Seems like a big own-goal for the administration to inject an agency which (according to polls[1]) is quite broadly hated into the daily lives of millions.
Politically they're just going from failure (immigration policy broadly considered a failure) to failure (starting a new forever war in the middle east is universally hated) to failure (this).
It's no wonder they're trying to burn the election system to the ground to prevent a fair election from occurring this year. It's the only way they're staying out of jail, especially Tom "cash bribes only" Homan.
Misinformation, low voter turnout, and an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density.
That’s ignoring any possibility of interference with insecure voting or tallying computers.
Don’t forget racism. This administration got elected in large part because they are openly racist, delivering outcomes at a velocity that ‘Southern’ dog-whistle deniability doesn’t allow for those that do, for whatever reason, want to continue having positive or neutral reputation with those opposed to racism (which includes half of U.S. women, or more if you limit to those younger than 30) while also benefiting personally from racism’s privileges to them and their families.
racism was a minor factor in the 2024 election. Had Harris been white, she still would have lost. She ran a campaign that said nothing about what she as going to do, she only said how evil Trump would be. She lost the election when she was asked on "The View," a Democrat friendly show, if there was anything she would do differently than Biden. There's only one wrong answer to that question ad she gasve, saying not a thing. Had she just said she'd tackle the border and illegal immigration, she'd have had a chance.
Had Biden kept to his word and been one and one, the Democrats would have had a primary and selected a candidate who could have won. (Harris would not have won the nomination in any sort of primary.)
We need paper ballots because people can understand them. Election conspiracy theories are becoming a problem. Having a counting process that people can understand and trust is a feature.
Conspiratorial thinking can't be fixed with additional facts. There is no set of facts that conclusively establish any claim to someone who is already committed not to believing the claim.
> an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density
You could blame the backing of the richest oligarchs in the world, you could blame a morally bankrupt culture amongst a large chunk of the electorate, but at the end of the day it was a very tight race and there was a global wave of incumbent losses[1], regardless of the incumbent party's position.
Between 2021 and 2024 the world went on a rollercoaster ride. Pandemic economic stimulus made everyone feel rich in 2021, and then harsh monetary tightening led to everyone feeling like their world was collapsing in 2024. They punished whoever was in charge at the time.
Because the Democrats tried to run Biden again, despite the obvious-to-everybody signs of decline and unfitness. Then, when that became impossible to ignore, they anointed Harris. (Thereby overturning the results of the primaries, which created bad memories from the previous two campaigns.) Then Harris said that she wouldn't do anything different from Biden, despite people being tired of Biden.
And because the electorate had kind of forgotten what Trump was like, because they'd just spent four years seeing what Biden was like. There was a bunch of stuff that Biden (or at least his people) did that didn't really resonate with voters, and a bunch of them voted for "not that".
The other thing they did wrong was, they were a year late in prosecuting Trump. Trump managed to delay things out to the point that the campaign (and then the office) protected him. I don't know if Democrats delayed deliberately, so that the prosecutions would be damaging Trump as the campaign season started, but if so, they were well-paid for that bit of attempted chicanery.
Democrats funded, armed and protected a live-streamed genocide so horrific that roughly a third of their own hard-core base (Biden 2020 voters) couldn't bring themselves to vote for Harris, even in a close race against Trump [0].
There are other reasons Dems lost, also important. Still, genocide remains the blazing neon-red 12-ton elephant in the room. And there seems to be absolutely no sign of owning that fact, which means that no lessons will be learned or policies changed.
How do they justify Immigration and Customs enforcement working domestic flights and departures in general? Isn't ICE's scope supposed to be limited to what/who is coming into the country from foreign countries?
Of course, that's a rhetorical question. When you're an autocrat, you do not need to justify your actions.
ICE’s scope isn’t who is coming into the country — that’s CBP’s scope. ICE’s scope is supposed to be those committing immigration offences who have already entered the country (either because the CBP failed to catch them, or because they were admitted but never left).
