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I would also love if anyone can actually explain to me what are the negative consequences for USA of increased immigration?
People here are writing about it in apocalyptic terms, where are the crime figures? Where are the mass shootings done by immigrants? Where are the huge burdens that they put on American society?
From all the actual statistics, immigrants lift up the economy, provide cheap labor (which is why this "undocumented" status has been dragged on for decades, so people can exploit them while holding ICE/immigration over their heads), they pay into programs they'll never benefit from, they pay taxes, overall, by all statistical means they are a net positive for the economy, so what gives.
Are all these people who are trying to protect them, who live side by side with them for decades just stupid and wrong and all of these undocumented immigrants are murderers and rapists? Shouldn't that be shown by statistics?
Violent and property crime spiked with COVID and after COVID and was on a steady decline, almost reaching the 2018 levels (2014 was the lowest ever) by the end of 2024, so what is this immense crackdown reaction to?
Crime wasn't up. So what are these terrible negative consequences of immigration exactly?
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United States43987 Posts
What about that time they poisoned the blood of the American race? Or when they ate all the dogs and the cats? Or when they invaded? Have you not noticed the globalist plan to replace the whites? It’s all over Twitter.
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On January 13 2026 18:42 oBlade wrote:
What happened is something like if Obama was enforcing immigration law at 25%, Biden was enforcing at 10% in his first three years, then Congress said I've got an idea let's actually pass a law capping enforcement at 12.5% in an election year to pretend like Democrats care, then Trump won and is up to maybe 40 or 50% enforcement at best. You do not wish Biden had enforced more, and nobody is ever going to fall for that concern trolling.
I love this reply. There are no numbers that support this fiction so you just made up some pretend numbers. Still ignoring the fact that Republican Congressmen literally said aloud they would tank the immigration enforcement bill they literally negotiated themselves to help Trump win the election.
On January 13 2026 17:02 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:Show nested quote +On January 13 2026 10:42 LightSpectra wrote:
You can lie until your face turns blue about Biden's alleged immigration failures but it will never change that Republicans at the time said, out loud, to news outlets, that they were intentionally tanking his ability to enforce immigration control to make him lose the election.
One day, everyone will have always been against this, but your shame will be on the internet forever. The guy who ended funding for the border wall on day 1 via executive order? The goal was to flood the country with illegals, grant them citizenship and you've got a massive new democrat voting bloc.Of course Trump actually won Hispanic men last election because it turns out a lot of legal immigrants aren't so keen on illegals Walzing on in.
Dear Lord, you can't actually be this stupid. The POTUS can't simply declare people citizens by fiat, most undocumented migrants are socially conservative and tend towards Republican values, the border wall was never funded lawfully by Congress and regardless is a stupid idea because it's spending billions for something that can be circumvented with a $200 ladder, and the previous three Republican presidents did more to encourage immigration than Democrats historically have. You should refrain from voting until you learn to separate braindead conspiracy theories from reality.
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On January 13 2026 23:39 pmh wrote:
The us will get its immigration no worrys. They will go to 500m population in 2050 is my guess (projected currently is 390m).
The us will need many more people if they want to have their "china at home" and be fully independent and there is plenty of room.
Its not a matter of positive and negative consequences. People simply do not like mass immigration.
Its not unique in the world. A nation like Israel takes in virtually zero non jewish immigrants. Russia takes in very few. Japan doesnt take in lots of immigrants they simply eat the demographic collapse and zero growth. Eastern europe doesnt like to take in lots of immigrants with different culture.
Its not a rare perspective to not want immigration its very common in the world. Its the other perspective that is rare and unique.
There is many advantages to lots of immigrants and also a few disadvantages but its sort of irrelevant. People simply do not want it for whatever reason. You will have to force it against the will of the people and then people will vote far right.
The Us should naturally be the most open nation to migration. Since it is already a very mixed and somewhat incoherent society. But even the most diverse nation in the world , build on immigration itself. Does not like immigrants for whatever reason. Its just a fact you have to take into account you wont change it with arguments.
