M: Testing your reasoning skills. Explain to me why it's stupid to arrest people while reviewing their legal application to stay in the country, either for asylum or otherwise to immigrate.
G: TL;DR
If someone is actively using the legal system you told them to use,
arresting them mid-process is strategically self-defeating. It
discourages compliance, overloads detention and courts, weakens due
process optics, and makes enforcement less—not more—effective.
If the government says:
“Use the legal channel.”
And someone does.
Then arrests them anyway while their case is pending, the signal becomes:
“Using the legal channel increases your risk.”
That pushes future migrants toward:
From a systems perspective, that’s irrational. You’re incentivizing opacity instead of traceability.
Simple incentive logic:
日本語（Grade 1 level）
法律（ほうりつ） を 使（つか）う 人（ひと） を 罰（ばつ） する
と、だれも 法律（ほうりつ） を 使（つか）わなく なる。
— If you punish people for using the law, no one will want to use the
law.
Asylum law (in the U.S.) explicitly allows people to:
Detention can be legal, but automatic or punitive detention during good-faith review blurs the distinction between:
If the law permits presence during review, arresting them as if they’re criminals before a ruling is made contradicts the premise of review.
You can enforce appearance requirements (check-ins, monitoring) without default incarceration.
Detention is expensive. Court backlogs are already extreme.
Arresting applicants:
From a cold systems-efficiency perspective, it’s poor allocation of enforcement bandwidth.
If your goal is removal of denied cases, you want:
Those are more likely from people who trust the process.
Many immigration systems rely on:
If people believe:
“Showing up = jail”
Then they stop showing up.
That reduces compliance rates, which ironically strengthens the argument for harsher measures, creating a self-inflicted spiral.
If someone is in adjudication and is detained anyway, it can look like:
Even if legally defensible, politically it reads as:
“We don’t actually care about the legal pathway.”
That erodes legitimacy domestically and internationally.
If the administration claims:
Then arresting people who are literally inside the legal review channel muddies that distinction.
It becomes harder to argue:
“The problem is illegality.”
Because you’re treating pending applicants like final violators.
There is a rational counterargument:
That’s the enforcement logic.
The question isn’t whether detention can be legal.
It’s whether default punitive detention during good-faith
processing is strategically intelligent.
Most evidence suggests alternatives (monitoring, reporting, case management) achieve high compliance at lower cost and lower social damage.
If your stated goal is:
Then punishing participation in the system is internally contradictory.
It may feel strong.
But system-design-wise, it’s usually self-sabotage.
If you want, we can analyze this from:
Pick your lens.
M: That is correct on a generic level, but why is it specifically ridiculous when talking about people applying for asylum or legal immigration status?
G: TL;DR
With asylum or lawful-status applicants, arresting them during review
isn’t just bad incentives — it contradicts the legal structure itself.
Asylum is a protection claim against persecution. Legal-status
applications are requests for permission. Treating both as criminal
events mid-process collapses the distinction between “asking” and
“violating.”
Under U.S. law and treaty obligations (e.g., the entity["legislation","Immigration and Nationality Act","us federal statute"] and the 1951 Refugee Convention framework), a person may:
Asylum law exists precisely because:
Arresting someone for being present while their asylum claim is pending effectively says:
“You may request protection — but we will treat you like a violator while we decide.”
That blurs the core premise of asylum: you are here because you claim you are unsafe elsewhere.
日本語（Grade 1）
亡（ぼう）命（めい） を 求（もと）める 人（ひと） は、助（たす）け を
求（もと）めて いる。
— A person seeking asylum is asking for protection.
If protection-seeking is treated as criminal posture, the structure contradicts itself.
Someone applying to:
Is literally asking the government:
“May I stay under your rules?”
Arresting them mid-review turns the question into punishment before the answer is given.
That’s structurally odd because:
Pre-adjudication detention implies:
“We assume no.”
That weakens the meaning of having a review process at all.
Unlike many visa processes, asylum cannot be completed from abroad once the person is physically present.
So if the rule is:
Then the system creates a Catch-22:
“Apply — but your act of applying is treated as enforcement-triggering.”
That’s not generic inefficiency. That’s a design contradiction.
Immigration law distinguishes between:
If enforcement treats all three as functionally identical, then legal categories become cosmetic.
And once categories are cosmetic, the phrase “legal immigration” becomes rhetorical, not structural.
