A news station producer was arrested by ICE and the agents peeled away ripping off someone's bumper[0][1] just for her to be released later without charges.
I live in Chicago, and this article doesn't even scratch the surface of how bad it is. My wife went to the beach yesterday for 10 minutes to try and rest from the chaos and a fucking black hawk helicopter buzzed by her. They literally fly over my house daily.
People, US citizens included, are literally being abducted. People have been shot and killed by masked agents. People have had their children abandoned on the side of the road after being kidnapped. Just today they raided Little Village with hundreds of masked troops. I'm in a dozen signal groups to get alerted about where things are.
What scares me the most is how few people seem to actually know what is happening here. I talk to people outside of Chicago, and watch the news, and I don't see or hear about anything that's going on here. I tell them what's happening and they are shocked.
It is impossible to convey what is happening here, how scared we all are for this country, and how much things seem to escalate every single day that this goes on.
Edit: This post has been flagged and hidden, just demonstrating how much this country wants to pretend this isn't happening. It's unflagged now, but the fact that anyone would want to hide what's happening here shows how bad things are for all of us.
The media also has an existential threat of being taken as seriously as Russian and Chinese media are taken by the Russian and Chinese people, respectively.
Understandable, but note that decisions like that are part of the adminstration's objectives. This isn't a Chicago policy; it's a federal targeting of Chicago for political reasons.
I live in Oak Park, just outside Chicago (and adjacent to Broadview, where the major regional ICE detention center is).
We have daily ICE sitings, and approximately every-other-day ICE detentions or arrests. It's a constant presence.
What it means psychologically depends. If you're someone who could visually be mistaken (perhaps in bad faith) for a Latino, it's a very big problem. ICE/DHS routinely stops people based on their visual appearance, it takes 15 minutes for them to work out that you're present legally, and throughout the whole thing you have hanging over you that they might just decide to detain you at Broadview anyways, which is a nightmare even assuming your eventual release.
If you're not someone like that --- at least where I live --- you can mostly ignore what's happening, if that's what you want to do. People are basically living their lives. About the closest an ordinary white/Black family here gets to direct disruption is needing to make special arrangements with their landscaping people.
> People are basically living their lives. About the closest an ordinary white/Black family here gets to direct disruption is needing to make special arrangements with their landscaping people.
I've watched a few local news clips on the topic, they seem to be dominated by what I would term angry old suburban white women. What annoys me is once you peel back the thinly veiled feigned anger, it becomes clear they are mostly angry over uncertainty if Pedro will be able to shovel their driveway this coming winter.
It's sad but no one seemed to care until their landscapers, roofers, etc. were impacted. Which begs the question, were they all deliberately going to the lowest bidder? Were they more upset about that vs. the human factor in any of this? (The assumption is a contractor on the up-and-up is verifying citizenship etc. before hiring employees.)
I've literally watched news reports where people have openly declared "I don't care if they're illegal" (as long as their lawn gets mowed).
Perhaps some self-reflection is necessary to see if that attitude is how we got here in the first place, and the response is an over-correction.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with whether "Pedro" will be there to shovel their driveway. Nobody cares about that. We all live with 100% certainty that somebody will exchange dollars for snow shoveling. The reason you hear about landscapers right now is that ICE is directly targeting them. If you're ICE, looking to meet a detention quota from whatever quadrant Oak Park is in, the easiest way to do that is cruise down the street and stop anybody on a riding mower.
It's natural to assume that, but what is more likely happening is they are targeting an individual, everyone else is detained in the melee, and they sort it out and ask questions later.
I'm not saying that's the right way to do it.
But this notion that roving bands of assassins are driving down the street looking for browns is likely an exaggeration (made worse by misinformation on social media).
Something like > 30% of ICE agents and > 50% of CBP officers are Latino themselves. It's incongruent with the narrative being presented.
If your governor did his job instead of grandstanding none of this would have likely happened, or at least not on this scale. But his position is understandable, since every detainee is one less eligible voter.
Your contention is that when ICE goes to the parking lot of a Home Depot and rounds up day laborers its because they had specific intelligence and an arrest warrant for one of them?
I'm an immigrant in Chicago (fortunately not one of the racial groups they're targeting) and I follow it pretty closely - yeah it's all really happening. I saw kids get taken away in front of where I live and others just a few streets down
My kids school has started doing drills with the students in what to do when ice shows up. Like they do for tornadoes. They need to because ICE is using schools as raid locations every day.
The children might be citizens, but ICE seizes them so that the immigrant parents have to show up and claim them.
Chicago schools are reporting lower attendance as a result.
We just had a case where a daycare provider was hauled out despite having her papers in order-she was subsequently released.
Priests being shot in the head with pepper balls, intentional accidents being caused by agents. And when they do something so egregious that they might face charges, they runaway to other states with vehicles and evidence.
I look forward to everyone in these organizations facing accountability. And not just the thugs on the street but the leaders first all the way to the top.
Under the auspices of civil disobedience I refer people to Beverly Hills Cop and the bananas scene. Also, Bass Pro Shops sell liquid skunk smell. It would be a shame if it were to end up in vehicles or on the outside air vents of cars. No damage, just annoying.
> I look forward to everyone in these organizations facing accountability. And not just the thugs on the street but the leaders first all the way to the top.
Unfortunately, the chances of this happening are minuscule, even if the executive branch ever changes hands in the future. The other party is too moderate, and doesn't have the backbone or courage to see it through, nor the patience and attention to detail to get them all. They'll be tied up in subpoenas, testimonies in front of Congress, hearings, hearings about hearings... Meanwhile, the people (both in leadership and boots on the ground) who are doing this today will slink back to normal life. The ringleaders will slide into comfy roles in think tanks, corporate boards, and lobbying groups. The hired thugs will go back to working as mall security and bouncers, hoping nobody remembers the time they cosplayed as Bond villain footsoldiers.
I live here, and Pritzker says the right things then does the wrong things. He sent the Illinois State Police to help protect ICE from protestors as Broadview, freeing up their resources to attack and kidnap people. In half the videos you see out there his state police as assisting ICE. We have Chicago Aldermen out in the streets and in the hospitals getting arrested and assaulted, we have candidates for congress like Kat Abughazaleh being indicted for protesting, and then Pritzker is giving speeches and going on podcasts while not even stopping his own thugs from helping ICE.
He doesn't have a spine, he has an election strategy.
Right now, I agree pretty strongly with this. In particular: Pritzker is the command in chief of the Illinois State Police. But the ISP is very conservative and fairly MAGA, and ISP has staffed protests pretty aggressively. Pritzker has in theory the ability to reorient ISP away from policing protesters and towards protecting them from DHS, and he has pointedly not done so.
Even if he's just OK, doing a replacement-level competent job of being a governor dealing with a problem he himself did not have a hand in creating, this is his opportunity to demonstrate leadership during a crisis, and he's flubbing it. He's asking (we assume) for the highest job in the land, so he doesn't get to ask to be graded on a curve this time.
Curious about the random Kat Abu comment at the end there? I know nothing about her background, but it certainly seems like she's using her campaign to actively help her local community directly and immediately. And in times like these, we could certainly use more political candidates who are willing to be tossed around by DHS.
She doesn't represent the district. She picked it off a map, while living in (I think?) DC, hoping to replicate what AOC had done in New York --- knocking off a geriatric institutional Dem in a safe blue district. What really got me was that she moved to Chicago to run for CD9, and didn't even move to the district --- she moved to the Gold Coast (IIRC?), far outside CD9 (which is Rogers Park, Evanston, and the near north suburbs).
There's a word for this (carpetbagging).
Then more broadly there's the question of what a Representative is for. Is it "designated protester for the district"? If so, she's the leading contender. It's my belief that "most effective on-site protester" is not in fact the job of a congressional representative.
It'd be one thing if the choice was between Kat Abu and a staid machine Democrat. But CD9 is naturally progressive, and she's up against Daniel Biss, a progressive with a real track record of getting things done (and unquestioned ties to the district). What I think she's really going to do, best case, is split the progressive vote.
