It's been fascinating watching the party of "small government" turn into one that supports ever expanding powers of a three letter agency whose job is supposed to be patrolling the border. It's like a new 9/11 Patriot act moment, except it's only one side supporting it this time.
It's the same as the Republican slogans of being the party of "fiscal responsibility" despite under-performing the Democratic party in nearly all financial metrics and constantly blowing up the deficit or being the party of "family values" while having leaders and 'respected' voices who are the complete opposite.
The party of small government is a slogan. It’s the same party that expanded domestic FBI surveillance, expanded intelligence agencies and lots of other things. It’s also the party that is intimately interested in what private citizens do in their bedroom (sodomy and condom laws) and what medical decisions doctors and patients can undertake.
To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
The Newt and the Tea Party started the slide, normalizing hatred and bombast and FU-politics, and MAGA perfected it.
Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent, what you are dealing with now are not really Republicans. They are MAGA-folks. They should really rename themselves the Solipism Party. Nothing matters but the current state of your own head.
And yes, I know parties change and evolve with the times, but I would argue this time is very different.
> To be fair, the current Republican Party bears almost no resemblance to the "classic" Republican Party of....10 years ago.
In other aspects, perhaps. But the "small government" or "pro-economy" branding of the Republican Party has been an absurdity for more like 75 years. Democratic administrations have performed better on virtually any conceivable economic metric with very few minor exceptions.
The "old" GOP also loved 3 letter agencies, unitary executive theory, and mass surveillance. They did the Patriot Act. And Scalia hated the 5th Amendment, was weird on the 4th, and dramatically increased police powers.
It's not like those Tea Party folk appeared out of the blue. They grew, but the core constituency has been pandered to by mainstream Republican leadership since at least Nixon.
The current Republican Party is the exact same as 10 years ago, just further along.
10 years ago was basically Trump 1. And 10 years before that was GWB starting the endless wars with an admin outright denying reality. Which Reagan also did. And of course Nixon literally broke into the opposition party’s.
.. 10 years ago. Yes it fucking does, it's just become more brazen. Those are the motherfuckers that passed the patriot act and then reupped it over and over.
Every US administration at least as far back as Woodrow has done nothing but expand the surveillance state. Like you can make the argument that occasional weirdos like Ike, Clinton and Hoover didn't really do anything to expand on that front and just kept the status quo and let them run themselves but there has never been any substantial rollback in at least 100yr. And as bad as the executive is the legislature is no better.
That's why all of these efforts to corrode civil liberties needs to be fought and contested by both sides. Otherwise the ratcheting effect makes if impossible to reclaim these liberties.
Yes votes were 144 D and 213 R in the house with unanimous yes (only one no) in the Senate. Right after 9/11 people were fine giving up with their rights pretty much across the spectrum. Granted Republicans more than Democrats. I think since then it has just been the status quo for every president since Bush. I hate it but it has been engrained at this point IMO.
This all reminds me of Makeshift Patriot by Sage Francis.
The Tea Party, MAGA (and the on the other side of the isle the Bernie bros and whatever their replacement will be) represent pent up demand from the masses to get the current status quo to F-off. So far the status quo has co-opted all these movements.
None of this is new. The article states that CBP got authorization to track license plates in 2017 and concerns about law enforcement use of ALPR date back to at least 2010. The ACLU sued the LAPD in 2013 on ALPR.
Is it? or is the new part that it's being reported? This "news" just looks like an investigation AP conducted on its own. Could they have conducted it years ago, and what would they have found then?
No it is not. The DEA has been doing that since at least the 2nd Bush admin and probably would've been under Clinton or Bush 1 had the tech existed at the time.
I've been seeing a slow splinter as of late between "establshment"-style Democrats focused on decorum, and the progressive-style democrats focused on overhauling the status quo. There definitely seems to be a slow shift towards people who want to take real actions an not stay stifled in years talking about actions.
Of course, the former won't let the latter perform without a fight. The campaign with Mamdami was one of many clashes on this, and there will be many more to come next year.
Either way, a focus of not falling to fascism is the bare minimum agreement between all democrats. I just hope we don't all think the job is done once we get the bar back from being underground. It being on the floor still isn't a great look.
They talk about increasing minimum salaries for exempt workers, paid sick and family leave, infrastructure funding, expanding access to healthcare, etc. How is that lower case conservative, or pro status quo?
Here’s some American context: a ~3 minute video. Bush and Reagan, during the primaries, trying to win over Republicans, answering a question about immigration.
Or even look at George @ Bush's calls for comprehensive immigration reform, and his repeated emphasis on treating all immigrants, legal or not, with dignity and courtesy: https://www.bushcenter.org/topics/immigration
Infrastructure funding is a pro-business position. At this point, most of the infrastructure that the Democrats are seeking funding for is maintenance, the definition of "status quo".
So is minimum wage, despite all of the screaming. Minimum wages ensure the existence of a working class. When the minimum wage drops below subsistence, there are civil disruptions that are bas for business.
When the Democrats expanded health care, they did so using a plan devised by the Heritage Foundation. It works on free-market principles, of consumers purchasing insurance from private enterprise. It is also very pro-business, creating a larger class of potential employees who can be hired without employer-sponsored benefits.
Many democrats would indeed like a government-run universal health care plan. But it's not a majority of the party, which is indeed (as the OP said) dominated by the center-right.
When have there ever been "civil disruptions" due to a low minimum wage in the US? Federal minimum wage has been underwater all of my life. If the minimum wage law had any teeth (requiring Congress to stop fellating business owners), it would at least be tied to the inflation rate (as Social Security tends to be).
If the Federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since it's peak value in 1968, it would be close to $26/hour.
None of that is conservative or liberal or leftist its common sense that both parties should be able to agree on. There are policies that are logically the right thing to do.
If implemented with a modicum of competence (which is admittedly not a foregone conclusion) and over a sufficiently long period (probably at least longer than one or two 4-year terms), all of those things would almost certainly have positive effects on the economy.
