You keep saying “nullification”. Can you explain precisely what you mean by that?
Because as far as I’m aware, immigration law is not a concern of the state, and what folks typically mean when they say “nullification” in this context is “the state isn’t doing the fed’s job for them.”
You also brought up warrants to enter private property. What do you make of the incident a few days ago where an agent hopped a fence to arrest someone, without a warrant? Should we just ignore those violations of our rights?
>Because as far as I’m aware, immigration law is not a concern of the state, and what folks typically mean when they say “nullification” in this context is “the state isn’t doing the fed’s job for them.”
It's not just immigration law, it's any federal law. States have the right to ignore federal law if they like. This is called nullification. However, it very, very rarely happens because its inherently undemocratic. It especially rarely happens to the extent that cities and states pass explicit laws that order state law enforcement to ignore federal laws, and even work against the federal government's interests.
It's happened recently with marijuana legalization, with success. Where the federal government did some raids, but marijuana legalization is politically popular, so they backed off... and there has even been talk in some years of ending the illegality of marijuana federally.
State nullification has been somewhat unsuccessful with illegal immigration. These raids are the result of the federal government going its own way to enforce the law without cooperation of the states. The last time we saw this level of federal enforcement against state objection is after Brown v Board of Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
I good comparison to the seriousness of nullification as an act that is inherently an escalation is gun control laws. Suppose some red states wanted to just nullify the National Firearms Act -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act -- The are perfectly in their rights to ignore federal laws and allow firearms dealers to sell unregistered, suppressed, machine guns to felons. The only way neighboring blues states -- obviously outraged that this is happening -- can do anything about this is by seeking federal enforcement, again, which would include raids, arrests, etc.
>You also brought up warrants to enter private property. What do you make of the incident a few days ago where an agent hopped a fence to arrest someone, without a warrant? Should we just ignore those violations of our rights?
I'm very much not saying ICE is always acting within the law. Like any other policing force, they're going to make mistakes (intentional or otherwise). We should be very angry about those things, especially if they're happening in bad faith. The problem I see is that when we're yelling about actually -- and unfortunately -- legal things then those serious issues are just going to look like background noise. The other serious problem is that all this crying wold literally makes the left look undemocratic. You don't like the law? Fight to change it. Don't just take the ball and go home, and then cry when the neighbors come to your house to get the ball back.
There is a world of difference between “passing a state law that directly contradicts federal law” and “declining to proactively enforce federal laws in ways that are not required by those laws.”
To drive the point home: federal immigration laws are already enforced by federal agencies. Here in IL, state and local officials cooperate to the extent required by law. There are no federal laws on the books requiring them to do the job of the federal government for them (they could pass one, but they haven’t).
Calling that “nullification” is intellectually dishonest. As you said - “if you don’t like the law, fight to change it.” Don’t pretend it’s something it’s not.
>Here in IL, state and local officials cooperate to the extent required by law.
This is clearly false in regards to most federal laws. To illustrate this, I'll take an exceptional example. If there where a serial killer who was living in IL, but had only killed anyone in other states, I suspect that IL government would likely go out of their way to assist the Feds in apprehending this killer, even though this is not required by state law.
IL would likely do the same for many, if not most, federal laws. The point of nullification is exactly when the state does not help when asked, still there are reasons for practical resources there, but it becomes very obvious nullification when the state passes laws preventing individuals who would LIKE to help, like local policed departments, from helping even if they wanted to. And this is exactly what has happened in many blue states.
Pretending that's not overt nullification is unserious.
Not assisting with enforcement acts you don't feel are worthwhile is not nullification. I'm not engaging in "nullification" when I don't call the police on a jaywalker. Or I mean maybe you think this is, but then police engage in wildcat strikes all the time, or change enforcement priorities, or whatever you want to frame it as. Calling a difference in prioritization "nullification" wrong, especially if local police in immigrant communities want to maintain good relationships with those communities. I think it's laudable that some police forces show an interest in serving their communities interests, as opposed to yearning to be fashy.
