a) The kids in cages garnered significant press, public sympathy, and protest
b) I also lived in Austin during that time, and the scale and militarization of current ICE action is on another level to what it was in the early 10's
idk, i live in oakcliff in Dallas. Per google 20% of people in the area are undocumented. Elementary schools are around 50% undocumented and the area high schools around 30% if not higher. My son is in the second most selective magnet HS in DISD and half of his friend group is undocumented.
I haven't seen a single ICE raid in the 10 years i've lived in the area. I did see DHS do a raid on a house once but i've yet to even see ICE. I'm not saying they're not around but they certainly don't make their presence known in an area overflowing with undocumented immigrants. I keep waiting for the jack boots and armored vehicles to roll through and wholesale round everyone up like i read about but it seems business as usual all day every day in Oakcliff.
edit: Honestly, i think no one really cares about oakcliff anymore. Dallas PD does nothing about the constant gunfire at night or street racing. So it makes sense ICE is never alerted, i think the people who would alert ICE just don't bother. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
c) despite appearances and the current state of fear, Trump's second-term ICE has deported merely a fraction (0.6m) achieved under Obama's ICE (3m+), so if it's on a different level, it's clearly a lower one. Movement vs action, perhaps.
Is this the same stat where turning a person away at the border counted as a deportation during the Obama years? I’ve found the changing methodology to make comparisons troublesome
I think what's weird is comparing them based on the zeitgeist, photos, video, and sensationalism instead of whatever numbers are at hand. The fear and the danger are rarely the same.
Whether you think we should look at per-year numbers or the overall numbers, I'd say that most people count total progress of a thing moreso than the velocity, or the prices of things instead of the spot inflation rate.
I always feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people say no one complained under Obama since I distinctly remember people complaining at the time (maybe it just didn't make it to less left-wing circles?). It's also pretty trivial to find contemporaneous ACLU articles on it with specific complaints.
The liberal media did an absolutely bang-up job covering up Obama's tyranny, and the conservative media wasn't about to start punishing Obama for threatening them with a good time. So nobody in the media talked about it, even though left-wing activists were shouting from the rooftops about the Deporter-in-Chief.
Obama might have even campaigned on some of these issues, but DNC insiders are experts at making big promises up front and walking them back[0]. Hell, I'm pretty sure Obama deported more people more often than Trump did, at least in his first term. And when people were suing ICE over COVID-era border closures, Biden staffers were privately wishing the activists on their side would lose.
Keep in mind, open borders is a libertarian policy, not a left-wing one. American lefties tend to also skew libertarian, but the "liberals" running the DNC are basically just Republicans with a liberal accent. The uniparty is real.
[0] I'm already seeing this with Mamdani and Queenslink. He is, at the very least, letting the shitty Queensway "let's cover this old railway up with politically untouchable greenspace to make the car-owning NIMBYs happy by stopping Queenslink" plan continue forward.
So firstly: no significant group in the US is advocating for "open borders", that term is just a strawman as used in modern politics.
Secondly: "open borders is a libertarian policy, not a left-wing one" doesn't really make sense. Saying a particular policy is inherently part of only a single ideology just isn't how ideologies work. Also, if you're looking for anti-statists who view people from all countries as equal and are for people being able to choose which government to be under then the ideology that best fits that is "anarchism". If you're using a definition where "anarchism" and "libertarianism" are essentially the same then you're using a definition where "libertarian" isn't particularly right wing (which makes contrasting it to "left wing" not make sense).
Oh, that's not true that there aren't folks in the US in favor of "open borders".
There are a lot of us left-libertarians who are in favor of humans having the same rights as capital, we are just easy to ignore because it's not a very big group. But hey, we actually do work instead of just bitching about it, so our impact on ICE is maybe a little outweighed compared to the average Harris-voter who spends their sundays at brunch instead of doing stuff.
I make use of the strawman-y American terms because it's the easiest way to avoid getting into long drawn-out arguments about what words mean[0]. So I interpret "open borders" to mean "any immigration policy that is permissive enough that an unqualified migrant with no criminal history can enter a country, apply for a job, and be hired without any additional bureaucratic formalities". Ellis Island, essentially.
"Left" and "Right" are also effectively unmoored from definition (unless you happened to be sitting on a particular side of the room in the Estates General of 1789), so I'm using the Political Compass's definition of those terms. It's fairly safe to say that there are enough commonalities in rhetoric between, say, Kropotkin (left-libertarian) and Lenin (left-authoritarian) that you can put them on one side of a two-dimensional plane and not get laughed out of the room. Likewise, on the right, Mussolini (right-authoritarian) and Rothbard (right-libertarian) didn't agree on much either, but they both wanted what power did exist to be invested in corporations explicitly empowered to put profit over people. You can also make a pan-authoritarian pairing between Stalin and Hitler[1] and a pan-libertarian pairing between Kropotkin and Rothbard, with about the same level of in-fighting on all four sides.
Yes, the Political Compass's definitions have Problems, but they are useful enough to make my point, which is that people whose ideology skews against state power also tend to oppose the state imposing restrictions on entering or exiting a country.
If you want the best argument against my point, it's that right-libertarians can't decide if immigration is a human right to be supported or a welfare program to be abolished. Their argument tends to be something like "Social Security or Ellis Island, pick one". This is a false dichotomy, of course[2], but that wasn't my point. My point was that the American people generally do not care about immigration beyond "we need to get these scary-sounding South American gangs off the streets". America has done a bang-up job of isolating their people from immigration bureaucracy in such a way that most people aren't even aware of how authoritarian the current system is. People talk about "moving to Canada" like it's something people can just unilaterally decide to do, and as if Canada's immigration system wasn't morally equivalent to a rock and a sticky note that said "YOUNG COLLEGE-EDUCATED CHINESE, FRENCH, AND BRAHMIN INDIANS ONLY, ALL OTHERS NEED NOT APPLY".
[1] Insert joke about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact here.
[2] In practice, the way the EU handled this concern was to let member states put a waiting period on social benefits to prevent migrants from shopping around for the best welfare program to use.
If someone does something to nth degree, it's bad. If someone does something to (n*10)th degree, are the sheeple really at fault for reacting? Do you not behave the same way in your own life?
