Comment by pfannkuchen

Comment by pfannkuchen a day ago

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What actions are being taken against legal immigrants and naturally born citizens?

Are you referring to getting arrested and released due to some suspicion (let’s say the suspicion is always fabricated for the sake of argument), or deported, or something else?

On due process, if someone accidentally gets a free flight to a foreign country, that totally sucks and they should be paid compensation, but let’s not pretend that deportation is the same as what authoritarian regimes typically do. Have people disappeared off the face of the earth? I think the Germans of the ‘30s would have a very different reputation if they had simply attempted to deport all the Jews…

dustractor a day ago

> Have people disappeared off the face of the earth?

It is established that hundreds of detainees from the July 2025 Alligator Alcatraz intake were unaccounted for in ICE’s online system by late August and reported as such through September 2025, with recurring reporting of about 800 with no online record and some 450 with unclear location data.

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komali2 a day ago

> On due process, if someone accidentally gets a free flight to a foreign country, that totally sucks and they should be paid compensation, but let’s not pretend that deportation is the same as what authoritarian regimes typically do.

Are you being facetious, or do you genuinely think so lightly of people being black bagged with no due process and deported to a random country that you'll joke about it being a "free flight?"

Also, you seem to not be aware that deportation and "voluntary deportation (via various forms of pressure)" of Jewish people was the step Nazi Germany did before the concentration camps.

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  • pfannkuchen 21 hours ago

    The way I think about this is, let’s say a lot of Americans are moving to Switzerland illegally by overstaying their visas. If I went along with that group, I would not be surprised to be deported by force. If I went there legally and got caught up in a raid or something, or even targeted personally because I sound American, and I get locked up for a bit and then sent back to America on an airplane, would I be upset? Absolutely I would be, that would be a terrible experience. But at the same time, I would understand that a lot of my countrymen are breaking Swiss law and the Swiss have to do something about it, and I can see why it might be hard to not make any mistakes. It would probably make me not want to go back to Switzerland.

    Is that not a valid take? Does it not apply somehow? If I put myself in their shoes, that is how I feel.

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    • komali2 15 hours ago

      Your take's premises have flaws.

      First off, maybe Americans do move to Sweden, and maybe sometimes they overstay their visas. On the other hand, for decades, various aspects of Sweden encourage this, such as the economic environment - turns out Swedes don't like picking apples, and if some Americans (a small percentage) don't overstay their visas, the apples don't get picked, and Sweden's apple industry collapses within a single season. So the society implicitly approves of having as many Americans as they can get, even if the government goes back and forth on the issue. As a result of this you have Americans with two generations of descendants that have lived in Sweden for decades and are undocumented or perhaps documented under some program that the new government of Sweden just decides it doesn't like. Or maybe they're citizens and the new government just wants to start denaturalizing.

      > or even targeted personally because I sound American

      I challenge you to really think deeply about this position. Think about what it means for a State to decide that all people from a whole bunch of different countries kinda look the same because of the color of their skin, or kinda have similar accents, and then just start arresting people based off of that. What does that mean for other people who happen to have accents? Who happen to have that one color of skin? Just typing it out makes me feel disgusted, it's flagrantly racist. Why don't you feel that way?

      Finally, I really deeply wish to impress upon you the critical importance of due process. It genuinely is All or None. There is no "due process for people who immigrated legally and no due process for people who immigrated illegally," because due process is the method that determines that. If due process is gone, there is no "oopsies we deported you by accident," and there is no "hang on a second, I'm an American, I don't even have a passport, just look at my driver's license!" Do you understand that when due process is suspended, nobody is safe from being black bagged? How could you justify that? How do you not immediately think of the SS?

      And all this for what? People being black bagged at the streets, people stuck in traffic tear gassed by high strung ICE agents, businesses being raided, all this violence because why? What actual problems were there from undocumented immigrants? Because deporting them is hurting the economy rather than helping it, so it wasn't the economy. Nobody's taking up the low paid fruit picking jobs that undocumented immigrants worked, so it wasn't for the jobs. Crime isn't going down, so it wasn't public safety. It's so transparently been a distraction from the failure of the ruling class to improve affordability that even my most stalwart of Trump supporting relatives are turning against it and looking to left economic populists like Mamdani.

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      • RHSeeger 12 hours ago

        > Finally, I really deeply wish to impress upon you the critical importance of due process. It genuinely is All or None.

        I the number of people who just do not get this staggering.

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mrguyorama 18 hours ago

ICE themselves states that only 70% of the people they arrest are even illegal aliens. Only 44% have prior criminal records or pending accusations.

Getting arrested with no valid cause doesn't "totally suck", it's a fundamental violation of the most basic rights of anyone living in a functioning country. As long as you can just pick up anyone you want, nobody has rights. You have a basic right to not be arrested for doing nothing wrong, and yet that's exactly what ICE is doing to tens of thousands of Americans.

>I think the Germans of the ‘30s would have a very different reputation if they had simply attempted to deport all the Jews…

Which is what they were literally doing. At first. But when you consider human beings as corrosive to your society, you will never be satisfied with just getting them out of your borders. The same people who treat prison rape as a good punishment for criminals will not be satisfied with illegal aliens just being removed, especially since they will "come back".

We've been through all this before. We literally signed treaties with Native Americans, but letting them have all this land just wasn't acceptable because they were "savages" that don't deserve it, and weren't being as useful with it as we would be!

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matthewmacleod a day ago

Of course this is where it starts. If you ever find yourself in the situation of saying “at least it’s not as bad as Nazi Germany” then you’re probably not heading in a good direction.

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  • andrepd a day ago

    While being mistaken about what Nazi Germany did (they did not, in fact, start gassing people in 1933; it began precisely with deportations).

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andrepd a day ago

> if someone accidentally gets a free flight to a foreign country

It's practically a vacation, you're right. I really don't know what they're complaining about /s

> think the Germans of the ‘30s would have a very different reputation if they had simply attempted to deport all the Jews...

There's no way you've just written that. I urgently suggest you to pick a history book.

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  • pfannkuchen 21 hours ago

    There is quite a lot of daylight between “something to complain about” and “authoritarian regime”. I never said they had “nothing to complain about”.

    I’m not trying to convince anyone that there isn’t authoritarian regime behavior happening. I am just trying to figure out what people are talking about when they refer to that as if it is happening.

    I am using “Germans of the ‘30s” as a euphemism. Obviously I know the timeline of what happened, you are just misinterpreting as an opportunistic drama nitpick. Whether the misinterpretation is happening consciously or subconsciously, I don’t know.

    If the “Germans of the ‘30s” had only ever done deportations, which they did do, i.e. had they stopped there, we would not view them in the same way. Ergo, if the current regime stops with deportations, which we have no evidence to show that they won’t, then there is nothing to suggest that they will end up behaving in an authoritarian way, because further massive steps are required to get there. And besides, the current American regime has tremendously more legal justification for these deportations than the Nazis had for the Jews deportation. The Nazis presumably had to change German law to even deport the Jews. No change of law is required here, because it is perfectly congruent with the existing legal framework (and was done consistently for decades prior to this administration, just more quietly and I guess in smaller numbers).

    It’s weird how slippery slope arguments are only valid in public discourse when it comes to the Nazis, and in that case it’s so valid it is just taken as a fact. Just because someone is doing something that can be squinted at to look like something that happened prior to a genocide, does not mean that it will lead to genocide. The ad absurdum version of this line of thinking would suggest banning vegetarianism or painting, as genocidal mania soon followed.

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