You'll notice that, except for paid sick leave, all these things are simply "keep the lights on" policies. That is conservatism.
You might be confusing conservatism with libertarianism. Up until about Reagan, all these policies were considered conservative.
Progressive policies aren't just about tweaking existing policy, it's about building new social structures. We've not seen anything really close to that in the US since roughly LBJ.
They notably do not talk about modifying the systems of governance that have prevented us from accomplishing those goals, which they have been "talking about" nearly the entire 40 years I've been alive. If I were to ignore their talk and judge purely based on action, it certainly seems like Democrats effect less change than Republicans.
(to be clear about where I stand, when given a choice between a conservative party and a regressive party, I have always begrudgingly chosen the conservatives)
They directly increased access to healthcare and infrastructure funding in the last 15 years, and both were very obvious, big bills. Perhaps it would behoove you to actually pay attention, instead of memeing online about things you don't actually know anything about?
Do you know any progressives? Do you follow any politics outside the US? I'm going to guess not, because your frame of reference for what a genuinely progressive win would look like is woefully miscalibrated. I suggest you rectify that before accusing anyone else of ignorance.
Yes, they have had some incremental policy wins and done tremendous good for millions of people (while also making, e.g. healthcare more expensive/profitable). No, the occasional incremental policy win does not a progressive party make.
I directly responded to your whining about “action” - I’m sorry that you now want to have a different conversation because you realized how utterly incorrect you were, but I’m not interested in asinine purity bullshit from some “Enlightened Progressive” who doesn’t, faintly, understand European politics.
Healthcare, for instance, is not more expensive for the average low-income person because of the ACA. You’re utterly incorrect, completely misinformed, and repeating bullshit. “Progressives”. Lol.
Since Clinton Democrats have been neoliberal (conservative). The mechanism they've chosen for all of their programs has been public private partnerships. Infrastructure funding, for example, has been "they created a slush fund for private companies to bid on". Healthcare was "They created a slush fund to pay for private insurance".
And I'll point out, that they also made healthcare more expensive with this slush fund approach. Medicare Part C was created by the Clinton administration which, you guessed it, created a giant slush fund for private insurance that ends up being more expensive than Medicare Part A/B.
I agree, democrats did expand access to healthcare, but they did it in the most expensive and easily corruptible way possible. The approach was literally a carbon copy of the Heritage foundation plan that Romney implemented in Mass.
"Woke" is more of a political weapon created by the right than any actual real concept.
There's no consistent or fixed definition of woke. It's a blanket term applied to anything that MAGA dislikes at any given moment. Woke's only purpose is to manufacture outrage, and it didn't exist as a concept until MAGA made it one.
“Their "first-ever female four-star admiral" appointed to lead the public health corps, which they falsely touted as a historic win for women, was actually a male transvestite.”
For one, the party either was in favor or did not take a clear stance on issues such as trans people in women's sports, DEI practices and other similar "woke" issues. That was enough to turn off a huge number of voters. Democrats of the Clinton era would have easily defeated Trump.
What a weird stance. A minimum wage guarantees all citizens can live a life in basic dignity. A worker is, even if part of a union, still a citizen of a state. A state is the sum of its constituents. There is, beyond the bipartisan war, room for compromise and mutual understanding for the benefit of all.
Unions are by far a net positive, but the way they fight against universal healthcare and minimum wage for people not fortunate enough to have the option of being in a union makes me question this belief.
They are anti-gun "progressive" nuts, how can they be "conservative". Their "normal" was destruction, so people voted trump in just to stop this idiocy (by starting a new one)
The far left always portrays the democrats as being too far left, even though both parties have moved to the left.
In 2000, no country in the world accepted gay marriage, up until 2013 gay marriage was banned in California because the Californians elected to do so (it was overruled federally against the wishes of the Californians).
In 2025, even a majority of Republicans (by some polls) support gay marriage. The far left always moves the goal posts. Once they legalized gay marriage, they considered it the norm instead of a wild idea that Republicans should fight to remove.
That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism. Many consider the average Republican to be too far left (similar to how leftists consider Democrats to be too far right).
Personally, I'm for the Matrix opinion. In the Matrix, the future humans live in a simulated 1999 because it was considered the peak of human civilization. Socially, it was.
The goal of the far left has always been equality. It's the same goal that legalized interracial marriage.
> That's why you see the rise of Christian nationalism
We've always had an issue with Christian Nationalism in the US, and they use any excuse they can to push their agenda. If it's not gay marriage it's immigration, or trans rights, or whatever other wedge issue they can create a moral panic over.
It's vital to remember that nationalist goals are absolute, but they will lie about it. They say they just want to protect women's sports to get their foot in the door, and then they're banning gender affirming care and looking to re-criminalize gay marriage. There's no reason to compromise with nationalists.
At this point, what would that party even be? Their only genuine appeal is to Christian fundamentalists who prioritize banning abortion and LGBTQ rights. There hasn't been a coherent domestic or foreign policy from them in decades.
Small C conservative would be what these days? Iraq invading weed dealer arresting homosexual hating mid-00s "we call ourselves neoliberals bur are nothing of the sort"? Or their counterparts on the other side of the isle who are happy to build up the police state thinking it can do no wrong or happy to regulate the shit out of everything uncritically deluding themselves into thinking it won't become a handout for moneyed interests at the expense of upstarts?
As bad as shit is now I think that might actually be worse.
While people haven't yet suffered enough to agree to compromise and just wind the whole mistake down, there is a huge consensus on both sides of the isle these days that we have too much government swinging it's weight around in pursuit of things that are bad.
Just to be clear, you really would prefer to live in crumbling infrastructure, with plenty of violence, martial law, and constant worry of whether you are going to get shot or not trying to get basic supplies?
Because boiler exploding isn't romantic or cool like you think it is. Imagine the worst possible riot, except country wide.