The only difficulty justifying this is ICE’s power to stop and question people, and an airport is no different to a random street from that point of view. Do they have probable cause? What suffices as probable cause?
And once you have probable cause, you run into the problem 8 USC 1304(e) creates: someone who doesn’t have documentation proving their legal immigration status falls into one of two categories, they’re either a citizen, or they’re an immigrant violating that section.
(And this is looking at it from a simple legalistic point of view, ignoring any questions about ICE’s behaviour or powers!)
> And once you have probable cause, you run into the problem 8 USC 1304(e) creates: someone who doesn’t have documentation proving their legal immigration status falls into one of two categories, they’re either a citizen, or they’re an immigrant violating that section.
So hopefully if you are tourist from abroad, CBP will give you stamp into your passport, otherwise you have entered "illegally". They are not always stamping passports.
CBP is doing it electronically for quite some time, as they can see your date of entry in the system and they are not controlling your date of leave against passport when you are leaving USA (you won't even meet CBP at that stage), but it is all checked electronically.
Last time I got stamped. But it seems like an exception than a rule.
A lot of countries don’t stamp passports — if you can guarantee the entry is immediately recorded in your central database, and you can reliably look up the latest entry for a given passport, a stamp doesn’t really gain much.
At least in the large airports, the international flights come in to a separate terminal. Will ICE limit their involvement to that terminal only, and only inbound flights? Immigration and Customs have no business on the outbound side or with domestic passengers.
Some international flights arrive in to domestic US terminals. These are from a limited set of countries where passengers have cleared US immigration in the departure country.
Canada, Ireland and the UAE are the major three, plus Aruba, Barbados and Bermuda.
For all its flaws, TSA (at least under previous administrations) did a lot of design thinking work around how to streamline flows through airports, minimize travel stress and conflict, and optimize to minimize traveler complaints while continuing to maintain security.
Bringing in shock theater optimized staff is a particularly poor fit for a scenario that will impact a disproportionately voting and bipartisan pool of citizens.
There's a reason advertising in airports is generally targeted at corporate leaders and decision makers.
If your goal is to intimidate and frighten people into submitting to you, then sending armed, masked "shock theater" thugs in should accomplish that goal.
They continued to maintain the illusion of security. The underwear bomber and shoe bomber had no problem smuggling explosives onto an aircraft directly under their noses.
Their idea of "security" is to get you into a scanner so they can stare at and save images of your naked body. Or to buy really expensive "sniffer" robots that don't work in one of the most corrupt government contracts recently known about.
Meanwhile, cockpit doors still have several functional deficiencies that make pilots vulnerable to the original attack that led to the creation of this derelict agency.
As they should be. I don’t want to fund DHS and I’m happy my reps are doing their job to keep it shut down. Funding TSA specifically is acceptable and has in fact been voted down in the senate by republicans several times now.
What’s left of FEMA? Anyway their disaster response is not impacted by the lapse in funding. They’re currently on the ground doing something or other in Hawaii.
I'm not sure about all the Americains acronyms, so DHS is Department of Homeland Security i guess, what does it have to do with your Emergency department? if i understand correctly, FEMA is your federal hurricane/flood/fire emergency response, wouldn't it be better for it to work closer with meteorologists and urban development? or at worst be independent?
And especially if so much is put under the same umbrella, i would rather have my representative vote the funding of one sub-agency after the other. Yes it is more work for them, but that's their job, and "all included" budgets bill are, in my opinion and after my government shafted us 3 time in a row, undemocratic.
They had 5 chances to do so and explicitly excluded it, so I don't see how that can possibly be true. Is your argument that they're incapable of constructing a bill representing their position?
I wonder how this will impact the economy. People deciding not to travel won’t help anything. You would think this is the last thing the administration would want to do at this point.
Straight white US citizen male here. This scares the shit out of me. I travel for work all the time, but understanding that we will now have barely trained, and in many cases completely lawless, consequence-free federal officers in direct, high stress, public areas where lots of people are constantly passing through seems like an absolute recipe for tragedy.