It's kind of too late for quick action. You're not going to turn the attitudes of Law Enforcement on a dime. We need a decades long effort to eliminate MAGA, White Supremacy, gangs, lawlessness and thuggery from thousands of local and state police forces nationwide. These attitudes have so thoroughly infiltrated policing for so long, it's going to take deliberate restructuring of these institutions and personnel replacement to resolve.
That attitude sounds like a really good way to be Brandon Johnson, the least popular mayor in the United States.
Pritzker can either solve the problem or he can't. It's fine if he can't. I couldn't solve it. Few could! But if he can't, he's not qualified to be President, a job that will send him harder problems than this. It's fine for him not to be President. Most people (waves at the Oval Office right now) shouldn't.
The NYPD all but threatened to kill Bill de Blasio's daughter when he tried to bring them to heel. I'm limiting myself to being furious at the fucking freaks terrorizing my city instead of creating new shit to get mad about. There's plenty as is.
He does not. People working in public service law could have told you that long before Trump won the election. That's sort of not on him; it's its own political power center. But that's his problem to solve now.
It's not an exaggeration. People have been kidnapped by these armed masked idiots within two blocks of my house twice, and those are just the closest cases I know about. Go check out the /r/Illinois subreddit [0] to see what's happening.
It's a forum run by venture capital if that tells you anything. The "tech right" were one of the reasons Trump won this past election. It describes a voter bloc consisting of Libertarian/Thiel/Musk types who are very motivated by: immigration (H1B), deregulation, increasing their wealth, and gaining more power.
Did you look at the links he posted? Have you seen the news reports he linked to? This is all actually happening right now. Please, read all he linked to an watched the videos of ICE kidnapping people violently.
Not at all exaggerated. The agents are lying about anything and everything even when there's evidence. One of them threw tear gas out of the window of their SUV because they were pissed to be stuck in traffic. They'll hit and run parked cars and flee the scene.
I live in Chicago and it is a BIG city. I've seen, in real life, none of this. But the online reports are legion. I think, like a lot of things, you can choose what reality you want to inhabit and find anecdata online to support any of it. During the Obama adminstration the right wing whackos came up with theories about black helicopters and UN camps and the rest. This may be _slightly_ more factual as the Orange Troll is more purposefully playing a media game, but I'd still take these reports with a grain of salt.
A large part of this lawlessness is rooted in nonnormative behavior. But! there are basic protections we could have right now if we demanded them. First and foremost: the Bivens Act; specifically, the right to bring suit in State court against Federal agents. Presidential pardons can't help these thugs in State persons.
Unfortunately the Bivens act was already heavily neutered well before this current trainwreck of a Supreme Court we have now was fully assembled (saving them the trouble of having to neuter it themselves):
The supreme court ruled that unless your case is virtually a carbon-copy of an existing Bivens case then it doesn't count. The current supreme court does not respect precedent in any meaningful way.
The problem is how many people enthusiastically voted for this madness, lawlessness and cruelty, and are still cheering it on.
You can say "vote, vote, vote," and maybe it will work in 2026 or 2028, or 2030 or whenever, but the root problem is not going away: you are still surrounded by people all over the country who want this.
Margin of victory was ~2M votes, about how many voters 55+ die in a year. Hopefully enough voters have aged out or learned their lesson next time around (considering election results we've seen in the last week or so [1]). You're never going to convince unsavory voters to vote with empathy, the subject brain structure does not support it (anterior insular cortex, primarily), you can only hope they're aging out of the electorate at a reasonable pace (and not being replaced).
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Planck's Principle [2] applied to voting)
It's comforting that maybe this mentality is correcting itself one funeral at a time.
But what really makes me sad is how this mentality so quickly swept into the country to begin with. 30 years ago, the vast majority of Americans would be horrified at the thought of people being assaulted on the street in broad daylight, black-bagged, kidnapped and disappeared forever by masked, non-identifying thugs. Fast forward 30 years, and (chances are) my neighbors want this and are absolutely giddy at the thought of it happening here!
Regardless of who votes for what, how did my country turn into this?
First, your country has been divided since at least the mid-19th century. Every war has a winning and losing side, but the losers don't simply vanish. Their mentality persists throughout generations, even if it remains in the background, and is ignored by the other side.
Secondly, all this technology you've built and allowed the world to use can and has been exploited by your enemies to your own detriment. The same systems you've built that allow manipulating people into buying things are also ideal channels for spreading propaganda and disinformation. Information warfare is not new, but modern technology has made it more effective than ever at manipulating groups of people, sowing dissent, and generally causing chaos and confusion within a nation.
So, putting those two together, it's not difficult to see how acts of information warfare could be used to fuel the deeply rooted social divide, directly causing or strongly contributing to the internal sociopolitical instability you've been experiencing for the past decade.
Meanwhile, your enemies can sit back and enjoy the show of an imploding nation. They know that you're untouchable via traditional warfare, which is why these tactics are so perfect. They do require a long time to come into effect, but they're highly effective, very cheap to deploy, and the best part is that they're completely untraceable to the attacker. It's still debatable whether there was Russian interference in your elections, and how effective it actually was, even though there is evidence for it. It's still debatable whether Chinese-operated social media platforms are a national security threat or not. Were J6 protesters rioters or patriots? And so on about every controversial sociopolitical topic.
This confusion is exactly the intended effect. Your regular checks and balances, your laws, ideals and values, make no difference if your communication channels are corrupted.
I don't see how you can get out of this mess, and I expect things will get much worse before they get better. Not just for you, but globally. These same tactics are also deployed in other countries, by the US as well. Though, ironically, countries that are cut off from the global internet have an upper hand in this conflict.
Tribalism, identity politics, low education and lack of respect for education and intellectualism, and late stage capitalism. A cautionary tale, for sure. People are angry, rightfully so, but at the wrong people. Thank Reagan (economics) and Gingrich (politics) for a lot of this we’re facing.
Deepfriedchokes is right; we need stronger, more robust systems to protect humans from other humans, because we cannot trust the human (broadly speaking).
The Biden admin (no idea if Biden himself was involved) literally sued Texas to stop Texas from enforcing border law. This same admin also essentially redefined "asylum" to be economic asylum rather than "I'm afraid that if I go back to my country I'll be killed" which is how people typically thought of asylum.
You can absolutely think that what's happening now is an overreaction, un-American, gross, illegal, and morally wrong.
But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
If you just want to see the people who voted for this as "the enemy" and "evil" you're basically doing the same tribal "othering" that's lead to these outcomes you don't like.
Is that ugly and uncomfortable? Yes, absolutely. Will things get better by ignoring it? Absolutely not.
>If you just want to see the people who voted for this as "the enemy" and "evil" you're basically doing the same tribal "othering" that's lead to these outcomes you don't like.
"If you point out problems, you yourself are actually the problem. I am very rational."
> But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
Anyone who's read about the history of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s should understand how it's possible. We can still feel disappointed and helpless that the same mentality is rearing its head again, especially in a country that itself sent people overseas to fight it 100 years ago.
Off and on throughout my life as an American, I thought my fellow Americans could be sometimes be described as arrogant, sometimes uninformed, sometimes overconfident, sometimes over-patriotic, sometimes selfish. But never needlessly cruel and cold-blooded like millions are today. This is new and terrible. It's absolutely sickening to walk outside in my neighborhood, look at 10 houses and think maybe 3 or 4 of them are homes to people who are OK with what is happening.
We shouldn’t need to count on voters dying to avoid outcomes like this. Our institutions are broken if they can’t protect the public from a mentally ill public official on a power trip.
The point is that we are not talking about protecting the public from a few mentally ill public officials. These officials didn't just appear out of the ether, they were voted for by tens of millions of voters who want this. Even if the officials go away, those voters are not.
I'm not sure this is the correct perspective on voting. Voters are often passionate about one or two key issues - crime, Israel v Palestine, cost of living, immigration policy, coal towns, Ukraine, military spending, or whatever is most important to them.