You're talking about anti-immigration attitudes like it's just natural and not a result of a decade of xenophobic propaganda being freely disseminated on social media. Let's use Canada as a case study: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/transparency/transition-binders/minister-2025-05/public-opinion-research-canadians-attitudes-immigration.html
Number of immigrants coming to Canada is just right/too few/too many:
November 2024 - 34%/7%/54%
December 2012 - 53%/11%/27%
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Well, interesting you'd bring up Eastern Europe, since it's kind of my neck of the woods I do have some opinions and facts for ya there.
Obviously, we in Croatia haven't really been prime targets for immigration, legal or otherwise for a long time. We had asylum seekers traverse our country, we helped where we could and yes, there were incidents with our border patrols clashing with immigrants, some shitty cops being violent to them, lots of anti-immigration sentiment being pushed, but, as we do have eyes and ears we, as Croatians saw that this is not a problem, these people were housed and helped and they didn't cause problems, not that we had that many, but it was OK.
Then, I moved to Netherlands and experienced some anti-immigrant sentiments there, but also a lot of pro-immigrant ones, it was, to me, personally, wonderful to see so many people of different races and cultures all through Amsterdam, not segregated but very much integrated in the vast majority of cases, it made me incredibly sad when the Dutch decided to give the most votes to Geert Wilders of all people, it made me feel unwelcome as an immigrant (well, we high skilled workers were called expats which is another bag of worms) and it's one of the reasons why I came back to my country.
Over the 2 years I was gone, I was shocked how much things changed, my little town of barely 3000 people had it's immigrant population jump from basically 0 to 250, a lot of factories, stores, bars and other business started hiring people who came here on work visas from Bangladesh, India, Philippines and Nepal, and yes, some people started looking them over, many developed bigoted opinions based on nothing, mostly people who never took the opportunity to chat to these folks.
This summer, my family business which is wine making was in crisis mode, all of my mom and dad's friends began pushing 70, and we relied on having friends and family helping us with grape harvests since forever, unfortunately, as the business grew we kind of outgrew this model and couldn't really harvest in time if we aren't going to find people to help us, it was incredibly fortunate that we were able to hire quite a few guys from India to help us, they worked, they drank with us, joked, stayed longer without counting the hours, they were great.
And this is the experience of vast majority of people here, there is no anger, we, as a country understand that we need these folks just like Germany needed us in 90-es to do the jobs that we no longer want or can do.
I can guarantee you that even if some fucking Trump-like ghoul came into power there would be 0 possibility of him sending people door to door to arrest people, allowing them to rough up, drag over concrete or shoot anyone without half of the country being on the street.
I mean, fuck, in 2022 football hooligans stopped traffic on our main highway around a gas station and started throwing flares around, there was 200 of them and 16 police officers came on site, they were surrounded and the fucks had bats and broken bottles, one of the cops shoot at the ground and they dispersed because one of the morons was shoot by a ricocheted bullet in the leg.
There was a moths long discussion if this was excessive use of force.
This is why we in Croatia, and I believe in most of Europe we'll never have ICE, because we don't believe in the idiotic American cowboy vigilante bullshit, we don't think that the price of "interfering" with cops should be execution or beatings, we believe all of us are humans and we understand that immigration is a fact of life.
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@Intro: eh, close enough. Thanks for your time, anyway. “Justified self-defense” and “a few mistakes” (traditionally “a few bad apples”) are classic fallback positions of rhetorically embattled conservatives, and the latter especially feels pretty evasive when we went through, at both high and low level, how ICE is not just occasionally or inadvertently overstepping legal limits; whole operations are clearly conceived, planned, and executed on the premise that they are wholly unaccountable to those legal limits. Their leaders – right up to the president himself – loudly insist that is the case, and none of these “mistakes” seem to provoke any remorse or promise to change the policy going forward. You don’t actually dispute any of those characterizations, and yet at the end of it you still can’t say anything about it but “well, I can tolerate a few mistakes, I’m not a utopian.”
