* Which US citizens have been abducted and by who? Which have been killed?
* Which US citizens found themselves in US detention centers (without lawful arrest) ?
* Which US citizens were placed in other countries without judicial review?
As far as I can tell:
No US citizens have been deported. No US citizens have been detained after evidence of their citizenship has been produced, which is a fast process in practice (taking a few hours), and has affected a few hundred people in total swept up during larger enforcement operations. The worst examples I can find are "At least 36 citizens were held at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or family." No US citizens have died in detention, nor been killed. In detention, deaths have risen on previous years, but are due to existing medical issues being untreated rather than anyone being killed.
But for just a taste, here's a propublica article on the matter.
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
It's unclear how that number could be "0" if there's any immigration enforcement at all. That is: supposing a person is likely to be present without authorisation in the country, and is unable to offer any evidence of citizenship, then what?
It seems this is an incredibly small number for such a large operation, ie., the worst case treatment of US citizens appears to be 36 held for a day.
Could this be improved? Presumably.
Its unclear how other than requiring the process to be perfect, and without any error at all, that the number could be much lower.
And such a requirement is, in practice, impossible. So requiring the number to be 0 is to require there to be no immigration enforcement at all.
Personally, I don't care if "enforcement" happens at all, though I don't expect you to care about that for the same reason you don't care about your neighbors.
What I do think is that if it was your mom that bad things were happening to, you'd have a different position on what "acceptable errors" look like.
The big difference here is that I care about my neighbors just as would care about my mother. You don't, and that's fine. Maybe you can get Grok to grow you a prothstetic soul or something.
Then don't arrest them and send them to a concentration camp would be a great start. The onus should be on the arresting officer to have a reasonable suspicion that the person in question is in the US without proper authorization (with reasonable suspicion being a pretty high bar, much higher than it currently is).
We have a court system. ICE even has their own special extra-judicial court system. There is absolutely zero need to proactively be disappearing people just because some guy who's only training is that Family Guy meme decided that this particular brown person needs to have their life destroyed.
Also, these detention centers are horrific and something history will not judge kindly, especially given that "the cruelty is the point" seems to be the guiding light for the folks building them.
36 US citizens being incorrectly and illegally arrested is 36 too many. Period. End of story.
Demand better of our government, not "eh, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet."
My question is: suppose they have such suspicion.
> 36 US citizens being incorrectly and illegally arrested is 36 too many. Period. End of story.
This doesnt really make any sense. Since you want to say that the process of immigration enforcement must be designed to never make a mistake that places a US citizen in detention for any amount of time, i assume that your real goal is to end all immigration enforcement.
It would be better if you said that, rather than laundered your view thru a claim about the possibility and necessity of perfect enforcement.
Then they should be able to articulate it. Instead in the few cases where they do, it's laughable, at best (or would be laughable if it didn't come with a non-zero risk of extradition to a third world prison in a failed central African state).
You can make that assumption. You would be wrong. But you are free to make that assumption.
> My question is: suppose they have such suspicion.
Then take it to a court and convince a judge to sign a warrant (it's not like it's that difficult). No different from other criminal investigations.
OK, fair enough. By this logic, those Jan 6th protesters who placed themselves between police and buildings/crowds such that they were injured/killed/etc. by the police -- those people get to cancel a federal election. For, if we cannot have elections without people dying, then presumably there should be none?
Being responsible for telling otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants that they need to leave is not a violent job, thus they don't need to be armed.
You don't need to murder someone to remove a heckler, especially one that you have zero jurisdiction over.
And what if you do?
Are you saying that you cannot conceive of a situation in which a person who disagrees with immigration law would deliberately place themselves in a position in which the only way of removing them from a enforcement situation is killing them?
This is strange given the number of domestic terrorism incidents. Consider, for example, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/8-convicted-of-terrorism...
> A demonstrator who shot and wounded a police officer outside a Texas immigration center
There is no case, to my knowledge, of ICE killing anyone who hasnt voluntarily placed themselves in the middle of an enforcement situation. And more so, there are many uncontroversial cases of the attempted murder of ICE officers (see, eg. the above).
The problem with your position is that it hands complete control over the existence of the immigration system to those who are willing to engage in domestic terrorism. I assume this isnt an accident, and you're well aware that "violence" here isnt "required" -- but it is caused by activists whose political project is to use violence against ICE officers.
