What is the point of a database with incorrect biometric data connected to a person?
The point is domination, and the app is simply one means to that end. They'd find another if they had to.
What happens right now is this: ICE can run loose and do whatever they want. If some judge finds their activities illegal, they can block ICE from doing the illegal things.
But...who's going to stop them? Not the DOJ. Stephen Miller has said that ICE have "federal immunity". The keen observer will of course know that there's no such thing as "federal immunity", so a charitable way to interpret that statement is that no-one federal will go after them.
So what about states, and local police? Sure, they could start arresting them, but then again, Miller et. al have warned the states about not interfering, threatening with going after LEO's etc. with federal charges if they do so.
The long story made short is that they can (and will) keep doing illegal shit until someone stops them, and that's not going to happen as long as Trump is POTUS. DOJ and ICE leaderships has explicitly said that their workers should just ignore the law and courts.
This is a problem from your government, by your government, that you voted for - one way or another. Pretending this problem is originating from anywhere else except the political choices you're making as a nation is denying reality.
I think it remains to be seen how broader US society responds to the approach being taken. Hard to say how close the Senate will be next year.
Their budget right now is larger than the Marine Corps and a lot of their members are looking at unemployment or prison time if the democrats get back into control of the government. Think about what they are likely to do during the mid terms if they are told to monitor election sites. They are a gang of dangerously brutal violent thugs operating with complete impunity.
To act as the domestic enforcement arm for Trump's autocratic fascism red in tooth and claw, the culmination of what everyone not drinking social media Kool-aid has been saying for the last 10 years. Yet a third of our country chose to aggressively reject these concerns because throwing the Constitution in the trash "owned the libs", which was the only concrete policy they had left after decades of being led around by the nose by the corporate state.
> Most of the spending was on guns and armor, but there have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.”
I'd really like to know why ICE needs guided missile warheads to do their job. (Edit: pointed out below, this is a purchase category that includes distraction devices like smoke grenades – they're thankfully not buying actual warheads.)
At this point, I'm confident that ICE could kick down my door and blow my white, midwestern, US Citizen ass away where I sit on this couch, and none of them would ever see the inside of a courtroom.
The purchase order PDF is linked here: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-guided-missile-warhead...
For example, deportation is a civil action, not criminal. That means that to exile you from your home the government does not need to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, does not need to provide you with legal representation if you can’t afford a lawyer, and the procedure takes place in an administrative court. There have been numerous cases of small children representing themselves in deportation proceedings. And this was all before the current administration.
The point of a bogus database is to give them cover for arresting, imprisoning, and deporting anyone they wish to.
> What is the point of a database with incorrect biometric data connected to a person?
The answer to both questions is ‘to cause fear among the [immigrant] population.’
But we cannot stop there, and needs ask why. There are structural forces that lead to this government, some of which are corporate. Fox and MSNBC exist to extract wealth from polarization, and have every incentive to drive wedges between us. Meta and X likewise get paid for optimizing engagement and hate drives engagement.
It's not all corporations, but they contribute to structural forces we're have to unwind as we also try to fix the government side too.
It can be argued as shared fault.
By, without vote/primary, unilaterally selecting a candidate to go on the ballot an unelected bureaucracy jammed up the election. Unfortunately in USA, it doesn't work how you propose, whether you appear on ballot is only up to democratic choice if there are primaries, if not an unelected bureaucracy selects the people that actually go on the ballot and due to dynamics of our voting system virtually ensure those will be the options.
In most states you basically have Democrat, Republican, maybe Libertarian party nominated candidate on the ballot and that is it. Writing in is throwing your vote.
I would argue we probably could fix this with write-in only and some sort of ranked voting kind of system or similar, but as it stands a large part of the election process is vulnerable to anti-democratic processes and this played out in Trump's favor last election.
That doesn't absolve the republicans for turning to fascism, but we shouldn't say the Dems are blameless here.
Corporations absolutely have an effect on all of this, you can bet they'd save time and money by focusing their efforts elsewhere if they thought it was pointless.
There are emotions (half support) and then reality (less than 30% of Americans). The emotions got us into this mess about misdemeanors at the federal level.
The authoritarians want you to say: “50% of people love this, give up already.”
When the truth is that 28% of people voted for Trump in 2024. He has lost a percentage of that support through his actions since January. Don’t help them normalize this through emotion.
Say it’s “half” is negotiating with fascists.
Note that all the facial recognition is being done by governments, which is the entity everyone suggests using to protect against facial recognition.
https://etias.com/articles/eu-biometric-border-checks-begin-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp7j55zxvo (under the control of the executive)
https://www.politico.eu/article/how-facial-recognition-is-ta... (under the control of the executive)
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202405/police-in-germany-usi...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/italy-outlaws-facial-reco...
