No. of Recommendations: 3
There are hundreds of citizens who have been abducted and imprisoned illegally, many of them for days, some for weeks. I call that "disappeared into ICE limbo", no contact, no information about their whereabouts, no legal representation, no warrant, no appearance before a judge, then kicked out to the street as if nothing happened.
Sure, but ICE has detained hundreds of thousands of people over that same time frame. So if you're told that a person has "disappeared into ICE limbo," the most likely scenario - by far - is that they are someone who is present in the country unlawfully. While it is possible that they are instead a citizen, that's a very unlikely scenario.
That in no way is arguing that it is good that ICE detains citizens, rather than being more careful in making sure that only folks for whom detention is legally justified because they lack legal authority to be in the country. It simply means that the overwhelmingly more likely scenario is that the person isn't a citizen, but is in fact a non-citizen without legal status.
Why push back on this? Because Democrats paid a very heavy political price in the last election cycle because they were perceived as indifferent to the problems caused by declining to enforce immigration laws. There is a lot to object to about how immigration laws are being enforced by the current Administration. But it's important to object to the specific horrible things, and not let those objections slide into objecting simply to the fact that immigration laws are being enforced.
The mere fact that a person at Last's son's college was taken in by ICE does not mean that ICE has necessarily done anything illegal or wrong, any more than the fact that someone at the college might have been arrested for something means that the police did anything illegal or wrong. That in no way excuses ICE (or the police) when they do illegal or wrong things. It simply means that ICE and the police are supposed to detain/arrest people, and a lot of the time when they do it there is a valid and justifiable reason - and since most voters tend to support the idea of people being arrested/detained when they're supposed to be, it's not a great strategy for progressive commentators to criticize the mere fact of such detentions without mentioning what ICE might have done wrong in that case. I don't think the Democrats will be helped with a repeat of "Abolish ICE," because while the sentiment might be noble the electorate doesn't want us to have no enforcement, just enforcement without the horrible parts.
