>It's actually not a crime to overstay a visa or to be here without one. It's nothing.
If it is not a crime, then what is it?
If it is not a crime, then what is it?
Without a current visa of some kind though, you are deportable, mostly at the whims and mercy of the government. But you wouldn't be committing a crime and deportation is not a criminal punishment.
When you do crimes, you get criminally punished (hypothetically) citizen or not (jail, fines, etc).
Whether the government can, should or must carry out a deportation are all truly separate considerations, often with distinct, case-by-case answers.
And with all this in mind, pause for a moment and sit with the fact that thousands of people who have committed no crime at all are getting grabbed off the street and incarcerated indefinitely by ICE and subjected to ghastly conditions
That is it, you said it.
>And with all this in mind, pause for a moment and sit with the fact that thousands of people who have committed no crime at all are getting grabbed off the street
Would you expect a cop who is detaining you because you were speeding, to let you go without checking your license because of some personal emergency. Why do you expect something different here?
Said what? That deportation isn't a criminal punishment? Oh no, you got me! Checkmate I guess.
I'll answer as if this is a good faith rejoinder, even though we both know it isn't.
Deportation is drastic. Very drastic. It's also very expensive and often very disruptive to many people's lives, including American citizens. Think households with an undocumented spouse, for example.
It's generally a bad thing to do without very good, justifiable reasons. Not the least of which how expensive it is for the state.
> Would you expect a cop who is detaining you because you were speeding, to let you go without checking your license because of some personal emergency. Why do you expect something different here?
I wouldn't expect police to imprison people indefinitely (and at great cost to the state) for minor traffic violations, no. That would be insane.
What about pulling a gun on you, if the cop suspects you are hiding something and not complying with instructions to search you. This put your life in mortal danger, much worse than imprisoning you.
I think frankly people are not thinking this through.
When you have to reach for such increasingly strained and indirect metaphors to talk about an issue instead of dealing with the issue directly on it's own terms, it's a tell you don't actually know much about it all
I can see in your other replies you've really latched onto this "it's not a punishment" line, that you literally just "learned" a couple of replies ago from me (as if it's some magical auto-win button). You're making it up as you go along
And you've even gotten that wrong. I said deportation isn't a criminal punishment. To put it another way, deportation doesn't imply some wrongdoing or a guilty verdict from a judge or jury
But it can be just as consequential as a criminal punishment though, so it's not something to be done lightly without very good reasons. It's drastic, life-altering, sometimes life-destroying, grave and serious thing
To bring it back to some real facts here: There are estimated to be over a million households in the US where an undocumented person is married to a citizen. Many of them have children who are US citizens. Deporting the spouse/parent utterly destroys families, there's no morally justifiable reason to go after these people, except in rare, exceptional cases.
This is not correct. I only saw your comment after I made the ones you are referring to. I think this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281449. There is probably no proof that I can give. You ll have to take my word for it.
>But it can be just as consequential as a criminal punishment though..
It. doesn't. matter. If you take a loan from a bank, and bank forecloses your house for non-payment, you and your family is going to be home less. It is very consequential, sure. But that what "law enforcement" mean. And without it, there will be chaos.
You are not being realistic. Because you don't see the slippery slope on which your argument stands.
You can't speak coherently about the actual facts and realities of immigrants or the immigration system, despite the vast ocean of facts and stories you can use to educate yourself
But hey... imagine a cop, the pope and a bear walk into a bar ... therefore deport, or something. Think about it!
Why is it completely disconnected?
>actually discuss it directly
So you want to discuss it independently of laws and law enforcement? Just the humanitarian side without any other considerations? Is that it?
As they have now seen, at least as far as Samuel Sey goes, deportation isn’t simply a matter of following the rule of law. It’s a policy choice rooted both in legal mandates and in acts of presidential discretion. And this president is using his discretion in a way that harms Americans and American national interests.
American immigration law is a mess. The system is overly complicated and often internally contradictory. But one thing is clear — the rule of law does not require mass deportation. It does not mandate that a man like Sey has to leave the country.
And it certainly doesn’t require his detention, away from his family, while the system adjudicates his case.
First, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2023 case, United States v. Texas, the president has considerable “enforcement discretion over arrests and prosecutions” and that discretion “extends to the immigration context.” This means the president “retains discretion over whether to remove a noncitizen from the United States.”
This isn’t a new principle. More than a decade earlier, in a 2012 case, Arizona v. United States, the court held, “Federal officials, as an initial matter, must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all."
^ This is how.
But Trumps popularity has plummeted to it's lowest point ever and immigration is a big reason.
It has gone from one of his strongest issues to a major liability, as people are confronted with what mass deportation actually is.
If you're not rich enough to lawyer up, spend five figures fighting through the kangaroo administrative process and then another five sticking it to them in real court a civil infraction is actually worse in a lot of ways because those pesky 4th through 8th amendments don't really protect you all that much. There's a lot of judicial precedent from the past 100yr that basically waters down your rights when a bureaucrat is after you rather than the cops.
Consider this scenario. A friend of yours walks up to you and says "man, I got a ticket yesterday." You will have a general idea of the level of enforcement involved, how that's looked at by the government and others, etc. You probably do not see your friend as a criminal.
Now, suppose the same friend walked up and says "man, I got arrested yesterday, I just got bailed out." You will have different ideas of the enforcement model and perceptions of that. There is now a greater probability that you see your friend as a criminal.
Do you have an example that is not isolated incidents?
And your response is....weird? It is as if there is nothing at the bottom of these (your) arguments. You poke a finger and it comes out of the other end..
It’s a sleight of hand, they say “the worst of the worst” and what they mean is “all immigrants (not just the illegal ones) are the worst of the worst”
This is why they’re going to lose their majorities next week.
It is not their home if they were occupying it illegally! What are you people smoking!?
If you find someone else living in your house when you came back after a long vacation, would you let them stay "for a while" out of compassion?
Yea, thought so.
Give a straight answer ffs!
There are two axes here: whether something is a punishment, whether it's deserved. You've moved from arguing it's not a punishment to arguing it's deserved. So you need to give a straight answer.
Anyway, your posts have too many exclamation points and curses, so I don't want to engage anymore. Have a nice day.
>There are two axes here: whether something is a punishment, whether it's deserved.
There is no punishment in the picture at all. YOU want it to be in the picture because that is something you can outrage on.
>Anyway, your posts have too many exclamation points and curses, so I don't want to engage anymore. Have a nice day.
Sure. Stop responding. Have a very nice day.
The question is if you would want them removed from your house/premises. Not if you want to punish them.