Have they had a lot of false positives? Almost every story I see seems to fall apart on further investigation. To be clear, I'm sure they have some false positives, but do they have a lot of them relative to any other immigration system?

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Terr_ 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Depends, how are we defining "false positive"? Ex:

1. Detained the incorrect person

2. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status

3. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, but in unlawful circumstances

4. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, in ostensibly-lawful circumstances, but in a way which is unconstitutional or crazy

An example of the final category are the immigrants that spent years being vetted, following the law, and doing expensive paperwork to be citizens. ICE snatched them when they showed up on at the last second as they were to take their citizenship oath. [0] Not because of anything they did, but because today's Republican party has decided that it's OK to hurt people based on their "shithole" country of birth.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/30/us-citizensh...

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0x3f 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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platinumrad an hour ago | parent [-]

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-...

	▲	0x3f an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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