When people living otherwise-blameless lives begin getting accosted, beaten, or killed on suspicion of the legal equivalent of unpaid parking tickets, then yes, the new enforcement occurring is indeed "evil."
When they start willfully breaking all sorts of other major laws and violating court-orders to enforce the minor law, yes, that's usually evil.
When rationales last-used to jail innocent Japanese-Americans into US "internment" camps during World War II are being resurrected to declare entire nationalities as foreign invaders, yes, that sure looks a lot like the evil it was before.
When people are being snatched off the streets and then shuffled constantly between prisons purely so that their own lawyers cannot find them to challenge their detention, that is evil.
When you're not just normally deporting people under US law, but start sending them--without trial or even charges--to rot for the rest of their lives in an El Salvador torture-prison run by a paid dictator accomplice, YES, that's f***ing evil!
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I could continue, but I won't, because those should be ample examples for normal Americans who've had over a year to watch all these well-documented things happen... and there is no amount will be enough for someone that secretly likes the evil when it happens to others.
I would argue that wherever you're getting your news from is lying by omission and you have no idea what's actually happening out there.
Alternatively, you're engaging in willful ignorance.
Yes, it's reasonable to want to enforce immigration laws, but ICE has been engaging in outright criminal behavior. Arresting and imprisoning US citizens, denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them.
Meanwhile, ICE and DHS are lying constantly on their social media pages.
Sure, ICE does have the authority to perform arrests for some crimes unrelated to immigration, that's not what I'm referring to. ICE is arresting US citizens based on immigration charges.
Tacking on: I feel that is also just secondary "icing on the cake" versus the bigger problem you identified in the rest of your sentence, a portion which they ignored.
Actually, hold up for a second... What kind of self-described "lawyer" could possibly ignore that portion... except by operating in bad-faith?:
> denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them.
Right, even if ICE/CBP were somehow only grabbing non-citizens and only for reasons vaguely within their legal mandate, that other behavior is still criminal. Those constitutional rights, and protections from the court system, apply to everyone in US jurisdiction regardless of their immigration status.
For anyone interested in more detail: "How ICE defies judges’ orders to release detainees, step by step" [0].
Go try the same in a non-Western country and report the comparative experience.
Histrionics over normal law enforcement that is tame and well-regulated by global standards is embarrassing — it makes Americans look uneducated and childish.
The majority of Americans support immigration enforcement, the majority does not support how it's being done. Enforcement of the law is not the evil you see people being upset about.
Other comparable countries also having roving gangs of secret immigration police that are unbound by the law and the only departments responsible for overseeing them are managed by the same boss that controls them?
Let's start with abandoning science funding, abandoning investments in and tax credits for renewable energy sources that are the future. Then there's applying political pressure to academic institutions to drive even more researchers away, abandoning the civil service and science/reason-based governance. Move over to the medical sector and put a dangerous anti-science nut in charge, kill off funding and research.
You pull out of international organizations, trade deals, and treaties. You throw temper tantrums and tariffs around, flip flopping day to day and making it impossible to predict the costs of doing business. You antagonize the rest of the world and give them a constant stream of reasons to stop doing business with you, leaving you isolated, weaker, and poorer.
Then, sure, let's go briefly to immigration. America has been great because it has been where all the smartest people want to be. Our political and academic environment caused the smartest people around the world to want to be here, and the US benefited massively from their contributions and inventions.
So you build a culture demonizing anyone not a specific shade of white. You destroy visa programs. You send thugs to universities to harass people and make them unwelcome. You tell students and researchers who went home to see family that they can't come back to the US. Then you send thugs into cities to terrorize and murder people. So you give all those brilliant scientists even more reason to leave the US, take their contributions with them, and never return.
Idk, I think a much more effective way to destroy the US would be to send armed gangs through the streets and have them kidnap people from their houses at random.
That would cause far more destruction than merely telling people you were doing that without actually doing it.
The people doing the arresting have no ID and wear masks, arrest people without any evidence, throw them in detention centers and then deny them their legal right to a bond hearing and instead detain them indefinitely. Even someone like you should understand, police are not the judges, they can arrest someone but detaining them for a long period of time requires ascertaining their legal status and offering a chance for bond. The judges also overwhelmingly ruled the same thing, while ICE is directly disobeying their legal orders. If they were law enforcement, they would be following the law not breaking it.
Arresting people solely on the basis of their skin color or having an accent is akin to kidnapping. How many legal residents and citizens are you comfortable with being arrested without a sound legal basis? My number is zero.
It always has been in America. Literally, the history of policing starts with armed gangs looking for escaped slaves, and never went away from those roots. You can see this in their "us or them" combative mentalities, their utter refusal to hold officers accountable even when obviously guilty, their tactics when governments try to impose rules on them, and everything else they do.
How are they not? They’re definitely armed, so only the “gang” part is questionable. Wikipedia says:
“A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime.”
I’d say that fits some law enforcement pretty well.