This will 100% make me reconsider travel and avoid airports with ICE agents. I think the writing on the wall is clear, nobody is safe.
Throwaway accounts and more propaganda isn’t proof of anything. I think it’s pretty clear that untrained, unaccountable armed people who have already killed multiple US citizens that they have no jurisdiction over is a real-world worry that people have.
It’s silly to dismiss rational, logic-based worry as “propaganda”.
Yes US citizens that are putting themselves in a situation they shouldn’t have been in to begin with while threatening and provoking a violent reaction. And we pikachu face at the result.
You’re the one cowering in fear of federal agents doing what they’ve already been doing for 20 years. One of us is obviously falling for the fear mongering here.
> Yes US citizens that are putting themselves in a situation they shouldn’t have been in to begin with while threatening and provoking a violent reaction.
This is not at all true. Plus, it's inconsequential -- ICE agents have no authority over US citizens except in extremely limited circumstances (https://www.perplexity.ai/search/9f4518c4-8a32-474a-bd92-3f1...), and even if they did, being able to arrest someone, file charges, and work their way through the justice system is the answer... Not killing people on the streets.
Hot take: I am 100% legally allowed to equip my sidearm and go follow ICE agents around wherever the fuck I want and scream obscenities in their face literally all day long, 24/7.
Dunno, you'd think the administration would prefer they be out on the streets rather than menacing business travelers. This may be pure legislative/executive incompetence rather than a grand scheme.
The Nazis were also actually extremely incompetent. Thankfully the current admin is more incompetent, but truly one of the main downsides of strongman governments is that they tend to be operated by dummies.
I don't know if I'd phrase it like that. It does show they see ICE as a fix all police they can deploy for a wide variety of purposes though. ICE is better funded than some branches of the military, and they are demonstrating they are willing to use ICE for whatever they think needs to be done.
Seems like a big own-goal for the administration to inject an agency which (according to polls[1]) is quite broadly hated into the daily lives of millions.
Politically they're just going from failure (immigration policy broadly considered a failure) to failure (starting a new forever war in the middle east is universally hated) to failure (this).
It's no wonder they're trying to burn the election system to the ground to prevent a fair election from occurring this year. It's the only way they're staying out of jail, especially Tom "cash bribes only" Homan.
[1] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-febru...
If they ever need a group to enforce their election ~~laws~~ executive orders, I wonder what group they might choose?
How did they get elected?
Centrist voters didn't understand that that inflation and monetary policy are subject to momentum.
Misinformation, low voter turnout, and an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density.
That’s ignoring any possibility of interference with insecure voting or tallying computers.
Don’t forget racism. This administration got elected in large part because they are openly racist, delivering outcomes at a velocity that ‘Southern’ dog-whistle deniability doesn’t allow for those that do, for whatever reason, want to continue having positive or neutral reputation with those opposed to racism (which includes half of U.S. women, or more if you limit to those younger than 30) while also benefiting personally from racism’s privileges to them and their families.
racism was a minor factor in the 2024 election. Had Harris been white, she still would have lost. She ran a campaign that said nothing about what she as going to do, she only said how evil Trump would be. She lost the election when she was asked on "The View," a Democrat friendly show, if there was anything she would do differently than Biden. There's only one wrong answer to that question ad she gasve, saying not a thing. Had she just said she'd tackle the border and illegal immigration, she'd have had a chance.
Had Biden kept to his word and been one and one, the Democrats would have had a primary and selected a candidate who could have won. (Harris would not have won the nomination in any sort of primary.)
I’m not referring to any single election or opponent.
We need paper ballots because people can understand them. Election conspiracy theories are becoming a problem. Having a counting process that people can understand and trust is a feature.
We already use paper ballots[1].
You can't use reason to get people out of a mindset they didn't use reason to get into.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/some...
Conspiratorial thinking can't be fixed with additional facts. There is no set of facts that conclusively establish any claim to someone who is already committed not to believing the claim.