> but it becomes very obvious nullification when the state passes laws preventing individuals who would LIKE to help, like local policed departments, from helping even if they wanted to. And this is exactly what has happened in many blue states.
Can you give examples?
Keep in mind, "sanctuary city" policies are usually actually supported by local police forces, because while they may look not tough on crime (and for this reason sometimes police forces halfheartedly lobby against them), they actually make on-the-ground local policing easier, because they engender trust between the local police force and immigrant communities who otherwise might not report crimes at all.
>I’m not going to engage with you if you’re going to get in multiple threads and refer to things as “fashy.”
>It’s difficult enough to engage in a heterodox view in good faith. I don’t need to deal with slapdash bullshit.
I see we've reached the point in the discussion where you 'abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating...that the time for argument is over.'
Good fascist! Nice fascist! Late for a Bund meeting, are we?
Source:
“Never believe that anti-Semites [or in this case, fascist apologists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre[0]
> 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).
Assassins? Nobody said that.
But my friend I can assure you they are, in fact, driving down the street and taking people who “look suspicious.”
(They also are doing more targeted things - both are true.)
In a way, the article understates how bad it is. I live in Chicago, and in my neighborhood every lamp post (and mailbox, and other surface) has a poster detailing your rights. “Fuck ICE” (and related) signs all over. Most businesses and a lot of houses in my neighborhood have signs explicitly stating that ICE is not welcome inside without a warrant. My coffee shop regularly has free whistles to take, so you can help alert others.
Just a few days ago I was working at a coffee shop and got a rapid response notice that ICE was about a block from me. I got a few more that day, all within a few blocks of my house.
It is incredibly stressful. I married people, have kids who are not white - they are a target. I pray every day that the next daycare raid isn’t my sons daycare, that ICE doesn’t stop my husband as he goes to work, that my mother-in-law doesn’t get snatched off the street when she walks to Target.
> Because you didn't tell it to make a "professional analytics application" for a while and then switch to nonsensical "unicorns and rainbows" at the end. You forgot to trick it into the "gotcha!" situation that OP intentionally created to make fun of the stupid AI.
Even if the OP initially asked for a “professional” application, this is hardly a “gotcha” situation - our tools should do what we ask!
I’m sure we could come up with some realistic exceptions, but let’s not waste our words on them: this is a pretty benign thing and I cannot believe we are normalizing the use of tools which do not obey our whims.
Our tools should not do what we ask if we ask them to do things they should not do.
If it were possible for a gun to refuse to shoot an innocent person then it should do that.
It just so happens that LLMS aren't great at making perfectly good decisions right now, but that doesn't mean that if a tool were capable of making good decisions it shouldn't be allowed to.
If you define the behavior of the system in an immutable fashion, it ought to serve as a guardrail to prevent anyone (yourself included) from fucking it up.
I want claude to tell me to fly a kite if I ask it to do something antithetical to the initially stated mission. Mixing concerns is how you end up spending time and effort trying to figure out why 2+2 seems to also equal 2 + "" + true + 1
> The chances of a citizen being targeted by ICE is low.
You can’t start with this premise, though. Recent rulings allow stops based on “probable cause” such as a combination of “speaks Spanish”, “is brown”, and “is in a place where we think illegal immigrants might be”.
So like: any Latino US citizen, who happens to be working someplace like a landscaping company. Or a kitchen.
The idea that citizens aren’t likely to be targets is now laughable. And we have ample reporting indicating that in fact, citizens are being detained, for hours and hours (if not longer).
Low doesn't mean zero, it means low. You might notice I used different terms for the different groupings, with the chance of a citizen being targeted by ICE as the highest overall at "low". ICE has so far deported more than 400,000 illegal aliens. [1] If they were "only" 99% accurate, you'd be able to find thousands of instances where things went wrong. Instead, you're looking more at tens to low hundreds of instances, so it's likely that their overall accuracy is somewhere in the 99.9% to 99.99% range.
