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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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My worry is that there's a negative incentive here. There's nothing to disincentivize the government to do the wrong thing in your framework

Perhaps.

But under the previous setup, there was nothing to disincentivize people from coming in illegally, since they knew that even if they got 'caught' it could take a long time for 'due process' to occur before they get removed.

I strongly believe that's the goal of the current actions the admin is taking. Make it clear that you can't just hop the border and expect to stay here for years while your case is held up endlessly in court. You have a real chance of getting removed, and a real chance of ending up in a foreign prison if you have a criminal record.

I DO NOT think that the Trump admin wants to deport thousands upon thousands of criminals and pay for them to stay in an El Salvadoran prison. There's no strong benefit to having to pay for their imprisonment indefinitely, vs. kicking them out and not have to worry about them returning.

Now, your concern becomes very valid if it comes to intentionally targeting noncitizens for removal as a means to, e.g. punish dissent or scare citizens into taking or refraining from taking some action.

But I don't think there's any way around the fact that a national government claims the inherent authority to decide which foreign parties are and are not allowed to be in the country. And thus you can't expect them to accept a regime where ANY attempt to remove noncitizens, regardless of justification, has to be held up by the courts before it is executed.

Like, we agree that if there were an active war popping off, the U.S. would be justified in kicking out any citizens of the enemy nation that were residing in its borders, yes?

Trump is in fact trying to make the argument that there's an 'invasion' occurring, and so you can see how this might slide the situation into a bit of a grey area.

I believe the US government should be compelled to reverse its actions if it accidentally removes someone who has the authorization to be in the country and ships them off to a foreign prison (regardless of whether the government can be compelled to do so in the current legal framework)

I think if this becomes enough of an issue then yeah, perhaps there should be some actions taken by the home countries of the person in question.

Like I can't believe nobody seems to think that the countries that these people are nominally citizens of aren't interested in freeing them from a foreign prison? Why is everyone expecting U.S. COURTS to intervene on behalf of foreign nationals???

I also think the economic incentives are such that if the U.S. accidentally removes people who are doing very productive work for the U.S., then various parties have reason to intervene and pay large sums of money to both retrieve them and lobby to prevent it from happening again.

I’m in agreement on the incentives both for the protests on college campuses (in which at least two students lost visas) and the mass deportations. The point is to let both the public and potential immigrants that the days of crossing into the USA and just staying forever and doing whatever you want are over.

I think long term we need some sort of expedited hearing system to prevent mistakes and allow people to question the deportation. But that can’t happen until the numbers are low enough that you can have reasonable processes. As it stands now, the legal immigranttion process is extremely difficult and takes almost a decade unless you qualify for H1B. The process for asylum is overwhelmed because everyone who gets caught knows they get to stay if they claim asylum, and they know it will take years and suspect that Congress will eventually pass another amnesty before the hearing ever happens.

Until you get this into a position where the numbers are less than what can be reasonable to have our system handle with some speed — maybe clearing the median case within 3-4 months instead of a decade — I just don’t think the logistics work.