Tag Archives: ICE

Criticizing cities and ICE activity in complex suburbia

Posted on by

President Donald Trump often criticizes American big cities, particularly Chicago as he has mentioned the city multiple times in his first and second term. Just yesterday in the Arizona service for Charlie Kirk, Trump highlighted Chicago:

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

Trump told mourners that one of the last things the slain conservative activist and Illinois native said to him was, “Please, sir. Save Chicago.” Trump then launched into a familiar refrain, saying, “We’re going to save Chicago from horrible crime.”

One of the Trump administration’s actions regarding Chicago includes recent ICE activity. While all the details are hard to come by, it appears however that this activity has not just affected people living in Chicago; there has been ICE activity in numerous suburbs. An ICE facility in Broadview. ICE agents approaching people in numerous suburbs, as far as 40 miles out from the city.

These actions hint at the complexity of the Chicago region and suburbs across the United States. Even as some Americans have long associated cities with racial and ethnic diversity, this diversity has increased in suburbs in recent decades. The American suburbs are full of people of different racial and ethnic groups as well as large numbers of recent immigrants to the United States.

So when Trump says Chicago has problems, does he mean just the city or is the whole region in question?Again, from the Kirk service:

Trump later took aim at Gov. JB Pritzker, declaring, “You have an incompetent governor who thinks it’s OK when 11 people get murdered over the weekend. … He says he’s got crime [under control]. No, they don’t have it under control, but we’ll have it under control very quickly.”

Both the city of Chicago and its suburbs have the same governor. Only one of the Chicago collar counties in Illinois voted for Trump in 2024: McHenry County. (There are portions of the greater Chicago area in southeastern Wisconsin and northwestern Indiana but they may not be part of the same conversation.) Are the problems some see in Chicago also ones they see present in suburbs?

The 84,000 question

Posted on by

I hadn’t had a chance yet to comment on the 84,000 websites the U.S. government seized about a month ago because they were supposedly associated with child pornography.  Turns out the government was wrong about that, but the damage was done since a lot of visitors to the websites of innocent small business owners were directed to a page displaying an imposing government seal and the statement:

Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.

Whoops.

Recently, the White House’s IP Czar Victoria Espinel testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) had a lot of pointed questions (YouTube video of the exchange here).  Now Ars Technica has posted an interview Rep. Lofgren in which talks about the due process problems with seizing domain names without giving people a chance to defend themselves before the seizure takes place:

You’ve got the prosecutors coming in, they have a judge sign something, and the people whose property is being seized are never heard from. It doesn’t appear, honestly—though it would not solve the due process problems—that there’s much inquiry on the part of the prosecution, either. Is there a fair use right? Is there an authorized use? Is there legitimate business going on? There’s no opportunity for that to be raised, and once the damage is done, it’s done.I’ve not yet talked to some of the individuals, but we’ve had second-hand reports of people in the child pornography takedown [i.e., who owned one of those 84,000 websites] whose businesses were essentially destroyed. There’s hardly anything you can say. It’s worse than accusing somebody of being a pedophile.

These are troubling developments indeed.  The whole point of giving the innocent-until-proven-guilty the chance to defend themselves before seizure is to help prevent these sorts of devastating mistakes from happening.