Comment by rickydroll 4 days ago
Organized as in they have meetings, serve cookies, and coffee? Most likely not. These anti-ice groups seem to be extemporaneous meetups.
Define obstruction. Everything reported, blowing whistles, encouraging businesses not provide service to ICE agents, and recording from a distance is not obstruction. It's a First Amendment right to keep government forces in check.
You claimed organized crimes; not simply organized resistance. What crimes are they organizing?
Resistance itself is not criminal, especially when many of the actions they are resisting are themselves illegal. In fact, it is our civic duty to resist illegal or immoral actions by the government.
Nice non-sequitur. I asked what crime they allegedly committed, not whether it was organized.
Surely organizing and paying people to do things by itself is not a crime.
To answer your question, no, I don't think the organized activity is criminal, and I don't believe the alleged criminal activity is organized.
A question for you: using your definition, do you think that ICE is an organized crime group?
Sheriff's deputy gangs are organized criminals working within Sheriff's departments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...
ICE may well be a similar situation.
> Ah, so organised or criminal but not both?
No, this misses their point. They are organized and some within the organization commit crimes, that does not mean the crime is organized. Hence asking about whether you consider ICE to be such an "organized crime" group because they can be described as (1) an organization (2) some members of which have committed crimes.
> If you don’t believe the criminal activity is organised, you can find the PDFs distributed in the Signal groups which contain instructions on violating the law.
What PDFs can be found and what criminal activity do they refer to?
If this were true we would have a lot more violence from the left on our hands, but time and again the more violent acts seem to come from the right - see the sibling comment for references.
The left surely is not without violence, however it’s often (from what I’ve seen) reactionary or in self-defense. It’s rare to see left-leaning actors committing large-scale violence like school shootings, theater shootings, family massacres, plotting to kidnap elected officials, attempting to overturn elections, etc.
The only thing remotely similar from the left I can think of, in America, was the Weather Underground and they tried to ensure the buildings they bombed weren’t occupied, though iirc a night security guard they didn’t account for died in one (and from what I’ve heard from one of the leaders was that he was incredibly remorseful).
>comments like that just make me thing people on the left are just good at violence
That's as may be, but it's not for a lack of trying by the right. In fact, the overwhelming majority of political violence comes from the right[0]:
"There were about 300 acts of political violence in the United States from the January 6 attack to the 2024 election.[46][45] According to the research, that was the largest surge since the 1970s.[45] Political violence during the 2024 election was also at its highest since the 1970s, and most recent violence came from right-wing assailants.[46][2]
As of 2023, political violence comes "overwhelmingly from the right", according to the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, and other research.[3][41][48] The Anti-Defamation League found that all of the 61 political killings in the U.S. from 2022 through 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists.[49] A Princeton University study reported that the number of cases involving harassment and threats against local public officials had increased 74% in 2024 compared with 2022, totalling 600 cases.[50] Serious threats against federal judges doubled from 2021 to 2023 according to the U.S. Marshals Service.[25]"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence_in_the_Unit...
There are many anti ICE activists that are organized. ACLU and Indivisible are two such groups. There are many instances of people obstructing federal agents by anti ICE activists and protesters.