• java-man 2 days ago |
    Step 2 in a nazi takeover of the United States. More is coming.
    • Buttons840 2 days ago |
      I don't know if I'd phrase it like that. It does show they see ICE as a fix all police they can deploy for a wide variety of purposes though. ICE is better funded than some branches of the military, and they are demonstrating they are willing to use ICE for whatever they think needs to be done.
      • password54321 2 days ago |
        It is clear that a more centralised system is being established which is progression towards authoritarianism.
      • pennomi 2 days ago |
        How is creation of a Gestapo analogue NOT a step towards Nazi-style authoritarianism?
    • cosmicgadget 2 days ago |
      Dunno, you'd think the administration would prefer they be out on the streets rather than menacing business travelers. This may be pure legislative/executive incompetence rather than a grand scheme.
      • estearum 2 days ago |
        The Nazis were also actually extremely incompetent. Thankfully the current admin is more incompetent, but truly one of the main downsides of strongman governments is that they tend to be operated by dummies.
  • ryandrake 2 days ago |
    How do they justify Immigration and Customs enforcement working domestic flights and departures in general? Isn't ICE's scope supposed to be limited to what/who is coming into the country from foreign countries?

    Of course, that's a rhetorical question. When you're an autocrat, you do not need to justify your actions.

    • paulddraper 2 days ago |
      Virtually all commercial passenger flights are to international airports.
      • ryandrake 2 days ago |
        At least in the large airports, the international flights come in to a separate terminal. Will ICE limit their involvement to that terminal only, and only inbound flights? Immigration and Customs have no business on the outbound side or with domestic passengers.
        • alexfoo 2 days ago |
          Some international flights arrive in to domestic US terminals. These are from a limited set of countries where passengers have cleared US immigration in the departure country.

          Canada, Ireland and the UAE are the major three, plus Aruba, Barbados and Bermuda.

        • smilebot 2 days ago |
          Since they will support tsa operations, I’m going to assume they will be at the outbound security checkpoints. Both domestic and international.
    • Buttons840 2 days ago |
      ICE has a lot of funding, more than some branches of the military.

      This demonstrates they see ICE as their fix all police force, and that they are willing to deploy ICE to do whatever they think needs to be done.

      • paulddraper 2 days ago |
        ICE is $11B.

        Coast Guard is $14B.

    • gsnedders 2 days ago |
      ICE’s scope isn’t who is coming into the country — that’s CBP’s scope. ICE’s scope is supposed to be those committing immigration offences who have already entered the country (either because the CBP failed to catch them, or because they were admitted but never left).

      The only difficulty justifying this is ICE’s power to stop and question people, and an airport is no different to a random street from that point of view. Do they have probable cause? What suffices as probable cause?

      And once you have probable cause, you run into the problem 8 USC 1304(e) creates: someone who doesn’t have documentation proving their legal immigration status falls into one of two categories, they’re either a citizen, or they’re an immigrant violating that section.

      (And this is looking at it from a simple legalistic point of view, ignoring any questions about ICE’s behaviour or powers!)

      • general1465 2 days ago |
        > And once you have probable cause, you run into the problem 8 USC 1304(e) creates: someone who doesn’t have documentation proving their legal immigration status falls into one of two categories, they’re either a citizen, or they’re an immigrant violating that section.

        So hopefully if you are tourist from abroad, CBP will give you stamp into your passport, otherwise you have entered "illegally". They are not always stamping passports.

        • paulddraper 2 days ago |
          Isn’t the stamp necessary?

          Under what circumstances would they not?

          • general1465 2 days ago |
            CBP is doing it electronically for quite some time, as they can see your date of entry in the system and they are not controlling your date of leave against passport when you are leaving USA (you won't even meet CBP at that stage), but it is all checked electronically.

            Last time I got stamped. But it seems like an exception than a rule.

            https://www.swlaw.com/publication/immigration-alert-cbp-elim...

            I can already see myself arguing with ICE officer that CBP is not stamping passport for years.

          • gsnedders 2 days ago |
            A lot of countries don’t stamp passports — if you can guarantee the entry is immediately recorded in your central database, and you can reliably look up the latest entry for a given passport, a stamp doesn’t really gain much.
  • vkou 2 days ago |
    Keep in mind that the Democrats have proposed five bills to fund the TSA, and the Republicans have shot them all down.