That said, you do pretty much come out and say “it’s not really about law-abidingness in general, I just think the outcomes of this policy are good so I support them.” Which I read to mean, you can tolerate a great deal of lawlessness in pursuit of mass deportation because this isn’t just about “if we have a law we should enforce it.” You think mass deportation is good, and you’ll forgive a hell of a lot as long as mass deportations still happen.
I think your phrase for Trump a while back was that he’s usually “directionally right, but procedurally wrong,” which would seem to be a nice euphemism for “he breaks the law constantly, but he does it in pursuit of goals I approve of.” It’s not, then, a surprise to you that his signature policy is being carried out in brazenly lawless and unaccountable fashion, and no amount of evidence proving that would persuade you to oppose the policy, because you already know that’s the case and support it anyway.
So yeah, I think we more or less got there.
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On January 13 2026 23:03 Jankisa wrote:
The guy is waking and filming them, he was clearly trying to get away from them, but sure, it wasn't as unprovoked as it seemed, he wasn't dragged out of Target for no reason, they still shouldn't have taken him into a truck, rough him up and drop him off, either arrest him or don't, law officers don't get to rough people up, that is not the law and it certainty is not justice.
Yeah instead of tackling him, putting him in handcuffs so he's not free to leave and escorting him to a law enforcement vehicle, they should have... arrested him. Would have made a huge difference. They should have arrested him instead of doing what they did, which was put him in handcuffs in a car.
There is no magical protection against getting hurt when you are physically fucking with police. There's just no kid gloves guarantee. Police have the right to use force. I guess you mean you believe he was roughed up after, in the van if that's what he claimed but I'm pretty sure being faceplanted on video accounts for whatever blood he had, I find the whole story dropped off a credibility cliff.
On January 13 2026 23:03 Jankisa wrote:
I spend exactly 0 time discussing ICE on Reddit, it's not my place, I also spend 0 time encouraging anyone doing anything, I don't do it here, I don't do it anywhere else, because, again, it's not my place.
Indeed.
On January 13 2026 23:03 Jankisa wrote:
Also, I asked you a few other questions that you conveniently haven't answered. There are plenty of excessive use of force cases of ICE documented, many completely unprovoked from people who pose no danger to them, this is not really up for discussion, and you failed to answer the question about that:
There are plenty of no use of force cases, and justified use of force cases. There are plenty of everything because it's a country of 350 million and DHS are a nationwide agency with hundreds of thousands of employees.
For example here's Portland police chief, an adult, a few days ago crying about the fact that two Tren de Aragua members were shot by DHS in the course of their duty. I have no idea what prompted his emotion, if he thinks it's sad because it might reinforce stereotypes about Hispanics or what. My answer to the shooting of the gang members who attacked law enforcement is simple: well done and stay safe. Many times we wish police would shoot faster, like Uvalde.
+ Show Spoiler +
On January 13 2026 23:03 Jankisa wrote:Show nested quote +Do you think that this kind of behavior, which you obviously vehemently disagree with was made less or more likely with the shooting of Renee Good and the subsequent reaction to it? You have also failed to answer many other questions, such as ones pertaining to January 6th, let's do a few: 1. Since there were clearly many officers there who's life was in danger according to the standards you laid out here, would have officers been justified in opening fire at the "protestors" there? 2. Was the shooting of Ashley Babbit legitimate? 3. Do you support Trump blanket pardoning the January 6th "protestors"?
I no longer vehemently disagree with the behavior since the greater context came out, so your first question lost its premise. It's probably more likely because of stirred-up people doubling down and creating similar situations vs. LEO.
I basically "conveniently don't answer" straw BS and loaded questions from a no-faith perspective like this. The only thing I posted anything resembling "standards" about was when officers have a car accelerate at them. I don't think that happened once on January 6th, but if you find a case I'm here. So I find your reading of my "standards" to be a misunderstanding.
Obviously for one there's no reason to, say, "open fire at" these people:
+ Show Spoiler +
This man was not a deadly threat, and not just because he's smiling and said "I'm not mad at you"
+ Show Spoiler +
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On January 14 2026 00:55 Jankisa wrote:
Well, interesting you'd bring up Eastern Europe, since it's kind of my neck of the woods I do have some opinions and facts for ya there.