If they voted for Trump it doesn't mean they agree with him on immigration and crime. They just have to think it's less important than the positions they do agree with. An effective argument to win over those voters isn't "you're evil and should have better opinions," it's "immigration policy is important too and this one is really bad, plus Trump is doing a bad job on your pet issues."
Complete hopium. I remember twenty years ago as we witnessed the second term of W and the talks about the republican party's base dying out and losing their support with it. Yet 21 years later they are going stronger than ever with just mayhem and chaos to show for it. Nothing constructive accomplished in two decades. They either obstructed when out of power or favoured the billionaire class when in power. Yet they rebranded themselves as the "revolutionary" party and suckered enough idiots to vote for them enthusiastically.
You are fucked, American friends. And we're all fucked with you and because of you. When you sneeze the rest of the world catches a Covid sized cold so you're taking down the rest of us with you.
The replacement voters are currently teenagers. They haven't "learned their lesson", they aren't old enough to have experienced politics at all. They were 6 years old when Trump was elected the first time. This is their reality and we can't expect that the electorate gets more sensible because old people rotate out.
I don't think this framing is very helpful. Whatever you believe about the people who pulled the lever for Trump, which included an unprecedented number of Latino and Black voters, they exist, and they're not persuaded by your disapproval. I think a really big problem we have on my side of the aisle is the belief that there's a celestial referee who will call offsides on the Republicans if we can just find the right argument at the right amplitude.
What led into our current circumstances was several years of uncontrolled, chaotic immigration, caused in large part by specific articulable decisions Biden's administration made. People felt like the situation had gotten out of control, and they weren't wrong. Every day I'd commute into my office and pass multiple corners and Ike off-ramps(!) staffed by a woman and several of her tiny children, out in the cold, trying to sell bottles of water.
My reaction to that wasn't "deport them". I'm a liberal Democrat. But we're kidding ourselves if we think a natural reaction to that situation was "this is fine".
The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability. It was not: people fucking hate inflation. By a large factor inflation was the most important issue in the 2024 election. But the second-most important issue was immigration (like it has been throughout Europe over the past 10 years) and then after that the issues sharply trail off in importance.
We must always vote. Our voter turnout for elections in the US is approximately shit.
We must also do other things, too: Voting isn't the end-all, be-all solution to everything. (And that's OK; we can do more than one thing at a time.)
But the absolute necessity of actually-voting is a constant, and I'm equipped with a profound amount of intolerance towards any idea that may suggest otherwise.
Or, they live in one of the 40-something states where the election margins are large enough that it doesn't matter whether they vote.
My state hasn't voted Democrat since 1964. The only two elections with less than a 10-point spread since then were in 1976 (7.5% spread) and 1992 (5% spread due to Perot stealing votes from Bush Sr.).
I predict that California will “go blue” in the presidential elections for at least the rest of my lifetime. Someone who “votes red” in California can say that their vote doesn’t matter, and a reasonable person would understand why they feel that way.
You don’t seem like a reasonable person, or you’re also suffering from some nihilistic delusion, possibly.
There are some who voted for Trump and do celebrate the cruelty on display in Chicago. But I also think many wanted to deport "the worst of the worst" and that is what they thought they were promised. And per the media many consume, that is what's happening. It's an open question on whether the real extent of the crackdown will break through the echo chamber, but from conversations I've had with people who consume Fox News, I really do think a lot of Trump voters will not be ok with the tactics as they are actually being carried out. For example, I just don't think that earnest religious conservatives I know would defend denying the Eucharist to people in the processing facility (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-...) and then banning prayer outside the facility altogether (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-lead...). When you lay out this (and the many events in Aphyr's post) to them clearly, they really don't like it.
I don't know, man. That is definitely true, but they didn't win by a landslide. And a lot of their edge came from the MAGA Latinx vote. This ICE/CPB action is a total self-own. That Latinx vote is going to disappear, and we've already seen the results in the 2025 elections.
I think the right will turn on itself in 2026. We could even end up with three parties, only one of them able to obtain a majority (Democrats). There's a plausible version of the future where the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs.
If they turn on themselves it will not be over immigration. This is the one issue where they are almost all in wild agreement. A massive, overwhelming majority of Republicans agree with these cruel treatment of immigrants[1].
They might disagree on the economy or tariffs or jobs or whatever, but there's no infighting here. They fully back this cruelty.
The biggest division right now seems to be support Israel. And if we up the attacks in Venezuela, I do think the America first folks will get louder in their divisions.
The election was fairly close. The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
All that said, as an American living abroad who votes left, the use of terms like “kidnapped” and “abducted” to describe immigration-enforcement actions seems really weird to me and my expat peers. There are quite a few democratic, developed countries high on freedom-ranking lists that widely deploy law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants and visa overstayers. Sure, deplore lack of due process when actual citizens get caught in the net, but so much use of these loaded terms isn’t even about that, it’s criticizing actions against non-citizens.
Do you not think there might be a relationship between the lack of due process and the choice of terms?
Like, maybe the defining difference between arrest and abduction is whether the action is the output of an accountable system of justice, rather than whether the people doing it are the right kind of people and the people having it done to them are the wrong kind of people.
For some years now there has been a segment of the American left, particularly visible on social media, who believes that strictly enforcing immigration laws at all is bad. This predates the current guy, as well as his administration as the former guy. So, when I read an article by someone like the writer here whose online activity has other shibboleths of a left more extreme than found in mainstream parties in many other democracies, my assumption is he is coming out of this trend and the current events, as appalled as he is by them, is not the ultimate cause of his use of that loaded language.
> The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
There may be differing views on other topics among the party, but Republicans broadly support this vision of cruelty and these actions against immigrants[1] by huge margins. It's probably the one single vision they are united behind.
- 74% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the Trump administration is doing the right amount to deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. Another 12% say it’s doing too little and 13% say it’s doing too much.
- Nearly nine-in-ten Republicans approve of sending additional U.S. troops to the border (88%) and increasing deportations (86%). More than six-in-ten strongly approve of these actions.
- 80% of Republicans approve of cutting federal funds to cities and states if they do not cooperate with deportations
- 72% of Republicans approve of suspending asylum applications, with 38% saying they strongly approve.
It looks like the difference in the popular vote was 2,284,967 votes towards R. Do all of those 2,284,967 voters demonstrably overlap with that 86% of the polled Republicans? If not, then claiming that a majority of Americans support every incident in the linked article based on the last election, lacks basis.
I'm not saying anything about the majority of the American population. Just that Republicans broadly support these actions. I hope we never get to the point where a majority of the overall public support this.
No, my point was that in a close election that depended on a party building coalitions between heterogenous groups of voters, the people in favor of any particular action taken by the elected government may be a minority of the population, not even a slight majority.
Sure, but in a healthy society, such extreme opinions should never even be close enough to a minority large enough to be elected into power. Hopefully, anyway.
ICE are wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, abducting citizens and non-citizens alike. They are accusing citizens of assault and then releasing them without charging - a pretty good indication that they lied.
They are conducting warrantless searches. There is a case where they rammed the car of a U.S. citizen (clearly seen on video), promptly took her into custody, accused her of hitting them, and then released her without charging her.
They are profiling people based on race and ethnicity.
The abductions look like kidnappings. They don’t look like law enforcement actions.
In many countries, including some high on freedom rankings as I mentioned, certain police units are masked and may not have to identify themselves during stings, which after all rely on the element of surprise. Immigration-enforcement actions are commonly directed against people based on looks, and due process serves to ensure that if citizens are mistakenly rounded up, they are not further detained. Again, when I see Americans deploring ICE actions based on those things (and not the outright abuses), it’s just a very peculiar political position from an international perspective.
In the USA, we have come to expect a certain level of formality, transparency, and adherence to due process when it comes to how law enforcement operates. Or, at least that's what we tell ourselves the standard is. Granted, we've been backsliding in this department for decades, which really started accelerating during the War On Terror. It's not new with this administration. But, we have strayed a long, long way away from the idealized "uniformed cop visibly walking the beat on the street."
