Notably, they haven't been "disappearing" people in the manner that would have to be happening here. Even the most egregious cases, which are very bad, have left a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow. This case is notable because no one seems to know where this man has gone.
But yes, point taken: the extrajudicial actions of ICE recently are absolutely not helping people stay calm in the face of something like this.
How can you be confident in this? Is it possible that you are saying this because the only cases we know about are when they have happened to leave "a paper trail for lawyers and journalists to follow"?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/lawyers-advocates-say-48...
Again: still bad, still inexcusable, but not the same thing as what would have to be happening here.
Illegal immigrants aren’t “undocumented.” They are present in America without the consent of the American people, as expressed in immigration law.
Source?
> How do we know it was the US government
We don't but its 100000x easier for the US government to disappear someone on US soil than it is for China to disappear someone on US soil.
I've heard of CCP affiliated Chinese nationals who essentially act as CCP police on foreign soil and force nationals to return to China.
A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today.
This is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance and is also asking someone else to prove nonexistence of a situation. Both of these are inappropriate in a good faith discussion and I believe it would benefit you to consider how you reason about these situations if you want to come to well founded conclusions.
If you have evidence, or even plausible speculation as to the government "disappearing people" you should present it here so we can all understand and respond to this, as it is extremely important. If you are just assuming that the government 'must be' disappearing people, without any evidence or even a plausible theory which you can share then you are just being hysterical.
2) There are numerous cases of the current administration using its discretionary powers to enact its desired policies in ways that violate norms and are quite probably illegal.
3) The administration actively circumventing record-keeping requirements, likely in an attempt to avoid detection of illegal actions.
The federal government is unbelievably powerful. Because of the jobs it is expected to do, it must maintain capabilities to do many terrifying things. For that reason, the government does not get the presumption of innocence. It has to be able to prove exactly what it was up to, and where its resources are being spent.
The reason there are so many tedious and wasteful rule-making and record-keeping and due-process requirements is exactly because it would be trivial otherwise to do things like disappear law-abiding citizens off the street and cover it up.
So when someone says "I want do do crimes A, B, and C", and then you discover that they have in fact done crimes B and C, and taken steps to conceal the potential commission of crime A, it isn't a fallacy to infer that they may have committed crime A.
If we see more cases like this one of someone disappearing without a trace and their disappearance getting documented but not explained, I'll accept this one as evidence to fuel future speculation. Until then, speculation used to fuel speculation is a dangerous path.
EDIT: Apparently my reference to conspiracy theories is pushing buttons? Unfortunately this is literally true: the logic of the conspiracy theorist builds upon itself, with as minimal reference to exterior circumstances as possible. The lizard people did it. How do we know? Because they did it before!
If we want to be different from conspiracy theorists, we need to cultivate an insistence on reasoning from documented facts, rather than building elaborate towers out of theories alone.
Better said: We have no evidence that they have been disappearing people in this manner. We also, clearly, have a large body of people who are on guard for any such possible evidence, so I would reasonably expect that if it were happening with any kind of regularity we would have seen it by now. There's a possibility that this is instance #1 and we see repeats. If we do see repeats, I will happily engage in speculation that this is a pattern and the government may in fact be disappearing people.
Until then, the known facts don't match a government disappearing program as well as they match other possible explanations.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/furry-hackers-fbi-raided/
Once is happenstance, Twice is a coincidence. But I'm way more suspicious of coincidences than I was even just a few months back.
* The target was committing crimes which were documented prior to the raid.
* The target was able to and chose to reach friends and tell them what happened.
* The target went nonresponsive after informing their friends of what happened.
* The friends allege that the location was raided but don't even imply that the leader is in federal custody.
* The leader is pseudonymous, so we fully expect that if they decide to go offline and stop using that handle that they will disappear. That's not the same thing as a person with a stable real-world identity vanishing.
Three times is enemy action
Can you name any cases in recent history where someone was "disappeared" or similar by the government (the only part of this we can objectively prove afaik) and then no evidence or other proof of the person's wrongdoing ever came about, and people just forgot about it?
I could be mistaken (and please correct me if I'm wrong) but I really don't think this is a thing that happens in modern times.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/most-guantanamo-detainees-are-...
Anyone taken prisoner must be given an opportunity to be heard, to be able to give evidence that they aren't the right guy.
(To be clear, there's no indication the subjects of this story have been so detained)
I am not saying there is a conspiracy going on, simply pointing out a case that appears to have been forgotten and perpetrated by the 1.0 version of the current administration.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
Of course there are people that nobody looks for
But everyone that has inquired so far has been able to figure out location
Given the ambiguous chronology here, it seems like this professor dipped out in advance and the FBI freaked out later. So he wouldn’t be in a system if that were the case
But of course it could be FISA court related
I find this kind of offensive and dismissive.