    This reichstag fire is manufactured.

    • 0xy 2 days ago |
      Democrats are explicitly opposed to a clean DHS funding bill with no changes.
      • KaiserPro 2 days ago |
        > They aren't clean bills, so this is absolutely irrelevant.

        I mean its not really irrelevant, its a calculated move from both sides.

      • vkou 2 days ago |
        Their bills are the clean bills. Yesterday's vote was a simple yea or nay for TSA funding. The Republicans voted against it.

        The GOP refuses to fund the TSA without tying a whole bunch of other fascist shit to it. This crisis is manufactured.

      • selectodude 2 days ago |
        As they should be. I don’t want to fund DHS and I’m happy my reps are doing their job to keep it shut down. Funding TSA specifically is acceptable and has in fact been voted down in the senate by republicans several times now.
        • 0xy 2 days ago |
          Why do you oppose FEMA funding?
          • selectodude 2 days ago |
            What’s left of FEMA? Anyway their disaster response is not impacted by the lapse in funding. They’re currently on the ground doing something or other in Hawaii.
            • 0xy 2 days ago |
              This is completely incorrect. FEMA has ceased public assistance for ongoing and historical disasters.
              • selectodude 2 days ago |
                You should let FEMA and the state of Hawaii know then. They must be really fucking confused. Thanks 0xy for bringing the knowledge.

                https://www.khon2.com/kona-low/governor-green-kona-low/amp/

                • 0xy a day ago |
                  Did you read the post you replied to? I very clearly stated ongoing and historical disasters. Meaning disasters that started before the DHS shutdown and were still ongoing, not new disasters.
          • aaomidi 2 days ago |
            FEMA does not and should not be a part of DHS. Good try though.
            • 0xy 2 days ago |
              • aaomidi 2 days ago |
                I drop the word need there.

                But yes putting it as part of DHS was a mistake and mistakes can be fixed.

      • rdegges 2 days ago |
        This is straight up untrue. There are clean bill proposals to fund TSA that Republicans have rejected. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/are-the-proposed-tsa-fundin...
  • yodon 2 days ago |
    For all its flaws, TSA (at least under previous administrations) did a lot of design thinking work around how to streamline flows through airports, minimize travel stress and conflict, and optimize to minimize traveler complaints while continuing to maintain security.

    Bringing in shock theater optimized staff is a particularly poor fit for a scenario that will impact a disproportionately voting and bipartisan pool of citizens.

    There's a reason advertising in airports is generally targeted at corporate leaders and decision makers.

    • themafia 2 days ago |
      > while continuing to maintain security.

      They continued to maintain the illusion of security. The underwear bomber and shoe bomber had no problem smuggling explosives onto an aircraft directly under their noses.

      Their idea of "security" is to get you into a scanner so they can stare at and save images of your naked body. Or to buy really expensive "sniffer" robots that don't work in one of the most corrupt government contracts recently known about.

      Meanwhile, cockpit doors still have several functional deficiencies that make pilots vulnerable to the original attack that led to the creation of this derelict agency.

    • ryandrake 2 days ago |
      If your goal is to intimidate and frighten people into submitting to you, then sending armed, masked "shock theater" thugs in should accomplish that goal.
  • LightBug1 2 days ago |
    The US tourism industry must be just lapping this up ...

    "Visit the USA ... starting your holiday off wiv your papers, and a bang! Schnell !!! "

  • zoklet-enjoyer 2 days ago |
    This country is a shithole
  • rdegges 2 days ago |
    Straight white US citizen male here. This scares the shit out of me. I travel for work all the time, but understanding that we will now have barely trained, and in many cases completely lawless, consequence-free federal officers in direct, high stress, public areas where lots of people are constantly passing through seems like an absolute recipe for tragedy.

    This will 100% make me reconsider travel and avoid airports with ICE agents. I think the writing on the wall is clear, nobody is safe.

  • vjvjvjvjghv 2 days ago |
    Seems ICE is basically just a slush fund to use wherever they see fit.
    • ndsipa_pomu 20 hours ago |
      Trump's private army, selected for loyalty.
  • mullingitover 2 days ago |
    Seems like a big own-goal for the administration to inject an agency which (according to polls[1]) is quite broadly hated into the daily lives of millions.

