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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

This is a very disingenuous question for a number of reasons.

- Whether unlawful presence is a civil or criminal law, countries should control who enters the country.

- Masked police seem like a reasonable response to doxxing of police officers? It’s not like the identity of these police aren’t know to the legal system and lawyers of the accused.

- Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense. It’s just meaningless rhetoric as detention bears no resemblance to actual concentration camps.

- Most importantly, the US enforcing its own immigrations laws does not make it an outlier - it was an outlier when it ignored its own immigration laws. Every other country I’ve visited rather strictly enforces its immigration laws including speedy deportation of any encountered who doesn’t have permission to be in the country. If anything the headlines should be “US joins rest of world in enforcing its own immigration laws”

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> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.

I don’t think you are paying attention to the abject cruelty in the administration’s own discourse about these facilities. The U.S. president describing with barely restrained delight his anticipation that escapees from the new facility in Florida would be eaten by alligators. I suppose if called out on it, he’d claim it’s a joke. I’m sure many regimes in history had their own euphemistic terms for facilities such as this; but purposeful cruelty is a cardinal feature of concentration camps in my view.

> The U.S. president describing with barely restrained delight his anticipation that escapees from the new facility in Florida would be eaten by alligators

Do you have a specific quote you can share? I haven't seen what you're referring to.

And I guess I think back to facilities like Alcatraz. It was created such that anyone trying to escape would likely drown. Is that the same thing you're talking about?

You can find this by googling "trump allegator escape".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cdxlld0dgxwo

I don’t see “barely contained glee at immigrants being eaten by alligators”, I see an attempt at making a funny comment about escaping alligators by not running in a straight line.

That seems like a paraphrase of the same thing? He’s joking about prisoners trying to escape the camp and being eaten by alligators.

> - Whether unlawful presence is a civil or criminal law, countries should control who enters the country.

Yes. And it's disingenuous to call for brutal police tactics with enormous collateral damage for something the letter of the law regards as the equivalent of a parking ticket.

> - Masked police seem like a reasonable response to doxxing of police officers?

Fuck. No.

> Calling immigration detention “concentration camps” makes no sense.

When they are meant for detaining people who are literally not guilty of any crime, and they are deliberately designed to feature inhumane conditions, it makes every sense.

> - - Most importantly, the US enforcing its own immigrations laws does not make it an outlier

I'll ask the same question again: which civil offenses do you think should also be addressed with secret police and concentration camps?

The EU is stricter with immigration than the US. But it does not use secret police and concentration camps.

You're not really arguing in good faith when your response is "Fuck. No."

> The EU is stricter with immigration than the US. But it does not use secret police and concentration camps.

You don't think the police in Europe sometimes hide the identity of their police from onlookers when required? I'm pretty sure they do.

Do you also think Europe doesn't detain people who are in their country illegally? I'm pretty sure they do. They are even creating "return hubs", which are basically detention centers outside their own country which hold immigrants until they can be returned to their home or a third country.

> You don't think the police in Europe sometimes hide the identity of their police from onlookers when required? I'm pretty sure they do.

Yes in the UK they do. However this is breaking the law and those who do this have been punished.

> You're not really arguing in good faith when your response is "Fuck. No."

If you don't already know that keeping the name & badge number visible is the most important part of proper policing, and established as such by the world's first police force and its founder, Robert Peel, there's no point arguing much of anything with you.

It's literally the difference between a police force and a Geheime Staat Polizei.

> If you don't already know that keeping the name & badge number visible is the most important part of proper policing

But clearly there are exceptions. You can even read about them on European police websites.

https://handbookgermany.de/en/police

"In particular, criminal police officers also work in "civilian" clothing and therefore are visually unrecognisable as the police force. They often have to hide their identity, for example, to observe people or to enforce arrest warrants."

RIght, because a detective going undercover to gather evidence means it's perfectly okay for masked thugs to pop out of unmarked vehicles and grab people off the streets.

Dude, WTF

Detectives are "masked thugs to pop out of unmarked vehicles and grab people off the streets".

You've never seen a takedown of street level drug dealers? Unmarked cars, plainclothes police, grab everyone off the street?

I'm really trying to understand what specifically you find objectionable. Is it the fact that ICE isn't in uniform? Or that they wear masks? Or that they arrest people?

> Detectives are "masked thugs to pop out of unmarked vehicles and grab people off the streets".

The moment they make an actual arrest (which is rare, since they prefer to maintain their cover), they identify and are held accountable for how they do it.

Something ICE is not doing.

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