The whole "masked plainclothes men jumping out of an unmarked van, dragging someone off the street into the van, and swooping away" thing is what the villains in the movies did, not the good guys.
Many of these people are documented permanent residents or US citizens being grabbed without warrants, without being read rights, without charges, and without an opportunity to present documentation.
Yup immigration was arguably the concrete issue of the election and these were the campaign promises. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that this is what mass deportation would look like.
A plurality of the people who voted went for Trump not a majority. He won 49.8% of the vote. When you include everyone who is eligible to vote he only got 31.8% of the total electorate. A large percentage of the electorate doesn't vote.
> Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works
The agents actually attempted to pull over Ms. Galeano’s vehicle, but the male driver (with Galeano in the passenger seat) refused to stop despite the sirens and lights. The agents pursued the car, which sped into a shopping center, and Ms. Galeano fled the vehicle and ran into a daycare, attempting to barricade herself inside. She didn’t get all the way in and was arrested inside the vestibule. None of the kids witnessed the arrest.
Regardless of your thoughts on immigration and ICE, if a cop tries to pull you over, and instead you decide to speed off and barricade yourself inside a daycare, you’re probably going to get arrested.
Witnesses on the scene and the video evidence that has been released contradicts basically all of that. Perhaps we may one day know the real story if the government were ever to take any of this to trial. But given they are already in trouble for actively lying in court perhaps not.
But you are actually wrong about what most police organizations would have done about enforcing an non-violent arrest warrant. If they were worried about the activities getting too close to a school they would specifically not follow the subject there. They would wait to get the person at a time and place that was safer. But this isn’t about public safety, as they are grabbing people from schools daily, its about intimidation and incompetence.
Currently as a Canadian there are probably only four or five countries I really do not want to travel to. In no particular order: North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States.
My parents (Canadian) won’t visit, and haven’t since Trump’s first term.
Keep in mind these are people who were educated in the US (Cornell, RPI, Florida State), and as kids, we used to spend at least a month a year in the US on vacation with their college friends. So not historically haters.
Did you read the article? Not wanting to visit countries where secret police are rounding people up, regardless of citizenship, seems like a reasonable opinion.
Well, technically, it's likely because he has decided to block UK IPs (or similar).
A form of protest I assume, assuming he runs no business in the UK and no other reason to think the UK Gov has any interest in policing an .com blog run by someone who doesn't live there nor hosts the website there.
(I'm not against that form of protest per se, but let's be clear about who's doing the blocking)
His website links to bdsm (and hosts some very mild art). He has very real concerns and has talked to lawyers about them. I would not call it a protest rather a protective measure.
Or to avoid the fines and/or to avoid integrating some age verification service.
Maybe symbolic since it unlikely the site would be prosecuted, even if they were in violation in some minor form. It is easy to be in violation to my understanding since it does not need to what is posted by the site owner as part of the blog but could be in the comments.
This [1] is civil-war-inducing stuff, that's not "police", that's an army that attacks its own country's citizens. Crazy stuff, didn't think I'd get to see this happening in the States.
This shit is so fucked up. And at a certain level I’m disappointed that we are still trying to fix it peaceably when every day of delay, there is irreparable harm to physical wellness, mental health and rights as citizens or residents. Also science in America is fucked for the next decade.
Violent resolution of the situation would almost certainly result in a society with even fewer freedoms. That is the historical lesson. Violent resistance to authoritarian takeovers gives them an air of legitimacy they need. That is the whole point of chicago and the attempt in Portland. They want violent resistance to justify crack downs. Instead they look like storm troopers. I am in awe of the restraint of those living in Chicago. Ice hasn't done half as much in Texas and they are getting ambushed with assault rifles. That doesn't work with their narrative of lawless blue states though. The ability of Chicagoans to resist peacefully, endure, and document these events may well be what gives the US another chance at being a democracy.
Republicans are controlled by big business and billionaires. I agree that violence isn't the solution, because to these guys, money talks.
What we need is a general strike. Shut the entire country down, teachers, warehouse workers, supermarket employees truckers. Everyone on the streets, refusing to make money for their billionaire bosses. When it hurts their profits, they will relent.
lol. It’s that the immigration policies currently being attempted plus the university grant shenanigans are destroying the stem training / research pipeline
> I think Americans should first do everything possible to bring to sanity the supporters of Trump
It seems that ship left the port last november. There is barely any noticable resistance whatsoever to Trump. All this talk about freedom and when the time comes americans just fold over like lawnchairs.
Years and decades of not enforcing law and encouraging and even aiding illegal alien status is what has caused this. You can’t create a problem, refuse to address it (and actively make it worse to the point of making it impossible to fix tastefully) and then complain about the tactics of the opposition that has decided to spend political capital fixing it. Mistakes get made but how do you propose the problem gets fixed? Ignoring it or saying it’s not a problem or that “it’s actually a good thing” are disqualifying. People voted to effectively deport and it’s a popular position. So what’s the more humane tactic
You can argue for or against mass-deportation as a policy. Fine. But the tactics are a choice, and at every turn, the current administration is deliberately choosing cruelty, fear, intimidation, violence, opaqueness, and grief.
In an alternate world, they could have still chosen to do mass-deportation, but also: 1. sent uniformed officers with arrest warrants, 2. who identify themselves clearly as officers, 3. who show their faces and badges, 4. who respectfully but firmly conduct the arrest, 5. transparently transport them for processing in marked police vehicles, 6. ensure innocent family members and bystanders are treated with dignity, protected and offered support, and 7. throughout the process operate nonviolently, respectfully, and adhere to due process.
Instead, they are deliberately choosing the opposite of this at every turn. No matter how mad you are about how previous administrations dealt with immigration, it doesn't excuse these tactics.
This is a common objection I hear raised, so I think it's good that you raised it here. Respectfully, I think there is a lot of rhetorical slippage in your argument.
First, I did not support the very loose amnesty policy, but I also don't support ICE teargassing the grocery store parking lot outside of my old apartment in Logan Square. In any case I don't think one's opinion on the first thing should disqualify them from having a take on deportation tactics.
Second, I think there is substantial ambiguity in what people voted for on deportation. There were lots of promises of deporting dangerous criminals (something that I agree would be a good idea). A subset of Trump voters in 2024 did want to round up migrant day laborers standing outside of Home Depots, and they are getting what they voted for. But I think another large subset believed that there was going to be a targeted deportation of "the worst of the worst". The administration claims to be doing this, but the worst of the worst are very unlikely to be looking for work outside of Home Depot.
Lastly, to your question, I think there are many many ways for the tactics to be more humane (and constitutional). To take just one example, I think the feds should resume allowing Catholic clergy into the Chicago-area processing facility at Broadview to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist.
“The Biden administration has also carried out the most administrative returns in at least 15 years—more than 505,000 from FY 2021 through February 2024. For comparison, nearly 685,000 migrants were administratively returned over the previous two administrations, from FY 2009 through FY 2020.”
That does not sound like a lack of enforcement to me.
I assume that HN has been targeted for this movement Democrat political stuff on the weekends. I'm s
This is a bizarre view of Chicago from the perspective of undocumented immigrants, their birthright citizen children, and of course the same wealthy movement Democrats and hipster outrage-surfers that have been at every protest that could they could bring an orange-man sign to since 2016.
They have organized into groups that follow around immigration officers, try to dox them so they can harass their families, warn all undocumented people to hide whenever they come around with apps and whistles, and pretty much operate with impunity in the city with the tacit support of city officials. I'm sorry, but the fact that this is happening is just an excuse for a military buildup in the city that will become a permanent feature, and when they're all gone, it will be turned on black people.
The illegal immigrants won't even be gone. This is a show for the base. Trump (and everybody else who owns things) loves workers who don't have any rights. While they're creating this video content of these brown people attacking their noble ICE operators, they're not busting the businesses that employ them if the bribe is good enough. This entire operation claims only to have deported 3000 people. That's nothing.
