I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

My takeaway from this is that laws and rules don't matter if the officials on the ground are incompetent, ignorant, and have contempt for you.

There is a lot of unnecessary cruelty and lack of due process in this story.

I sort of disagree. There _is_ a process, which optimises for holding people as long as possible for the prison industrial complex to make money. When you privatise these kind of social services, this is what happens. This is not due to a few officials on the ground that just happened by chance to be "incompetent, ignorant, and have contempt for you". As the article concludes,

> The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

> Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

> The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

> There _is_ a process, which optimises for holding people as long as possible for the prison industrial complex to make money

"due process" is what you are due - it is what is afforded to you by the 4th amendment and habeus corpus. Op is correct.

It's a couple things.

One is the private prison industry being incentivized to hold as many people as possible.

But there's also a bureaucracy (ICE and State) with little to no pressure to perform better for this particular population (because who cares about criminals?).

Consequently, you get an industry that's perfectly happy to warehouse people... coupled with a slow and ineffective government controlling the keys to their release.

Private detention facilities should be banned.

But the government also needs KPIs with consequences tied to them. E.g. average holding time, average response time to filing, etc. And leaders get fired / budgets cut if targets are missed.

I was disagreeing that it is just a matter of some officials doing a bad job. And in any case it is not about who is right or wrong, OP is right in identifying that there is no due process, and I did not disagree with that.

At this point, I am not sure if we can exclude that lobbying from private prisons does not affect the way bureaucracy runs, from the stage of legislation to the point of how said legislation is executed. Thus I am not sure that these two are in truly independent.

But otherwise I agree; even in places where detention facilities are not privatised, bureaucracy can still pose a lot of issues because, as you say, "who cares about criminals", or because certain traits are overrepresented in the group of people who take up these jobs.

Well, now those incentives work in the opposite direction. There have been many reports of Trump being livid that his deportation quotas aren't being met.

When the incentive is a quota rather than just adjudication, you end up with what's going on now.

However, the US has long been very clear: constitutional rights only apply to citizens. US law is perfectly happy with arbitrary brutality towards non-citizens.

(ECHR is different on this, which has caused a lot of controversy in the UK from people who want to be arbitrarily brutal towards non-citizens)

There's that proverb "You might have the right of way, but the semi truck will still kill you". We might have the Constitution, but it apparently is enforced on an honor system. (Plus non-citizens don't have any rights, so I guess they aren't inalienable human rights after all, eyeroll)

It's certainly gotten worse, which is why I hope people will vote in every election they can vote in.

> This incompetence has only happened since

Can we be sure? Do we have stats?

If you look at international press, horror stories happen everywhere, semi-certified (the press from Country C diffident against Country Y will publish if they have a warning piece). The issue is telling the exception from the norm and similar.

> constitutional rights only apply to citizens.

This isn't true and what I wish more than anything in life is if people would stop repeating unadulterated propaganda because that literally normalizes it.

> The Court reasoned that aliens physically present in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are recognized as persons guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...

And don't try to gotcha me either - yes the same article says they have qualified the extent of those rights but

1. The qualifications are not "you have to be a citizen" but whether you "developed substantial ties to this country."

2. This woman had a work visa - I'd call that pretty substantial ties

> However, the US has long been very clear: constitutional rights only apply to citizens.

Nope, most of the constitutional rights apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the US. It's why the Bush administration set up Guantanamo--to try to evade any hint of constitutional protection, and he still failed that. (Of course, as Guantanamo also shows, the remedies available to people whose constitutional rights have been grossly violated by the government are quite lacking.)

The "I don't know"s in the article smack of bureaucratic ineffectiveness more than deliberate obsfuscation.

To wit, that no one actually cares about doing anything.

And granted, that's long been a consequence of low morale in the prison and ICE employee pool, but now it's coupled with a removal of even the least pressure from above to do the job well.

In short, I don't think "Be cruel to people" needs to be messaged from above: "We don't care about anyone you're holding" is sufficient for low-level employees to be their worst selves.

Yes, and exceptions from the norm get extra publicity when it fits a press narrative.

> constitutional rights apply to all people

Not within 100 miles of the border unfortunately. https://www.aclu.org/documents/constitution-100-mile-border-...

That comment was heavy sarcasm

The San Diego port of entry is the busiest land border crossing in the western hemisphere. The takeaway here should be that the resources to handle immigration along the southern border are insufficient.

> Not within 100 miles of the border unfortunately.

Taken from your link:

> In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. No matter what CBP officers and Border Patrol agents think, our Constitution applies throughout the United States, including within this “100-mile border zone.”

It seems that non-US citizen still have rights, but abuse is rampant within the US border patrol.

To some extent this has always been the case in the US fairly broadly. From living in cities in the Midwest I've heard stories from people I know and their interactions with police and luckily the stories aren't this bad but they are in the same vein of incompetence and cruelty with little recourse.

> But they were all perfectly competent and infallible under Biden.

It's clear that you're trying very hard to fabricate assertions and muddy the debate. If it helps clarify, until January 20th they were just as abusive and shitty, but with Trump imposing a political mandate to ramp up their abusive and shitty behavior then of course the abusive and shitty behavior will ramp up. Is there something specific that you don't understand?

Imprisoning someone takes far more resources than any other way of handling them, so I don't see how lack of resources can be blamed here.

> The "I don't know"s in the article smack of bureaucratic ineffectiveness more than deliberate obsfuscation.

I’m pretty sure it’s not either.

In situations like this, it’s simply conflict avoidance and sticking to the responsibilities of your pay grade. Any given ICE employee may have a good idea where someone is likely to go or not go, but they almost certainly don’t know enough about any specific case to make a comment about it in a way that may have legal ramifications.

This may sound like punting responsibility, but if an ICE employee says something incorrect to someone being held, that could come back to haunt them via legal consequences. As such, if it’s not their job to answer questions about a detainee’s status, it’s probably prudent for them not to answer.

Let me be clear, I think that this is a racket. I also think that any person with decent morals and ethics should consider not working at these places.

That said, I don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable to criticize the ICE folks for staying in their lane when on the job.

...except at border crossings (which may be at a US border crossing or at an international port of entry like an airport gate where US customs has a checkpoint).

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) may search any electronic devices without probable cause at these points.

see https://informationsecurity.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toru...

and

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/usa-border-phones-search-1.4...

Canada doesn't behave this way - https://www.harrisonpensa.com/new-limits-imposed-on-border-s...

I'm waiting for 'jcranmer to respond to this, because it was a response to this claim years ago that started me following him, but, no: the "100 miles from the border constitution-free zone" thing is a myth.

If you’re deporting someone, they have to be in custody. They have to deport her to Canada, not Mexico. They likely deal with many other countries and have to arrange for transportation back to all those countries.

I don’t think anyone would have a problem if she was processed promptly and quickly deported or if the confinement accommodations were nicer. That’s purely a resources problem.

> They have to deport her to Canada, not Mexico.

In theory and past practice, perhaps.

Currently the USofA is comfortable deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador with no trial or other due process.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz032xjyyzyo

Venezuela has historically not cooperated with deportations. They also actively send their criminals to the US.

I wasn't planning on responding to this, because the sibling comment already points out that the ACLU's own explainer page is walking back its original description of it as the "Constitution-free zone".

Although while I'm here, I will note that they still don't discuss the fact that--as far as I can tell--all the regulations and laws means the 100 miles start not from the water's edge, but from the international boundary, which is 12 miles out to sea. And which also means Chicago is not in the 100 mile border zone, since the actual Canadian border is on the side of Michigan, well over 100 miles away.

That's what I remember about your comment! The extreme maritime border nerdery.