Giving domestic terrorists a veto over government legislation is presumably not a position you wish to defend. Or if it is, be aware that quite a lot of historical domestic terrorism was right wing, and under the same principles, so it would be again.
It is not a capital offense to interfere with the duties of law enforcement officer in the united states. It's a jailable offense worth up to about a year in prison unless you use a weapon. So "they were in the way" is abso-fucking-lutely not a reason to murder someone.
At no point in time did Alex Pretti nor Renee Good represent any direct danger to the ICE agents who murdered them. ICE agents killed Americans, in cold blood, because they knew they could get away with it. If I have to choose between a bunch of people quietly minding their own business who happen to be missing some paperwork, and a gang of blood thirsty hicks galavanting around the country brutalizing people, I'm going to pick the peaceful ones every time.
Alas, I've spent to much time typing out reasoned responses to a Fascist.
ICE have guns because the people they are aiming to deport are often violent and have guns themselves. Apprehending a person without permission to be in the country is an inherently dangerous activity because without the use of any force at all, none would comply with the request to leave. That request has already been issued.
I don't know what you think large-scale child slavery operations are like, but you'd want the people detaining those involved to have guns I imagine. Likewise, sits of law enforcement operations are not places that you can protest -- the act of "disrupting" criminal enforcement procedures is itself a crime -- for obvious reasons. You cannot just murder someone, then every time an officer comes to arrest you, arrange for your neighbors to "protest" an arrest.
Political protest is a crime when "protestors" commit crimes. All protestors you've mentioned were committing crimes as soon as they entered an enforcement operations, that's called obstruction.
> reasoned responses to a Fascist.
You havent offered any reasons at all. You're using emotionally escalating language which justifies arbitrary violent action by people you agree with, in order to disrupt activities of the state which have a many-decades long bipartisian popular democratic mandate; and have been going on in the present form, for decades. You're seeking to justify the use of domestic terrorism to undermine the legitimacy of democratically legitimated government policies because you disagree with them.
Deporting a person to their country of origin is not a punishment. They are citizens of the country they are being returned to. At any given time 70-80% of pretty much all western states agree with a much harsher immigration enforcement that is ever actually enacted by states themselves. Mass immigration has always taken place against the democratic wishes of vast majorities of people. The removal of people without permission to be here, to the place they have permission to be, is not an attack on that person.
By emotionally white-washing acts of domestic terrorism you are creating a situation in which "protestors" are encouraged to get themselves killed in actions against the state. You do not have a hecker's veto on immigration policy, and nothing you do will give you one. The attitude you are taking here i just getting people killed LARPing matyrs for people who, in the end, are not being punished, theyre being deported.
In the US, we believe people are innocent until proven guilty. The way this number can be 0 is by ICE and CBP doing the bare minimum investigation "Is this person here legally" before arresting, not after.
There are, of course, situations that make that particularly difficult to determine, for example at home birth and homeschooling. But that's a burden for the state to resolve, not the individual.
> supposing a person is likely to be present without authorisation in the country, and is unable to offer any evidence of citizenship, then what?
It's not their burden to show citizenship or authorization. Before being arrested the state should have gone through a process "Is this person a citizen? where do they work? Do they have an SSN? Do they have school records or is there a birth certificate?" These are all tasks for the state to do before arresting someone.
> It seems this is an incredibly small number for such a large operation,
1. It's entirely too large, particularly because citizenship can be determined before arresting.
2. This is only what has been found by journalists, not the sum total of illegal arrests. Like I said, ICE is specifically trying to obfuscate their operations (the article mentions it) specifically to get around thing like FOIA requests to see how often these false arrests happen.
> Could this be improved?
There's almost no way it couldn't be improved.
> These are all tasks for the state to do before arresting someone.
There were certainly done in the case of these 36. That isnt the issue. The issue is that there are some non-zero pool of US citizens, who associate with non-US citizens illegally in the country, who cannot readily prove their citizenship. Since they are present with illegal immigrants, and are reasonably suspected of being one, they are reasonably detained.
> There's almost no way it couldn't be improved.
This indicates you aren't aware of the issues involved.
No one thinks its a good thing for US citizens to be mistakenly detained. The onus is on people who agree that there should be some level of immigration enforcement to explain how a perfect process avoids 100% of all such cases.