Yes these new gig ICE workers suck, it's a shitty job where you're rounding up normal people, and only shitty desperate people will take it. Yes they lie, all cops lie. Yes, they use excessive force, but this is the rare case when they look sympathetic, surrounded by a hundred people screaming at them, boxing them in, and waving Mexican flags. They're not the brightest bulbs, and I'd like to see how the brightest bulbs would behave in the same situation.
I wish everybody else got the license to break the law that these people do, but it's only for protesters on the Democratic side of wedge issues under Republican administrations. When Biden and Obama were running the country, cops got carte blanche to stomp black heads, and nobody gave a shit. Obama deported more than Trump did, which is part of the reason that Hispanics turned on mainstream Democrats during the 2016 Democratic primary and the following election.
I can't just go to Mexico to live, they don't let people do that: if you don't have privileges to go with your duties of citizenship, you don't have a country. Unlimited immigration is and has always been a capitalist program to undermine labor, except during the very earliest part of the 20th century and late 19th century when it was a way to inflate the white population against the new free blacks.
You keep telling me that this country was built by immigrants (and it hurts, because my people were slaves, not immigrants), but the immigrants who built this country can be recognized by the fact that they're here. People who just got here yesterday did not build America. They just destroyed the low end labor market for people like black people and white people who didn't inherit money so life has become middle-class or die. People voted for deportations, and they should get them.
If black people put together an app tracking police movements around the city and the identities of officers, we'd go down on RICO charges in like two seconds. But there's this aura of impunity that these political parties are granting to their strategic pawns that is scary. If you think Republicans can't have racist citizen-paramilitaries in the streets and refuse to enforce the laws against them, you are extremely-short sighted. The immigrants can just leave though; I don't have anywhere else to go.
Happy to be downvoted into oblivion in a shill thread for expressing the majority opinion of the US electorate.
It would not be necessary to dox the ICE agents if they were operating under normal rules of engagement for policing citizens. Police are not allowed to hide their identification because citizens need to be able to hold them accountable for abuses.
Part of the problem with these degens is their attitude that downvotes mean they are over the target.
This dude is just ignorant with, near as i can tell, asmongold on your brain and breath. His mistakes aren’t worth refuting, but I’ll give them one for free : despite the claim otherwise, it is in fact possible for Americans to go south to Mexico and live, and Mexico City is itself going through somewhat of a gentrification problem by gringos from the north. Channel 5 covered it recently: https://youtu.be/Oti0eNxLxyQ?si=JJqiQ3kiO46YxDSf
We all saw ICE laughing while they pepper balled a priest in the head. No one voted for that.
The only question for OP and other chicagonians: why don't you organize and push back?
It seems like the overwhelming majority of city population including local police doesn't support this, so go ahead and do something instead of crying on HN.
There are protests everyday you walnut and the administration is using that as a pretense to move in honest to god military troops.
Nearly everyone I know (including my 80 year old neighbor) has been to a protest. You can go to an organizing meeting any day of the week in any neighborhood in the city. We are all walking around with whistles for signaling when ice comes and kids are making them on 3d printers in the library.
Getting shot? I think you might have stumbled onto the question of gun control. I wonder if that's ever been a topic of discussion.
Or if it's about black-on-black crime, maybe there's something to look into with affirmative action?
Cops against blacks? ACAB or kneeling at football games ringing any bells?
Sarcasm aside, one difference here is that the government is trashing your neighbourhood on your dime. You have to listen to republicans say there's no money for healthcare while they spend money on deploying troops to shoot priests with pepper bullets and trying to deport citizens.
50 every weekend is an exaggeration, but more people were murdered in Chicago from 2001 to 2021 than American soldiers died during the Global War on Terror (6,593 died in Iraq and Afghanistan vs. 11,561 in Chicago).
This is something of a red herring though as somewhere around 75% of those murders are black-on-black, with only a minority involving Latinos. Chicago primarily attracts attention not because of its murder rate (#22 in the country vs. Detroit at #5), but instead due to the size of its population and the prevalence of violent music that has come out of the region.
Not to dispute your point, but the GWoT was shockingly low casualty for the Americans. Almost 10x as many Americans died in the Vietnam war (58,281 US military KIA), mostly between 1965 and 1971, peaking at 16,899 in '68 alone. There are lots of reasons for this, including the different styles and intensities of fighting, the soldiers used (GWoT was all volunteer after all), improvements in transport and trauma care, and the sheer technological lead that the US held. GWoT was really an example of punching down counterinsurgency, not a real "war" in a lot of ways.
My take the high murder rate among blacks in Chicago is due to Slavery, Jim Crow, followed by decades of racist therefor ineffective policing. That toxic racism is also what's motivating the ICE terrorizing.
My point is everyone has been silent about Chicago's violence for decades, and only now they seem to care because it's not Black people being targeted. It's straight up racism to not care about Black people's welfare but care only when it's other people being endangered.
When I lived in Chicago, no one was silent about Chicago's violence. It was widely acknowledged as one of the city's biggest problems and there was a ton of effort put into stopping it by the government and nonprofits, including grassroots initiatives.
To steelman what you're saying, it's true we lived with it so long that it came to seem normal in a way if you weren't personally affected. But "everyone has been silent" is just not true.
These demonstrations were nominally dedicated to protesting police brutality, not crime, and the policies they advocated for generally had an adverse impact on the crime rate in subsequent years.
If you don't understand how critically violent Chicago is, especially in the number of Black people shot and murdered every week, then you have no business being engaged in this topic. Chicago is one of the most violent cities in the US.
What does that have to do with federal officers conducting immigration raids against schoolteachers and random US-citizen paralegals? Do you suggest that those people are the ones shooting and murdering Black people every week?
Well then you should have no problem proving what you are now only insisting on. This is HN, not Reddit. Where's the citation? Prove what you said or I have no reason to take you seriously.
1646 shooting victims in chicago over 40 weeks = 36 shooting victims per week. Although these are cases so there are probably multiple victims in many cases.
If you go back 10 years, there are around 34,000 cases of gunshot victims.
So what you're saying is that the rate of violence has been dropping over the last decade? And that we should ignore fed violence (against brown, white, and black people)?
The obsession with Chicago's murder rate and not the murder rate of cities like St Louis, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Indianapolis, or Little Rock is a political constructon of a right wing apparatus still hell-bent on punishing Chicago for having produced Obama.
That murder rate is gang related and extremely localized, and to boot, people in Chicago DO care about it; here are the top results for searching for "Chicago groups against gang violence" in duckduckgo:
It is just broadly untrue that nobody cares about it. This point is extremely easy to debunk if you have any desire to debunk it, but you obviously have no interest in that.
And besides, there's an ocean of a difference between interpersonal gang on gang violence and the government sending secret police to put people into concentration camps and deport them to countries where they have no affiliation based on racial profiling.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/14/chicago-ice-...
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLGI2hMaz5Q
Can folks who live in Chicago confirm/deny/comment on the extent to which this article gets it right?
(I have no reason to believe that it's an exaggeration, but I sincerely hope that it is.)
People, US citizens included, are literally being abducted. People have been shot and killed by masked agents. People have had their children abandoned on the side of the road after being kidnapped. Just today they raided Little Village with hundreds of masked troops. I'm in a dozen signal groups to get alerted about where things are.
What scares me the most is how few people seem to actually know what is happening here. I talk to people outside of Chicago, and watch the news, and I don't see or hear about anything that's going on here. I tell them what's happening and they are shocked.
It is impossible to convey what is happening here, how scared we all are for this country, and how much things seem to escalate every single day that this goes on.
Edit: This post has been flagged and hidden, just demonstrating how much this country wants to pretend this isn't happening. It's unflagged now, but the fact that anyone would want to hide what's happening here shows how bad things are for all of us.
If the media had balls, they’d broadcast anyway, license or not.
https://bsky.app/profile/unraveledpress.com
https://bsky.app/profile/djbyrnes1.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/thetriibe.com
https://bsky.app/profile/prisonculture.bsky.social
For many of us that ship sailed a few years ago.