And they were right. The American revolution had more to do with the fact that the wealthy landowners in the colonies wanted to claim even more land to the west. The British crown was getting tired of sending soldiers to clean up the messes the colonists were getting into by picking fights with the natives.
Most of that rhetoric about tyranny and freedom was simply propaganda to get the poors to fight on their behalf.
And it worked! They successfully conned the other colonists into laying down their lives to make the founders even richer.
Somehow it doesn't feel all that different from America today. Something something history, doomed to repeat it.
That is an absolutely delusional position to have and speaks volumes to lack of critical thinking or the effectiveness of propaganda.
You are a wealthy plantation owner in 1770. Do you a) grumble about taxes and the British and pay anyway because you like free-ish trade that makes you money hand over fist b) instigate a war that will drag armies all across the countryside of your nation with all the disruption to commerce that entails. If you have a brain, it's not even a choice.
They didn't to it because they lacked principals and would do anything for a buck. They did it because they were such ideological zealots who would rather forgo years of commerce, and risk the total destruction of their nation and subjugation of their countryman than bend over and take what they saw as violations of their rights as British subjects.
The founders didn't even get substantially richer out of it, many of them got poorer. You can go read about what they did after the war and it wasn't "make money hand over fist". It was mostly figure out how to run a nation, be stressed out and die young.
Trading the protection of the dominant and very benevolent for the time world power for freedom you mostly already had in practice is not a trade that pays off in anyone's lifetime. It's a miracle that it worked out at all. Plenty of other countries kicked out the British with not much to show for it.
If the ship is gonna sink there's an argument to be made for letting it go down with those who doomed it aboard rather some unspecified future generation.
The Reds very nearly lost the civil war to the Whites, not because of any battlefield victory, or even a concerted propaganda effort. Instead, it was because for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That's have likely been forced to go with a limited monarchy with a legislature and limited democratic characteristics (like most of the rest of europe at the time) in order to consolidate the support, or at least buy the compliance of the factions that opposed them.
That might've saved a whole bunch of lives. And looking at it now 100yr later, Russia didn't exactly turn out great.
The leadership of the Whites were not the moderate monarchists who just wanted Nicholas to abdicate to literally any functioning adult. They were the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types. Their explicit goal was a restoration of pre-Revolution autocracy, whose brutal dysfunction was the explicit reason for the February revolution in the first place. The Whites were not good people, and it’s a mistake to characterize them as simple, noble anti-communist fighters. Most of the White leadership that survived into WWII went beyond just collaborating with the Nazis on invading Russia, but were onboard for all of the Nazi program save for “Ukraine belongs to Germany now”.
Don’t misunderstand me, Stalinism was worse for Russia than the Czars, but there’s really no White-victory scenario where it’s all sunshine and roses and limited democracy. That option went out the window with the October revolution.
All I’m saying is that there is no better illustration of how bad War Communism got than the fact that people looked at the literal pogroms and said “maybe that’s not so bad”.
>”Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality or death!” types.
That's just not true. The Black Hundred responsible for pogroms were in decline already before revolution having lost state support as bureaucrats felt it was getting out of control. They played zero role after the revolution. Monarchists were a minority among Whites, it is just that the most competent military leaders were (i. e. Kolchak Denikin, Kappel) - but even them were not too loud loud about it as not to lose support. The Reds nearly lost simply because they had zero approval rating to begin with, what got them any support at all was the promise to exit WWI - and the support fell considerably when it turned out that exiting the war meant Brest peace accord.
The whites can want a strict monarchy all they want but that won't be what gets the communists to not pick their arms back up again. Preferences don't change the political reality or what it takes to consolidate and keep power.
The Taliban can hate the west all they want, it's not politically tenable for them to engage in any serious effort to sponsor terrorism abroad. Likewise going full jackboot during reconstruction after the US civil war wasn't politically possible.
> for a lot of people, they'd take going back to the old rotten monarchist system that got them into this mess, if meant they could just stop starving to death while party operatives came and took all their food away.
That describes Russia under Putin. Putin considers his regime to be a continuation of Imperial Russia. He's brought back the Imperial Eagle, the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, considers himself to be the next Peter the Great, and says that his goal is to extend Russia to its traditional boundaries, out to at least the edge of Poland and the Baltics.
Communism was a historical accident which has now been corrected.
People fantasize about revolution, but the reality would mostly be huge amounts of suffering and death.
And there's near-zero chance that the outcome would be the 'high-tech fully-automated luxury communism' that people dream of. There's many much-more-likely outcome that are worse than what exists now.
Accelerationism never works. There's a long, long list of complete and utter disasters and tremendous suffering inflicted by this moronic logic. Things get better by being made better, not by being made worse.
It has never been about small government. You can just look at the Republican record on deficit spending or military funding to dismiss that. “Small government” was just an acceptable way to say you were for reducing benefits to people deemed undeserving.
There are people who called themselves Republican who started to believe their own propaganda, but it’s never been an empirical fact in the modern era that Republicans acted to reduce government spending in toto.
There's no need to partisanize this. Why would you immediately turn off half of your possible audience when speaking about an issue that affects everyone equally? San Francisco is covered in Flock cameras just like the ones pictured top-right in the article, and you won't find a more-Democrat-leaning place. One cannot analyze and act on data that does not exist: https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/sf-takes-historic-step-to-s...
Flock is sort of a new kind of animal in the LPR space. Before that there were a lot of LPR companies out there but none of them were providing data in such a way that law enforcement could do what it's doing. LPR has been in use for tolling and for parking enforcement for decades now. It's the same kind of shell game Ring has been running by putting surveillance cameras on everyone's house and then selling access to law enforcement.
On the contrary, the only way to drive change in a democracy is via partisanship. Demanding we all adhere to an artificial both-sides framing is manufacturing consensus for the status quo. Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
Also, obviously, because the analysis in this case is clearly wrong. This is a 100% partisan issue. Period. There are good guys and bad guys in the story, and if you won't point out who they are you're just running cover for the bad guys.