And as I was demonstrating above, the conditional probabilities required for a false positive from this app mean that it's practical effective accuracy rate will likely be 100%.
> Instead, you're looking more at tens to low hundreds of instances
…based on what, the independent research ProPublica did? DHS doesn’t even keep statistics on how many citizens they detain so I’m not sure we should be assuming the numbers here are that low.
What I mentioned already. Being incorrectly detained isn't consequence free. People can and have successfully sued, winning substantial sums of money in the process. And we also live in the social media age where nothing gets more of those sacred likes and other such things (including that sweet sweet GoFundMe money) than framing oneself as a victim. And on top of this all immigration enforcement runs contrary to the corporate media's biases. They are actively trying to make a mountain out of every single molehill, yet they are clearly finding themselves annoyingly short of molehills.
In other words, ICE's errors are highly visible. That my approximation aligns with ProPublica's (which is probably a higher end ballpark since I doubt they were especially critical of any claims they discovered) is unsurprising.
> People can and have successfully sued, winning substantial sums of money in the process.
I would be quite interested to know if you can cite sources on that.
> And we also live in the social media age where nothing gets more of those sacred likes and other such things (including that sweet sweet GoFundMe money) than framing oneself as a victim.
What, exactly, is your argument here? That it’s all fine because you think people will play victim and strike it rich on GoFundMe? I’m struggling to see what point you’re actually trying to make.
> They are actively trying to make a mountain out of every single molehill, yet they are clearly finding themselves annoyingly short of molehills.
Sources? Please list out what molehills were made into mountains. What evidence do you have that they are actively trying to do it because of their “bias”? You’re regurgitating tired, right-wing talking points. Back it up with evidence if you’re so sure about it.
> which is probably a higher end ballpark since I doubt they were especially critical of any claims they discovered
Well, sure. Let’s see some evidence that they weren’t critical enough with their reporting. My understanding is that they are a highly respected journalistic outfit. What makes you so sure they were playing fast and loose with the facts?
Here [1] is a case where somebody won $150,000 for being detained for 12 hours. The cases aren't especially difficult to search for yourself, so I'm not sure why you're asking me. I can actually respond to everything else you said with an example from ProPublica's story you cited [2], to emphasize that I'm not cherry picking cases to make my point! Scroll down about 25% of the way and you'll get their first inline video example of "Rafie Ollah Shouhed".
Now go frame by frame at about the 5.5s mark. You can see the individual in question charge and then thrust his body in front of the responding ICE officer (watch how he leans left into the officer before they are in physical contact) to create a physical altercation. He then attempts to grab the legs of the officer as he jogs away. The same guy then comes out for more, and pushes one ICE officer dealing with somebody else, and then starts grappling with another ICE officer before he's finally tackled and arrested.
Media Framing:
- Surveillance footage shows Ice agents pushing 79-year-old man to the ground (Guardian)
- Car wash owner files $50M claim over injuries sustained during immigration raid (ABC)
- 79-year-old US citizen pinned by ICE agents (Fox)
- U.S. citizen files civil rights claim after ICE raid at his car wash (NBC)
As this is the first video ProPublica featured, presumably they think that's the most compelling case. In any case it's certainly one of their cases which are supposed to be injust, yet there wasn't even the slightest injustice there whatsoever. And now he wants $50 million lol. I'd also add that ProPublica implies that the government dropping charges in cases is because of lack of merit. In reality it's going to be a balance of gain:loss from such. This is one of those cases where the charges were dropped, but obviously that was not done for lack of merit.
What you see as “thrusting” sure looks to me like he was trying to stop himself from a full-on run - why did he grab a door handle on the wall? Why would you grab and pull like that if you were trying to tackle?
And “grabbing his legs”… come on man. That looks a hell of a lot like an old man flailing after getting tackled.
And you think he grappled with the officer before getting arrested outside? It looks like precisely the opposite.
