Does that law allow killing them by shooting? I suppose that officers need to detain them, read their rights, and put them in court. That’s what I thought was the core of the American Law.
If the officers involved had could reasonably believe that they posed an immediate lethal threat at the time, yes it does. Whether or not that was the case is for courts to figure out after things calm down and all facts have been gathered and not a valid reason to call for the shut down of entire agencies with the intent of stopping enforcement of laws you don't like.
Is the immediate lethal threat in the room with us right now? I hope no one ever accidentally believes you're an immediate lethal threat simply for existing, or at least if they do, maybe you'll be lucky enough to not have yuppies on the internet trying to defend your murder.
Can the officers in any of these incidents even articulate a threat, and how the only remedy was to shoot through the driver side window, or in the back of the head?
The presence of actual patriotic Americans who believe in individual liberty and limited government is an "imminent threat" to the agents' fantasy narrative where they're heroes doing good. Everything downstream of that is rationalization.
Some people have absolutist takes on these sorts of things. If the stated purpose makes sense ("stop illegal immigration"), they will dismiss tragedies as routine accidents of an imperfect world. If they have no sense of when exceptions become intolerable and course-correction becomes necessary, then by definition, no amount of evidence will change their mind.
What if we believe that those shootings are completely unacceptable (probably criminal), but that “have no immigration enforcement and permanently halt deportations” is also unacceptable? The latter seems to be the solution being pushed by one party.
Like always, the left’s problem is that their proposed solutions read like they were written by teenagers, based on emotions and dismissive of the reasons why their supposed “enemies” disagree with them.
Most Americans would support having ICE operate perhaps even entirely with nonlethal weapons. That would be a smart thing to push for! And popular too. But the party line is instead “Abolish ICE.” And of course nobody (who isn’t pro-open-borders) trusts that there’s any Democratic plan besides look-the-other-way and maybe amnesty.
People wanting to abolish ICE are not, generally, calling for doing away with immigration enforcement entirely. The main thing I've seen called for is the abolition of ICE, and the restoration of the pre-DHS Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), not under the DHS, but under the DOJ. I have also seen calls to eliminate the DHS entirely, and separate out the agencies under it to their pre-DHS organization.
Pardon my skepticism, but what difference would that make to rename or reorganize DHS into a different shape? If you want immigration enforcement to be nicer (which I think I support you on in broad strokes) the correct steps are:
1. Win elections
2. Pass laws (or win the Presidency, a cheat code that has been the main way most things get done since ... 2008 or so, and is basically effective unless the "thing" is kinda unconstitutional and SCOTUS is against you. Blame RBG btw for screwing Dems on that last part)
The reason why we won't get this outcome is that the Democrats stopped being serious about convincing the moderates to get onboard their platform, because they give too much of a platform to the people who just chant slogans like "No person is illegal!" Which, while I get the humanitarian point, reads to me like you'd really prefer that anyone caught here illegally should ethically just be let go, rendering the whole concept of borders, visa applications, green cards, all of that, a big joke on the people who follow the rules.
> Pardon my skepticism, but what difference would that make to rename or reorganize DHS into a different shape?
ICE, being under DHS, is part of the US security apparatus. It has a threat-orientation. INS did have an enforcement component, but it was substantially an administrative agency. Immigration enforcement agents should primarily be process servers, notifying people whose papers aren't in order either what they need to do to fix them, or when their court date is.
Okay. Out of curiosity, in this arrangement, what should happen when these upstanding individuals, after overstaying their visa by a few years, simply don't show up to court or bring themselves into compliance, because they never intended to? Let's imagine for fun that they live in San Francisco, where the police are bound by local law to hide undocumented immigrants from the Federal government at all costs.
I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever actually heard someone give a reason why the US having open borders would be a bad thing. You are a country of immigrants, and your greatness was built upon that foundation.
Yet now it's getting undone for seemingly no reason. But I hope that there would actually be one, so please enlighten me and the other commenters.
> You are a country of immigrants, and your greatness was built upon that foundation.