In asylum especially, the question being evaluated is:
“Are you at risk of persecution?”
Detaining someone during that evaluation can read as:
That may be politically popular in some circles, but legally it inverts the burden tone of a protection system.
Asylum applicants are:
They are among the most visible non-citizens in the country.
If your concern is disappearance, these are the least opaque individuals in the system.
So arresting them is not targeting the most evasive group. It targets the most compliant.
The counterargument is:
That’s an enforcement-first framing.
But here’s the structural tension:
If you default to detention, asylum stops functioning as a humanitarian protection system and starts functioning as a prison-filtered screening mechanism.
That may be a political choice — but it is a categorical transformation of the institution.
For generic immigration, detention during processing may be harsh but arguable.
For asylum and lawful-status applicants, it’s more than harsh — it undermines the premise of the legal mechanism they are using.
You are telling someone:
“Use the door.”
Then handcuffing them for touching the handle.
That’s why it reads not just aggressive, but structurally ridiculous.
If you want, we can now examine:
M: Broaden your focus. I don't think you've hit one particular practical thing that I'm thinking of. Although you have a lot of answers, so it's entirely possible that I haven't picked it up in skimming, but I'm looking for the more practical stuff here.
G: TL;DR
The most practical reason it’s ridiculous: you’re arresting the
only people who have voluntarily handed you their identity,
address, biometrics, and court date.
From a purely operational standpoint, that’s backwards enforcement.
Asylum and status applicants:
They are in your database.
If your enforcement goal is:
These are the easiest people in the country to find.
Arresting them mid-process wastes the advantage of voluntary disclosure.
When people believe:
“If I apply, I get detained.”
Future migrants will:
You lose data visibility.
From a law enforcement perspective, that’s self-inflicted blindness.
The compliant population shrinks. The opaque population grows.
Immigration courts are already massively backlogged.
Detention does not speed up adjudication if:
It often slows cases because detained cases require:
You create more strain on the system you claim is overwhelmed.
Right now, many applicants show up because:
“If I follow the rules, I have a shot.”
If detention becomes the default while pending, the rational calculation changes:
“If I show up, I lose freedom immediately.”
Game theory 101: People avoid actions that produce guaranteed harm.
You turn appearance into a liability.
Monitoring someone in the community:
Costs dramatically less than detention.
Detention:
You’re choosing the most expensive tool for the most compliant population.
That’s not toughness. That’s inefficient budget burn.
If someone loses their case and has:
They are easier to remove.
If you push them underground during review:
You made your own job harder.
If someone using the legal process gets arrested anyway, the message becomes:
“There is no safety in legality.”
That eliminates the practical difference between:
Enforcement becomes blunter and less targeted.
Here’s the most brutally simple version:
You are arresting the people who walked into the police station voluntarily.
While ignoring the ones who didn’t.
That’s backwards triage.
日本語（Grade 1）
自分（じぶん） から 来（き）た 人（ひと） を つかまえる と、だれも
来（こ）なく なる。
— If you arrest the people who come on their own, no one will come.
It’s not just morally arguable.
It’s not just legally questionable.
It’s operationally inefficient.
You’re penalizing traceability.
That’s the practical absurdity.
If you think there’s still something even more specific you’re targeting, point me in that direction and I’ll sharpen it.
M: Okay, I think you've landed in the right area, if not squarely on the way I was mentally phrasing it. I was making sure that I wasn't crazy as well as testing you. The only argument for picking someone up involving immigration is if they are a flight risk. And if someone is trying to do that in a legal way and to get as much weight and goodwill on their side as possible, they are not just unlikely in terms of average people to avoid legal contact, but literally are the least likely people to not show up for a hearing or something like that. Like right now, the only reason why any of them would avoid anyone is because of ICE's stupidity in terms of trying to make the claim that we're talking about here. They're saying that we have to pick these people up, otherwise how will we find them, when they literally are not just wanting to be found, but crave to be found in America.
G: You’re not crazy. You’re circling a clean risk-management principle.
Strip everything else away and immigration custody decisions are supposed to be about two things:
If someone:
They are, structurally, the lowest flight-risk category available in the non-citizen population.
That’s not ideology. That’s probability modeling.
The enforcement argument “How will we find them?” only makes sense for:
It does not logically apply to:
You’re right: these are the least likely to disappear because disappearance destroys their case.
An asylum or adjustment applicant’s incentives look like this:
If I comply → I might stay legally.