Obviously, we in Croatia haven't really been prime targets for immigration, legal or otherwise for a long time. We had asylum seekers traverse our country, we helped where we could and yes, there were incidents with our border patrols clashing with immigrants, some shitty cops being violent to them, lots of anti-immigration sentiment being pushed, but, as we do have eyes and ears we, as Croatians saw that this is not a problem, these people were housed and helped and they didn't cause problems, not that we had that many, but it was OK.
Then, I moved to Netherlands and experienced some anti-immigrant sentiments there, but also a lot of pro-immigrant ones, it was, to me, personally, wonderful to see so many people of different races and cultures all through Amsterdam, not segregated but very much integrated in the vast majority of cases, it made me incredibly sad when the Dutch decided to give the most votes to Geert Wilders of all people, it made me feel unwelcome as an immigrant (well, we high skilled workers were called expats which is another bag of worms) and it's one of the reasons why I came back to my country.
Over the 2 years I was gone, I was shocked how much things changed, my little town of barely 3000 people had it's immigrant population jump from basically 0 to 250, a lot of factories, stores, bars and other business started hiring people who came here on work visas from Bangladesh, India, Philippines and Nepal, and yes, some people started looking them over, many developed bigoted opinions based on nothing, mostly people who never took the opportunity to chat to these folks.
This summer, my family business which is wine making was in crisis mode, all of my mom and dad's friends began pushing 70, and we relied on having friends and family helping us with grape harvests since forever, unfortunately, as the business grew we kind of outgrew this model and couldn't really harvest in time if we aren't going to find people to help us, it was incredibly fortunate that we were able to hire quite a few guys from India to help us, they worked, they drank with us, joked, stayed longer without counting the hours, they were great.
And this is the experience of vast majority of people here, there is no anger, we, as a country understand that we need these folks just like Germany needed us in 90-es to do the jobs that we no longer want or can do.
I can guarantee you that even if some fucking Trump-like ghoul came into power there would be 0 possibility of him sending people door to door to arrest people, allowing them to rough up, drag over concrete or shoot anyone without half of the country being on the street.
I mean, fuck, in 2022 football hooligans stopped traffic on our main highway around a gas station and started throwing flares around, there was 200 of them and 16 police officers came on site, they were surrounded and the fucks had bats and broken bottles, one of the cops shoot at the ground and they dispersed because one of the morons was shoot by a ricocheted bullet in the leg.
There was a moths long discussion if this was excessive use of force.
This is why we in Croatia, and I believe in most of Europe we'll never have ICE, because we don't believe in the idiotic American cowboy vigilante bullshit, we don't think that the price of "interfering" with cops should be execution or beatings, we believe all of us are humans and we understand that immigration is a fact of life.
thank you for the write up <3
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On January 14 2026 01:58 Jankisa wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2026 01:36 oBlade wrote:On January 13 2026 23:03 Jankisa wrote:
The guy is waking and filming them, he was clearly trying to get away from them, but sure, it wasn't as unprovoked as it seemed, he wasn't dragged out of Target for no reason, they still shouldn't have taken him into a truck, rough him up and drop him off, either arrest him or don't, law officers don't get to rough people up, that is not the law and it certainty is not justice. Yeah instead of tackling him, putting him in handcuffs so he's not free to leave and escorting him to a law enforcement vehicle, they should have... arrested him. Would have made a huge difference. They should have arrested him instead of doing what they did, which was put him in handcuffs in a car. There is no magical protection against getting hurt when you are physically fucking with police. There's just no kid gloves guarantee. Police have the right to use force. I guess you mean you believe he was roughed up after, in the van if that's what he claimed but I'm pretty sure being faceplanted on video accounts for whatever blood he had, I find the whole story dropped off a credibility cliff. On January 13 2026 23:03 Jankisa wrote:
I spend exactly 0 time discussing ICE on Reddit, it's not my place, I also spend 0 time encouraging anyone doing anything, I don't do it here, I don't do it anywhere else, because, again, it's not my place. Indeed. On January 13 2026 23:03 Jankisa wrote:
Also, I asked you a few other questions that you conveniently haven't answered. There are plenty of excessive use of force cases of ICE documented, many completely unprovoked from people who pose no danger to them, this is not really up for discussion, and you failed to answer the question about that: There are plenty of no use of force cases, and justified use of force cases. There are plenty of everything because it's a country of 350 million and DHS are a nationwide agency with hundreds of thousands of employees. For example here's Portland police chief, an adult, a few days ago crying about the fact that two Tren de Aragua members were shot by DHS in the course of their duty. I have no idea what prompted his emotion, if he thinks it's sad because it might reinforce stereotypes about Hispanics or what. My answer to the shooting of the gang members who attacked law enforcement is simple: well done and stay safe. Many times we wish police would shoot faster, like Uvalde. + Show Spoiler +On January 13 2026 23:03 Jankisa wrote:Do you think that this kind of behavior, which you obviously vehemently disagree with was made less or more likely with the shooting of Renee Good and the subsequent reaction to it? You have also failed to answer many other questions, such as ones pertaining to January 6th, let's do a few: 1. Since there were clearly many officers there who's life was in danger according to the standards you laid out here, would have officers been justified in opening fire at the "protestors" there? 2. Was the shooting of Ashley Babbit legitimate? 3. Do you support Trump blanket pardoning the January 6th "protestors"? I no longer vehemently disagree with the behavior since the greater context came out, so your first question lost its premise. It's probably more likely because of stirred-up people doubling down and creating similar situations vs. LEO. I basically "conveniently don't answer" straw BS and loaded questions from a no-faith perspective like this. The only thing I posted anything resembling "standards" about was when officers have a car accelerate at them. I don't think that happened once on January 6th, but if you find a case I'm here. So I find your reading of my "standards" to be a misunderstanding. Obviously for one there's no reason to, say, "open fire at" these people: + Show Spoiler +This man was not a deadly threat, and not just because he's smiling and said "I'm not mad at you" + Show Spoiler +
I don't really see how the Ashley Babbit question is a straw man, it's a very, very simple yes or no proposition. Same goes with the pardons.
I like how you again refused to answer the questions and while accusing me of straw manning literally constructed your own ones that don't even make sense.
If you want to see some pictures of the event, specifically of a guy who beat a cop with a flag pole who was later pardoned, feel free to read up on it here.
It also has a nice video of the mob being about 5 seconds from being able to capture Mitt Romney, a sitting senator.
Please ask me any questions, I'm happy to answer any and all of them, because, unlike you, I'm not a raging hypocrite who likes the taste of fascist boots.
Again, mine, which you are refusing to answer because (my cooky theory) you might be afraid that your own fascist friends might get a hold of your post history and deem you not worthy:
1. Was killing of Ashley Babbit legitimate?
2. Should Trump have pardoned all the Jan 6th rioters, including the guy who beat the officer of the law with a flagpole?
3. (Bonus round) Is hitting someone with a flagpole while they are lying belly down more of a threat to an officers life then "accelerating" a car while turning the wheel away from the officer?
4. Would a different officer be justified at shooting someone beating his colleague with a flagpole?
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On January 14 2026 01:07 ChristianS wrote:
@Intro: eh, close enough. Thanks for your time, anyway. “Justified self-defense” and “a few mistakes” (traditionally “a few bad apples”) are classic fallback positions of rhetorically embattled conservatives, and the latter especially feels pretty evasive when we went through, at both high and low level, how ICE is not just occasionally or inadvertently overstepping legal limits; whole operations are clearly conceived, planned, and executed on the premise that they are wholly unaccountable to those legal limits. Their leaders – right up to the president himself – loudly insist that is the case, and none of these “mistakes” seem to provoke any remorse or promise to change the policy going forward. You don’t actually dispute any of those characterizations, and yet at the end of it you still can’t say anything about it but “well, I can tolerate a few mistakes, I’m not a utopian.”
That said, you do pretty much come out and say “it’s not really about law-abidingness in general, I just think the outcomes of this policy are good so I support them.” Which I read to mean, you can tolerate a great deal of lawlessness in pursuit of mass deportation because this isn’t just about “if we have a law we should enforce it.” You think mass deportation is good, and you’ll forgive a hell of a lot as long as mass deportations still happen.
