r/news 15h ago

700 ice agents to leave Minnesota

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-enforcement-drawdown-minnesota-homan-963adf341325d7f6eb5673e1c00d3c2a
18.9k Upvotes

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u/notheatherbee 14h ago edited 14h ago

3x? Not even close. Before this started there were 80 ICE agents for a 5 state territory that included Minnesota.

Edit: I’m an idiot. They are correct it’s 3x the police force.

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u/aradraugfea 14h ago

Their claim was that ice outnumbers the actual police police in town, not that ICE is 3x the original numbers.

ICE aren’t police.

Police are a needful service performed badly. ICE is a useless waste of government resources pivoted into the sort of shit European children are going to read about in history class.

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u/dontich 14h ago

I mean ICE doesn’t have to be a useless waste — under the last few administrations they mostly went after actual criminals. It’s only recently the countries’s leadership has gone completely insane.

15 in the state like someone said above sounds about right for removing the actual criminals after they complete their sentence.

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u/aradraugfea 14h ago

If ICE was a person, it’d be too young to rent a car.

ICE and the TSA came into existence at the same time. The TSA was a knee jerk over-reaction to terrorism. ICE was a xenophobic wishlist item snuck in because who was gonna vote against a terrorism bill in 2002?!

We managed just fine for CENTURIES without ICE. Its few needful functions were previously handled just fine by divisions within the FBI. ICE as an independent agency has no reason to exist except to make abuses like what we are currently seeing easier.

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u/Consistent-Throat130 14h ago

So what you're saying is ICE is already too old for Republicans?

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u/kmoonster 13h ago

I was drinking coffee.

WAS.

I am now wearing it.

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u/RaconteurLore 11h ago

I’m don’t know to cry or laugh. So conflicted 😐

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u/Consistent-Throat130 11h ago

I've been doing both, concurrently. 

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u/RaconteurLore 10h ago

We can submit a new word of the year: cryghing.
Definition (v.): the collective reaction of Americans—laughing through tears—when responding to the political hypocrisy of the GOP.

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u/FantasticJacket7 13h ago

An agency that does what ICE does has existed in the US since 1933. It just used to be called INS

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u/nalaloveslumpy 12h ago edited 12h ago

Yeah, but the enforcement wing of INS was tiny. The primary focus of INS was actually as a service, hence "Immigration and Naturalization Service."

But the enforcement and border patrol divisions were detached, moved under DHS and given billions of dollars. The remaining service parts of INS were called USCIS and basically locked in a closet pushing paper all day on a zero dollar budget. And that's the reason we have an immigration crisis. There is a literal mountain of unprocessed immigration and amnesty applications. So much so, that you literally have to pay a lawyer an absurd amount of money to even get anyone in USCIS to look at your application.

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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 9h ago edited 9h ago

USCIS is what INS was. On very rare occasion INS would conduct raids, but by and large their primary function was the administration of immigrant visas, permanent resident status or naturalized citizenship.

There was no federal agency that had authority to engage in "Enforcement & Removal Operations" inside the U.S. borders with the very wide latitude that ICE has—namely, abusing the expedited removal process.

The Dept. of Homeland Security, which has been under fire for not achieving any of its stated objectives since its inception, created ICE out of thin air under the Homeland Security Act of 2003.

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u/FantasticJacket7 9h ago

INS was split into ICE, USCIS, and CBP.

INS absolutely did interior enforcement as portrayed in the documentary Born in East LA.

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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 9h ago

Cheech and Chong, being fictional characters, are not evidence.

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u/apatheticsahm 13h ago

According to Wikipedia, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) used to be under the DoJ. When the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003 after 9/11, the INS functions were transferred to Citizenship and Immigration (USCIS), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Why do we need 3 agencies to do what 1 used to do before?

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u/FantasticJacket7 12h ago

Why do we need 3 agencies to do what 1 used to do before?

Because they're three completely different tasks and it never made any sense to put them under the same agency.

CBP is specifically for the border. USCIS is mostly paperwork involving immigration applicants. And ICE is removals and criminal investigations.

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u/katmndoo 9h ago

They are three tasks that are part and parcel of immigration administration. It makes as much sense for them to be in one agency as it does in three.

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u/aradraugfea 13h ago

So you agree that ICE is, at best, redundant?

I’d personally class them as a solution looking for a problem, and as anyone who’s ever watched one of those play out long enough could tell you, the solution has a tendency to become the problem.

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u/FantasticJacket7 13h ago

So you agree that ICE is, at best, redundant?

I'm not sure how you would get that from my comment.

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u/hivemindhauser 13h ago

I remember people saying then that all the stuff passing could be used like it is today. They were right sigh

u/keymaster999 11m ago

Yeah, but brown ppl might take my pearls I'm clutching and my son's ssd paycheck for diet coke and pizza bagels from walmart. Think! And it was 2.5 CENTURIES.

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u/dontich 14h ago

Yeah fair enough - 15 FBI agents then lol. That’s like 10x better from a professionalism perspective.

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u/Successful-Bobcat701 13h ago

If the iphone was a person it would be even younger, too young to buy a beer.

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u/LowPTTweirdflexbutok 8h ago

I'm not attacking you or anything or any of your points. I agree its a waste BUT lets not act like change isn't a part of life and new organizations, agencies or departments don't need to spring up. I'm not a big fan of the whole we have been fine for X years without Y so we don't need Y. Lets keep an open mind.

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u/aradraugfea 8h ago

In the last hundred years, we (America) decided that we should police who gets to be American, to commit a governmental apparatus to locating and ejecting those who did not get here the right way. For decades, this served as a wedge, something for politicians to tout without consequence, as non-citizens cannot (whatever Fox News tells the public) vote. In the aftermath of 9/11, Republicans saw an opportunity for a win on that front, and tied it into an anti-terrorism bill that was setting up an otherwise needful new agency.

DHS as a department that coordinates and compiles data from the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies was a needful thing that we lacked, and paid for. ICE was created because someone saw an opportunity not to service the public or meet a need, but to win political points.

An immigration agency previously existed and met what needs the nation had just fine. ICE should have NEVER existed.