“Federal agencies created in times of crisis are rarely well thought out, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is no exception. ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, was created in 2002 in reaction to the previous year’s September 11 attacks. The federal body tasked with handling all things national security was empowered, via ICE, to target and deport the country’s largely peaceful population of undocumented immigrants—and ICE has operated as if those missions are two sides of the same coin.
ICE has several subagencies, but its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) component is both the largest and what most people think of when they hear ICE. Its mission is to find, arrest, and remove undocumented immigrants. In practice, that results in agents invading the personal and professional lives of migrants who have called the country home for years, are parents to U.S. citizens, and have contributed economically and socially to their communities, tearing all that apart over a long-ago border crossing or visa overstay. It is a militaristic mission that effectively turns nonviolent immigrants into fugitives.
Presidents may set different guidelines for ICE’s enforcement wing. Some presidents have prioritized the removal of violent offenders and people deemed national security threats, deprioritizing those without criminal records or with only minor charges. But President Donald Trump broadened ICE’s enforcement mandate significantly, essentially making all undocumented immigrants targets for removal.
Under those terms, ICE carried out controversial (and mind-boggling) enforcement activities against migrants who couldn’t possibly pose a risk equal to the force used against them. There are countless such stories: An undocumented man driving without his license was bringing his pregnant wife to a scheduled cesarean section when ICE took him into custody; ICE fought to send Iraqi Christians back to a homeland where they feared persecution; it deported the caretaker of a 6-year-old paraplegic boy. Far from just targeting undocumented immigrants, ICE has swept up people of all immigration and residency statuses—from arresting a longtime legal permanent resident who was tending his lawn to mistakenly deporting dozens of U.S. citizens. Those stories may ebb and flow from administration to administration, but the potential for abusive enforcement is always there.
ICE has routinely shown itself to be an overreaching and unaccountable agency. Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology found that ICE has scanned the driver’s license photos of one in three American adults and could access the driver’s license data of three in four American adults. The agency boasts a “long history of impersonating police officers, abusing immigrants in ICE detention, [and] building a vast surveillance network of data purchased from brokers and other legally questionable means,” reported Electronic Privacy Information Center Counsel Jake Wiener.
ICE’s budget has steadily increased since the agency’s creation in 2003, from $3.7 billion ($6.4 billion in current dollars) to $9.1 billion in FY 2024. The ERO’s work force has nearly tripled in the same time period, reaching 7,711 in FY 2024. It’s worth asking tough questions about the return on investment, but few politicians are willing to do so because they largely view ICE as an indispensable tool.
Many of the issues ICE purports to address would be better solved by overhauling the U.S. immigration system. The country’s undocumented immigrants are overwhelmingly a benefit, not a liability. It makes far more sense to bring them out of the shadows by providing a pathway to citizenship than to use government force to upend their lives. Reducing the incentives that drive illegal immigration, such as expanding work visa pathways and streamlining visa and green card processing, would further reduce whatever issues ICE currently thinks it must solve.
ICE is tasked with disrupting American communities and families at great cost and little benefit to taxpayers. Some important duties fall under its umbrella—there is a role for the government to play in detaining and deporting actually dangerous migrants, for one—but such things were handled before its creation, and they can be handled again by relevant law enforcement agencies. ICE’s current powers and central deportation mission are neither appropriately sized nor easily reformed. It would be much better for the government to extend an olive branch to nonviolent undocumented immigrants, reassign ICE’s useful functions elsewhere, and let the agency go once and for all.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-ice-2/
The U.S. needs to manufacture more ammunition for the military. Stocks are too low!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USX6yuv6J_Q
“What would be better than FOIA?
An employee of a federal agency, who was sick of constantly having her email searched for records requests, once floated the idea to me of proactive disclosure: Just redact and release everyone’s emails on a rolling basis.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/abolish-foia/
Biden missing in action as Turkey inches closer to full-blown war against US-allied Kurds in Syria
https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-missing-action-turkey-inches-205703408.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkXJiEzWxFs
“Qualified immunity allows government officials to avoid liability even in cases where courts find that they violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights. Defenders of qualified immunity say it protects police from frivolous lawsuits, but in practice it also short-circuits credible allegations of civil rights violations before they ever reach a jury.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/14/supreme-court-wont-hear-a-qualified-immunity-case-where-a-cop-disclosed-an-abuse-report-to-a-womans-abuser/
“the Treasury Department issued another reminder about the cost of doing nothing to change course. The national debt hit $36 trillion—less than four months after surpassing the $35 trillion mark.