The important part about the Italian "ban" is, as with most privacy laws in the EU, the government bans facial recognition for companies, and explicitly allows the government to use it for everything they do)
This is common in the EU. For example, the GPDR guarantees that your medical data isn't used by companies. That sounds great! Except for the exceptions: insurance and health care providers are exempted, courts (even foreign ones) are excempted (and so a judge can subpoena your private medical information for divorce or custody cases), the police is exempted, youth services is exempted, ...
The fact that Americans are getting caught in the dragnet, having their possessions and lives destroyed, getting sent to secret jails or being assaulted for merely being in the same zipcode as an ICE agent doesn't matter to them. It's all about inflicting harm on people they dislike, and if ICE is harming someone then obviously it's because it's they did something bad.
It's pretty dire circumstances. ICE was always close to a paramilitary organization, it just took Trump to actually fund it and push it over the edge.
They're all going to receive a blanket pardon.
First of all, it's misleading in its categorization: "half of people who voted in the last election" is not the same as "half of all eligible voters".
Second of all, a lot of the people who voted for Trump do not meaningfully "want fascism". Some do—no question about that! And, unfortunately, some who didn't before have rationalized themselves into wanting it now in order to self-justify their decision to vote for him.
But many of them are low-information voters who genuinely do not understand what is going on, and fall into one (or more) of a few categories:
- People who have always voted Republican, because their parents always voted Republican, and that's just The Way Things Are.
- People who have been brainwashed by constant propaganda from Fox News over the past 30 years telling them that Democrats are Evil.
- People who have poor to no civics education, have seen their economic situation slide slowly downward over the last few decades (or fall off a cliff, eg in 2008), and have heard the various Republican candidates telling them, over and over, "Just vote for us! We will solve all your problems. You don't have to worry about how!" (or "...by punishing the evil Others who are the cause of every ill in this country", depending on how racist they're already primed to be)
None of that requires "wanting fascism". And I can tell you, from personal experience, that there are still people out there—left, right, and center—who genuinely do not know what is going on. They don't watch the news. They just try to get by. They have no idea that ICE is abducting citizens off the streets, that Trump has shattered the executive branch institutions that actually run this country, or that the Supreme Court has said that Trump can do whatever the hell he likes.
If you want to be able to fix a problem, you have to understand it in all its nuance, and just dismissing tens of millions of people as "eh, they all wanted fascism; guess there's no possible way to reach them, then" is the wrong problem definition.
The immunity is only from state prosecution and only for acts taken required as part of their official duties, but it does exist.
Which I will completely accept as true. They didn’t.
From here, there are two branching paths. Did the Democrats put up someone who was actually worse than Trump? As in, are we better off than if the November election had gone the other way? Or did the Democrats have a better candidate who just wasn’t better enough to win? (Fully understanding that this is a very subjective question.)
It’s my firm opinion that it’s the second one. Harris would have been a better President. (So would Jeb! Bush, Mitt Romney, the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, or a frog snatched out of the Tidal Basin.) In which case, giving Democrats any blame for the outcome requires the people who voted for the actual winner to have no agency. They were presented with a choice and they selected the worse one. That’s entirely on them.
Networks of companies support political candidates, so there really isn't a true separation between the government's actions and the will of these corporations.
But part of this process is candidates being nominated by the major parties, and the RNC put forward a candidate that people actually wanted to elect. The DNC did a worse job of this, as a seeming plurality of votes for Harris were not because they liked her, but because she was "not Trump".
Both parties have agency, but the DNC did a worse job at picking their nominee (assuming the goal was to win an election).
This is in fact one of the most distressing parts of the situation. Most people conceive of getting off the couch to vote in the midterm as the absolute height of their potential power to stop this. Phone banking for some blue dog in the midterm isng going to cut it in this situation.
Meanwhile the "opposition" has decided to lay low rather than risk their (checks notes) low 30% approval rating by taking a stand on anything (except funding genocide) for most of this year. Every institution is being steamrolled, gutted, corrupted, and weaponized faster than we can keep track, and folks are trying to make themselves believe if we just vote hard enough this will all end in 2-4 years like it was a bad dream rather than an ongoing play-by-play descent into fascism.
States ought to do that aynway, then instigate cop-on-cop violence. Ask Putin or Xi for help.
Don't be absurd. Fascism rose in Germany, and was defeated. Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was defeated.
We can defeat fascism too. We will defeat fascism too.
It'll just be harder if more people think like you.
