> The Fifth Circuit has held that the VWP statute “‘unambiguously’ limits an alien’s means of contesting removal solely to an application for asylum.” McCarthy v. Mukasey, 555 F.3d 459, 460 (5th Cir. 2009) (citation omitted). And once an individual violates the terms of the VWP by remaining in the United States for more than ninety days, the individual is no longer entitled to
contest removal on any other basis. Id. at 462. This is true even when an individual has a pending adjustment of status application on the basis of their marriage to a U.S. citizen. Id. at 460, 462.
> Culleton concedes he is removable under the VWP. Reply 10. But he argues that
because USCIS accepted and began processing his adjustment of status application, he is entitled to due process protections in its fair adjudication. Id. at 9. The Fifth Circuit has foreclosed this very argument, reasoning that the VWP waiver includes a waiver of due process rights. See Mukasey, 555 F.3d at 462. And “[t]he fact that [Culleton] applied for an adjustment of status before the DHS issued its notice of removal is of no consequence.” Id.
It's shocking that the court could determine this when the whole process of getting permanent residency involves an adjustment of status that allows you to remain in the country even though your visa has expired so long as your application is being processed (which can take a very long time). You just can't leave the country. So to arrest someone while they are following the steps they're supposed to be following, is similar to entrapment (do X and you'll be ok, then they do X and get arrested).
> So to arrest someone while they are following the steps they're supposed to be following
I think the issue complicating this man’s situation is that it appears when you dig into the details that for nearly 16 years he was skirting the system and only tried getting his legal situation resolved just a few months prior to his detainment. He is choosing to fight it which is resulting in the long detention.
Personally I believe we need some legal carve outs for this type of situation, but there is simply no doubt that this guy made a series of poor decisions prior to April of 2025 that has created the situation he is in.
This is the one thing that pops up often in these cases and my European head can't understand this. Obviously people do this because they can but why does the system allow this? People should be forced to sort out their legal situation one way or another in timely manner, because if something happens after decades (like what's going on now) it will cause lots of damage for many people including families with children. This many people living in legal limbo also encourages lawless behavior of the agencies.
It would be very hard to skirt the system like that in many European countries. Not impossible, some people do it anyway, but that means more or less living completely underground without healthcare, driving license, any sort of banking etc.
There was a similar problem in Sweden. In the old system a person could first seek asylum, get denied, then seek a work visa, get denied, then seek a student visa, get denied and then repeat the process since now enough years has passed. People could also simply go underground for a period of time and then restart the process.
Two law changes was added last year to prevent this. First, any decision remains in force indefinite as long the person remains in the country. The second is that all applications will be running simultaneous and the final decision is given at the same time, with no option to change application afterward if the result returned negative.
The system has some drawbacks, especially if the applicant apply for the wrong thing and don't change it until the decision has been reached, but it removes stalling and delaying tactics.
> In the old system a person could first seek asylum...
Yes but that still means communicating with the institutions and having some sort of legal status. What is en masse happening in the US and to a lesser extent was (or is, not sure, but see for example the Windrush scandal) happening in the UK is that people legally enter the country and have for a time legal standing to reside there, but that lapses, laws change etc., and just nobody cares deeply enough to solve the situation one way or another? And then decades pass and bad things start to happen. But all of this was entirely avoidable and I don't mean just 'not voting for Trump' avoidable, but in a systematic manner.
We could compare that to the situation in Spain where there is a group of illegal migrant workers who are exploited as cheap work force. Now they are given a chance to legalise their status but that too is happening after decades of neglect. Of course there are similar groups in other countries.
The Windrush situation is a bit different - the people involved were British Subjects, and didn't need any documentation when they arrived in the UK.
The only thing that changed was the introduction of the "hostile environment" policy in 2012, meaning that everyone (including full UK citizens) must now prove that they have permission to be in the country before getting a job, renting a home, getting a bank account, etc.
The Windrush generation always had that permission, and continued to have it - what they didn't have was the documentation to prove it. And, to make matters worse, the Home Office had disposed of their arrival records so in many cases it became all but impossible for them to get it.
(I know this is a minor quibble, but I think it's worth pointing out that the people affected shouldn't have needed to regularise their situation, because it was never irregular in the first place!)
> I think it's worth pointing out that the people affected shouldn't have needed to regularise their situation, because it was never irregular in the first place!