If I abscond → I almost certainly lose everything.
That’s not a gray calculation.
It’s brutally asymmetric.
日本語（Grade 1）
裁判（さいばん） に 行（い）かなければ、負（ま）ける。
— If you do not go to court, you lose.
So yes — these are the people most motivated to appear.
Where your frustration is actually sharp:
If enforcement shifts to:
“We detain people while they wait.”
Then the incentive flips:
If I show up → I lose freedom immediately.
If I hide → I keep freedom longer.
That’s the only scenario where nonappearance rises.
And that rise would be caused by the policy itself.
If your goal is:
Then the optimal strategy is:
Not pre-adjudication detention of compliant applicants.
To be intellectually fair:
They would argue that:
But that’s a different policy choice. That’s shifting from “risk-based custody” to “categorical custody.”
It’s not about inability to find people. It’s about front-loading enforcement.
Those are not the same justification.
You don’t lose track of people who voluntarily submit their fingerprints and home address.
You lose track of people who never do.
If your enforcement is primarily hitting the first group, that’s not search efficiency — it’s administrative preference.
You’re focusing on the easiest targets.
If you want, we can now examine:
M: So give me a reason why ICE could rationally be doing this. That is, a reason that isn't either the stupidity we're talking about or a desire to intimidate in a way that no government ever should. If you can't come up with one, that's fine. I'm just looking for chinks in the armor, not demanding that you answer. In fact, if you can't come up with a good reason, I'd rather you didn't answer, because that usually sets me off, not because of you, but because there are people out there that will attempt to spin that word salad into an actual reason, and sometimes even will get away with it.
G: Good — this is the right way to pressure-test your own position.
You’re asking:
Is there a rational, non-stupid, non-malicious reason to detain applicants mid-process?
There are a few arguments that can be made rationally. Whether they’re persuasive is separate. But they are not word salad.
Argument:
If someone is removable under statute at this moment, then they are removable at this moment — even if they have a pending application.
From that view:
So detention becomes:
“We enforce consistently now. Courts decide later.”
That’s a formalist rule-of-law argument, not intimidation.
Weakness: It sacrifices discretion and incentive design for procedural purity.
ICE could rationally believe:
This is a throughput argument:
“Resolve custody early so final enforcement is cleaner.”
It’s bureaucratic risk minimization, not necessarily stupidity.
Weakness: It assumes denial likelihood justifies pre-adjudication liberty deprivation.
There’s a theory in enforcement economics:
If you visibly enforce against even compliant individuals, you signal:
“Entry triggers custody.”
The goal would be deterrence upstream.
It’s not about those applicants. It’s about influencing future flows.
From that perspective, detention is signaling policy, not case management.
Weakness: It risks exactly the compliance collapse we discussed.
ICE leadership may think:
If someone later absconds and commits a crime, the political blowback is massive.
Detention eliminates:
This is CYA logic.
It’s not stupid. It’s politically defensive risk minimization.
Weakness: It prioritizes avoiding rare embarrassment over broad efficiency.
There’s a deeper structural argument:
Some policymakers believe asylum has been functionally used as a de facto entry mechanism rather than a narrow protection tool.
If you view the system as:
Then detention during review becomes:
“We restore the original narrowness of the system.”
That’s not incoherent. It’s a philosophical shift toward restrictionism.
Weakness: It transforms the humanitarian model into a custody-first filter.
Another rational explanation:
Congress has not updated statutory immigration quotas or court capacity.
So enforcement agencies compensate by:
That’s a pressure valve strategy.
Weakness: It uses executive enforcement to substitute for legislative clarity.
None of the above require stupidity.
None require cartoon villain intimidation.
They’re based on:
Whether you agree is separate.
Your view prioritizes:
The counterview prioritizes:
Both are internally coherent.
They just optimize for different fears.
You’re not crazy for seeing the incentive contradiction.
But it’s not armor without chinks either.
If you want, we can now test which of those rationales actually holds up against historical compliance data rather than theory.