Evenly divided, that means every American is now six figures in the red, thanks to the decisions made in Washington, D.C., over the past few decades. The trajectory ahead looks no better. The federal government is on pace to run multitrillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future—and that’s the rosy scenario, which assumes no recessions, wars, pandemics, and the like. Measured against the size of the U.S. economy, the debt is approaching the record high set in the final year of World War II. The rising debt means higher annual interest payments that will complicate the federal budget, likely require higher taxes, and make everyone poorer.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/15/the-national-debt-just-hit-36-trillion-does-trump-have-a-plan-to-control-it/
“Last year, student-led protests over the Israel-Hamas war broke out at dozens of college campuses. With the new school year well underway, student demonstrations have begun again in earnest.
While many students expressed their opposition to the war in Gaza through peaceful means, some protests devolved into property destruction, trespassing, and even violence on a handful of college campuses, including at some of America’s most elite universities. Many students erected large encampments claiming public space on campuses—a form of protest that colleges are generally free to limit under reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), attempts to deplatform speakers were surging by this April. Of the 67 attempts it had recorded from January to mid-April, 73 percent involved controversy surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So how did a year of raucous—and occasionally disruptive and destructive—protest affect student opinions on free speech?
In September, FIRE released its fourth annual College Free Speech Rankings. The survey, which polled almost 60,000 undergraduates from more than 250 colleges, asked students a wide range of questions about free speech and the campus climate affecting it. The survey—as in past years—also asked questions about whether they would find it acceptable for students to engage in various kinds of disruptive protests of a hypothetical controversial speaker on campus.
About 37 percent of respondents agreed it was “sometimes” or “always” acceptable for students to shout down a campus speaker; last year, only 31 percent said the same. In all, fewer than one in three students said that it would “never” be acceptable to shout down a speaker.
Less than half of all students said it was “never” acceptable to protest by blocking other students from attending a controversial speech—a decline from last year’s 55 percent. Nearly one in three said they would support violence to stop a campus speech in at least some circumstances. In 2023, only 27 percent of students said the same.
These results don’t necessarily show the percentage of students who would engage in these activities themselves—rather, they reveal the proportion of students who might condone actions from other students that restrict speech. ”
https://reason.com/2024/11/16/censorship-on-campus/
Republicans don’t like federal agencies.
https://reason.com/2024/11/18/infographic-how-republicans-and-democrats-view-federal-agencies/
“The US shipbuilding industry is a shadow of what it was in the final years of the Cold War. The Navy is reliant on only a handful of major shipbuilders that design and construct different ship classes: Huntington Ingalls Industries (aircraft carriers, submarines, amphibious ships, destroyers), General Dynamics (submarines, destroyers, support ships), and Fincantieri Marinette Marine Corporation (frigates). Higher production rates would require infrastructure costs and a larger workforce. Repair and maintenance are likewise constrained by the few public yards available.
A Department of the Navy review earlier this year found that top US Navy shipbuilding projects, from new submarines to surface ships, are delayed by years and facing ballooning costs.
The longest project delays, expected to be at least three years, are for the coming Block IV Virginia-class attack submarines and the Constellation-class guided-missile frigate. The Navy’s first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, a priority for the Pentagon, isn’t expected to arrive until 12 to 16 months after its planned delivery, potentially leaving a hole in readiness plans for the nation’s nuclear forces. And the Navy’s next Ford-class carrier, USS Enterprise, faces a delay of 18 to 26 months.”
…
“the US needs to make significant investments in rejuvenating its military shipbuilding capabilities and capacity, ramp up production, and streamline its design process. A clearer strategy for industry and establishing stable supply chains, as well as hiring and keeping talented workers, is critical, too. Larger investments and drastic changes may be needed to build and maintain a force beyond 300 ships.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/weak-shipbuilding-could-us-navys-090002658.html