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.

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)