I didn't say he was trying to tackle, I said he was trying to create a physical altercation, probably with the premeditated goal of trying to sue and/or buy time for the likely illegal aliens working for him - not only for their sake, but because hiring illegal aliens is a felony. I don't believe you believe that he just 'accidentally fell' exactly on the officer exactly as he came into range.
The reason he grabbed the door handle is because in his mind he thought he was going to be the one knocking the officer down. He's a big and very aggressive guy that's this spry at 79 - I'm positive this wasn't even remotely close to his first rodeo. He grabbed on to help maintain balance.
As another issue he wasn't running anywhere in particular, except towards the officer. As soon as he collides, he then gets up from crashing into him he turns around and starts racing back towards him again. He then pushes the other officer at 28 seconds and begins grappling with yet a third officer at 30 seconds. He's then tackled at 35 seconds.
Given he was not arrested for intentionally crashing into the first officer I think ICE was generally trying their hardest to ignore him, but that probably became impossible about the point he actively decided to start grappling with them.
> probably with the premeditated goal of trying to sue and/or buy time for the likely illegal aliens working for him
My bad. Didn’t realize you already knew his heart, and that this was premeditated. And that you clearly know who his employees were and that they were here illegally.
Whoops. Since we know they’re guilty, I guess all that’s left to do is find the evidence!
Enjoy yourself. I won’t engage in this uncharitable, ugly discussion with you anymore. I hope you find peace in you heart, and I hope others treat you with the charity and dignity you’re clearly unwilling to give others.
Feel free to try to create a plausible explanation for his aggressive behavior otherwise. Why would you say he was running towards the office officer only to 'accidentally' land on him right as he passed him? And then why would he go outside, push one officer, and begin grappling with another? This is not how normal people behave.
He actually gave an explanation for this which we clearly know is a lie - he claimed that "when he tried to speak with the agents and show them the legal paperwork for his employees, they shoved him to the ground, and at least one agent put his knee on Shouhed’s neck." [1] He probably wasn't aware the outside altercation had been recorded. Where's the paperwork? And in this case 5 illegal aliens were arrested, including one who had already been arrested and deported twice previously.
There's a balance to all things in life. Obviously we should not be blindly prejudiced against individuals on one extreme, yet on the equal but opposite extreme one can be so open minded that your brain falls out.
Available reporting indicates that judge ruled on Thursday, and that DHS deported on Friday. Moreover, available reporting also indicates:
> DHS and ICE did not respond to questions from The Associated Press seeking additional details on the timeline and how officials receive federal court orders.
So they aren’t clarifying anything. Odd.
And don’t forget back in March, when the administration publicly asserted that oral orders from a judge carried no authority and that they would only heed written orders.
When you put those two together, one wonders: perhaps DHS is playing fast and loose with timelines again.
Why on earth would you treat anything they say as if it were truthful or reliable? They have lost the right to be treated as trustworthy by default.
Are you suggesting a government agency is just making things up in official communications?
If that’s the case you must also assume the deportee is lying as well? Between the two it’s the deportee who has the bigger incentive to make things up.
If we’re going to go with those assumptions there is no point in even discussing it because neither of have any facts to base an argument on.
So why should I believe anything they say these days? They are blatantly lying, in ways that are manifestly obvious to anyone that is willing to look. We don’t owe the presumption of good faith to people who time and again have been publicly caught lying - and worse, who haven’t even tried to correct the record.
Half of your sources are other government officials. That kind of runs counter to your argument that you can't rely on government official statements to be true, no?
And let's look at the Reason article. "Martinez also was taken to the hospital by ambulance, and the criminal complaint against her only mentions two cars, not 10."
Ok, so the DHS "lied" about being boxed in by 2 not 10 cars. That seems to miss the forest for the tree no? The DHS agents were still boxed in - normally threatening federal law enforcement officers is illegal, no?
If someone is taking the time to refute ChatGPT’s output and telling you why the answer isn’t applicable in a given situation, it certainly implies that ChatGPT wasn’t “correct enough” at all.
