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.
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.
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.
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.