I feel like we would disagree on the role of immigration in the US but I really appreciate you calling out how the current administration’s approach is only effective at making viral clips online. Meta comment, but it’s refreshing to talk with people who have different goals while still referencing a shared reality. Removing the masks and adding cameras shouldn’t be controversial unless your goal really is to make a paramilitary force for the president.

The unstated but obvious (to me?) goal of what ICE is doing is not to get large numbers of people out of the country, but to drive costs down for migrant labor by further disenfranchising them, making them scared, marginal, etc.

If they actually thoroughly evicted non-status migrant workers they'd have a outright revolt on their hands from farmers and other businesses that depend on them.

Instead those businesses can now take further advantage of the fear of harassment and/or deportation to drive down compensation and rights.

Contrast with countries like Canada that have a legal temporary foreign agriculture worker program that provides a regulated source of seasonal migrant farm worker labour under a non-citizen temporary status, but with some rights (still often abused). It's notable to me as a Canadian that I don't see this being advocated on any large scale by either party in the US.

Anyways, all this just to say that the jackboot clown theater is the point, not a side effect.

It's not merely a matter of detainment or deportation. Racial minorities, not just immigrants, face intimidation tactics. These guys are walking into schools, they're walking into social security offices, and courthouses. They stand around menacingly just to scare people. They harass random passerby's on the street, or in the grocery store. You would feel unsafe and stressed if this happened to you, no matter your circumstances.

Unfortunately, the most extreme is that it's the new normal that now, there's >0 chance that someone, whether they are a US citizen or not apparently, child or adult, can end up in a camp, with no due process.

Give them time, they've only just started. They do waste a lot time abducting random US citizens though.

I think it would be a useful exercise to look at all the revocations of legal access in the us, and then do the division to see how we've increased the likelihood of becoming an illegal, and therefore targeted.

I dont think youre as right as you want to believe. Certainly not as right as I want you to believe