1, I don't see why stay calm is so appropriate. It's always more effective to persue any aim thoughtfully rather than thoughtlessly of course, but that's just "all else being equal" and not all else is equal. Another truth is the the greater the injury the greater the reaction is still valid, defensible, appropriate, etc.
2, calmness is pretty orthogonal to assessment. You can be perfectly calm while judging extrajudicial actions of ICE and others as utterly outlandish and intolerable.
3, How calm are the ICE agents when they show up and you try to decline their offer? Why aren't they required to "let's just calm down and talk this out and see if we can resolve this with civility..."?
And as long as we're presuming to correct each others reading comprehension, this comment was in fact in response to a comment about staying calm in the face of ICE actions.
From what I've seen, it mainly comes to public attention through family, or in a few cases, bystanders recording videos of the incident. It seems like families ask the authorities where their loved ones have gone and they don't get answers. There have been reports of people only knowing based on press photos of people sent to Guantanamo or El Salvador.
If someone doesn't have a lot of local family it seems easy for it not to be reported anywhere.
If this was simply a missing person case, wouldn't the local police be involved instead of the FBI? If it's still in the FBI's jurisdiction (odd), wouldn't they have something to say instead of nothing?
In this case, this was a professor working on cryptography stuff, which if you will recall was infamously treated as munitions by the US govt for a long time. And he is likely either a naturalized citizen or greencard holder who was originally from China, so there's both an international and potentially geopolitical aspect to it. I suspect that if the local police were involved, they very quickly handed that off to the FBI. There aren't many police forces in the US equipped to deal with that nexus of factors.
They used to have a Github.[3] But now it says "No public repositories".
Here's their NSF funding.[4][5] About US$3 million. Xiaogang (Cliff) Wang is listed as the principal investigator.
[1] http://nsf-cdcc.org/principle-investigators/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250120221302/https://nsf-cdcc....
[3] https://github.com/CDCC-Project
[4] https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-awards-advance-cybers...
[5] https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2207231&His...
(*) Albeit with full legal work authorization.
We don't know the identities of, or even how many people have been extrajudicially rendered to the Salvadoran prison. The administration claims they're not citizens, but how would we know?
To be clear, ICE does not require “judicial action” to remove aliens so using the phrase “extrajudicial action” makes no sense. See: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/expedite...
Note that even when expedited removal does not apply, deportation is handled by immigration courts which aren’t really courts at all, but instead Article I tribunals within the executive branch. And many decisions of these immigration “courts” aren’t appealable to the real judicial branch.
…
> when expedited removal does not apply, deportation is handled by immigration courts
And how many of these recent cases have gone before an immigration court?
Are immigrants entitled to any form of due process?
Should they be, based on your personal principles?
Immigrants are entitled to “due process”—but “due process” doesn’t mean “judicial process.” Due process is a flexible concept that depends on the nature of the legal right being asserted. Non-citizens have no constitutional right to be in the U.S. So in my view the only constitutionally required “process” is to verify whether someone is a citizen or not. And I think that can be done adequately within the executive branch.
Why were immigration courts created in the first place?
You know only about cases that journalists follow. If there is a case journalists do not follow, there is no way for you to know about it.
The government is blowing off judicial orders. Thats a crime. One you start down that path, you tend to keep going.
So whether or not it does matter if the facts don't line up with the speculation, it should matter.
Notably, "observed fact" is an oxymoron. You mean observation of something you then produce a statement to lossily refer to. Especially if the "fact" is bound to floating signifiers.
Most of the terms of the alleged "facts" are floating signifiers. Good luck.
You'll find a lot more success appealing directly to peoples' emotions surrounding materially clear situations. Eg it's obvious ripping contributing members of society out of their homes and expelling them from the country is bad for us. But it's the validation of peoples' immaterial fantasies of being raped by immigrants that sustains this material violence. Leaning into analysis of floating signifiers just enables this societal dysfunction.
Facts are useful, but only if they're actually factual. You haven't grounded any of your factual assertions in material analysis. Any factual analysis of "disappearing" is impossible as this inherently relies on your expectations of the potential behavior of the government when the government never attempted to provide a material basis for the justification of violence to begin with.
That is, whether or not you consider "disappearing" to be a valid concept very much relies on whether or not you thought the government attempted to treat people in good faith to begin with. I personally think you're a moron if you trust the state to do anything but look after itself.
Not that we know about yet. Someone's got to be the first of that sort of government action to be discovered and come to the notice of more than just their friends and family, and it's highly unlikely to be discovered the very first time it happened.
I'm reasonably confident that if this news manages to get covered widely enough. there's going to be a bunch of "me too" reports of coworkers or family that have disappeared under similar circumstances in the last 3 or 4 weeks. I'll be curious to see what other nationalities and professions show up in those reports.