It’s so sad to see HN taking the side of violence and oppression with their “head in the sand” approach.
I wonder how different they would feel if their own families were being torn apart. Disgraceful.
The only reason this exists now is because it’s the weekend crowd.
>Facing police brutality with no accountability
>Media blackout
We're not beating the, "Horrible things that happen to black and indigenous Americans will eventually happen to everyone else," rap.
Submissions like this getting flagged contributes to that.
I mention that because the previous submission with this article got flagged to death.
We have daily ICE sitings, and approximately every-other-day ICE detentions or arrests. It's a constant presence.
What it means psychologically depends. If you're someone who could visually be mistaken (perhaps in bad faith) for a Latino, it's a very big problem. ICE/DHS routinely stops people based on their visual appearance, it takes 15 minutes for them to work out that you're present legally, and throughout the whole thing you have hanging over you that they might just decide to detain you at Broadview anyways, which is a nightmare even assuming your eventual release.
If you're not someone like that --- at least where I live --- you can mostly ignore what's happening, if that's what you want to do. People are basically living their lives. About the closest an ordinary white/Black family here gets to direct disruption is needing to make special arrangements with their landscaping people.
I've watched a few local news clips on the topic, they seem to be dominated by what I would term angry old suburban white women. What annoys me is once you peel back the thinly veiled feigned anger, it becomes clear they are mostly angry over uncertainty if Pedro will be able to shovel their driveway this coming winter.
It's sad but no one seemed to care until their landscapers, roofers, etc. were impacted. Which begs the question, were they all deliberately going to the lowest bidder? Were they more upset about that vs. the human factor in any of this? (The assumption is a contractor on the up-and-up is verifying citizenship etc. before hiring employees.)
I've literally watched news reports where people have openly declared "I don't care if they're illegal" (as long as their lawn gets mowed).
Perhaps some self-reflection is necessary to see if that attitude is how we got here in the first place, and the response is an over-correction.
I'm not saying that's the right way to do it.
But this notion that roving bands of assassins are driving down the street looking for browns is likely an exaggeration (made worse by misinformation on social media).
Something like > 30% of ICE agents and > 50% of CBP officers are Latino themselves. It's incongruent with the narrative being presented.
If your governor did his job instead of grandstanding none of this would have likely happened, or at least not on this scale. But his position is understandable, since every detainee is one less eligible voter.
The abuse of power there is ridiculous
Chicago schools are reporting lower attendance as a result.
We just had a case where a daycare provider was hauled out despite having her papers in order-she was subsequently released.
Priests being shot in the head with pepper balls, intentional accidents being caused by agents. And when they do something so egregious that they might face charges, they runaway to other states with vehicles and evidence.
I look forward to everyone in these organizations facing accountability. And not just the thugs on the street but the leaders first all the way to the top.
Under the auspices of civil disobedience I refer people to Beverly Hills Cop and the bananas scene. Also, Bass Pro Shops sell liquid skunk smell. It would be a shame if it were to end up in vehicles or on the outside air vents of cars. No damage, just annoying.
Unfortunately, the chances of this happening are minuscule, even if the executive branch ever changes hands in the future. The other party is too moderate, and doesn't have the backbone or courage to see it through, nor the patience and attention to detail to get them all. They'll be tied up in subpoenas, testimonies in front of Congress, hearings, hearings about hearings... Meanwhile, the people (both in leadership and boots on the ground) who are doing this today will slink back to normal life. The ringleaders will slide into comfy roles in think tanks, corporate boards, and lobbying groups. The hired thugs will go back to working as mall security and bouncers, hoping nobody remembers the time they cosplayed as Bond villain footsoldiers.
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/...
He doesn't have a spine, he has an election strategy.
Even if he's just OK, doing a replacement-level competent job of being a governor dealing with a problem he himself did not have a hand in creating, this is his opportunity to demonstrate leadership during a crisis, and he's flubbing it. He's asking (we assume) for the highest job in the land, so he doesn't get to ask to be graded on a curve this time.
(Not a fan of Kat Abu, though).
What negatives am I unaware of?
There's a word for this (carpetbagging).
Then more broadly there's the question of what a Representative is for. Is it "designated protester for the district"? If so, she's the leading contender. It's my belief that "most effective on-site protester" is not in fact the job of a congressional representative.
It'd be one thing if the choice was between Kat Abu and a staid machine Democrat. But CD9 is naturally progressive, and she's up against Daniel Biss, a progressive with a real track record of getting things done (and unquestioned ties to the district). What I think she's really going to do, best case, is split the progressive vote.
Pritzker can either solve the problem or he can't. It's fine if he can't. I couldn't solve it. Few could! But if he can't, he's not qualified to be President, a job that will send him harder problems than this. It's fine for him not to be President. Most people (waves at the Oval Office right now) shouldn't.
Until then, he bears responsibility for their actions.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/illinois/
https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/11/05/daycare-...
Thank you for outing yourself as willfully ignorant. I also appreciate the unintended admission of privilege.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fktQUIkf6o0
The supreme court ruled that unless your case is virtually a carbon-copy of an existing Bivens case then it doesn't count. The current supreme court does not respect precedent in any meaningful way.
I’m so sad that he had to.
Pay attention to what’s going on and vote.
You can say "vote, vote, vote," and maybe it will work in 2026 or 2028, or 2030 or whenever, but the root problem is not going away: you are still surrounded by people all over the country who want this.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Planck's Principle [2] applied to voting)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45818505
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
But what really makes me sad is how this mentality so quickly swept into the country to begin with. 30 years ago, the vast majority of Americans would be horrified at the thought of people being assaulted on the street in broad daylight, black-bagged, kidnapped and disappeared forever by masked, non-identifying thugs. Fast forward 30 years, and (chances are) my neighbors want this and are absolutely giddy at the thought of it happening here!
Regardless of who votes for what, how did my country turn into this?
There are two components to this answer.
First, your country has been divided since at least the mid-19th century. Every war has a winning and losing side, but the losers don't simply vanish. Their mentality persists throughout generations, even if it remains in the background, and is ignored by the other side.
Secondly, all this technology you've built and allowed the world to use can and has been exploited by your enemies to your own detriment. The same systems you've built that allow manipulating people into buying things are also ideal channels for spreading propaganda and disinformation. Information warfare is not new, but modern technology has made it more effective than ever at manipulating groups of people, sowing dissent, and generally causing chaos and confusion within a nation.
So, putting those two together, it's not difficult to see how acts of information warfare could be used to fuel the deeply rooted social divide, directly causing or strongly contributing to the internal sociopolitical instability you've been experiencing for the past decade.
Meanwhile, your enemies can sit back and enjoy the show of an imploding nation. They know that you're untouchable via traditional warfare, which is why these tactics are so perfect. They do require a long time to come into effect, but they're highly effective, very cheap to deploy, and the best part is that they're completely untraceable to the attacker. It's still debatable whether there was Russian interference in your elections, and how effective it actually was, even though there is evidence for it. It's still debatable whether Chinese-operated social media platforms are a national security threat or not. Were J6 protesters rioters or patriots? And so on about every controversial sociopolitical topic.
This confusion is exactly the intended effect. Your regular checks and balances, your laws, ideals and values, make no difference if your communication channels are corrupted.
I don't see how you can get out of this mess, and I expect things will get much worse before they get better. Not just for you, but globally. These same tactics are also deployed in other countries, by the US as well. Though, ironically, countries that are cut off from the global internet have an upper hand in this conflict.
Deepfriedchokes is right; we need stronger, more robust systems to protect humans from other humans, because we cannot trust the human (broadly speaking).
You can absolutely think that what's happening now is an overreaction, un-American, gross, illegal, and morally wrong.
But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
If you just want to see the people who voted for this as "the enemy" and "evil" you're basically doing the same tribal "othering" that's lead to these outcomes you don't like.
Is that ugly and uncomfortable? Yes, absolutely. Will things get better by ignoring it? Absolutely not.
"If you point out problems, you yourself are actually the problem. I am very rational."