> Politicians only change their positions if they think they'll lose votes because of it.
And you won't convince any of that party's voters to care about location privacy enough to make it a vote-changing issue if you open your argument by criticizing their party (which, yes, almost universally sucks) instead of talking about the actual issue, which is location privacy.
This is HN, no one here is ignorant of the issue. Even granting your framing, you're addressing the wrong audience. This is the choir here, not the laity.
Look, no, that's just wrong. Immigration enforcement overreach (and law enforcement overreach more generally) is an almost purely republican issue. Period. Trying to silence criticism, especially in this forum, is simply trying to deflect blame.
How so? You don't want us discussing the fact that republican policymaking is behind the CBP overreach in the linked article. You... literally said so.
Well at least post 9/11 unconstitutional escalation required legislation and the creation of agencies like the DHS and TSA. Now, a political culture that is willing to break norms and abuse technicalities is silently expanding powers to the max, and that’s far more insidious. But maybe it’ll result in a strengthened democracy in the long term if new laws or amendments are passed to contain this problem.
Yeah the emerging 'The Bullwark' wing of the democrat party. Never trumper republicans trying as hard as they can to move the right flank of the democrat party into the bush era republican gradient so that they can pretend that they didn't lose their own party.
Seriously. Where were all these people when the Democrats overreached into every aspect of our lives?
Apparently the only criticism is an accusation of hypocrisy for calling themselves the party of small government. Nothing wrong with the actions themselves apparently! Lol.
Plenty of people complained and wanted all government overreach to stop - this is an even more dire situation, propped up by people who directly lied and said they were not interested in this (which they obviously are, and they are liars.)
Why are you complaining about people's concerns instead of the actual problems created by those in power?
Because it feels like theater for party politics instead of genuine concern. I expect these people to go quiet when Democrats come into power and start doing the same things.
The same things? You mean effectively making money laundering legal, crashing the government and starving the poor, ending health care benefits, stealing directly from the coffers, pardoning sex pests and criminals as they continue to commit crimes, ramp up terrorist action against american cities, drop bombs on boats with no justification, roll back our environmental protections to invest in dead end energy projects, double down on crony capitalism, make it so corporations either bend the knee by directly giving money to the president or have their business ended with tariffs, and generally do everything they can to rob us blind and you say "oh it's all the same!"
The president is sending the troop into cities on made up offenses, he's posting to social media shitting on american citizens, he's doing death threats on sitting politicians, this is not the same you absolute twat.
I have plenty of criticisms for the democrats (who I do not consider my party) but both sides bs is just uncritically accepting the republican framing of the problems they are causing, I don't need to spend my time complaining about the party in power effectively nowhere.
The problem is that the "both sides are bad" people just uniformly vote Republican. Its the cope of understanding that your side is batshit insane, so you have to pretend that the current state of affairs doesn't actually matter, and the problem goes deeper in the goal of normalizing your party.
The truth is, the only reason not to trust the intel community is because of some fringe bullshit you heard on Joe Rogan.
I've been voting third party for a long time. When both sides are bad (in different ways) it is the only choice left. (The third party isn't all that great either, but they are better and hopefully they send a message that people care)
No because the statistics are counted. People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change. Long term it isn't a bad strategy, but it does mean you have to accept whoever wins (though in rare cases a third party has won) for today. If one candidate isn't too bad I will vote for them.
In my case I've decided on criteria is has not held this office for more than one term (that is I give you two terms no matter what office you are running for) because no matter how much I agree with you I don't want anyone to spend too long in government.
I consider third parties running in Presidential elections to be joke candidacies but what you’re saying is just the whining of whoever lost the election that was influenced by third party voters. Would have been the same result if the third party voters didn’t vote btw.
People in the "smoke filled backrooms" pay attention to what third party messages are getting attention and in turn use that to inform how they change.
Kinda like how the Libertarians got ~3% of the vote 2016, and over the following years the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire was taken over by groypers and the national LP endorsed Trump in 2024? I mean, in an ideal polity you'd be right, major parties would pay attention to where they're losing votes at the margin to inform their policy decisions. But we live in a far-from-ideal polity where the two major parties systematically undermine minor party candidates at anything above the county level.
When faced with reality over the past decades, and the historically good record that Democrats have had, versus historically bad record that Republicans have had, versus the unproven record that any 3d party had,
and considering what was at stake in the 2024 election,
you either voted for sanity (especially given that Kamala was the most milquetoast unoffensive candidate ever which would have been MILES better than what we have now), or you voted for insanity, because lack of vote for Dems means you were giving Trump a chance to win.
The democrats have a bad record too. The record is bad in different areas, but both have plenty of reasons not to support them. You have to make a choice, (not voting is a choice) and there are not good ones, the question are any not so bad that you are willing to support them.
I'm a "both sides are bad" person and I almost always vote Democrat. I might revise this if Newsom is the nominee however, he seems determined to stoop to Trump's level. Also if the GOP nominates another Romney, I will almost certainly vote Republican in order to reward them for that choice.
This is your cope to justify your side's righteousness. Many people recognize how awful both parties are and do not vote republican. Every socialist/leftist/communist falls into this category.
Wait, are you saying mass surveillance is a good thing?
The US has a 2-party system. Those parties will tend to be very loose and ideologically diverse coalitions almost by definition.
There is an interesting philosophical issue around these accusations of "distributed hypocrisy". It would be one thing if you were pointing to a particular individual who took an inconsistent position. But if two loosely affiliated individuals disagree, that's not necessarily hypocritical. Even a single individual may change their mind on an issue over time.
There is nothing small Govt anymore. Both parties are the same when it comes to extending Govt's power (just for different reasons). It is just a talking point now.
If you're interested in some reflection on that, What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) by Thomas Frank explores some of this, but centered around Kansas. Pretty interesting (and frustrating) stuff.