I think your phrase for Trump a while back was that he’s usually “directionally right, but procedurally wrong,” which would seem to be a nice euphemism for “he breaks the law constantly, but he does it in pursuit of goals I approve of.” It’s not, then, a surprise to you that his signature policy is being carried out in brazenly lawless and unaccountable fashion, and no amount of evidence proving that would persuade you to oppose the policy, because you already know that’s the case and support it anyway.
So yeah, I think we more or less got there.
OK well I do have to at least briefly address this. I am granting that the examples you listed are bad. But that's partially because I'm seeing the heated opinions and hardline interpretations people have around here. I don't think the problem is nearly so dire, e.g. I think the shooting of Good was self-defense. And if it wasn't, i would want him prosecuted, in line with my previous statements. That's not a "fallback position" and your characterization as such makes me think perhaps there isnt as much understanding as i thought. Im only "tolerating lawlessness" in the same way that every non-anarchist is. So you see what I'm saying as "we'll if he's even justifying the shooting then there's no price he isn't willing to pay" but in my mind what I'm saying is the current cost is being grossly exaggerated especially by those who are going out of their way to make scene. So take that as you will. I kinda thought they should be fairly clear background but I just want to make it more explicit. It probably won't change your mind so I will still take your above post as written. I'm not advocating a "do what you can get away with" mentality.
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On January 14 2026 01:07 ChristianS wrote:+ Show Spoiler +@Intro: eh, close enough. Thanks for your time, anyway. “Justified self-defense” and “a few mistakes” (traditionally “a few bad apples”) are classic fallback positions of rhetorically embattled conservatives, and the latter especially feels pretty evasive when we went through, at both high and low level, how ICE is not just occasionally or inadvertently overstepping legal limits; whole operations are clearly conceived, planned, and executed on the premise that they are wholly unaccountable to those legal limits. Their leaders – right up to the president himself – loudly insist that is the case, and none of these “mistakes” seem to provoke any remorse or promise to change the policy going forward. You don’t actually dispute any of those characterizations, and yet at the end of it you still can’t say anything about it but “well, I can tolerate a few mistakes, I’m not a utopian.”
That said, you do pretty much come out and say “it’s not really about law-abidingness in general, I just think the outcomes of this policy are good so I support them.” Which I read to mean, you can tolerate a great deal of lawlessness in pursuit of mass deportation because this isn’t just about “if we have a law we should enforce it.” You think mass deportation is good, and you’ll forgive a hell of a lot as long as mass deportations still happen.
I think your phrase for Trump a while back was that he’s usually “directionally right, but procedurally wrong,” which would seem to be a nice euphemism for “he breaks the law constantly, but he does it in pursuit of goals I approve of.” It’s not, then, a surprise to you that his signature policy is being carried out in brazenly lawless and unaccountable fashion, and no amount of evidence proving that would persuade you to oppose the policy, because you already know that’s the case and support it anyway. So yeah, I think we more or less got there.
You figure out if these right-wingers want (secretly or not) to see me executed? That matters to me quite a bit, obviously, but it also matters in deciding, for instance, whether publicizing evidence of the administration doing something like that would be an effective persuasion strategy. If that kind of explicit political violence is something they’re in denial about, maybe so. If it’s what they wanted in the first place, it’ll only make them support the administration more, right?
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DOJ leaders are reportedly resigning in protest of not investigating the killing of Renee Nicole Good
Four of the leaders of a crucial division in the US justice department have resigned in protest over a decision not to investigate the recent fatal shooting of an unarmed US citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis – even as the FBI presses ahead with an inquiry into the victim instead.
The lawyers left the civil rights division, which has a criminal investigations unit that investigates the use of force by police officers, according to MS Now, citing three people it said were briefed about the departures.
It follows a decision by Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration-aligned assistant attorney general for civil rights, not to investigate the 7 January killing of Renee Nicole Good by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, as would be usual in the case of a shooting by law enforcement.