Incredible logic.
Anyone who's read about the history of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s should understand how it's possible. We can still feel disappointed and helpless that the same mentality is rearing its head again, especially in a country that itself sent people overseas to fight it 100 years ago.
Off and on throughout my life as an American, I thought my fellow Americans could be sometimes be described as arrogant, sometimes uninformed, sometimes overconfident, sometimes over-patriotic, sometimes selfish. But never needlessly cruel and cold-blooded like millions are today. This is new and terrible. It's absolutely sickening to walk outside in my neighborhood, look at 10 houses and think maybe 3 or 4 of them are homes to people who are OK with what is happening.
If they voted for Trump it doesn't mean they agree with him on immigration and crime. They just have to think it's less important than the positions they do agree with. An effective argument to win over those voters isn't "you're evil and should have better opinions," it's "immigration policy is important too and this one is really bad, plus Trump is doing a bad job on your pet issues."
You are fucked, American friends. And we're all fucked with you and because of you. When you sneeze the rest of the world catches a Covid sized cold so you're taking down the rest of us with you.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-support-among-men-eroding-108...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-absolutely-craters...
Young women are also most liberal than ever, and who carried recent election wins. I expect this trend to continue.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/gallup-analysis-finds-yo...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men...
https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/03/2025-election-results/
What led into our current circumstances was several years of uncontrolled, chaotic immigration, caused in large part by specific articulable decisions Biden's administration made. People felt like the situation had gotten out of control, and they weren't wrong. Every day I'd commute into my office and pass multiple corners and Ike off-ramps(!) staffed by a woman and several of her tiny children, out in the cold, trying to sell bottles of water.
My reaction to that wasn't "deport them". I'm a liberal Democrat. But we're kidding ourselves if we think a natural reaction to that situation was "this is fine".
The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability. It was not: people fucking hate inflation. By a large factor inflation was the most important issue in the 2024 election. But the second-most important issue was immigration (like it has been throughout Europe over the past 10 years) and then after that the issues sharply trail off in importance.
We must also do other things, too: Voting isn't the end-all, be-all solution to everything. (And that's OK; we can do more than one thing at a time.)
But the absolute necessity of actually-voting is a constant, and I'm equipped with a profound amount of intolerance towards any idea that may suggest otherwise.
My state hasn't voted Democrat since 1964. The only two elections with less than a 10-point spread since then were in 1976 (7.5% spread) and 1992 (5% spread due to Perot stealing votes from Bush Sr.).
I moved to this state in 1993.
I predict that California will “go blue” in the presidential elections for at least the rest of my lifetime. Someone who “votes red” in California can say that their vote doesn’t matter, and a reasonable person would understand why they feel that way.
You don’t seem like a reasonable person, or you’re also suffering from some nihilistic delusion, possibly.
I think the right will turn on itself in 2026. We could even end up with three parties, only one of them able to obtain a majority (Democrats). There's a plausible version of the future where the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs.
If they turn on themselves it will not be over immigration. This is the one issue where they are almost all in wild agreement. A massive, overwhelming majority of Republicans agree with these cruel treatment of immigrants[1].
They might disagree on the economy or tariffs or jobs or whatever, but there's no infighting here. They fully back this cruelty.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/07/what-amer...
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-rights-existential-fight-over
The election was fairly close. The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
All that said, as an American living abroad who votes left, the use of terms like “kidnapped” and “abducted” to describe immigration-enforcement actions seems really weird to me and my expat peers. There are quite a few democratic, developed countries high on freedom-ranking lists that widely deploy law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants and visa overstayers. Sure, deplore lack of due process when actual citizens get caught in the net, but so much use of these loaded terms isn’t even about that, it’s criticizing actions against non-citizens.
Like, maybe the defining difference between arrest and abduction is whether the action is the output of an accountable system of justice, rather than whether the people doing it are the right kind of people and the people having it done to them are the wrong kind of people.
There may be differing views on other topics among the party, but Republicans broadly support this vision of cruelty and these actions against immigrants[1] by huge margins. It's probably the one single vision they are united behind.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859760
- Nearly nine-in-ten Republicans approve of sending additional U.S. troops to the border (88%) and increasing deportations (86%). More than six-in-ten strongly approve of these actions.
- 80% of Republicans approve of cutting federal funds to cities and states if they do not cooperate with deportations
- 72% of Republicans approve of suspending asylum applications, with 38% saying they strongly approve.
Yeah but "the totalitarian Neonazis who wanted to deploy secret police were only a slight majority" is really faint praise.
They are conducting warrantless searches. There is a case where they rammed the car of a U.S. citizen (clearly seen on video), promptly took her into custody, accused her of hitting them, and then released her without charging her.
They are profiling people based on race and ethnicity.
The abductions look like kidnappings. They don’t look like law enforcement actions.
The whole "masked plainclothes men jumping out of an unmarked van, dragging someone off the street into the van, and swooping away" thing is what the villains in the movies did, not the good guys.
That's kidnapping.
The agents actually attempted to pull over Ms. Galeano’s vehicle, but the male driver (with Galeano in the passenger seat) refused to stop despite the sirens and lights. The agents pursued the car, which sped into a shopping center, and Ms. Galeano fled the vehicle and ran into a daycare, attempting to barricade herself inside. She didn’t get all the way in and was arrested inside the vestibule. None of the kids witnessed the arrest.
Regardless of your thoughts on immigration and ICE, if a cop tries to pull you over, and instead you decide to speed off and barricade yourself inside a daycare, you’re probably going to get arrested.
But you are actually wrong about what most police organizations would have done about enforcing an non-violent arrest warrant. If they were worried about the activities getting too close to a school they would specifically not follow the subject there. They would wait to get the person at a time and place that was safer. But this isn’t about public safety, as they are grabbing people from schools daily, its about intimidation and incompetence.
My parents (Canadian) won’t visit, and haven’t since Trump’s first term.
Keep in mind these are people who were educated in the US (Cornell, RPI, Florida State), and as kids, we used to spend at least a month a year in the US on vacation with their college friends. So not historically haters.
Hell, I just remembered as a kid I spent a whole summer in Chicago. IIRC We stayed in student housing while my dad finished his book (https://archive.org/details/Inside_Commodore_Dos_1984_Datamo...).
Hottest summer of my life and no AC anywhere to be seen.
Coined by people who _live_ there.
It's hard to imagine anyone would have made it a vacation destination prior to this.
https://cdn.choosechicago.com/uploads/2025/07/Chicago-Touris...
https://abc7chicago.com/post/chicago-sees-record-breaking-ho...
Is that a lot?
Well, Rome - which people the world over would consider a “tourist destination” only has 35M tourists per year.
https://hotelagio.com/rome-tourism-statistics/
Even Paris is less, around 47M
https://parisplaybook.com/paris-tourism-statistics/
https://archive.is/X33oQ
A form of protest I assume, assuming he runs no business in the UK and no other reason to think the UK Gov has any interest in policing an .com blog run by someone who doesn't live there nor hosts the website there.
(I'm not against that form of protest per se, but let's be clear about who's doing the blocking)
His website links to bdsm (and hosts some very mild art). He has very real concerns and has talked to lawyers about them. I would not call it a protest rather a protective measure.
Or to avoid the fines and/or to avoid integrating some age verification service.
Maybe symbolic since it unlikely the site would be prosecuted, even if they were in violation in some minor form. It is easy to be in violation to my understanding since it does not need to what is posted by the site owner as part of the blog but could be in the comments.
America is sick. Republicans are sick. They condone this and have made no attempt to do anything about it.
[1] https://x.com/LAURA_N_ROD/status/1985412485185188067
What we need is a general strike. Shut the entire country down, teachers, warehouse workers, supermarket employees truckers. Everyone on the streets, refusing to make money for their billionaire bosses. When it hurts their profits, they will relent.
I think Americans should first do everything possible to bring to sanity the supporters of Trump
It seems that ship left the port last november. There is barely any noticable resistance whatsoever to Trump. All this talk about freedom and when the time comes americans just fold over like lawnchairs.