"turn into" is referring to the mask off nature of it all. Before, they might be a little embarrassed or pretend they still stand for those principles. But all I've seen are conservatives explaining why it might be technically allowed or straight up cheering it on.
While you're not wrong, not sure it applies here. This is an all-party thing:
Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.
Some of the lawsuits (cited in article) to fight this, and illegal pull overs, go back years.
Really? It shows how this tech can be used in ways you don't like, when your party is no longer in power. How whatever laws you pass, surveillance you enact, powers you give, aren't just for you.
The “party of small government” has always seen protection of sovereignty and borders as exactly one of the few things a government should actually do.
Meh. I think political parties in the states are really there just to make money. Why else would the dems keep pelting you with adds for $5? I think both parties are saying whatever they need to say to convince people to give them cash. The number of people who care about privacy seems smaller than the number of people who want to be entertained by politicians, so it's unlikely to change anytime soon.
The logical conclusion of all this oppression is that everyone will just stay home, and go out no more than necessary, and spend no money that isn't absolutely necessary.
The only thing fascinating is that anyone believed any of that crap.
Everything that Trumpists are doing was peddled in the 1990s by such distinguished figures as Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani. Usually with a nauseating appeal to "rule of law". The "surprise", and "this behavior may be the path to authoritarianism" stuff in the NY Times makes it hard to read without an eyeroll.
> If you create a problem like this by essentially opening the border and failing to enforce the law, the necessary corrective action is going to have to be a lot heavier than if you’d just patrolled the border in the first place
Deportations are lower than under Obama, despite ICE having Saudi Arabia's military budget. The resources are very clearly being spent on something other than immigration enforcement. Whether that's an authoritarian agenda or simply corruption is still, in my book, to be seen.
"Deportations" is an ambiguous term, which may or may not include people turned away at the border and actual categories like Removals, Returns, and Expulsions.
It is. Which means the numbers are generally able to be fluffed. The fact that ICE isn't even bothering to do that communicates that they're not focussing on nor being held to it.
> which may or may not include people turned away at the border
You don't need to blow the military budget of most of the world's militaries [1] to do this, nor build "a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior."
Agreed. I think it's important to remember the lack of real "mass deportations now" when you see two things:
1) low Trump approval rating. Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)
2) protests against deportations. Why do dems simultaneously crow about their superior deportation numbers while condemning current efforts as heavy handed and cruel?
I think the answer to 2) is that the Obama administration scrupulously followed the law, actually targeted those with criminal records rather than grabbing people just based on their ethnicity, and didn't engage in practices like sending people to prisons in third countries such as El Salvador. I suspect you already know this, given your choice to draw a contrast between numbers and methods.
It's the untrained masked men with guns dragging people away because the computer said to, that's the new heavy-handed method that America has not seen before except in WW2 Germany and the Soviet Union.
Correct. "Once hired, ICE agents receive training before beginning fieldwork" [1].
That said, "unlike many law enforcement roles, no previous experience in law enforcement is required, and candidates do not need to take a pre-employment exam." And the training is minimal, as evidenced by the dismal deportation figures.
> so just normal law enforcement arresting people
Normal law enforcement is bound by laws and identifies itself. We do that to prevent abuses of power and to ensure that unidentifiable agents shoving Americans into unmarked cars is something that raises alarm, because there is zero assurance it's ICE versus e.g. foreign operatives or gangs.
> Oh no everyone its WWII Germany oh no I mean it's my political opponents governing
These processes are being kept under wraps because they're a massive expansion of state power. The kind conservatives and libertartians oppose. The narrow branch of MAGA that's distrating federal law enforcement isn't representative of any governing coalition.
Understanding why process matters is difficult for everyone when your guy is in charge. A good method is to imagine a left-wing President having these extralegal authorities and resources.
Here's a job posting for CBP: https://www.usajobs.gov/job/849185400
I'm having trouble finding the ICE requirements, my understanding is even less than CBP. The ones without firearms training won't have guns, fortunately.
Compare to state police officers, who go through half a year of academy. FBI needs a college education or two years work experience, and then they do another 1000 hours of training.
If you've ever watched real cops working, the difference in training / professionalism is obvious. They will identify themselves, and be familiar with the case history before dragging anyone away.
Here's one of the apps used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Fortify . ICE agents aren't psychic. There's a database of people who's legal status has expired, the database is not perfect. An ICE official decides who is guilty and issues a civil arrest warrant. The supervisor sends agents to where the computer has tracked them, and the agents arrests if the computer says so. There's no judge issuing the warrant before, or trying the case afterward.
These are a real changes in America, we have a right to speak about it, and it's reasonable to guard against these tools being turned on Trump's "enemies within" next.
> Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)
No. Most of it has to do with the fact that masked, unidentified ICE agents are abducting and disappearing people with no due process.
American citizens are being taken away. People who are here legally are being abducted and sent to countries they aren't from.
Of the deportations, Trump said they would be targeted toward violent criminals. Over 90% of those who have been rounded up have no criminal history.
Masked men with weapons who refuse to identify themselves are shooting people and lying about it, directly refuted by video others took of the event.
This isn't some case where "Americans are upset Trump isn't doing what he said!". This is a case where Americans are finally seeing the reality of what he is doing and are sickened by it.
Ah, I see how you perceive this situation. You think the Democrats manufactured a police state by flooding America with undocumented immigrants in order to get Republicans to go full gestopo in order to fix it. Some 5D chess move where the left is to blame for "forcing" the right into authoritarianism. And somehow the videos coming from communities within America are just "hysterics".
So just pure conspiratorial nonsense that absolves all blame from the perpetuator and abuser. Got it.
No, it’s not a police state in the first place. The belief that it is? Hysterics being fed by your media diet.
The videos that you’re seeing of people losing their minds over law enforcement actually doing their jobs?