Additional facts can slow the rate at which conspiracy theorists can convert others. It helps if the additional facts are visibly obvious.
> an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density
Trump won the electoral college and popular vote.
You could blame the backing of the richest oligarchs in the world, you could blame a morally bankrupt culture amongst a large chunk of the electorate, but at the end of the day it was a very tight race and there was a global wave of incumbent losses[1], regardless of the incumbent party's position.
Between 2021 and 2024 the world went on a rollercoaster ride. Pandemic economic stimulus made everyone feel rich in 2021, and then harsh monetary tightening led to everyone feeling like their world was collapsing in 2024. They punished whoever was in charge at the time.
[1] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/2024-the-year-incumbent-gov...
Because the Democrats tried to run Biden again, despite the obvious-to-everybody signs of decline and unfitness. Then, when that became impossible to ignore, they anointed Harris. (Thereby overturning the results of the primaries, which created bad memories from the previous two campaigns.) Then Harris said that she wouldn't do anything different from Biden, despite people being tired of Biden.
And because the electorate had kind of forgotten what Trump was like, because they'd just spent four years seeing what Biden was like. There was a bunch of stuff that Biden (or at least his people) did that didn't really resonate with voters, and a bunch of them voted for "not that".
The other thing they did wrong was, they were a year late in prosecuting Trump. Trump managed to delay things out to the point that the campaign (and then the office) protected him. I don't know if Democrats delayed deliberately, so that the prosecutions would be damaging Trump as the campaign season started, but if so, they were well-paid for that bit of attempted chicanery.
Democrats funded, armed and protected a live-streamed genocide so horrific that roughly a third of their own hard-core base (Biden 2020 voters) couldn't bring themselves to vote for Harris, even in a close race against Trump [0].
There are other reasons Dems lost, also important. Still, genocide remains the blazing neon-red 12-ton elephant in the room. And there seems to be absolutely no sign of owning that fact, which means that no lessons will be learned or policies changed.
0 - https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
How do they justify Immigration and Customs enforcement working domestic flights and departures in general? Isn't ICE's scope supposed to be limited to what/who is coming into the country from foreign countries?
Of course, that's a rhetorical question. When you're an autocrat, you do not need to justify your actions.
ICE’s scope isn’t who is coming into the country — that’s CBP’s scope. ICE’s scope is supposed to be those committing immigration offences who have already entered the country (either because the CBP failed to catch them, or because they were admitted but never left).
The only difficulty justifying this is ICE’s power to stop and question people, and an airport is no different to a random street from that point of view. Do they have probable cause? What suffices as probable cause?
And once you have probable cause, you run into the problem 8 USC 1304(e) creates: someone who doesn’t have documentation proving their legal immigration status falls into one of two categories, they’re either a citizen, or they’re an immigrant violating that section.
(And this is looking at it from a simple legalistic point of view, ignoring any questions about ICE’s behaviour or powers!)
> And once you have probable cause, you run into the problem 8 USC 1304(e) creates: someone who doesn’t have documentation proving their legal immigration status falls into one of two categories, they’re either a citizen, or they’re an immigrant violating that section.
So hopefully if you are tourist from abroad, CBP will give you stamp into your passport, otherwise you have entered "illegally". They are not always stamping passports.
Isn’t the stamp necessary?
Under what circumstances would they not?
CBP is doing it electronically for quite some time, as they can see your date of entry in the system and they are not controlling your date of leave against passport when you are leaving USA (you won't even meet CBP at that stage), but it is all checked electronically.
Last time I got stamped. But it seems like an exception than a rule.
https://www.swlaw.com/publication/immigration-alert-cbp-elim...
I can already see myself arguing with ICE officer that CBP is not stamping passport for years.
A lot of countries don’t stamp passports — if you can guarantee the entry is immediately recorded in your central database, and you can reliably look up the latest entry for a given passport, a stamp doesn’t really gain much.
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ICE has a lot of funding, more than some branches of the military.
This demonstrates they see ICE as their fix all police force, and that they are willing to deploy ICE to do whatever they think needs to be done.