    Politically they're just going from failure (immigration policy broadly considered a failure) to failure (starting a new forever war in the middle east is universally hated) to failure (this).

    It's no wonder they're trying to burn the election system to the ground to prevent a fair election from occurring this year. It's the only way they're staying out of jail, especially Tom "cash bribes only" Homan.

    [1] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-febru...

    • paulddraper 2 days ago |
      How did they get elected?
      • apothegm 2 days ago |
        Misinformation, low voter turnout, and an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density.

        That’s ignoring any possibility of interference with insecure voting or tallying computers.

        • altairprime 2 days ago |
          Don’t forget racism. This administration got elected in large part because they are openly racist, delivering outcomes at a velocity that ‘Southern’ dog-whistle deniability doesn’t allow for those that do, for whatever reason, want to continue having positive or neutral reputation with those opposed to racism (which includes half of U.S. women, or more if you limit to those younger than 30) while also benefiting personally from racism’s privileges to them and their families.
          • 5555624 2 days ago |
            racism was a minor factor in the 2024 election. Had Harris been white, she still would have lost. She ran a campaign that said nothing about what she as going to do, she only said how evil Trump would be. She lost the election when she was asked on "The View," a Democrat friendly show, if there was anything she would do differently than Biden. There's only one wrong answer to that question ad she gasve, saying not a thing. Had she just said she'd tackle the border and illegal immigration, she'd have had a chance.

            Had Biden kept to his word and been one and one, the Democrats would have had a primary and selected a candidate who could have won. (Harris would not have won the nomination in any sort of primary.)

            • altairprime a day ago |
              I’m not referring to any single election or opponent.
            • UncleMeat 18 hours ago |
              It isn't just "the dem candidate is black and I am racist so I will vote for the republican candidate." Trump and his people going on TV and whipping up racist paranoia about how refugees are eating people's pets and how he is going to get rid of all of the immigrants motivates racists to the polls.
        • Buttons840 2 days ago |
          We need paper ballots because people can understand them. Election conspiracy theories are becoming a problem. Having a counting process that people can understand and trust is a feature.
          • mullingitover 2 days ago |
            We already use paper ballots[1].

            You can't use reason to get people out of a mindset they didn't use reason to get into.

            [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/some...

            • apothegm a day ago |
              Paper ballots that we almost never bother manually checking against the insecure digital tallies unless there’s a very close race or explicit challenge to the count.
              • estearum a day ago |
                This is just literally not true.

                Nearly every state routinely does statistical audits of voting machines compared with paper records.

                People hate to hear this but: statistics work. You can randomly sample a portion (say, 2% to 5%) of ballots and have effective certainty about how much fraud or error there is in your voting system.

          • estearum 2 days ago |
            Conspiratorial thinking can't be fixed with additional facts. There is no set of facts that conclusively establish any claim to someone who is already committed not to believing the claim.
            • AnimalMuppet 2 days ago |
              Additional facts can slow the rate at which conspiracy theorists can convert others. It helps if the additional facts are visibly obvious.
              • UncleMeat 18 hours ago |
                A common property of conspiracies is that any evidence is evidence of the conspiracy. Not enough data produces "what are they hiding" stuff. More data produces deliberate misunderstandings of the data to justify the conspiracy. We saw this very clearly with covid. When public health agencies were less transparant it was evidence of an evil coverup. When public agencies were more transparant about limitations or things they didn't fully understand it was evidence that public health efforts didn't work.
        • paulddraper 2 days ago |
          > an electoral system that massively over-represents people living in areas of low population density and underrepresents those living in areas of high population density

          Trump won the electoral college and popular vote.

          • muwtyhg 19 hours ago |
            But he is shielded by the Senate, which vastly favors low population density areas/states.
        • theshrike79 a day ago |
          > low voter turnout

          Why voting day isn't a federal holiday is baffling to me. Along with all the weird-ass rules about "registering to vote" and people having to queue for hours in the heat and nobody is allowed to even give them water.

          I usually vote a few weeks in advance while grocery shopping, there's a booth set up at the supermarket. I can just walk in with my ID, vote and the vote is sealed in a box until the official day.

          Or I can walk like 1km to the nearest school, again show my ID, vote and go home.

          If I had to "register to vote", I'd most likely forget it or not bother to do it.