What situations do you think it’s fine to be “correct enough?”
But this person says they want to refute it in every situation.
Some people seem to make a hobby of refuting the output of others. So no, I don’t trust the implication that if somebody spends time refuting it that it must be worth refuting.
In my experience (with both people-output and ChatGPT-output) my goal is to not refute anything unless it absolutely positively must be refuted. If it’s a low-stakes situation where another person has an idea that seems like it might/will probably work, let them go nuts and give it a shot. I’ll offer quick feedback or guiding questions but I have 0 interest in refuting it even if I think there’s a chance it’ll go wrong. They can learn by doing.
When you step back far enough, ultimately the governments power is derived from the consent of the governed (as the Declaration of Independnce puts it).
SCOTUS can decide what the “strict bounds of the law” is, within our current system of government. But it is wise to heed what the people want the law to actually be - since their consent is truly what matters. Any government is ultimately powerless if the people decide it is so.
The people elected the politicians who appointed the Supreme Court justices (the governed giving their consent).
If the losing side wants to get politicians into power who are more sympathetic to their causes, they should try to appeal to governed. We overwhelmingly voted for a government that would prioritize us over legal and illegal immigrants, H-2As, H2-Bs, and H-1Bs from countries where ethnic nepotism imported to be weaponized against us.
Maybe it's not productive to compare immigration enforcement (law enforcement) to Nazis (who, by the way, mass murdered 75% of Europe's Jewish population).
Maybe it hurts their credibility when the American middle class is obviously being priced out, and their solution it to vilify us, while they give sanctuary to people who broke the law and illegally entered (or overstayed), from the poorest countries in the world, to compete with the poorest Americans for work and for housing.
Then they'll say "Americans don't want to do those jobs!" That's only partially right. Americans don't want to work for a wage that is on par with the minimum a Honduran illegal will take. Americans had no problem doing agricultural work in the 50's. My Grandpa is 93, and he still gets a pension from Hormel from his decades of work in a meat processing plant in Iowa. Americans always did this work, and every other type of work, until we were systematically pushed out of every blue collar profession by illegal immigrants (and now legal). And they're not stopping there, H-1Bs and other legal work visas are coming for the rest of us, too. Every single field from the lower to the upper middle class is being deliberately undercut by immigration.
The absolutely nutty thing about all of this is that it's all just a giant show. Obama deported 420,000 illegals in 2013, which comes out to 35,000 per month. The most this administration has deported in any one month was 18,000 in June. Suddenly this admin is no longer "within the strict bounds of the law," and the biggest issue you take with all of this is that your rioters, activists, and misfits spent a day in jail for civil disobedience, and that the cops are wearing masks?
> The people elected the politicians who appointed the Supreme Court justices (the governed giving their consent).
I seem to recall a recent instance where a Supreme Court seat was stolen from the politician with the right to appoint them. But, sure, we all consented to these specific justices. Sure.
> We overwhelmingly voted
Ah… that is not at all how the vote went. The popular vote, as I’m sure you know, was a difference of less than 2%. The electoral college ensures that it looks “overwhelming,” but you and I both know that this administration was not elected with an “overwhelming” in any sense of the word. It’s propaganda.
The middle of your rant is just kinda filled with dog-whistles and half-truths, so I’m not going to bother with that.
> Suddenly this admin is no longer "within the strict bounds of the law," and the biggest issue you take with all of this is that your rioters, activists, and misfits spent a day in jail for civil disobedience, and that the cops are wearing masks?
They’re arresting citizens on the street with no probable cause, and publicly lying about why the arrests were made and the circumstances around them. Yes, it is a huge issue. And yes, the masks bother me: accountability matters in law enforcement.
The reason you don’t care is that you think somehow this cruelty will benefit you and people who look like you.
No probable cause? So you are truly convinced that out of hundreds of thousands of interactions with ICE, those 170 people who were actually arrested, didn't meet any of these criteria for arrest? Are you really that far gone?