This is what I don't agree with and exactly why I mentioned Windrush as an example. The situation was irregular because while they were legally entitled to stay, they didn't have a simple way to prove it. And once they needed that, it became an issue.
Now I assume most of them regularised their situation and some didn't and since the state knew enough about them to try to deport them, it should have fixed their status in the first place by issuing them the needed documents. But it didn't! And that was my original point - the state neglected their situation for decades, let them adapt to changing legislative environment on their own (or not), only to swing the axe (wrongly) without warning. If they were issued a citizen ID long ago none of that could ever happen.
> We could compare that to the situation in Spain where there is a group of illegal migrant workers who are exploited as cheap work force
The term we should be using here is human trafficking. It is a extremely common practice in construction and farming. As a police officer said here in Sweden in a news article, if they went to a single major construction site the yearly budget for human trafficking violations would be used up for that site alone. It is an open secret that construction sites has a tier based system for workers, where the most illegal workers (and there are different degrees to that) get the most dangerous assignments, least amount of safety equipment, longest hours, and with the lowest pay.
A lot of the calculation on the cost of reduced immigration get based on the resulting increase in costs to construction and farming. It is quite insane how much of the economy is based on exploiting people.
In the US it’s easier. Certain states will issue you a drivers license even with a questionable immigration status. Once you get that, maintaining it is easy for long periods of time….basically obey the traffic laws and don’t drink and drive take an eye test and written test every 5-7 years and you are golden and keep it.
With a DL check cashing is a snap and it looked like this guy was a building sub-contractor which can and often operate in cash. Cash secured credit cards give you access to plastic. Healthcare doesn’t require an ID and hospitals are compelled by law to treat you if you are in a life threatening situation. Urgent care clinics will gladly accept cash to fix your sniffles.
I think the biggest issue that allows it is just inconsistent enforcement of our immigration laws from administration to administration and the general bureaucratic reset that happens every 4 to 8 years.
Thank you, this is a valuable perspective. So essentially every person that lives this way doesn't pay income tax (and/or possibly other taxes) and the states, and most of the time the federal government too, just don't care?
If you are getting paid in cash you are only paying income tax if you actually set out to do so. Operating fully in cash is getting harder and harder as we progress to a more cashless society, but right now, still do-able.
The government always cares when it is not getting its share, but enforcement is probably more by accident rather than intention. If you are living modestly and are not calling out any sort of government paper trail to yourself (avoiding government services, police interactions), you are probably not going to attract any investigation.
These sweeps that we are seeing change that a bit. Easier to get ensnared.
you can still file taxes regardless of your immigration status if you can get an SSN. It used to be easy to do that using your DL. So you have people who have been in the country for many years and have an SSN, pay taxes, etc., but technically are still "undocumented"
yeah, probably so. but what should matter is whether you're in compliance _now_. But if we do really want to arrest people who were at some point out of compliance in terms of their visa status, let's start with Elon and Melania, and we can talk about going through everyone's else's history and deporting them if they broke the immigration rules.
There are quite a few missing but important details not in the news story. Apparently he complicated matters and put himself into a no win legal situation by choosing against applying for asylum. The “forged” signatures turned out to be a close match to checks that were provided to the court that he admitted to signing. He also admitted to the court that his memory was hazy around that time. There was also no need for immigration officials to forge his name on those documents because if he refused to sign the notice document it had the same legal result as if he did. SOP would be for an immigration official to simply indicate “refusal to sign” on the document.
Unfortunately our laws don’t always protect us from ourselves.
I don't think it's that subtle: it would be enough to have a continuous integration tool that tries to compile the proofs that are checked into version control and raises an error if it fails.
The linked blog post says "Unfortunately, a student once submitted work containing this error; it was almost entirely incorrect and he had no idea." I guess the student probably was aware that not every proof had gone through, and that the that he saw like "99 out of 100 proofs succeeded" and assumed that meant that he had mostly completed the task, not realizing that a false theorem would be used to the give incorrect proofs for the rest of the file.
Indeed this can simply be checked by a command-line invocation.
But I don't think the student was aware: They would only have seen a purple coloring of the "stuck" part, as shown in the linked example in the blog post. And if one assumes that the system only accepts correct proof steps, it's very easy to miss a small error in a theorem statement...