ICE is $11B.
Coast Guard is $14B.
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Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for much better than this here...
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
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Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is this the new "payment package", so a bit less than 19B/year, or is this added to the 11B, and ICE funding is 30B/year?
The latter. It’s additional one time appropriations for additional agents and detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Virtually all commercial passenger flights are to international airports.
At least in the large airports, the international flights come in to a separate terminal. Will ICE limit their involvement to that terminal only, and only inbound flights? Immigration and Customs have no business on the outbound side or with domestic passengers.
Some international flights arrive in to domestic US terminals. These are from a limited set of countries where passengers have cleared US immigration in the departure country.
Canada, Ireland and the UAE are the major three, plus Aruba, Barbados and Bermuda.
Since they will support tsa operations, I’m going to assume they will be at the outbound security checkpoints. Both domestic and international.
For all its flaws, TSA (at least under previous administrations) did a lot of design thinking work around how to streamline flows through airports, minimize travel stress and conflict, and optimize to minimize traveler complaints while continuing to maintain security.
Bringing in shock theater optimized staff is a particularly poor fit for a scenario that will impact a disproportionately voting and bipartisan pool of citizens.
There's a reason advertising in airports is generally targeted at corporate leaders and decision makers.
If your goal is to intimidate and frighten people into submitting to you, then sending armed, masked "shock theater" thugs in should accomplish that goal.
> while continuing to maintain security.
They continued to maintain the illusion of security. The underwear bomber and shoe bomber had no problem smuggling explosives onto an aircraft directly under their noses.
Their idea of "security" is to get you into a scanner so they can stare at and save images of your naked body. Or to buy really expensive "sniffer" robots that don't work in one of the most corrupt government contracts recently known about.
Meanwhile, cockpit doors still have several functional deficiencies that make pilots vulnerable to the original attack that led to the creation of this derelict agency.
Keep in mind that the Democrats have proposed five bills to fund the TSA, and the Republicans have shot them all down.
This reichstag fire is manufactured.
Democrats are explicitly opposed to a clean DHS funding bill with no changes.
As they should be. I don’t want to fund DHS and I’m happy my reps are doing their job to keep it shut down. Funding TSA specifically is acceptable and has in fact been voted down in the senate by republicans several times now.
Why do you oppose FEMA funding?
What’s left of FEMA? Anyway their disaster response is not impacted by the lapse in funding. They’re currently on the ground doing something or other in Hawaii.
This is completely incorrect. FEMA has ceased public assistance for ongoing and historical disasters.
You should let FEMA and the state of Hawaii know then. They must be really fucking confused. Thanks 0xy for bringing the knowledge.
https://www.khon2.com/kona-low/governor-green-kona-low/amp/
FEMA does not and should not be a part of DHS. Good try though.
Wrong.
https://www.fema.gov/about
I drop the word need there.
But yes putting it as part of DHS was a mistake and mistakes can be fixed.
This is straight up untrue. There are clean bill proposals to fund TSA that Republicans have rejected. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/are-the-proposed-tsa-fundin...
Their bills are the clean bills. Yesterday's vote was a simple yea or nay for TSA funding. The Republicans voted against it.
The GOP refuses to fund the TSA without tying a whole bunch of other fascist shit to it. This crisis is manufactured.
Democrats will not vote for a clean DHS funding bill. Kicking the can on FEMA funding is one hell of a political gambit.
I'm not sure about all the Americains acronyms, so DHS is Department of Homeland Security i guess, what does it have to do with your Emergency department? if i understand correctly, FEMA is your federal hurricane/flood/fire emergency response, wouldn't it be better for it to work closer with meteorologists and urban development? or at worst be independent?
And especially if so much is put under the same umbrella, i would rather have my representative vote the funding of one sub-agency after the other. Yes it is more work for them, but that's their job, and "all included" budgets bill are, in my opinion and after my government shafted us 3 time in a row, undemocratic.