In an alternate world, they could have still chosen to do mass-deportation, but also: 1. sent uniformed officers with arrest warrants, 2. who identify themselves clearly as officers, 3. who show their faces and badges, 4. who respectfully but firmly conduct the arrest, 5. transparently transport them for processing in marked police vehicles, 6. ensure innocent family members and bystanders are treated with dignity, protected and offered support, and 7. throughout the process operate nonviolently, respectfully, and adhere to due process.
Instead, they are deliberately choosing the opposite of this at every turn. No matter how mad you are about how previous administrations dealt with immigration, it doesn't excuse these tactics.
First, I did not support the very loose amnesty policy, but I also don't support ICE teargassing the grocery store parking lot outside of my old apartment in Logan Square. In any case I don't think one's opinion on the first thing should disqualify them from having a take on deportation tactics.
Second, I think there is substantial ambiguity in what people voted for on deportation. There were lots of promises of deporting dangerous criminals (something that I agree would be a good idea). A subset of Trump voters in 2024 did want to round up migrant day laborers standing outside of Home Depots, and they are getting what they voted for. But I think another large subset believed that there was going to be a targeted deportation of "the worst of the worst". The administration claims to be doing this, but the worst of the worst are very unlikely to be looking for work outside of Home Depot.
Lastly, to your question, I think there are many many ways for the tactics to be more humane (and constitutional). To take just one example, I think the feds should resume allowing Catholic clergy into the Chicago-area processing facility at Broadview to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist.
“The Biden administration has also carried out the most administrative returns in at least 15 years—more than 505,000 from FY 2021 through February 2024. For comparison, nearly 685,000 migrants were administratively returned over the previous two administrations, from FY 2009 through FY 2020.”
That does not sound like a lack of enforcement to me.
Source: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-re...
This is a bizarre view of Chicago from the perspective of undocumented immigrants, their birthright citizen children, and of course the same wealthy movement Democrats and hipster outrage-surfers that have been at every protest that could they could bring an orange-man sign to since 2016.
They have organized into groups that follow around immigration officers, try to dox them so they can harass their families, warn all undocumented people to hide whenever they come around with apps and whistles, and pretty much operate with impunity in the city with the tacit support of city officials. I'm sorry, but the fact that this is happening is just an excuse for a military buildup in the city that will become a permanent feature, and when they're all gone, it will be turned on black people.
The illegal immigrants won't even be gone. This is a show for the base. Trump (and everybody else who owns things) loves workers who don't have any rights. While they're creating this video content of these brown people attacking their noble ICE operators, they're not busting the businesses that employ them if the bribe is good enough. This entire operation claims only to have deported 3000 people. That's nothing.
Yes these new gig ICE workers suck, it's a shitty job where you're rounding up normal people, and only shitty desperate people will take it. Yes they lie, all cops lie. Yes, they use excessive force, but this is the rare case when they look sympathetic, surrounded by a hundred people screaming at them, boxing them in, and waving Mexican flags. They're not the brightest bulbs, and I'd like to see how the brightest bulbs would behave in the same situation.
I wish everybody else got the license to break the law that these people do, but it's only for protesters on the Democratic side of wedge issues under Republican administrations. When Biden and Obama were running the country, cops got carte blanche to stomp black heads, and nobody gave a shit. Obama deported more than Trump did, which is part of the reason that Hispanics turned on mainstream Democrats during the 2016 Democratic primary and the following election.
I can't just go to Mexico to live, they don't let people do that: if you don't have privileges to go with your duties of citizenship, you don't have a country. Unlimited immigration is and has always been a capitalist program to undermine labor, except during the very earliest part of the 20th century and late 19th century when it was a way to inflate the white population against the new free blacks.
You keep telling me that this country was built by immigrants (and it hurts, because my people were slaves, not immigrants), but the immigrants who built this country can be recognized by the fact that they're here. People who just got here yesterday did not build America. They just destroyed the low end labor market for people like black people and white people who didn't inherit money so life has become middle-class or die. People voted for deportations, and they should get them.
If black people put together an app tracking police movements around the city and the identities of officers, we'd go down on RICO charges in like two seconds. But there's this aura of impunity that these political parties are granting to their strategic pawns that is scary. If you think Republicans can't have racist citizen-paramilitaries in the streets and refuse to enforce the laws against them, you are extremely-short sighted. The immigrants can just leave though; I don't have anywhere else to go.
Happy to be downvoted into oblivion in a shill thread for expressing the majority opinion of the US electorate.
This dude is just ignorant with, near as i can tell, asmongold on your brain and breath. His mistakes aren’t worth refuting, but I’ll give them one for free : despite the claim otherwise, it is in fact possible for Americans to go south to Mexico and live, and Mexico City is itself going through somewhat of a gentrification problem by gringos from the north. Channel 5 covered it recently: https://youtu.be/Oti0eNxLxyQ?si=JJqiQ3kiO46YxDSf
We all saw ICE laughing while they pepper balled a priest in the head. No one voted for that.
70+ million of you voted for exactly that.
Everyone saw exactly who and what Trump was during his first term.
It seems like the overwhelming majority of city population including local police doesn't support this, so go ahead and do something instead of crying on HN.
Nearly everyone I know (including my 80 year old neighbor) has been to a protest. You can go to an organizing meeting any day of the week in any neighborhood in the city. We are all walking around with whistles for signaling when ice comes and kids are making them on 3d printers in the library.
Or if it's about black-on-black crime, maybe there's something to look into with affirmative action?
Cops against blacks? ACAB or kneeling at football games ringing any bells?
Sarcasm aside, one difference here is that the government is trashing your neighbourhood on your dime. You have to listen to republicans say there's no money for healthcare while they spend money on deploying troops to shoot priests with pepper bullets and trying to deport citizens.
This is something of a red herring though as somewhere around 75% of those murders are black-on-black, with only a minority involving Latinos. Chicago primarily attracts attention not because of its murder rate (#22 in the country vs. Detroit at #5), but instead due to the size of its population and the prevalence of violent music that has come out of the region.
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/sites/default/files/pape...
To steelman what you're saying, it's true we lived with it so long that it came to seem normal in a way if you weren't personally affected. But "everyone has been silent" is just not true.
you're just throwing shit at the wall
wholly disingenuous to compare the two.
but yours is the standard misdirect on anything "Chicago" so I'm confident being disingenuous was intentional.
But when it's some other ethnicity being targeted, then all of a sudden they are up in arms, even though the scale is orders of magnitude smaller.
This is racism by ignoring Black people.
1646 shooting victims in chicago over 40 weeks = 36 shooting victims per week. Although these are cases so there are probably multiple victims in many cases.
If you go back 10 years, there are around 34,000 cases of gunshot victims.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/58-shot-weekend-chicago-governor-r...
https://cwbchicago.com/2025/11/two-killed-21-wounded-in-hall...
“Chicago ranked 8th out of a bigger sample of 24 cities in terms of the homicide rate in both 2023 and 2024.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8jl969pg7o.amp
Chicago is ranked 22nd for murder and 92nd in the country in violent crime overall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
The obsession with Chicago's murder rate and not the murder rate of cities like St Louis, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Indianapolis, or Little Rock is a political constructon of a right wing apparatus still hell-bent on punishing Chicago for having produced Obama.
That murder rate is gang related and extremely localized, and to boot, people in Chicago DO care about it; here are the top results for searching for "Chicago groups against gang violence" in duckduckgo:
https://thetriibe.com/2024/07/13-black-led-organizations-tha...
https://www.buildchicago.org/our-programs/intervention-and-c...
https://togetherchicago.com/violence-reduction/
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/community-safety/home/...
https://www.chicagocred.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-...
It is just broadly untrue that nobody cares about it. This point is extremely easy to debunk if you have any desire to debunk it, but you obviously have no interest in that.
And besides, there's an ocean of a difference between interpersonal gang on gang violence and the government sending secret police to put people into concentration camps and deport them to countries where they have no affiliation based on racial profiling.