If you dont want immigration enforcement, that's a clearer position. Then the question is: what does the US owe to non-citizens who have build nothing, and paid nothing? If the answer is "nothing" you've got a lot of homelesssness, medical, etc. issues to address --- if your answer is "something" then you've got 8bn people on the planet, and the question is: how much?
Yes it absolutely does. Cops need more than just a hunch before they can arrest someone. They need clear articulable evidence that the person they are arresting more than likely committed a crime. That's what the 4th amendment protects.
For obvious reasons, we don't just allow cops to go out and arrest people on no grounds. Only ICE seems to get that benefit.
> There were certainly done in the case of these 36.
No it wasn't, they wouldn't be arrested if it was done before.
> who associate with non-US citizens illegally in the country
We have the freedom of association (1st amendment and NAACP v. Alabama). There's no such thing as "illegal association".
> This indicates you aren't aware of the issues involved.
Oh I'm aware that there are a number of racist people who want mass deportation and don't care who gets swept up in it. The problem they have is you can't do mass deportation and due process, which is why ICE has abandoned due process. So, people like yourself defend that abrogation because you like the thought of a few more mexicans being thrown into CECOT.
We can stop pretending that's not the "issues involved".
At this point, I dont think i'm talking to a person offering arguments in good faith. Nothing you've said advances or clarifies how such a procedure could be enacted, and your replies are simply restatements of your assumption.
If you think this is bad faith, fine. I think you just don't have a strong retort other than "I don't like that idea".
I don't think that such a thing is possible, for any effective enforcement procedure. I think all effective procedures of any kind, which exist in the real world, have an error rate. And error rates, for any real procedure, are never zero. And all government policy, which incidentally here arises from overwhelming democratic support, exists in the real world.
If you want to say A) "the only permissible enforcement procedure is one which is error free" and B) "such an enforcement procedure is possible" then I deny both premises. If you are saying something else: what's your allowed error rate?
My arguments against A, B i've already given. To accept A is to say that the government has arbitrarily high costs for either: 1) perfect enforcement or no borders: ie., if such a perfect procedure is possible, its costs are arbitrarily high (how does one in every possible case, spend arbitarily long amount of time, in arbitary situations, determining if a person is a US citzien? flawlessly ); or 2) if it isn't, then a borderless country which raises taxes and has social systems thereby awards all people within travel distance benefits from these.
As for B) this follows, a priori, from a claim that all real-world processes have error rates. To be more specific: immigration enforcement is a social process involving: people, human judgement, a wide vareity of unusual situations, and so on. At each stage there are signficant rates of error which follow from this.
Incorrect. Immigration enforcement at the border is exactly where I'd expect immigration enforcement to temporarily detain US citizens while they check documents. We aren't talking about simple detaining, which doesn't involve putting people in cuffs and transporting them to immigration facilities, that's an arrest.
Outside of border enforcement, no, there should never be a reason why immigration detains a US citizen. About the only time for that is when they are checking to see if they are the person they are searching for. There is no way you can determine the citizenship status of someone simply by looking at them or listening to them. People that get citizenship status keep their looks and their accents. That means that ICE must do the legwork that they aren't doing and investigate before arresting. And by investigate, I mean more than just "A lot of mexicans are working on that house over there, let's arrest them and see whose a citizen".
> for any effective enforcement procedure.
You mean for mass deportations, which I agree, it's not feasible to do a home depot or farm raid. But they shouldn't be doing that anyways. The assumption that everyone in an area has no residency status is a bad one that arrests innocent citizens.
> A) "the only permissible enforcement procedure is one which is error free" and B) "such an enforcement procedure is possible"
This is a false dichotomy. There's a huge sea between "we make as few mistakes as possible" and what this administration is doing which is arresting everyone that looks a little mexican. My position is that the administration should be putting in a lot more effort to limit false arrests, including checking immigration status BEFORE detaining or arresting someone. They clearly are not doing that. The burden should not be on the person being arrested to prove they are a citizen, that's exactly backwards.
You have made a bad faith "all or nothing" argument while also misrepresenting my stated position. And again, you've not addressed a single one of my points.
> what this administration is doing which is arresting everyone that looks a little mexican
If they were doing that, how could there only be 36 cases?
Again, you arent even engaging with the reality of the situation.
