Comment by 0x3f
12 hours ago
These are all forms of false positives but the most popular news stories seem to be where they detain the correct person, correct legal status, lawfully, and the story happens to gloss over the facts about the legal status and focuses on the hardship. Yeah, it's a hardship to be split from your family, I can't deny that. But I'm not aware that most countries are very sympathetic to illegal immigrants.
If anything I find the stories featuring white/European people oddly racist because they seem to assume that I, the reader, will assume a white/European person couldn't possibly be in violation of immigration rules. But all the ones I've read turned out that they were indeed in violation of immigration rules.
Overall as a potential immigrant to the US myself, I find the process capricious and that US citizens by birth don't fully appreciate how painful it is or why it shouldn't be that way. But I don't find it notably worse or more onerous than the vast majority of immigration policies of other countries in practice.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. The most popular stories are the ones when they detain US citizens, rough them up, and then dump them on the side of the road somewhere without even apologizing.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/ice-immigrat...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...
[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
I assume this is probably a function of our respective locations, because the most popular stories I see as an 'outsider' are those that would discourage tourism or immigration, not those that would worry already-citizens.
To address your stories specifically, my point would be that I'm still not sure whether this shows the US is notably worse on this than any other place.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
> the story happens to gloss over the facts about the legal status and focuses on the hardship
Suppose you have a "civil infraction" against you, like an unpaid parking ticket, running across the road in an unsafe way, or overstaying a visa. It's terms of US law categories, it's less than graffiti on a fence. In this case you were "indeed in violation" of it.
However, what happens next is some recently hired weirdos in mismatched camo-gear claiming to be police (with no ID) surround you on the the sidewalk, drag you into a van, and imprison you for months without trial. You are purposefully shuffled between different prisons in different states to prevent your own lawyer from being able to find you.
Meanwhile, some internet dude nicknamed 0x40 comes along and says: "Ugh, why do you guys keep glossing over the facts about their parking tickets to focus on the hardship? Yes, it's a hardship to be split from your family, I can't deny that, but..."
In short, one of the several problems right now is the that even for victims that actually did something wrong, the "hardship" is frequently illegal and disproportional. The truthfulness of the cause does not justify the effect.
> It's terms of US law categories, it's less than graffiti on a fence
The 'level' of the crime is only one aspect determining the treatment.
Some crimes are inherently more prone to absconders, immigration infractions being one of them.
Now, you could just say "oh well, that means we should just not try so hard to get perfect enforcement". Which is fine. But that's obviously not the view of everyone.
I'm not even sure that's the view of everyone when it comes to grafitti. Plenty of people would like to be zero tolerance on that too, it just doesn't have the political momentum right now that immigration issues do. And immgrants as a class are vulnerable in a way that random natives spraying fences aren't.
Also, I'm not sure this really addresses the question(s) of the thread which were more along the lines of "when compared to other countries, does the US: (a) have a higher false positive rate; and/or (b) a harsher regime of treatment".
On that, I'm still not convinced the answer is yes. The UK, for example, has been up to almost exactly the same things. Many European and Asian countries are much worse.