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)

> 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.)

> constitutional rights apply to all people

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

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.

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.