          • apothegm a day ago |
            In the US, this is a partisan issue. The left benefits from higher turnout and the right gets less traction. States with Republican leadership and vaguely competitive elections are doing their best to make it harder to vote.
      • Schmerika 2 days ago |
        Democrats funded, armed and protected a live-streamed genocide so horrific that roughly a third of their own hard-core base (Biden 2020 voters) couldn't bring themselves to vote for Harris, even in a close race against Trump [0].

        There are other reasons Dems lost, also important. Still, genocide remains the blazing neon-red 12-ton elephant in the room. And there seems to be absolutely no sign of owning that fact, which means that no lessons will be learned or policies changed.

        0 - https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling

        • paulddraper a day ago |
          > roughly a third of their own hard-core base (Biden 2020 voters) couldn't bring themselves to vote for Harris,

          No, roughly a third of Biden voters who voted for someone other than Harris cited the Gaza conflict.

          • Schmerika 16 hours ago |
            That's an important distinction, thank you.

            However, it still points to the fact that Harris lost millions of votes due to her support for arming Israel.

            And, even for the people who voted Harris there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm - directly because of Gaza.

            > Even among Biden 2020 voters who did vote for Harris in battleground states, voters by a seven-to-one margin say they would have been more enthusiastic in their support if Harris “pledged to break from President Biden's policy toward Gaza by promising to withhold additional weapons to Israel” rather than less enthusiastic.

            > More enthusiastic - 35% > Less enthusiastic - 5%

      • mullingitover 2 days ago |
        You could blame the backing of the richest oligarchs in the world, you could blame a morally bankrupt culture amongst a large chunk of the electorate, but at the end of the day it was a very tight race and there was a global wave of incumbent losses[1], regardless of the incumbent party's position.

        Between 2021 and 2024 the world went on a rollercoaster ride. Pandemic economic stimulus made everyone feel rich in 2021, and then harsh monetary tightening led to everyone feeling like their world was collapsing in 2024. They punished whoever was in charge at the time.

        [1] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/2024-the-year-incumbent-gov...

      • cosmicgadget 2 days ago |
        Centrist voters didn't understand that that inflation and monetary policy are subject to momentum.
        • vkou a day ago |
          And that you can't print a trillion dollars and have half the country not go to work for a year without pain further down the road. Which was, by the way, a Trump policy... (Not that it was an incorrect one.)
      • AnimalMuppet 2 days ago |
        Because the Democrats tried to run Biden again, despite the obvious-to-everybody signs of decline and unfitness. Then, when that became impossible to ignore, they anointed Harris. (Thereby overturning the results of the primaries, which created bad memories from the previous two campaigns.) Then Harris said that she wouldn't do anything different from Biden, despite people being tired of Biden.

        And because the electorate had kind of forgotten what Trump was like, because they'd just spent four years seeing what Biden was like. There was a bunch of stuff that Biden (or at least his people) did that didn't really resonate with voters, and a bunch of them voted for "not that".

        The other thing they did wrong was, they were a year late in prosecuting Trump. Trump managed to delay things out to the point that the campaign (and then the office) protected him. I don't know if Democrats delayed deliberately, so that the prosecutions would be damaging Trump as the campaign season started, but if so, they were well-paid for that bit of attempted chicanery.

    • Buttons840 2 days ago |
      If they ever need a group to enforce their election ~~laws~~ executive orders, I wonder what group they might choose?
      • pseudohadamard a day ago |
        Why, Imperial Command Enforcement of course. They're a a bit like Hitler's SA (in fact one of them even dressed the part), the Great Leader sends them wherever he wants something stamped on.
  • decimalenough 2 days ago |
    Welp, good thing there's absolutely no way this could go horribly wrong.
    • cosmicgadget 2 days ago |
      As long as no planes drive in the direction of the terminal.
  • iJohnDoe 2 days ago |
    I wonder how this will impact the economy. People deciding not to travel won’t help anything. You would think this is the last thing the administration would want to do at this point.
  • jeremie_strand 20 hours ago |
    The jurisdictional basis is murky but not nonexistent — ICE's authority under 8 USC 1357 applies to persons 'within a reasonable distance from any external boundary,' which courts have defined as 100 miles. Most major airports fall within that zone, which is how they'll justify domestic operations legally. That said, the line between 'checking papers' and full detainment authority is shakey without an ongoing investigation or warrant.