This makes a great talking point, but those immigrants eventually assimilated into the culture, and also importantly, they were specifically allowed to come because the US needed more people in order to power its economy. The Chinese came to build the railroad, the Irish and Italians and Germans came over and worked in factories and as police and many other industries. This was badly needed 100 years ago.
Today most illegal immigrants are uneducated and are either working in the unofficial economy or in service-sector jobs, which depresses wages for everyone with low education. We don't need every restaurant to have an unending stream of desperately poor would-be busboys and dishwashers, or for Uber to have a stream of poor drivers. Or for rich people to have an ample supply of housekeepers paid in cash. All that does is keep wages in the toilet for working people.
But about open borders, why are so many Latin American countries such bad places to live that so many of their people want to come to the US? Open borders just means anyone can walk right in and bring all of their problems with them, not to mention their drug and human trafficking operations and the criminal gangs that operate them. We already have enough of that as it is.
No Western country can stay civilized with open borders. Anyone with half a brain can see how it is going in the UK and France, where they are only a bit more "open borders" than the US has been. Thankfully for Americans, Latin-American culture is more compatible with Western culture than Islamic culture is.
Years ago, I would have agreed with most of what you wrote. The left, like the right, reacts with emotion and absolutism. No one is above this, so I think it is very important that we frequently assess what would actually change our minds.
Given the present tide of things, however, I think there's no amount of course-correction back toward the left that would prove excessive. My opinion on this will change as soon as the tide does, and e.g. a leftist president endorses indiscriminate murder of ICE agents, or something equally egregious to what we're seeing in the opposite direction.
In a more ideological sense, though, I tend to despise the left/right continuum and think it is unhelpful for analysis.
> a leftist president endorses indiscriminate murder of ICE agents
Comparing the rhetoric today, this might never happen. There are qualitative differences between both political geoups, so grouping them together as a single horseshoe is 'unhelpful for analysis'.
That said, you cant fully rule out leftist led atrocities aswell and maybe thats the reason why the right is escalating in violent rhetoric, they want this as a self fullfilling prophecy to justify more violence.
When Kirk was shot, all the "this needs to stop" commentary, as if it was an organized mass phenomenon, was sending shivers down my spine. We all know how the far right envisions stopping this 'mass' violence.
> "have no immigration enforcement and permanently halt deportations” is also unacceptable? The latter seems to be the solution being pushed by one party.
What party? What makes it "seem" that way? Could you link to anyone calling for this?
Those using memes along the lines of "nobody is illegal" (sometimes "on stolen land" is added)? This is a movement not limited to the US. Here in Europe there is a similar movement, using that same slogan. They don't want any borders or border enforcement at all.
> Protesters were seen carrying flags, signs and spraying graffiti on nearby property, including on the U.S. Courthouse sign where it read "No one is illegal on stolen land".
This is completely orthogonal to the conversation, but I think you misunderstood that slogan. It does not mean “immigration rules must not be enforced”.
It means differentiating between a potentially illegal action (illegal entry/overstaying) and the person itself. You never talk about an illegal driver, or an illegal drinker, but people talk about illegal immigrants, with the implication that the person itself is illegal.
It’s subtle but it’s a step towards dehumanizing a person, or making infractions to their rights “count less” in the public eye.
The protest you linked wasn't calling for completely open borders. That's also not policy of either of the main parties in the US, as was implied above. I understand "no one is illegal" to be a counter to the use of language like "illegals" to describe the humans involved.
I get that you can make the argument that they're merely making a semantic point. However, if that side of the debate actually agreed with us that these people shouldn't even be here at all, what difference does it make what we call them? If the side who wants them gone had their way, they'd be gone back home and they'd no longer be in any illegal status in any sense of the word.
It only matters what we call them, if you want to keep them here forever. I think the present-day recommended term is probably just "immigrant" right? So basically we should call them the same thing we call the people who waited years for their turn and proved that they had a positive contribution to make to our society.
The term for immigrants without papers is "undocumented immigrant". The largest group of undocumented immigrants are people who entered the country legally, and then overstayed their visas or otherwise violated their terms (usually by working on a tourist or student visa). This is a civil offense.