As stated before, that's 36 cases found by propublica last year. We don't know how many US citizens ICE has arrested because they aren't tracking that number.
As for "that's not happening". You literally just need to google it, there's hundreds of videos and articles of ICE arresting people for looking mexican [1] [2] [3]. In fact, that resulted in a supreme court shadow docket ruling allowing the practice to continue [4].
> Again, you arent even engaging with the reality of the situation.
Yeah, I am. The reality of the situation is we have federal thugs arresting people based on looks, sometimes multiple times. [5] The argument that this is simply normal immigration enforcement is laughable. None of this is normal or desirable.
[1] https://ktla.com/video/video-captures-ice-agents-tackling-da...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-15/home-dep...
[3] https://hoodline.com/2026/09/ice-detains-10-day-laborers-at-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop
[5] https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-leo-garcia-ve...
See how you've moved the goalpost. Now it's not "these aren't happening" it's "Well, a lot of mexicans work that job and a good number of them are probably illegal".
It's not reasonable to believe every mexican walking in or around home depot is illegal. That's just racist.
This is a prime example of lazy thinking and ICE not spending their vast resources just doing minimal investigatory work. If they weren't so hell bent on dressing up like fat narcos, they could do some actual police work before hand and figure out who actually is illegal and who isn't instead of just arresting everyone based on racist prejudices.
People are being needlessly detained/arrested because their tactics are awful and inefficient. Given their general incompetence I'm truly unable to tell if that's a feature not a bug or they're just that bad at EVERYTHING.
No. Just follow the law[0]:
(a) Issuance. If the complaint or one or more affidavits filed with the
complaint establish probable cause to believe that an offense has been
committed and that the defendant committed it, the judge must issue an arrest
warrant to an officer authorized to execute it.
So, you assert that at least 36 American citizens (as well as many thousands of non-citizens who, despite the rhetoric of some, are afforded constitutional rights by their presence in the US, but I digress) have had their constitutional rights violated by government agencies.
>It seems this is an incredibly small number for such a large operation, ie., the worst case treatment of US citizens appears to be 36 held for a day.
That strongly implies that you believe that given the scope of "such a large operation" that number is acceptable. If 36 is acceptable, how about 50? 100? 19,000? Where do you draw the line at the number of violations of constitutional rights are acceptable? That's not a rhetorical question.
I say it should be zero, as all Federal agents are required to take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. How many Federal agents shredding the Constitution is acceptable to you? I again say zero, and criminal charges should be brought against any and all who break their oath.
What say you? Again, not a rhetorical question.
did you speak out?
because those of us who marched in the streets and got tear gassed in front of ICE facilities did speak out
and brave souls like Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed for speaking out
And what did you do about it? Probably the same as the rest of us.. nothing that actually matters.
We have no power except a vote. Our country is too big (physically) to effectively protest. Our wealth distribution is too large. Our social safety nets are laughable. People can't even take time off work to protest, or if they just didn't show up they can be fired without recourse.
Our country and government is basically built for the people having no actual power. We are at the mercy of the ultra rich that control everything and a large majority of all of our "elected" officials.
If everyone who was allowed to vote actually voted, I think there's a reasonably high chance we'd have better politicians. As it stands, there's this pretend "virtue" from a bunch of pseudo-intellectual morons who think they're cool by abstaining from their right to vote, and dedicate a lot of time trying to convince people that their votes don't matter.
Cynicism is always tempting but ultimately lazy; if they votes didn't matter then there wouldn't be politicians wasting their time trying to make it hard or impossible for you to vote.
The Serbians did that for two years straight, until their government resigned and called for new elections. Look at videos from a protest: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1jc29fk/breathtakin...
If a much poorer country with (for now!) much worse repression can do it, what's your excuse, Americans?
Politics isn't just the ballot box every couple of years. Politics is always and everywhere.
That is, of course, the minimal thing, but I think we'd have way better elections if people just used this fundamental right.
[1] Yes yes I know about disenfranchisement for felonies and the like, you don't need to lecture me.
There were larger protests at ICE concentration camps but ICE made it clear that they'd use deadly force to disperse them. From the Left, the worry was that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act to suspend elections, deploy the military, etc.
I will be voting, like I always have, but I live in a state where that's easy to do. This administration is testing the limits of what people will put up with.