Multiple career prosecutors in Dhillon’s office offered to lead an inquiry into the shooting but were told not to do so, CBS News reported on Friday.
The resignations are the latest in a flow of departures from the civil rights division since Donald Trump began his second term a year earlier. In May, the Guardian reported that more than 250 attorneys had left, been reassigned, or accepted a deferred resignation offer since January, a roughly 70% reduction.
“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to see this as the end of the division as we’ve known it,” a civil rights division attorney told the Guardian at the time.
Subsequently, in September, the online news outlet Notus reported that only two lawyers remained out of 36 at the justice department’s public integrity unit assigned to investigations of corrupt politicians and law enforcement.
www.theguardian.com
Something tells me those two remaining lawyers have always worked for the corrupt officials.
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unfortunately this is an administration without shame and they will happily function without a civil rights division.
In fact they are no doubt happy for it to die.
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On January 14 2026 02:49 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2026 01:07 ChristianS wrote:
@Intro: eh, close enough. Thanks for your time, anyway. “Justified self-defense” and “a few mistakes” (traditionally “a few bad apples”) are classic fallback positions of rhetorically embattled conservatives, and the latter especially feels pretty evasive when we went through, at both high and low level, how ICE is not just occasionally or inadvertently overstepping legal limits; whole operations are clearly conceived, planned, and executed on the premise that they are wholly unaccountable to those legal limits. Their leaders – right up to the president himself – loudly insist that is the case, and none of these “mistakes” seem to provoke any remorse or promise to change the policy going forward. You don’t actually dispute any of those characterizations, and yet at the end of it you still can’t say anything about it but “well, I can tolerate a few mistakes, I’m not a utopian.”
That said, you do pretty much come out and say “it’s not really about law-abidingness in general, I just think the outcomes of this policy are good so I support them.” Which I read to mean, you can tolerate a great deal of lawlessness in pursuit of mass deportation because this isn’t just about “if we have a law we should enforce it.” You think mass deportation is good, and you’ll forgive a hell of a lot as long as mass deportations still happen.
I think your phrase for Trump a while back was that he’s usually “directionally right, but procedurally wrong,” which would seem to be a nice euphemism for “he breaks the law constantly, but he does it in pursuit of goals I approve of.” It’s not, then, a surprise to you that his signature policy is being carried out in brazenly lawless and unaccountable fashion, and no amount of evidence proving that would persuade you to oppose the policy, because you already know that’s the case and support it anyway.
So yeah, I think we more or less got there. OK well I do have to at least briefly address this. I am granting that the examples you listed are bad. But that's partially because I'm seeing the heated opinions and hardline interpretations people have around here. I don't think the problem is nearly so dire, e.g. I think the shooting of Good was self-defense. And if it wasn't, i would want him prosecuted, in line with my previous statements. That's not a "fallback position" and your characterization as such makes me think perhaps there isnt as much understanding as i thought. Im only "tolerating lawlessness" in the same way that every non-anarchist is. So you see what I'm saying as "we'll if he's even justifying the shooting then there's no price he isn't willing to pay" but in my mind what I'm saying is the current cost is being grossly exaggerated especially by those who are going out of their way to make scene. So take that as you will. I kinda thought they should be fairly clear background but I just want to make it more explicit. It probably won't change your mind so I will still take your above post as written. I'm not advocating a "do what you can get away with" mentality.
I mean… you’ll notice I haven’t actually talked about the shooting basically at all in this conversation. Not because it isn’t important, but because I’m just not very interested in having a CSI frame analysis argument. I admire the Bellingcat people, I think they’re good at their jobs, I feel no particular need to check their work or argue with you or oBlade or Nettles about what precise speed and angle the car was moving at or what this or that video shows.
I should say, I don’t doubt your sincerity in saying it was self-defense. I do wonder a little at the credulity involved; if a car is moving towards me, I don’t understand why transmuting the driver into a cadaver would ever make me any safer. Cadavers in driver seats tend to drop their feet into the gas pedal and accelerate in uncontrolled fashion, which is exactly what happened, no? The only time killing the driver would plausibly make me safer is if they were steering to hit me, otherwise getting out of the path of the vehicle is the only thing that makes me any safer.