> It only matters what we call them, if you want to keep them here forever.
You think it makes no difference if we call them "the scum of the earth" or "below human entities" otherwise? Surely there's a line of what rhetoric you would tolerate. This is ours.
Why do you choose that single example, which I said was just that, and pretend my whole statement hinges on it?
You are either misinformed, willfully ignorant or lying, and I've had it with this discussion style.
Yes, people who use "no one is illegal" do also say "no more borders". Not every single one, clearly humans are diverse, but your statement is just false.
> Why do you choose that single example, which I said was just that
Because we're looking for people saying borders should be completely opened. An example of people saying something else is irrelevant.
> Yes, people who use "no one is illegal" do also say "no more borders".
Ok but the conversation is about people saying the latter. It was you who brought the former into the conversation.
> Here a UK example
Which British parties are active in the United States?
> Another example, also showing this is an older movement
The claim was that "the left" has no response to emigration issues beyond "open all borders" and that this was the policy of "one party." The existence of an anti-borders movement is again irrelevant to the questions I raised in response to this assertion.
Just because some people who say "no one is illegal" also say "no more borders," that does not automatically mean that the former implies the latter. If that were the case, we could paint everyone who agrees with Nick Fuentes on any point (including, in the extreme, "nice weather we're having today") as a antisemite. The old joke linking dietary choices to Nazism ("You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!") is meant to make light of this logical fallacy.
The grandparent post accurately captured what I have understood people to mean by "no one is illegal" -- it is meant to protest a dehumanizing way to describe a class of people.
> What is a border when crossing it without permission is not illegal?
There aren't good statistics on how many undocumented immigrants overstayed a visa (and therefore legally crossed the border) vs how many entered without a visa, but experts estimate that it's somewhere around 40-45% [0]. It's not a criminal act to overstay a visa, though you do become subject to deportation. So a good chunk of "illegal immigrants" are doing something less illegal than, say, driving a car whose registration has expired (which is a criminal act), but, as another commenter noted above, we don't refer to "illegal drivers" on our roads.
The traditional term for someone who has not fulfilled a positive legal obligation like renewing their car registration is a "scofflaw," and I would not object to anyone referring to "scofflaw immigrants" the way I object to the phrase "illegal immigrants."
The irony of this comment is that deportations were higher under Biden than during Trump's first term, which makes it seem exactly like it was "written by teenagers, based on emotions." The administration with the highest deportation rate in the past 60 years was the 2nd Clinton administration.
> The latter seems to be the solution being pushed by one party.
Is it? I'm not aware of legislation introduced by the democrats, either when they were in power or today, that proposed anything resembling this. There are individual congresspeople calling for ICE to be abolished (which is not the same as having no immigration enforcement) but leadership within the democrats is very clear that they support extremely minor reforms like making ICE agents wear masks less frequently. This is considerably more minor than disarming ICE agents, which you claim would have nationwide support.
It's using immigration as a pretext to build an unaccountable group of thugs that disappear people into camps, murder political opponents and surveil the populace (as seen in OP). It's recruiting primarily from far-right militias, regularizing them into a paramilitary force of the regime.
There is no justifiable reason to have them terrorize an entire city like they have been doing in Minneapolis.
The brownshirts needed to be abolished in the 1920s, a pinky-swear they wouldn't do the thing they were designed to do wouldn't have been enough.
> “have no immigration enforcement and permanently halt deportations” is also unacceptable? The latter seems to be the solution being pushed by one party.
Obama and Biden, famously, deported more people than Trump. And with a substantially smaller budget too. Is this "no immigration enforcement" party in the room with us right now?
You are completely out of touch with what the immigration policy of the last democratic government (Biden 2020) was.
It was aggressive, it was inhumane, and immigrants were killed despite a massive effort by people from "the left" to feed and clothe people who were detained in open fields or between two border fences without any care being provided by the US agencies detaining them.
Maybe you are right that nobody who is right-leaning trusts that the US democratic party isn't pro border enforcement and anti immigration, but that's based purely on lies and propaganda.