A protestor's actions are arrestable if they meet statutory elements:
- Physically blocking police movement or access (e.g., surrounding a patrol car or blocking arrests).
- Touching, grabbing, or standing too close after a lawful order to back away.
- Ignoring a lawful dispersal order after being warned.
- Using amplification or crowd behavior that prevents officers from issuing commands or making arrests.
Officers typically move to arrest when:
- They’ve given clear, repeated commands (e.g., “Move back,” “Clear the street”) that are ignored.
- The person’s proximity or actions create a safety risk (blocking traffic, interfering with detainment).
- A dispersal order is issued and disobeyed.
- The crowd shifts from peaceful to physically obstructive or destructive.
>> "The reason you don’t care is that you think somehow this cruelty will benefit you and people who look like you."
This doesn't work anymore. If you're this committed to being a victim, and claiming racism whenever you experience cognitive dissonance, that's your problem. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it anymore, and it would probably do you and others like you a benefit to read the room.
> So you are truly convinced that out of hundreds of thousands of interactions with ICE
What time frame are you thinking of here? It’s very easy to minimize problems if you’re defining the time frame to be years, or something. It’s better to focus on the stark changes in enforcement behavior more recently, I would think.
> those 170 people who were actually arrested, didn't meet any of these criteria for arrest? Are you really that far gone?
For starters, as the article notes - 170 was just the number of US citizens that were arrested, and specifically the number that ProPublica could verify independently, since the government does not keep the statistics themselves. I think that’s important to call out, since the scale of the problem is important.
But the bigger problem is that you’re defining the “typical” behavior - and the “typical” behavior is not what’s happening. Just yesterday, for instance, a judge in IL stated that she was extremely concerned that ICE was not following her orders regarding tear gas - that it was being deployed with no warnings.
And moreover, a different district court judge in IL and three different judges on appeal held that the stories coming out of DHS appear to be completely unreliable!
So - yes, I actually feel pretty good about asserting there likely wasn’t a reason for those arrests. Perhaps there were in some cases, but the lies from the administration make it nearly impossible to tell.
> This doesn't work anymore. If you're this committed to being a victim, and claiming racism whenever you experience cognitive dissonance, that's your problem. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it anymore, and it would probably do you and others like you a benefit to read the room.
What doesn’t work, exactly? And when you say “others like you” - what do you mean by that? What kind of person do you think I am? Why do you assume I experience cognitive dissonance?
> What doesn’t work, exactly? And when you say “others like you” - what do you mean by that? What kind of person do you think I am? Why do you assume I experience cognitive dissonance?
Well since you’re the one who started playing identity politics and making assumptions about “people who look like me,” implying that I’m racist because I have a different opinion about a topic, how about you start out by clarifying what you meant about “people who look like me?”
I’d respond to your other points, but since we’re playing this game, it’s clear that you’re debating in bad faith.
I certainly haven't called you a racist - but given that you seem to support these slapdash ICE raids where agents have no way of knowing who's a citizen and who's not, either you believe in a magic citizen-detecting wand or you're ok with ICE agents doing some profiling.
> No probable cause? So you are truly convinced that out of hundreds of thousands of interactions with ICE, those 170 people who were actually arrested, didn't meet any of these criteria for arrest? Are you really that far gone?
The article itself is saying that and listed in the large summary box at the top. [edit] and at the very bottom of the article they detail "How We Did This" and gives more details on the numbers
We found more than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests.
Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.
Out of the 170 that that ProPublica could review, only 130 of them were taken "for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers".
That means the others were not.
There are many reports of Americans being detained at their place of work. I'll leave links in the case that you truly believe every US Citizen detained was because they were at a protest and assaulting officers. [0][1][2] There are more if you care to do a simple search
I have zero sympathy for anyone who initiates attacks on any law enforcement and finds themself arrested; in the same way I have zero tolerance for US Citizens being rounded up for matching a profile of people who lived here long before my ancestors ever landed in Virginia. The burden of proof is on the officers whose paycheck also comes from the citizens they are roughing up or humiliating in front of their families/workplaces. It's uncalled for and it's un-American
> This doesn't work anymore. If you're this committed to being a victim, and claiming racism whenever you experience cognitive dissonance, that's your problem. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it anymore, and it would probably do you and others like you a benefit to read the room.