Those videos are not evidence of a police state. A police state would have locked them up the minute they started their ridiculous, childish public tantrums.
They’re evidence of the hysteria people like you are driven to by the media you consume.
Do you not realize that outside your bubble, this is how you and your compatriots are perceived? Hysterical and fully disconnected from reality?
> The belief that it is? Hysterics being fed by your media diet.
You know nothing about my media diet, except that yours tells you all others are being fed hysterics.
> The videos that you’re seeing of people losing their minds over law enforcement actually doing their jobs?
Huh? No, these aren't reaction videos. These are videos of ICE violently detaining people they have no right to detain. I'm just going to completely ignore their "stop and frisk" style of fishing for undocumented folks and focus solely on them abusing American citizens.
Which they have done. Countless times. One time they hit someone driving to work in their car. Then they got out of their vehicle and violently ripped a lady out of her car--an American driving to work as ICE did an illegal U-turn in the road--and put their weight on her while they detained her.
That's a police state.
And your media diet didn't show it to you. Your media diet is feeding you propaganda by means of telling you "everything is fine, it's hYsTeRicS".
> Do you not realize that outside your bubble, this is how you and your compatriots are perceived? Hysterical and fully disconnected from reality?
Your head is in the sand, but I understand you honestly believe this nonsense. But you're factually wrong.
The US police state is obvious to most Americans and the vast majority of the world. Any global polling--or interaction with people from other countries, which I do daily--will show you that.
You are in the minority, blaming what's happening here on hysterics. You are wrong.
> reevaluate your own neurosis and realize how hysterical you’ve been
What are you talking about? Everything I've stated is pure fact. Your whole strategy around the conversation appears to be attacking, insulting and avoiding reality.
> You’re just a confused kid throwing a tantrum.
You're incredibly disrespectful and it's clear you're not fit to be posting on HN. You aren't winning anyone over by pretending authoritarianism isn't prevalent and growing. What is happening in the US is not normal, and no amount of you pretending otherwise is going to change that reality. The fact that you consider people being alarmed by masked men with guns who refuse to identify themselves abducting people (including Americans, mind you) off of the streets is telling.
I’m totally sure you’d apply the same for unchecked corporate law breaking, right? Enforce the Hatch Act, go after wage theft which dwarfs any kind of retail or private theft, etc. If you think it’s about political power, you’d question prisons and detention centers being put in red states where they count political appropriation from the inmates and guards.
Well-stated. Our prior solutions to internal enforcement of previous Border misses no longer work given that the scale of border "misses" exploded after deliberate non-enforcement.* Now larger-scale internal enforcement is needed. Sucks for all of us.
*Worse than non-enforcement, the feds actively blocked/destroyed Texas border protections.
This notion of 'opening the border' is a political myth conservatives have been using to justify their increasingly extreme positions for years, much like their inflammatory use of the word 'invasion'.
The border was de facto open since there was no serious enforcement. Because there was no space to detain millions of people, the majority were processed and then simply let go into the U.S. with a "Notice to Appear" set for 2030. Basically a free pass to stay for years.
On top of that, they had parole loopholes (like the CBP One app and CHNV) to legally admit millions more people.
> ICE raids started and 25% of the school kids didn't show up to school. Which indicates that likely 25% of the population is illegal.
you're downvoted but this is a very real thing, especially at the elementary school level. My kids had regular classes in first/second grade taught in Spanish because they were the one single English speaking student in the room (this was fixed when my wife and I found out). The level of illegal immigrants in schools goes down over time as they drop out. My son is now 16 and a sophomore in HS, SEM Magnet, and in a class of about 100-125 he knows maybe 10 that have told him they're here illegally.
> border enforcement and deportations are what we want.
this is not what “we want” - this is what ruling party wants you to think and obsess over while they pillage and make your life otherwise miserable.
the same young votes voted for Biden in 2020 knowing very well what the immigration policy would be (and they were as bad as it gets the first two years)
> except it's only one side supporting it this time.
I wish.
Very early on in this Trump admin there was a bipartisan bill passed which greatly expanded the capabilities of ICE to deport [1]. Democrats have been well aligned with the republicans when it comes to immigration policy. You'll find few that will actually criticize the actions of ICE/DHS.
46 voted yes. And just a few months prior democrats tried to pass this [1] [2]. Which only failed because Trump didn't want Biden to be able to show a "tough on the border" stance.
Again, you'll find few democrats that have a stance on the border that contradicts the Republican stance. There are a few, but most are just staying silent. The only reason they vote against these sorts of bills is because of pure partisanship, not out of some ideology alignment.
You can't even call the GOP the party of capitalism either.
The party that took a 10% stake in Intel to at least partially nationalize it. The party of tariffs, the party of special interest tax loopholes giving taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels, real estate, and agriculture, the $400 million equity stake in MP materials.
Sure sounds like they are picking winners and losers, the antithesis of free market capitalism.
It's going to be one party, or the other, in my opinion .. a party that is more overtly favoring the business- / owner-class. And today it happens to be GOP.
The fascinating / interesting part to me is how Lying, a socially-unfavorable trait, is overtly deployed more and more often by a specific political party.
And so it reinforces, in my mind, the "Post-Truth Era" labeling by some political scientists, for today. Where society itself is complicit in accepting the GOP, I assume because it feels good to "win", while the GOP gratuitously lies.
Their leader, Trump, is re-explained by his supporters, "what he meant when he called for the execution of other Government leaders was ..." and similar such intentional misdirection / lying.
As a tactic, it's remarkable to me how Lying is successful. I expect to see more of it, from popular and even unpopular business leaders, going forward, perhaps enabled by increasingly capable automated information generation technology like AI & (mis)info-spreaders like social-networks.
Your comment feels unsubstantiated. What do you mean by that? Or do you just mean the current government has Republicans at the top.
Can you share data on how people of one party are supporting ALPR and the other are against it? I was looking for a public poll on this question and couldn't find one.