The scary thing is that there is.. you should look up "sovereign immunity". The government has complete immunity, except where and how the law permits it to be held accountable. And while we have a constitution, defending those rights through the courts requires legislation to permit it. For the most part, federal law permits lawsuits against states that violate the constitution, but have permitted far less accountability for federal actions that violate the constitution.
For example, Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act only permits individuals to sue state and local governments for rights violations. It can't be used to sue the federal government.
There's many court cases, dating back decades, tossing out cases against the federal government for rights violations. Look how SCOTUS has limited the precedent set by Bivens over the years, basically neutering it entirely.
To keep everyone else in line. Americans are so programmed to defer to aw enforcement that they will watch the most blatant abuses carried out right in front of them with little other than hand-wringing. Immigration status is just the excuse, compliance is the goal. What do you think is going to happen at the next election? ICE doesn't even need to intimidate people at polling places, just the rumor that hey are doing so will be enough to scare many citizens away from voting in person. They could vote by mail, but no doubt you're aware that the President ad his party constantly impugn the validity of such votes. How much do you trust them to uphold and abide by the voting process? We've already seen what happens when they get a result that's not favorable to them.
Dem flaws aside, Trump isn't just 'a candidate people actually wanted to elect'. He's an authoritarian, every major prediction about how authoritarian this administration would be has turned out to be correct, he instigated efforts to overturn the result of the last election where he lost, and 25-30% of the voting population likes authoritarianism and do not give a shit about what the Constitution actually says.
Evidence suggests that about 30% of people will accept being worse off in order to inflict a greater loss on someone else. They form a plurality, with the other groups being win-win types (~20%), loss-averse pessimists (~20%), selfless volunteers (~15%), and inconsistent folks who may be confused (~15%).
Now this is just empirical observation rather than proof, but it's a good quality observation, enough that it has heuristic value. If you admit the possibility that about 1/3 of people are mean, then an awful lot of ongoing political phenomena become much easier to understand.
You are in such a rush to be sarcastic that you're accusing the GP of wanting to cooperate with fascism, when they're simply stating the reality of the problem. You're saying naying nice words about the outcome you want to see, but ignoring the horrors between the institution of fascism and its eventual defeat. That suggests to me that you don't really have any idea or plan about how to overcome it, you're just wishcasting. The danger of this is that many people will advocate waiting for the next election to decide if it's really fascism (because that's an unpleasant thing people would prefer to avoid), but don't have anything in reserve if the election is subverted, and in any case are giving away the political initiative for a year.
Instead of trying to rally people with WW2 tropes (which the non-fascists are in no position to wage) it'd be better to build momentum toward general strikes, which have a rather successful track record in the US and have been quasi-outlawed as a result (eg by the Taft-Hartley act, which bans solidarity and political strikes by labor unions).
My plan to overcome it is to make it clear to elite decisionmakers that they will be held personally responsible for the misery Trump's administration inflicts on people, including by many of the people who thought they supported Trump before they realized what he was doing. It's not a perfect plan, nor does it have a guarantee of success, but it seems better than the alternatives.
Well, we've already crossed into "the law is what I say it is" territory thanks to the republicans, so the next admin just needs to leverage that. The GOP thinks that pardons signed by autopen are invalid [0] so I don't see what would stop the democrats from apply the same logic to ICE agents and administration, except perhaps cowardice.
[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5575379-house-gop-comer-d...
To the extent that their actions are unlawful, they are often crimes under state law in the states they occur, as well as federal law. The President of the United States has no power to pardon state law offenses (and while there may be political considerations that discourage pursuing charges while it might provoke conflict with the Trump Administration, but in many cases the statutes of limitations for violent crimes under state law are not short.
make it clear to elite decisionmakers that they will be held personally responsible for the misery Trump's administration inflicts on people
How?
If you look at Trump, the only people who think he's honest are his opponents. His own supporters swear up and down he's a liar, he doesn't know what he's talking about, he won't do this or that. And this is their defensive! These are the best arguments they can articulate in his favor!
I think, the thing is, a lot of people don't want effective leaders or care. They want to win, or maybe they want to screw over some people they don't like. So go ahead and elect the idiots with bad policy, because government sucks anyway or something.
I didn’t come to this easily, as someone who generally believes in the goodness of others. But it’s really the only explanation at this point
One important dynamic I think people often miss is that party discipline is weak in the US. Schumer can’t make the caucus go along with a shutdown fight; he has to convince them it’s a good idea, and be confident they’ll stay convinced for long enough to get what he wants, because otherwise the 7 most moderate members will happily defect and start writing their campaign ads about how they’re independent minded who won’t be pushed around by anyone. He’s already got 3 defectors in the current fight.