Then shouldn't you blame the party making a absolute shitshow of enforcing immigration out of incompetence and cruelty instead ? (and pressuring a state for its voters roll in the foolish attempt at meddlmeddling with the next election)
If I want what I believe is a reasonable policy and the enforcers of that policy start doing the worst job ever, it is my duty to call them out, not to call out the opposing side for mostly imaginary reasons.
Abolish ICE is not a unreasonable take. If the agents working in this agency have become some ultra politicized paramilitary, it makes sense to abolish it and create a new agency altogether.
> If the stated purpose makes sense ("stop illegal immigration"), they will dismiss tragedies as routine accidents of an imperfect world.
Indeed, this is the modus operandi, though I'd argue that it doesn't have to make sense but rather be in the political canon. I recall hearing arguments that "some gun deaths are necessary" (in the context of mass shootings at schools) for us to have our "god-given right" to own guns, but the purpose—owning guns for the ability to... checks notes... stand up to entities that can legally commit violence against you—isn't so obviously sensible.
And some people will use tragedies as am argument to just stop enforcing laws at all even when those tragedies are a direct result of people trying to interfere with that enforcement and would have never have happened when people opposing the laws acted in reasonable ways.
When an officer has reasonable suspicion that a civilian poses a threat to his life, he can shoot them. Once police start shooting they are trained to continue shooting until the target is incapacitated. That's the law. Whether the recent shootings you saw meet that standard is up for debate.
Sure, there's procedures to arresting someone and when they are allowed to shoot, that's all fine. But the danger is that these procedures are not being followed, and that there are no consequences to it.
That people get killed is a tragedy, but that the people that killed them do not get the proper training, guidance or consequences for their action is a problem.
Beyond the reasonable suspicion of a threat to their life, the officer must believe that: a) the threat is imminent, and b) the threat will reasonably be mitigated by the application of force. An officer cannot, for example, immediately shoot someone who plausibly promises to murder them in 36 hours.
Absolutely, likewise we should shoot ICE officers who come near us because we have strong precedent they are mentally unstable and prone to psychotic bouts of insensate violence. Since we have more than reasonable suspicion of threat to our life.
Sure but the first was arguably unreasonable and the second one was omg are you f@##%&@ kidding me, didn't you see the video about a peppered sprayed guy on his belly on the ground then not possibly brandishing with no gun since it had just been removed from him ?
It's fine to make reasonable sounding comments but for the love of God, a bit honesty wouldn't kill you.
"The party told you to ignore the evidence you see with your own ears and eyes*
Here's a complete refutation of your argument: Pretti did not attempt to "de-arrest" anyone at any point. Nobody, not even ICE, DHS, the White House, or the FBI has argued this.
Whoever told you this made it up. You should stop listening to whoever told you that. They are lying to you about this, and everything else they have told you is a lie too.
Lived in Denver for the last 15 years and own a company. You couldnt pay me to have office space in Denver simply by virtue of i'd rather spend commuting time doing something more fun. This applies to just about everyone i know here as well. Many come to Denver for the outdoors and the activities, commutes cut into that time.
Inflationary policy continues to exist, also it is rare to have a true overabundance of housing. But places like Detroit show prices can go down in the right conditions.
Commercial leases have their own quirks and long timelines that encourage waiting on a better price. Perhaps a tax on vacant commercial units.
The machinist union requested the maximum speed to be lowered from 300 km/h to 250 km/h on multiple areas, the one where the accident happened being one of them. Both trains were driving under 210 km/h when the accident happened, so I don't think the "rattling" they reported was the issue.
As I mentioned before, this area was renovated last year, so attributing the accident to under-funding is highly unlikely. If the infrastructure happened to be the issue at the end, it might be because of different causes: eg. Planning the wrong materials for the amount of traffic / weather conditions / etc.
In general, when you talk about under-funding in the rail network it's often regional or small areas within the inter-city (larga distancia) and transport networks. High speed infrastructure is very well financed, it's not cheap to move trains close to 300 km/h.
Doesn't need to be underfunding, may 2025 was last summer and this was the first winter, defects in laying the tracks didn't have a chance to show up until now.