Polling this year consistently shows that Republicans support all the actions being taken with respect to immigration under this admin. Sorry I don't have any links handy at the moment, but you can see it in this thread: "too many people crossed under Biden, look what you made us do!"
I don't see anything in the article that says anything about immigration. From the info provided, this is about suspicious behavior ID'ed via ALPR, and they don't specify suspicious of what. That seems very broad and something a reasonable person would expect many people of all parties to be wary of, not just people of one party.
Where does it say immigration? You know USBP is bigger than immigration right? Drugs, weapons, currency, illegal goods, etc. Even the largest cateogry of enforcement activity, illegal entry/removal - is itself much bigger than "immigration" which I take it to be people who want to live in the US or seek asylum.
Within illegal entry you have:
Terror watchlist
Recycling deportees (commuting to/from construction job sites in Phoenix or coming from Tijuana to do sex work in US)
Ultralight pilots dropping meth in fields
Smuggled minors (custody disputes)
Chinese nationals on the run from China
Mexican wildlife/hunting violators
Archaeological and horticultural looters stealing from Sonora Desert
Dryback US citizens pretending to be aliens to get a free ride on ICE flights to Houston
US citizen gotaways
Hard to blame this squarely on the Republicans. Access to private license plate readers was granted under the Biden admin, and no doubt each of the last four administrations played some part.
To me, the CPB and ICE are looking more and more like an American Gestapo.
They've been at these programs for decades; if they were effective we wouldn't be in a drug epidemic At some point you have to cut your losses and accept that the only benefits were the politicians Flock donated to.
I'm not saying you have to abolish CBP. I'm saying they should be protecting the border and this ain't it.
Do you feel the same way about murder? Gary, Indiana has a murder problem for decades. Should we stop prosecuting it? Would murder get better or worse?
Millions of illegal aliens have entered the US under Biden. They're not all hanging at the border. Of course CBP needs to go everywhere in the US to remove all of them.
Before terrorists it was drugs, before that it was communists, before that it was communists with less weed and shorter hair.
Eventually you realize your enemy isn't the system. The system is like a misbehaving toddler that's never been disciplined. It acts as badly as it can get away with. Your enemy is your fellow countryman, you coworkers, your own family. And from that realization comes nothing actionable nor good conclusions, only despair...
ICE has very little legal authority and is yet the current president’s ground troops to lock up everyone who looks foreign. I’d say they have all the power they need.
ICE can walk into your house / pull you out of the car with masks on and kidnap you without showing you any papers. That's more power than a lot of other agencies
Trump wasn't in office at that time. He urged Republicans to not pass it for various reasons which I will not enumerate here, and CBP was funded weeks later.
The reasons you don’t want to enumerate here are “he wanted only Republicans to look good on the border by ensuring that nothing could get passed while a Democrat is president”. He doesn’t care about the border, he cares about authoritarianism and party politics.
Translated to "Even though I know that most republicans said they didn't want to go against someone who had a very good chance winning in 2024 for the fear that they would get their political career destroyed, because that is what Trump explicitly said to them, I will vaguely allude to some fringe statements about things that haven never been proven true in regards to other aspects of the bill as the reason Republicans didn't vote for it, because in no way shape or form will I ever admit that I was wrong.
I don't get why people on your side still think that saying shit like this makes you sound smart. That ship has long sailed.
There were a lot of things not to like about the bill, such as being tied to Israel/Ukraine aid, setting an emergency trigger that normalized flooding the border, and it being a token measure for Biden to use in the election.
Small government without control of who comes in is borderline anarchy, and they never claimed to be for anarchy. Small government internally requires border controls, and if the border controls failed in the past do you expect them to just shrug? I can see disagreeing with them, easily, I just don’t see obvious hypocrisy like you are suggesting.
We're literally discussing a mass surveillance dragnet throughout the country (not just at the border) here; the kind of stuff that is normally reserved for dystopias in fiction.
To argue that it is somehow okay because it enables "small government" to exist is very much in the spirit of "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength". When thugs in uniform stop and interrogate Americans on the roads because their movement patterns are "suspicious", there's nothing small about it.
I’m not saying it’s okay, but I am not a small government person. Illogical arguments just bother me. I think small government is impossible for other reasons.
The republicans have been the party of massive military since forever. I don’t really see how this is different.
Small government without [big thing I happen to like] is [bad thing] therefore it's okay to make the government big in [the aspects I like] and I don't see any hipocrisy in that.
Its been proven many times over that the majority of "illegal" immigrants, whether they come US and either overstay their allowance, or manage to skirt by on refugee status, are all predominately doing it for financial reasons, willing to work jobs for lower pay that Americans will never do, which is a huge benefit for economy.
This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans. Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.
> willing to work jobs for lower pay that Americans will never do, which is a huge benefit for economy.
Pushing wages down for low-skilled work is possibly good for the economy, but it's very bad for low-skilled American workers.
> This idea that border control somehow failed is a lie sold to you by republicans.
There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.
> Also Trump killed the CBP funding bill in early 2024 that would have addressed a lot of issues.
Conjecture. Trump was not in office in 2024. That bill may or may not have addressed some issues, while also creating new issues or making things worse.
“Still, the president conceded that "all indications are this bill won't even move forward to the Senate floor", despite the support of the Border Patrol Union.
"Why?" he asked. "A simple reason: Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks it's bad for him politically."
Mr Biden said the former president had spent the past 24 hours lobbying Republicans in the House and Senate in an effort to torpedo the proposal.
He said Mr Trump had tried to intimidate Republican lawmakers, "and it looks like they're caving".
Mr Biden urged the lawmakers to "show some spine".
The Trump campaign blasted the Biden speech, calling it "an embarrassment to our Nation and a slap in the face to the American people".
Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called Mr Biden's criticism of Mr Trump "a brazen, pathetic lie and the American people know the truth".