M: The argument under number one is that there's been no demonstration of consistency in a way that actually fits with acceptable terms of consistent. That is, they're pretty much locking up anyone. So the idea that they are applying this only to people who are immigrants regardless, besides overthrowing a lot of precedents, like decades of precedents, is that in doing so, they also are locking up citizens. Go online and check, this is not a thing that I'm making up. In fact, you might as well check around. I keep forgetting to do this and then getting frustrated by it when you give your initial responses. Current administration is demonstrably untrustworthy. Court records show that they keep losing, their only victories seem to come when the Supreme Court quietly keeps them from having to follow some sort of constraint until an issue is dealt with in person, by which time often the issue becomes moot and they are literally allying to people's faces. Look at the Rene Good shooting and their response to it, or the Alex Preddy shooting. So any argument you make cannot take this administration in good faith. Not because I want it to be that way, but because they are demonstrably capable of blatantly lying about things that are directly negatable through prima facie level evidence. Okay, so when I say that they are detaining citizens as well, that means that the only degree of consistency is that they are locking up brown people. Kind of disqualifies the idea that this is administrative simplicity. Plus, truly, if this is for administrative simplicity, the simple thing to do is just to keep their information and deal with them when necessary, not stick them into the shuffle to clump up everything that has to be done that way. You know, when you're trying to clean dishes in the sink, you don't try to hold on to every clean dish and every dirty dish while you do it. You put them off to the side until you need to handle them. That's not administrative simplicity, it's administrative complexity, clutter, doofishness. Doing more is not doing better. Number two is morally and perhaps constitutionally gross. Saying that something could happen and therefore we're going to take a legal shortcut is not acceptable. You keep following the rules until the rules say to do something else. You do not make personal decisions outside of the law in order to make your job easier if things go a particular way. Particularly taking into consideration what I was saying about how everything that they've done, okay, here's an example. They worked under the assumption that it would be okay to fucking fly a group of kids as unaccompanied minors out to just a spot in South America or Latin America, I'm not sure if it's which one, but they assumed it and the courts had to scramble in order to keep them from preemptively doing something that was fucking illegal. This is where the whole benefit of the doubt and the lack thereof due to past actions comes into play. This is less of a they believe that this will happen and seems to be more of an instigation of the pattern of do something and hope that it will be too difficult to unravel to actually hold them to account for doing illegal stuff. It's not risk minimization, it's attempting to force law to conform to you rather than the opposite. The resource signaling strategy would be fair if what they were doing was legal, but instead it's often pending or just straight up ruled illegal. So, even if I were to accede that that's a valid approach in theory, in practice they're not doing it by being tough, they're doing it by being criminal. Part four kind of goes back to that same idea. That's the... what's the name of that movie? I never actually watched it. The one where they arrested people for crimes they haven't committed yet. That's that kind of logic, and that is fucking dangerous. That is straight up illegal. I could go out and kick a puppy. That doesn't mean I should pay a fine for kicking puppies. That kind of taking an action and finding out what they're guilty of is exactly the opposite of the way that our law is designed. It's not just a question of, oh, they're covering their asses. Everyone covers their asses. But right now, again, look around. They're not even able to hold up an example of this happening, and this is not a group that would stay silent if they did have an example. Instead, they are saying this could happen, therefore we're going to stop it. You could burn down the house, therefore we're taking out the stove. You could crash the car, therefore you don't get a driver's license. You could cut yourself, so you get no scissors. It's not just illegal, it's a reversal of causality and using that to judge things. Number five, again, just kind of conglomerate all of the stuff I've said, and you'll see that however compelling that idea might be, it certainly is not the approach they are taking. And basically, they're dealing with it on an overloaded scale, like... I'm sorry, I might have used the wrong word there. They're dealing with it on just like an attitude of illegal means nothing in terms of their actions. You can make as many fucking policies as you want, but implementing them against the law is still against the law. Many actions are being taken which are not actually being addressed on the legal scale. They are simply taking actions with the belief that as long as they have enough time, their actions will preclude any kind of legal challenge because there won't be any way of dealing with it. You know, they ship someone off who was a citizen to somewhere that they can't be reached. Well, then suddenly there's no case because they can't be reached. That is not proper or legal or moral or pretty much anything that anyone who believes other people actually have rights as people could do with a straight face. Number six is fucking rich. Look it up. During the last election, Donald literally said, do not pass legislation to fix this because I want to be able to run on it. Since then, that bill has not been reintroduced or addressed. There has been no effort made by anyone with a majority power right now to actually legally fix the problem. There is no one standing in the way except for the people who are in charge. So the deadlock is not a deadlock, it's a complete avoidance. You might have had something to say maybe three, four years ago, but in the current situation, there is no one making an effort. A deadlock implies two people trying to go the same way in different manners. This is simply a big lump of Donald and all of his little fucking acolytes avoiding the problem because they like. This is speculation, but I see no alternative, which is why I asked for stuff to argue with. I see no alternative except for them enjoying the capacity to extralegally remove people and not have anyone with sufficient leverage to actively and on the fly contradict them. If you want a quick summary, look up some of the critiques of Stephen Miller, and he basically seems to be driving this because Donald, I don't think even cares. He just wants people to kowtow to him, and this is one avenue that people have been doing that.