The biggest part then might be that they should have listened to the operators warnings and scheduled a proper re-inspection of the route once they started warning of issues.
> defects in laying the tracks didn't have a chance to show up until now.
Defects in laying the tracks have a chance to show up on an inspection, either the final one when building or one done at the regular intervals. If it doesn't shows up, your inspection is bad. If you can't inspect what you build, you can't build it.
Not going to be claiming to be an expert, but buckling is a well documented phenomenon and I'd be surprised if there wasn't possible issues due to contraction on the other end of the spectrum when it gets colder, the track was laid this last spring/summer so it's probably not been as cold for long before on the tracks.
Also modern high speed rails are built with continious welding without thermal expansion joints.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqmOSMAtadc goes through track building and the effects and literally mentions at about 12:30 that they do need to do inspections when it gets cold if the track cracks (there was a photo linked in another post about a cracked track).
Is it the cause? No idea but doesn't feel far fetched.
You seem very well informed, so I'm sure you've read that every single railway engineer and independent expert is saying that this seems like a freak accident and that the causes are totally unknown.
Knowing this, you're still all over the thread trying to score political points while there are dead people still on the tracks. One quick glance on your posting history is all one needs to see that you're happy to take any chance to do so, apparently including the death of at least 39 people. You disgust me. Y te creerás un "español de los buenos". Felicidades, patriota.
The collision was due to one train derailing first, if that was due to the track (as mentioned in andy12_'s toplevel comment) then listening to warnings could perhaps have avoided the accident.
Could have, though both trains were going slower than what the mechanic union asked for. Either or wasn't a factor, or the conditions were even worse than all parties believed.
Some have mentioned that the tracks were installed during may 2025, it's also the first winter so track issues and then thermal contraction could've cause too much strain.
Most recent reports indicate a broken weld on the track, so definitely possible damage from frost heave (is that a thing in the area it derailed?) or poor construction practices.
Unless there is evidence that the accident was caused by the Iryo train, I wouldn’t be so fast to blame the private companies on a decaying infrastructure.
There are plenty of cases of lack of maintenance in the railway network.
The railway network has been mismanaged and plagued with incidents for years. See it for yourself: ADIF was aware that there were issues in Adamuz for months[1].
That doesn't mean we know for sure it was that, don't you think? Your comments seem very politically motivated, and you're asking others to not blame it on the train as the reasons for the accident are still unknown and at the same time you're pushing the maintenance issues narrative.
I am nos asking anything. You can think what you want. What the data that we have right now tells us is: new train built in 2022, checked 4 days ago[1], and issues on that part of the railway track for months[2].
You mean the People's Party (PP) which was in charge when the Angrois derailment happened didn't do anything to address the warnings from the machinists? Because they had been in government for more than a year and a half already.
No, I mean the party who was in charge when all that happened (PP). They had plenty of time to fix that if, as you claim, the machinists were warning about issues in the railroad.
But brand new doesn't mean the repairs / mainenance were done correctly. It could both be brand "new" and defective.
We've seen lots of serious fuck ups in Europe lately: including for a start several cases of maintenance improperly done on big passenger planes that nearly led to hundreds of passengers deaths (several planes have been diverted in the last months and the cause was improper maintenance).
I'm not saying improper repairs/maintenance on the rails are the cause: I'm saying it's a fact we've seen improper repairs/maintenance on passenger planes in the recent months.
I think much manufacturing adheres to the die-young, die-old principle (Often mentioned in the Backblaze reports), manufacturing defects shows up early on, time of stillness and then as it ages it starts to fail.
The tracks were laid in May 2025, that means no winters had passed before now and any defects in the tracks due to temperature differences hadn't had a chance to appear before now.
Railways are neither consumer electronics, nor software. There is a final inspection after construction work, in which the network operator releases the constructor from responsibilities, which should catch any issues. When the network operator later claims, that there was a manufacturing defect, the first question is why didn't it has known earlier, because that is their job.
Childhood’s End was not bad, but it didn’t leave an impression on me. I thought that it was dated (the Spanish watching a bullfight when the aliens came, oh c’mon!). What did you like the most about it?
reply