But he had not been an apprentice before making this, he started the apprenticeship that year, and this is supposed to be the first thing he ever painted.
> Michelangelo's biographers—Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and Ascanio Condivi (1525–1574)—tell us that, aside from some drawings, his first work was a painted copy after a well-known engraving by Martin Schongauer (1448–1491) showing Saint Anthony tormented by demons. Made about 1487–88 under the guidance of his friend and fellow pupil Francesco Granacci, Michelangelo's painting was much admired; it was even said to have incited Ghirlandaio's envy.
[https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...]
I can’t respond much too this being Michelangelo’ painting, but if he was an apprentice under his fellow pupil it’s possible that he just did minor things or filled in. It was how you learned. You did final retouching and such.
The idea is that e.g. the government would give you an app that lives on your phone. When you apply for the app you provide some documents to prove your age, but you don't say anything about what sites you plan to visit. When you want to visit an age-restricted site you use the app to generate a proof that you have it, but the site doesn't learn anything more than that, and the government doesn't learn that you used the app.
Yeah, that sounds very unlikely. The full paper dismisses the possibility:
> Another possible explanation to consider is that the current indings were caused by cross-cueing (one hemisphere informing the other hemisphere with behavioural tricks, such as touching the left hand with the right hand). We deem this explanation implausible for four reasons. First, cross-cueing is thought to only allow the transfer of one bit of information (Baynes et al., 1995). Yet, both patients could localize stimuli throughout the entire visual field irrespective of response mode (Experiments 1 and 5), and localizing a stimulus requires more than one bit of information. Second, [...]
I get the impression that the authors of the paper have some kind of woo (nonmaterialist) view of consciousness. But they also mention this possiblity, which seems more plausible to me:
> Finally, a possibility is that we observed the current results because we tested these patients well after their surgical removal of the corpus callosum (Patient DDC and Patient DDV were operated on at ages 19 and 22 years, and were tested 10–16 and 17–23 years after the operation, respectively). This would raise the interesting possibility that the original split brain phenomenon is transient, and
that patients somehow develop mechanisms or even structural connections to re-integrate information across the hemispheres, particularly when operated at early adulthood.
> I get the impression that the authors of the paper have some kind of woo (nonmaterialist) view of consciousness.
Indeed:
"Our findings, however, reveal that although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent."
Which is materially impossible, given the premise.
They are regulating websites anyway, surely they can just invent some standard format to say what function each cookie has. How about requiring that the name of every cookie has to start with one of "Strictly Necessary", "Functional", "Performance", and "Targeting/Advertising"?
The F-22 itself was delayed because of the end of the cold war. The original plans were to have it enter service in 1995, and then this slipped by a year or two. They could have had it being pass produced from 1997, but they delayed it because of the peace dividend. (This is from Aronstein et al, "ATF to F-22 Raptor"). So one should not consider the 2005 date as "how long it took".
The Rust compiler always produces quite large binaries compared to other programming language. I notice there's a (closed) issue on the Zed github [https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/34376],
> At this time, we prioritize performance and out-of-the-box functionality over minimal binary size. As is, this issue isn't very actionable, but if you have concrete optimization ideas that don't compromise these priorities, we'd be happy to consider them in a new issue.
I'm guessing they mean it detected a different vehicle and pedestrian but not the ones it hit. (If it was the victim I don't think they would have said "a".)
> The Fifth Circuit has held that the VWP statute “‘unambiguously’ limits an alien’s means of contesting removal solely to an application for asylum.” McCarthy v. Mukasey, 555 F.3d 459, 460 (5th Cir. 2009) (citation omitted). And once an individual violates the terms of the VWP by remaining in the United States for more than ninety days, the individual is no longer entitled to contest removal on any other basis. Id. at 462. This is true even when an individual has a pending adjustment of status application on the basis of their marriage to a U.S. citizen. Id. at 460, 462.
> Culleton concedes he is removable under the VWP. Reply 10. But he argues that because USCIS accepted and began processing his adjustment of status application, he is entitled to due process protections in its fair adjudication. Id. at 9. The Fifth Circuit has foreclosed this very argument, reasoning that the VWP waiver includes a waiver of due process rights. See Mukasey, 555 F.3d at 462. And “[t]he fact that [Culleton] applied for an adjustment of status before the DHS issued its notice of removal is of no consequence.” Id.
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