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Comment by znpy

1 day ago

> More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised.

Yeah, obama was president at the time.

A lot of fanfare and then nothing happened.

People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.

It’s always “weird” when the same action get different a connotation depending on who’s president…

A couple things you're ignoring or underplaying for some stupid political-score-keeping reason:

1) Many were upset, especially here and in the general tech media, with the Snowden information. Is "a lot of fanfare and then nothing happened" worse to you than "no fanfare and nothing happened"? The fanfare regardless of who was in office on that info is telling, there, no?

2) Many of those policies went back well before Obama

Not sure why you're trying to deflect "we should be fighting this" into "Obama bad, actually!" when the evidence is very clear that it crosses parties, has crossed parties for decades, and will almost certainly continue to if the status quo is maintained.

Possibly because you don't want to fight it?

It's an explicit policy of the Trump admin to not just increase the volume of deportations (regardless of if they've hit their goals yet), but also increase the speed and disruptiveness of them (picking people up when they're at their regularly scheduled "trying to do it the right way" appointments, for instance), and reduce judicial process and oversight.

It's very intentionally NOT the same action, because they're looking for more red meat for the base to distract from any number of other failed promises on affordability, jobs, etc. They've really been unable to do much there other than, at best, "stay on or close to the trend line from 2023-onward as the covid-induced supply chain bullwhips and demand whiplash effects started to recede."

Have you considered that one can protest against those changes independently of doing math on how many happened in 2013? Or that they might also take into account certain notable other actions on immigration taken by the Obama administration as a balancing factor?

If anything, doesn't that suggest that the Trump admin's moves to bypass legal safeguards are unnecessary and are just increasing the militarization of the federal government for nothing?

>People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.

That's because most news are (or were) partisan with a liberal bias.

Just like a republican bias makes you miss the fact that whether Obama was deporting more in larger quantities, Trump has moved the Overton window about what ICE is allowed to do, how blatantly they can do it, and what they get away with even if it's still illegal.

Ever think that maybe it’s not the deportations that are the problem, but the murders and other human rights abuses?

And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.

  • News like "a child dying from a rare form of cancer is deported" only got popular (including on HN) during Trump's latest term.

    • Was it “got deported”? Or was it “got deported despite being a citizen,” or “was arrested and held in a prison without necessary medical care”?

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  • I’m pretty sure that if people had tried to obstruct the law in a similar manner there would have been similar death. And unlike today, there was pretty much no bodycam at the time.

    Regarding the fanfare… yeah sure big deal… and yet, here we are, with ubiquitous surveillance whose ground work was laid out during the obama administration.

    • Multiple independent and credible sources including documents from within the DHS show a deliberate strategy of terrorizing and harming civilians who have done nothing illegal, and numerous serious and sometimes lethal cases of violence against protestors (protest is in fact supposed to be legal) and just random people, as well as spurious immigration arrests to meet unreasonable quotas, cruel and inhumane conditions in the holding facilities they've rushed to build to support all this, and a general lack of due process and proportionality throughout all of this. You are uncritically repeating state propaganda

    • People tend to get outraged at actual events, not hypotheticals. Smartphones were ubiquitous by the end of the Obama administration, cameras aplenty.

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