But I don’t wonder that much, when you’re already so willing to catalogue all these other very obviously intentional abuses as “mistakes.” Pobody’s nerfect, right? But, like, the most plausible attempt at implementation of a policy you’ve wanted for decades (mass, indiscriminate deportation) is finally happening and you’re loathe to have to oppose it on procedural grounds. Those men with guns are solving a problem you’re very concerned about, and don’t know other solutions to, so you’re prepared to suspend a lot of disbelief if it enables you to just support them in an uncomplicated way.
I don’t mean to sound patronizing, this has been going on with conservatives (and liberals!) in response to questionable police shootings for a long time. If they’re the thing blue line between order and chaos, who are we to second-guess their methods? Any narrative that allows us to presume their innocence and good intentions is enormously attractive, whether or not it’s supported by close examination of the facts. I do think it’s, in some way, motivated reasoning, but only in a fairly generic way that all of us are guilty of from time to time.
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United States43987 Posts
If I was afraid of the driver of a car but didn’t think they were a terrorist about to drive into a crowd then I would note down their license plate number. The idea that these people were so afraid that she might drive into them that they approached and started circling her car doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Unless, of course, they wanted escalation and to use lethal force.
Essentially the reason why this wouldn’t happen anywhere else. In another country she’d just be mailed a ticket for a court appearance if they really cared about it.
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On January 14 2026 03:03 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2026 01:07 ChristianS wrote:+ Show Spoiler +@Intro: eh, close enough. Thanks for your time, anyway. “Justified self-defense” and “a few mistakes” (traditionally “a few bad apples”) are classic fallback positions of rhetorically embattled conservatives, and the latter especially feels pretty evasive when we went through, at both high and low level, how ICE is not just occasionally or inadvertently overstepping legal limits; whole operations are clearly conceived, planned, and executed on the premise that they are wholly unaccountable to those legal limits. Their leaders – right up to the president himself – loudly insist that is the case, and none of these “mistakes” seem to provoke any remorse or promise to change the policy going forward. You don’t actually dispute any of those characterizations, and yet at the end of it you still can’t say anything about it but “well, I can tolerate a few mistakes, I’m not a utopian.”
That said, you do pretty much come out and say “it’s not really about law-abidingness in general, I just think the outcomes of this policy are good so I support them.” Which I read to mean, you can tolerate a great deal of lawlessness in pursuit of mass deportation because this isn’t just about “if we have a law we should enforce it.” You think mass deportation is good, and you’ll forgive a hell of a lot as long as mass deportations still happen.
I think your phrase for Trump a while back was that he’s usually “directionally right, but procedurally wrong,” which would seem to be a nice euphemism for “he breaks the law constantly, but he does it in pursuit of goals I approve of.” It’s not, then, a surprise to you that his signature policy is being carried out in brazenly lawless and unaccountable fashion, and no amount of evidence proving that would persuade you to oppose the policy, because you already know that’s the case and support it anyway. So yeah, I think we more or less got there. You figure out if these right-wingers want (secretly or not) to see me executed? That matters to me quite a bit, obviously, but it also matters in deciding, for instance, whether publicizing evidence of the administration doing something like that would be an effective persuasion strategy. If that kind of explicit political violence is something they’re in denial about, maybe so. If it’s what they wanted in the first place, it’ll only make them support the administration more, right?
In Intro’s case, no, I don’t think he wants that. I think if the Trump administration saw my posts and decided to have me thrown out of a helicopter, he’d be quite upset by that, and if that was happening at scale, showing him evidence of that would be effective in persuading him they’re bad.
oBlade or Nettles, no clue.
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He would be quite upset by that and then still vote for them.
So he isn't a lick better than the others.
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On January 14 2026 05:20 Velr wrote:
He would be quite upset by that and then still vote for them.
So he isn't a lick better than the others.
For sure. Regrettable, but better than not enforcing the law at all.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZHN4smAcjR4/maxresdefault.jpg)
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