Her statement also said Mr Trump's policies had "created the most secure border in American history, and it was Joe Biden who reversed them".
On Monday, Mr Trump posted on social media that "only a fool, or a radical left Democrat" would vote for the bill. ”
>There are millions of illegal aliens in the US. From 2021 to 2024, several millions more entered the US.
The border bill that Trump killed would have increased funding to CBP to speed up the process of determining who is fit to stay and who isn't because so many people were entering that there wasn't enough staff to process cases quicker.
>Conjecture.
Nice try lol. I know yall LOVE to rewrite history, but that doesn't fly anymore. Everything is on record on why Republicans voted against it.
Illegal aliens operate outside of minimum wage laws obviously.
Yes that is one of the things that bill would have done, along with hundreds of other things which may or may not have been beneficial or detrimental.
And again, Trump didn't kill anything. He was not in office. There were many criticisms of that bill on its merits. The criticisms are on record as you said https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
> In this video, several Republican Senators express their blunt dismissal of the so-called "bipartisan" border security bill, highlighting their reasons for opposition and their dissatisfaction with the negotiation process and their leadership.
Just in case it wasn't clear from my last comment, because you don't live the same reality as I do, we can't have a conversation. Trump did kill the bill, no matter what you believe, and you lack the critical thinking skills (or too blinded by ideology), to understand this.
Hopefully, once US economy tanks, and you lose years of your life due to stress and a good portion of your retirement funds, you will understand this because its impossible for you to learn this any other way.
And yet, while a visa overstay is a misdemeanor, assisting someone to stay or work while unauthorized is a felony, that does more damage to the economy, but this administration seems "remarkably" unwilling to prosecute that.
Undocumented Tyson Chicken employees handed over paperwork _from Tyson_ that was given to over 900 of them where the company told them how to fill out government/tax/payroll forms when undocumented so as to stay under the radar... and CBP said that wasn't part of the scope of their investigation into Tyson, and did precisely nothing about that.
Hormel, much the same.
The bitching and moaning about "the economy" by Republicans is so amazingly selective - it's funny how they focus on that, while ignoring how _awfully convenient_ it is to farm, livestock, food production and other employers and businesses it is to have access to that same labor pool.
Producers will either have to increase the price to keep or soften the blow to their margin or stop selling.
Either way, prices will increase - that's just the immediate corollary of having a higher production cost due to higher salaries. Hopefully the Maga distortion field still acknolwges that basic fact. Guess what happens when prices increase. People won't buy more out of patriotic feelings.
The problem you (and others) raise with this point is that Americans don’t want to do those jobs. But if they paid a lot more, they would want to. Okay now the problem on your end shifts. Ohhh but the prices would go up. Okay, and? Yes, the prices go up, and we can discuss whether that is a problem, but it isn’t your original problem, you have performed a squirm maneuver (probably unknowingly since you are probably just repeating essentially a propaganda script you have unknowingly ingested).
You take it as a foregone conclusion that the price increases would be prohibitive. You have provided no basis for this assumption, and nobody ever does because it isn’t obviously true. It depends on a) what percent of the consumer price can be attributed to the artificially low wages and b) the second and third etc order effects of increasing wages on affordability across society, including the domestic workers in these areas. When you dig into it (a) isn’t generally above a few years worth of target inflation, on very specific product categories, and you simultaneously increase wages for low skill domestic workers, which sounds like a win for the left but somehow it isn’t? Pay slightly higher prices to support American workers is a pretty easy slogan.
So the proposal is basically that we knowingly abandon the rule of law in the area of immigration in exchange for 6% cheaper vegetables. Uh, no thank you, I’ll pass on that one.
Immigrants do pay taxes, legal or not, because sales tax exists. Income tax doesn't really apply until you're richer.
The comparison to slavery is quite funny, because you're actually right. But probably not in the way you think - or even, the way most American politics talks about. For example, whenever a state gets a bug up their butt about illegal immigration and tries to actually enforce eVerify[0], the local agricultural sector collapses. Because American agriculture has always been addicted to slave labor, and always will be absent specific interventions to give agricultural workers negotiating power.
Of course, that's not the kind of intervention you're going to see out of Congress anytime soon. The arguments had in Congress, and with Trump, boil down to "how many indentured servants do we bring in, and for how long do they have to work before they get their rights back?" Illegal immigration is solely understood as a fault of the immigrant, not the companies who rely on them. Even the mass deportations are being carried out with the understanding that the slaves are the problem - not their masters.
And to be clear, the slave-like nature of immigration (illegal or otherwise) comes down to the fact that immigrants don't use the same job market Americans use. If I want to poach an H1-B, I have to go through hoops and pay an exorbitant sum to sponsor them. This means they can't demand equivalent salaries - even though the condition of their visa was that they'd be getting paid the same or better. It just doesn't pencil unless the immigrant works for peanuts and you're a huge organization that can swallow the compliance costs.
You can't get rid of slavery by whipping the slave harder. If you want to actually get rid of immigration-as-slavery, you need to hand out visas like candy, green cards to anyone who tells on their employer / trafficker / etc. for violating labor laws, and amnesty to people who have been here for a long time without a rap sheet.
[0] This is the US government service that actually tells you if you're hiring someone who has a legal right to work in the country or not.
If you can’t afford to pay enough, you don’t have a viable business. This is a standard argument for minimum wage, which is reasonable, and it applies here as well, no?
The point is that there isn't a large amount of Americans that are willing to work for minimum wage, because we got used to a standard of living. You aren't going to force people to go to work for minimum wage in positions that are usually taken up by immigrants, because those people already have higher paying jobs - the unemployment (at least pre 2025) was like at an all time low.
For economy to be healthy, money has to exchange hands. The more you do this, the better the economy gets. This is why US was so far ahead of other countries because we had way less restrictions on this.
And being welcoming to people at all income levels is necessarily a part of this, because at the end of the day, even the fanciest car requires low skilled labor to builds roads for.