FEMA is a part of DHS, and none of the bills proposed by Democrats fund it.
Why should they? Has there been any investigation or accountability into the (livestreamed) death of US citizens in the hand of DHS?
They'll vote for a clean TSA funding bill. Why are the reps tying all the star chamber shit they are doing with ICE to TSA funding?
Cool, so no FEMA funding. Good luck with the next disaster everyone, Democrats are politically grandstanding again.
"Things aren't looking good for us with TSA funding. Better pivot to FEMA!"
I'm sure they'll vote for a clean FEMA bill, too.
Huh? The Democrats bill did not include FEMA funding.
Congress is allowed to pass more than one bill.
Hope this helps.
Give them a clean FEMA bill, and they'll vote for it.
They had 5 chances to do so and explicitly excluded it, so I don't see how that can possibly be true. Is your argument that they're incapable of constructing a bill representing their position?
GOP presented a FEMA-only bill?
No they didn't lol.
> They aren't clean bills, so this is absolutely irrelevant.
I mean its not really irrelevant, its a calculated move from both sides.
Welp, good thing there's absolutely no way this could go horribly wrong.
As long as no planes drive in the direction of the terminal.
Seems ICE is basically just a slush fund to use wherever they see fit.
I wonder how this will impact the economy. People deciding not to travel won’t help anything. You would think this is the last thing the administration would want to do at this point.
Straight white US citizen male here. This scares the shit out of me. I travel for work all the time, but understanding that we will now have barely trained, and in many cases completely lawless, consequence-free federal officers in direct, high stress, public areas where lots of people are constantly passing through seems like an absolute recipe for tragedy.
This will 100% make me reconsider travel and avoid airports with ICE agents. I think the writing on the wall is clear, nobody is safe.
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Throwaway accounts and more propaganda isn’t proof of anything. I think it’s pretty clear that untrained, unaccountable armed people who have already killed multiple US citizens that they have no jurisdiction over is a real-world worry that people have.
It’s silly to dismiss rational, logic-based worry as “propaganda”.
Yes US citizens that are putting themselves in a situation they shouldn’t have been in to begin with while threatening and provoking a violent reaction. And we pikachu face at the result.
You’re the one cowering in fear of federal agents doing what they’ve already been doing for 20 years. One of us is obviously falling for the fear mongering here.
> Yes US citizens that are putting themselves in a situation they shouldn’t have been in to begin with while threatening and provoking a violent reaction.
This is not at all true. Plus, it's inconsequential -- ICE agents have no authority over US citizens except in extremely limited circumstances (https://www.perplexity.ai/search/9f4518c4-8a32-474a-bd92-3f1...), and even if they did, being able to arrest someone, file charges, and work their way through the justice system is the answer... Not killing people on the streets.
The Kavanaugh Stop is brand new. So are the shock and awe tactics.
Safe to assume you aren't from here?
Hot take: I am 100% legally allowed to equip my sidearm and go follow ICE agents around wherever the fuck I want and scream obscenities in their face literally all day long, 24/7.
Refer to US Constitution
how many habeas petitions were there in previous admins?
The US tourism industry must be just lapping this up ...
"Visit the USA ... starting your holiday off wiv your papers, and a bang! Schnell !!! "
Step 2 in a nazi takeover of the United States. More is coming.
Dunno, you'd think the administration would prefer they be out on the streets rather than menacing business travelers. This may be pure legislative/executive incompetence rather than a grand scheme.
The Nazis were also actually extremely incompetent. Thankfully the current admin is more incompetent, but truly one of the main downsides of strongman governments is that they tend to be operated by dummies.
I don't know if I'd phrase it like that. It does show they see ICE as a fix all police they can deploy for a wide variety of purposes though. ICE is better funded than some branches of the military, and they are demonstrating they are willing to use ICE for whatever they think needs to be done.
It is clear that a more centralised system is being established which is progression towards authoritarianism.
How is creation of a Gestapo analogue NOT a step towards Nazi-style authoritarianism?
This country is a shithole
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