if this is a good faith rejoinder, even though we both know it isn't.
Deportation is drastic. Very drastic. It's also very expensive and often very disruptive to many people's lives, including American citizens. Think households with an undocumented spouse, for example.
It's generally a bad thing to do without very good, justifiable reasons. Not the least of which how expensive it is for the state.
> Would you expect a cop who is detaining you because you were speeding, to let you go without checking your license because of some personal emergency. Why do you expect something different here?
I wouldn't expect police to imprison people indefinitely (and at great cost to the state) for minor traffic violations, no. That would be insane.
Comment · 3 days ago
The current administration seems to be doing a trial run of this policy, limited to agents in ICE/USBP
Comment · 3 days ago
There is no semantic game going on here
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
Comment · 3 days ago
It's nothing. It's completely outside the criminal justice system. It's not even a misdemeanor.
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
Comment · 3 days ago
> where they can use ICE to hammer their enemies
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
Comment · 3 days ago
It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
It only becomes a crime once you're formally deported
Comment · 3 days ago
Yes and no
The internet era has brought about the rise of small dollar donors making an outsized impact (for better or worse - it's not always a good thing)
This has given rise to more forms of populism (left and right, benign and toxic)
In any case, it does provide some counter weight to large donor class.
Money tends to have diminishing returns past a certain point, when it comes to elections.
And I think people underestimate what dopes many large donors are - that just get milked by the party people pumping them full of sweet talk and don't really get much in return
But Trumps popularity has plummeted to it's lowest point ever and immigration is a big reason.
It has gone from one of his strongest issues to a major liability, as people are confronted with what mass deportation actually is.