You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say

If you're white British with an accent from our shores, you don't have a very serious problem. Sure you could get locked up somewhere away from a lawyer for a few days which is terribly inconvenient —- that clearly is happening to British citizens -- but nobody is going to pin you to the ground until you can't breathe. We appear to be getting the benefit of some doubt (unless we have opinions).

And if you are white and have an American accent you're going to be ignored entirely anyway.

Perhaps carry any paperwork you need, definitely carry any medication you'll need for a few days.

As to whether the officer will ignore evidence presented: that is clearly what they are being told to do. There are lawful citizens carrying their papers with them and there's video of an ICE agent mockingly saying "what papers?"

Because on the ground it's not about immigration status really, it's about race and white power and sheer numbers of arrests to meet Stephen Miller's quotas.

They've certainly been held in custody, though.

Unfortunately, lots of people are going to arrive at a first-hand understanding of the oft-repeated systems adage: "the purpose of a system is what it does."

This may be statistically true, but it's probably not very good advice. You might equally end up deported, now that they are running everyone through every database looking for things that might make you technically deportable that would never have come up under previous administrations:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g78nj7701o

You used to be able to get bailed while stuff got sorted out. That has changed. Now they keep you locked up for months, not days. How long are you prepared to hold out before agreeing to be deported despite being in the right? Racial profiling is certainly happening, but anyone can find themselves in this situation if the wrong database pings when they walk through an airport, and once you have been dropped into immigration detention, relying on your ethnicity to get you out is not a sure thing.

Oh it was partly sarcastic ("terribly inconvenient" being something of a Britishism for really quite awful)

For now, until they move on to persecuting political adversaries.

Re: Stafford Beer, we're beyond that in so many ways —- what in ordinary times might be considered an emergent, unthinking consequence of this system is what it was actually designed to do: the terror and arbitrary quality or even the perception that the USA is hostile to foreigners, is not an accidental, emergent quality of the operation. It's Stephen Miller's intent.

If you were to take a truly Stafford Beer approach to this, then you might say the purpose of this system is to desensitise Americans to the arbitrary and/or violent expression of presidential power.

But when you combine that with blowing up boats that contain no combatants and could have been interdicted, the use of selective prosecution, and the confidence with which they say, look, that is exactly what we're doing, even that feels like it is pretty close to text, certainly not unconscious subtext.

It’s no different than a US citizen having an arrest warrant but then showing the cop a final disposition from the court showing the charges were dismissed.

Whats next? It’s certainly not the cop just walking away.

You detain the person until the discrepancy can be resolved.

Are some innocent people going to be held in custody? Yes, in both cases. But until a better approach can be found (other than just ignoring it), it’s how it works.

If you are a US citizen they can call your county that holds the birth certificate, take affidavits from parents or other family members.

I mean the fact we haven’t heard of any US citizens detained for months (as you put it) is a good indication it’s not happening because you know the media would blast that story to the top for weeks.

How it works now in Trump 2.

Obama, notably, had a better approach, with a faster rate of deportation of illegal migrants, and he did so without absurd threatening intimidating cruelty, or ordering arbitrary kidnappings off the street by violent anonymised paramilitary thugs. There was a really quite high level of voluntary compliance with that system.

The only reason this is all happening is that Stephen Miller wants to beat Obama's number: it consumes him that during Trump 1 they didn't get close to the performance of ICE under Obama 2. And he wants it to be showy, threatening, arbitrary, militarised and for it to overpoweringly favour white people.

It's legitimately crazy to normalise it by framing it in normal terms like you are doing. There is nothing normal about this, nothing essential, procedure-based or unavoidable. It's an attempt to build a white police state.

The point is that in Trump 2.0 ICE tactics have changed up from targeted raids (where a few US citizens might have had time to identify themselves as such in the process of an enforcemenr action) to untargeted sweeps where people are being dragged off the street based on their ethnicity and dumped in holding camps in other states by masked goons who are not at all interested in the process because they are literally working to quotas and bonuses.

The rate of US citizens being arrested and held for days has increased exponentially and the process no longer cares about fairness; it cares about detention, intimidation and causing fear.

This change is obvious, marked to anyone paying attention, and not remotely normal.