> Ew, bootlicking hypocrisy and dishonesty in broad daylight. Nope!
You can hold whatever opinion you like, but this kind of ad-hominem rhetoric is not acceptable on HN: "Be kind. Don't be snarky.… Edit out swipes.… When disagreeing, reply to the argument instead of calling names."
> Except here we have it
The disingenous thing is quoting Noem in the first place. I am not Noem and I do not purport to defend her statement. ProPublica seeks to distract from the obviously improper conduct of protesters and falsely imply that they are merely "filming". Practically every time there is video footage, though, we see protesters doing clearly unlawful things other than "filming" which they try to justify as "filming".
Same objection to rhetoric.
> And a five second google query yields
Same objection to rhetoric.
The fact that you can find such a link is irrelevant, insofar as I made a claim about what the ProPublica article evidences.
The USA Today link demonstrates the existence of one such case, assuming that we take an immigration lawyer at his word. It cites an academic paper to speculate that perhaps 1.5% of those deported are citizens, but there are numerous problems with this highly implausible suggestion:
* The paper does not give a 1.5% figure for deportations; it gives (page 632) a 1-1.5% range of wrongful apprehensions.
* The paper does not evidence the upper end of that range; the relevant figures (page 622) only support the lower end.
* The paper's actual estimate for citizens among those "who sign removal orders and are physically removed" is 0.05% (page 629). But even this does not have a clear basis in the preceding.
* The paper is from 2011 and based on data from years prior to that. As such, citing it only makes sense in the context of trying to delegitimize the concept of ICE in general; it has nothing to do with anything currently going on under Trump.
Similar observations apply to the GAO report. It covers Trump's first term; USA Today is curiously uninterested in investigating whether similar patterns continued under Biden. Of the 70 "potential US citizens" who were "removed" across a period of multiple years, several were not "deported" in any meaningful sense, and 24 had a prior history of immigration violations (and another 36 were convicted criminals). It's not established in the report that any of these "potential" citizens actually were citizens. And based on the table on page 24, even the 0.05% estimate is an order of magnitude too high, even if we take for granted that all 70 were citizens. (Similarly, less than 1 in 1000 arrests were of citizens, and that presumably includes a lot of protesters who were violating the law as part of a protest.)
> I would recommend you try and detach from your currently-held beliefs and re-evaluate these events through a more empathetic and constitutional lens.
My empathy is with legal immigrants whose efforts to be recognized by the system get invalidated when others violate the law to enter the country, and subsequently receive favourable treatment in "sanctuary cities". I am Canadian, but I respect the US Constitution; it gives the US — like Canada and any other country — the right to determine who is and is not legally permitted to reside within their borders. And the other branches of government are, a priori, obviously justified in seeking to enforce those rules, as they would otherwise be meaningless.
Your other links are again irrelevant here. They are just trying to add more random anecdotes of ICE impropriety, which are outside the scope of what I responded to.