Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

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Not to speak for the OP, but at least for me, I'm seeing a lot of my friends all of a sudden up in arms over policies that Obama (and Bush, and in some cases earlier than that even) got crickets for.

Admittedly, I'm not trying to compare apples to apples, and I'm the furthest thing from a Trump supporter, and it's absolutely amazing that the media have finally grown into their role of a check and balance against the government, but all too often, that means that they do so with carelessly chosen words that misrepresent the issue, and they act like it's new.

The problem with acting like it's new and giving a pass to handsomer / more liked / partisan presidents of yore is that once Trump is out of office, everyone will start to be complacent again.

Standing up for your rights is the job of the citizenry no matter who is president, and holding our elected officials' collective feet to the fire is what we're supposed to be doing all the time. If it took electing Trump to get people engaged, so be it, but let's not pretend that passing what effectively amounts to law with "a pen and a phone" is Trump's idea, or that people weren't cheering on the last president when he chose to do so, or that it's in any way a good thing to remove the checks and balances branches of the government are supposed to be providing against their co-equal branches.

People keep bringing up the Obama thing in response to the immigration ban.

Obama suspended visas from Iraq for six months, and gave plenty of warning beforehand so people could prepare.

Trump suspended all immigration from seven countries on a Friday without warning, ordered the detention of people from those countries at the border, prevented them from seeking legal representation, and deported some of them. Including green card holders.

If you don't understand the massive difference between these two things than I don't know what to tell you.

I'm well aware of the difference, which is why I specifically did not reference any particular event for which Obama may have been responsible, except to illustrate that civil rights abuses have been going on for far longer than Trump has been president, and the comparative outcry has been infinitesimal.

Apologies if my deliberate ambiguity was hard to parse.

I have a couple of questions here if you'll allow me to play devil's advocate.

1) Given that what Trump is doing is allowed by law - what circumstances can one imagine in which this kind of travel ban would be okay (since it's legal) or is the law itself a problem?

2) I'm curious about (1) because there are legitimate reasons why Trump's ban is more draconian than Obama's, all of which are rooted in various screw-ups by the previous administration. Those are:

a) Last year, the vetting process somehow managed to grant visas to 9500 terror linked individuals, all of whom are missing. When the visas were revoked, there was no way to locate them. (Source: House oversight committee hearings & Mainstream media ~ 2015 / 2016)

b) DHS has 40 staff members currently handling 51000 applications for credible threat to life asylum requests. (Source: House oversight committee hearings & Mainstream media ~2015)

c) Top intelligence officials have named the refugee program as a high risk attack vector (Source: CNN, ~ 2015/2016)

Under those 3 criteria alone, if you are taking over as President and you see this kind of track record from the administration, and you get this advice from the intelligence agencies, would you really be comfortable with the visas issued thus far?

I sort of agree with the principle in theory that if the government has granted someone the right to enter, they ought to be allowed to enter, but that's never really been an airtight thing either. Your final entry is always conditioned upon being interviewed at the airport and getting your passport stamped, and answering various questions - where will you be staying, for how long, etc. etc. I suspect it would have been more principled to have a comprehensive screening process for people when they landed, but that may be an operational nightmare.

Given that there are plenty of PhD students, guest workers, etc. from Iran mostly, who are immensely inconvenienced by this kind of draconian rule, I am not entirely in favor of the policy. At the same time I'm curious as to whether a President is really dutybound to stand by the visas issued by the previous administration when there is proof of this sort of incompetence / error in the process at this magnitude (i.e. nearly ten thousand).

If we grant those legitimate reasons (none of which are quoted in the stated justifications for the EO given to date by the White House, but which are, if true, certainly reasonable grounds for executive action) - If the concern is with visas issued in a given time period, from particular offices, via particular channels, then direct CBP to stop people for additional screening or refusal to enter if they present a visa issued in that time period, from those particular offices, via particular channels. Every US visa has all those details printed on it. You get all the benefits you want - time to rescreen those visa holders whose visas may not have received adequate screening - without causing massive confusion and inconvenience to travelers whose visas don't need to be called into question.

Such action would be fully backed up by the precedent of what Obama did in suspending the Iraqi asylum application process for 6 months in reaction to specific risks that had been highlighted in that process.

>Last year, the vetting process somehow managed to grant visas to 9500 terror linked individuals, all of whom are missing. When the visas were revoked, there was no way to locate them. (Source: House oversight committee hearings & Mainstream media ~ 2015 / 2016)

No, since 2001, 9500 "terror linked individuals" were given visas. Unfortunately, I can't find any explanation of what "terror linked" means in this context. Each year, the US grants approximately 8-9 million visas. So, in 15 years, across over 100 million issued visas, approximately 10,000 may have been given to individuals who were "terror linked", where that could mean "confirmed terrorist", or it could mean "their uncle once went to a market that we believe is a known terrorist hotspot". Again, there's no explanation, anywhere, of what "terror linked individual" means in this context.

Please stop editorializing.

>Given that what Trump is doing is allowed by law

both the (now fired) AG and several federal courts don't think it's allowed by law.

Trumps entire campaign was predicated on heavily disrupting the status quo. He promised chaos in Washington and now he's delivering on that promise. Obama pushed policies in baby steps to avoid heavily disrupting peoples lives, so of course they were never up in arms over it.

It also reeks of hypocrisy of the highest order.

When we're done evaluating the motives of individual Internet commenters and ensuring that the evils of hypocritical rhetoric are forever banished from the fair shores of our message boards, can we acknowledge that children with American citizenship and their green card parents are being detained or even deported at our borders, without access to counsel, in flagrant violation of both the law and standing court orders?

I'm on board for the tribunal where we evaluate everything anyone ever wrote in an Internet comment. Twenty lashes for me, I'm sure. I'll submit willingly, if we can put that aside for a year and a half and work on resisting the current threat to the rule of law.

Are they though? I thought Green card holders were not being detained?

Result of a quick Google for "green card holder detained": https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/green-card-holder-detained...

Moreover, it's been reported in several places that Steve Bannon overruled DHS to ensure that green card holders would be impacted by the ban. In addition to being flagrantly unconstitutional, that was an act of distilled cruelty.

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