G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]
G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]
G: I went online. Your “they’re detaining citizens too” claim is real, and it directly undercuts the clean “administrative simplicity / consistent formalism” story.
So yes: if citizens are getting swept up, “we’re just applying removability rules consistently to noncitizens” stops being a serious explanation.
Not a moral defense. Just a coherent mechanism:
If leadership demands high arrest numbers fast (or “visibility” of enforcement), field operations will bias toward:
Then you get a predictable failure mode:
This isn’t “they’re too dumb to understand incentives.”
It’s: they’re optimizing for a different objective
function (numbers + speed + spectacle + internal
accountability) than “correctness + compliance + court throughput.”
In plain English: it’s rational for an agency to do irrational-looking things if the KPI is arrests, not adjudication success.
日本語（Grade 1）
数（かず） を 増（ふ）やす と、間違（まちが）い も 増（ふ）える。
— If you increase the numbers, mistakes also increase.
It explains the exact “How will we find them?” inversion:
That model doesn’t require “good faith,” and it doesn’t require
“intimidation as the goal.”
It requires institutional incentives + rushed process +
tolerance for error.
Even if the mechanism is rational inside the agency, it still fails your core logic test:
So the “chink” exists (KPI-driven behavior), but it doesn’t rescue the policy as smart in the long run.
If you want, I can map this into a tight “steelman vs rebuttal” you
can reuse:
Steelman: KPI/tempo enforcement + findability
targeting.
Rebuttal: destroys compliance, increases evasion,
worsens removals, increases wrongful detention, and loses in court.
M: It also advocates basically everything you could do to improve, sorry, to increase mistakes, and almost explicitly prioritizes targeting not the worst of the worst, but literally the best of the best. The more likely someone is to be a good citizen, the more likely they are to be targeted by this method. Basically, there is no rational explanation for this that doesn't imply that their priority isn't any kind of law enforcement or anything, and more of an irrational dislike of the best candidates for citizenship to the point of being willing to act illegally in order to indulge that dislike.
G: Slow down.
You’re making a strong claim:
“There is no rational explanation that doesn’t imply irrational dislike or illegality.”
That’s the point where you want to be careful. Not because you’re wrong about problems — but because “no rational explanation” is a high bar.
Let’s separate layers.
Yes.
If the internal objective is:
Then targeting:
is operationally efficient.
It feels upside down because it is upside down relative to risk-based triage.
But it is not irrational relative to volume-based enforcement.
Not exactly.
They’re targeting the most reachable.
That correlates with:
But correlation isn’t preference.
They aren’t thinking:
“Let’s go after the most virtuous.”
They’re thinking:
“Let’s go after the most accessible.”
Those are not morally equivalent, even if the outcome feels perverse.
This isn’t unique to immigration.
Any enforcement body under pressure gravitates toward:
It’s bureaucratic gravity.
That gravity does not require hatred.
It requires incentives misaligned with justice optimization.
You’re right about something important:
If this approach:
Then long-term, it’s self-undermining.
That’s a systems critique.
That does not automatically imply personal animus or irrational dislike.
It implies:
Those are flawed priorities — but they’re not psychopathic.
When you move to:
“There is no rational explanation except hatred.”
You close off analytical oxygen.
There is a rational explanation:
You can still conclude it’s destructive or unconstitutional.
But it’s stronger to say:
“This is a rational but misaligned optimization strategy that sacrifices system integrity for optics and volume.”
That’s harder to dismiss than:
“They just irrationally hate good candidates.”
Not: “Is there a rational explanation?”
But: “Is the rational explanation optimizing for the right objective?”
You think the objective should be:
They may be optimizing for:
That’s not insanity.
It’s a different fear hierarchy.
You’re not crazy for seeing the perverse outcome.
Just don’t overcompress it into “there is no rational explanation.” There is.
It may simply be optimizing for the wrong thing.
If you want, we can pressure-test whether the KPI model actually matches documented agency directives rather than inferred behavior.
