As far as I understand, people are ID'd all the time in US. If police stops you, they will ask for an identification document; if you don't have it, they will ask for your SSN and if you can't remember it, they will run your name and address until they match you with a photo id on their systems. In the meanwhile, you're detained and you're not free to leave. Immigration aside, how are they supposed to identify you?
They can't detain you forever because they can't ID you. You can't be compelled to own an ID or carry it around with you all the time. Many naturally born americans have no passport, birth certificate, or even state license.
So many homeless here have zero identification.
They are basically just going after people who are too brown and even ending up grabbing people who are just here on vacation, legally.
Wait, I agree that false positives shouldn't happen, but true positives (i.e. you are an illegal alien, ICE interacts with you, they detain you until they discover your status, then start the deportation process) are how the system is supposed to work.
This is illegal, notoriously, police can only request AND detain someone to provide ID if they are actually suspected of committing a crime. Potentially being illegal, a neighbor calling the police or stuff like that does not give them permission to detain. They can nicely ask, but that's all.
That's specific to ICE though, where they need a "warrant", not from a judge but just from some other ICE "supervisor".
I agree that in practice there is some kind of loophole: ICE gets a "warrant" for someone that by definition has no ID, so there is no point in identifying a detainee - the immigration court will do that, later. Effectively, they seem to get away with snatching people off the street that vaguely may resemble any "warrant" they have.