You are aware that the Supreme Court recently ruled that race was a valid pretext for an ICE stop, right? Do you need me to Google it for you?
This is not about reading the room. Whatever anti-woke crusade you're on is irrelevant to this discussion - there are actual, naked facts that you are ignoring so that you can "sleep at night."
Seeing that your account is the one that is days old I can understand that you may have not yet taken the time to read the guidelines and am leaving this link to help you avoid similar faux pas in the future.
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Help! I'm trying to have a serious discussion on the Internet but this guy is incapable of dealing with data and facts and keeps accusing the windmills of being too woke.
Perhaps typical, but it certainly puts the lie to the claims of violent protests coming out of the administration, and shows how hollow their justifications are for federalizing the national guard.
Because if it was as bad as they claim, they wouldn’t be letting people off the hook like this.
No there absolutely are protesters who are rightfully arrested, but the cost to prosecute is not worth it to the DA so they drop the case. Protesters really like to be in this grey area of legality so that you can write articles like this.
If the protests truly were as violent as the administration claims, if ICE agents were truly out there fighting for their lives, etc … then they would prosecute. It wouldn’t be “not worth it” to prosecute if things were really that dire.
Law enforcement don't have to be "fighting for their lives" in order to arrest you. The
Cops can and will arrest you if you're impeding their duties. Prosecutors don't have to charge you, and often don't when it comes to political activism. Doesn't mean they can't, the people who are released without charge are being given a break, I wouldn't be outraged over that. And we're talking about 170 citizens who were definitely protesting and interfering with police duties, out of tens hundreds of thousands of police interactions. This is a big fucking nothing burger and you are all losing your minds.
A protestor's actions are arrestable if they meet statutory elements:
- Physically blocking police movement or access (e.g., surrounding a patrol car or blocking arrests).
- Touching, grabbing, or standing too close after a lawful order to back away.
- Ignoring a lawful dispersal order after being warned.
- Using amplification or crowd behavior that prevents officers from issuing commands or making arrests.
Officers typically move to arrest when:
- They’ve given clear, repeated commands (e.g., “Move back,” “Clear the street”) that are ignored.
- The person’s proximity or actions create a safety risk (blocking traffic, interfering with detainment).
- A dispersal order is issued and disobeyed.
- The crowd shifts from peaceful to physically obstructive or destructive.
This process is completely separate from the decision to prosecute those who are arrested. Often, protestors are not prosecuted for political and economic reasons. It's not a crime to arrest someone and not charge them. It's not a violation of the constitution. Nothing has to be dire.
Especially given that they have brought charges against people for trivial shit and then had juries give not-guilty verdicts because the charges are obviously bullshit.
I don’t know if the means matter much - the outcomes are the same. One side could rely on their activist group networks to pressure decision makers and the other side is using their corporate connections to do the same.
The government isn’t doing anything directly in either case. End of day the network made this choice.
> The government isn’t doing anything directly in either case. End of day the network made this choice.
The kindest read here is that you are unaware of the FCC’s comments on the matter.
Unfortunately, the government actually did do something - they put their thumb on the scale and implied severe consequences if the network did not follow through.
This is a massive difference. It is extremely chilling.
And I’ll say if it is overreach, which it well could be, it too will be punished in due time. Previous regimes largess is currently being punished. Endless cycle.
Because as far as I’m aware, immigration law is not a concern of the state, and what folks typically mean when they say “nullification” in this context is “the state isn’t doing the fed’s job for them.”
You also brought up warrants to enter private property. What do you make of the incident a few days ago where an agent hopped a fence to arrest someone, without a warrant? Should we just ignore those violations of our rights?