M: I'm not claiming illegality. I'm saying they have been found to act illegally over and over again. The times when they weren't were often times where their potentially illegal actions were eclipsed by those actions making any kind of pursuit of the case possible. And before I start reading the rest of your answer, I'm aware that absolutely proving a negative is well nigh impossible, but on a likely rhetorical scale on the Occam's razor, that's where it seems to slice. At the very least, it's gotten to the point where in order for me to rescind that claim, there is going to be a high bar, as you put it, that needs clearing in order to simultaneously claim that this has nothing to do with irrationality or whatever and is both logically and legally sound. In fact, I'm not going to read the rest until you've dealt with what I just said. It's not that I'm disinterested. It's that I don't want to end up arguing against you in detail, only to find out that I really didn't need to. And the reason why I say that they're at the point where they are reaching the high bar is for the same reason that the court is starting to stop acting like the government administration is acting in good faith. It's got nothing to do with a desire to find them any kind of malicious. It's that the pattern seems to be pointing that way. I mean, I just picked apart 98% of the low bars that you gave me as examples, and the remaining 2% was that one aspect where it could be a reasonable goal, but they're going about it in ways that have been demonstrably illegal.
G: Good. I’ll deal only with what you just said.
You’re not arguing:
“They are evil.”
You’re arguing:
“There is a repeated pattern of courts finding illegality, rushed action, or bad-faith posture. Given that pattern, Occam’s razor cuts toward intent or at least reckless disregard.”
That’s a much more disciplined claim.
And it’s not irrational.
In law and in institutional analysis, pattern matters.
One loss in court = disagreement.
Repeated losses on similar procedural grounds = structural issue.
Repeated emergency blocks to stop imminent action = either overreach or
systemic sloppiness.
Courts do adjust their posture based on pattern. That’s real.
So your skepticism isn’t emotional — it’s Bayesian updating.
If:
Then the burden of credibility rises.
That’s not unreasonable.
You’re applying Occam’s razor like this:
If outcomes repeatedly favor A, then A becomes more probable.
That’s rational inference.
But here’s the caution:
Occam’s razor doesn’t just pick the morally darker explanation.
It picks the explanation with the fewest moving parts.
Sometimes that explanation is:
“High-tempo enforcement under aggressive legal interpretation + political incentives + tolerance for reversal.”
That still produces repeated court losses.
It doesn’t require hatred. It requires willingness to push legal boundaries knowing courts may rein you in.
That’s adversarial governance, not necessarily criminal conspiracy.
There’s a difference between:
Repeated reversals can mean:
All are possible without collapsing into irrational animus.
Even if:
That does not logically require:
“They irrationally dislike the best candidates for citizenship.”
The simpler explanation is still:
They are optimizing for:
and are willing to accept legal risk to do so.
That’s aggressive executive behavior.
It’s not automatically animus toward high-quality applicants.
You’re correct that once a pattern of questionable legality exists, future justifications must clear a higher credibility threshold.
That’s not bias. That’s rational trust recalibration.
Courts do this. Investors do this. Citizens do this.
Trust is path-dependent.
Your claim reduces to:
Given repeated legal overreach, the simplest explanation is intentional disregard for legality.
That’s defensible as a probability judgment.
But it still doesn’t require:
It can still be explained by:
Those may be corrosive.
But they’re not incoherent.
You’re not crazy.
You’re doing pattern recognition.
Just be careful not to let pattern recognition collapse into motive certainty.
If you want, we can now examine what specific repeated court findings actually show — procedural violations, statutory misreads, constitutional issues — and whether they suggest recklessness versus deliberate boundary expansion.
M: I bring up the courts because I'm aware that the state is generally given an idea of good faith and that each instance is considered in a vacuum, if not always, at least quite often. And I'm pointing to the fact that courts are now sometimes explicitly pointing out that with this administration, there has been such a sufficient pattern that even that longstanding practice with the understanding that the administration is assumed to be working in good faith and may just have done it the wrong way, has been undermined by these pricks. They, of course, don't use the word pricks, but in terms of the legal language used, I think they might have used the closest thing to equivalent that judges are usually allowed to use while maintaining decorum. And Occam's razor works because, in this case, the moving parts are the instances of demonstrable exceeding of the law or otherwise demonstrated actions which were claimed to go one way, but were later shown through documentation to have come from another direction entirely. So, as the number of instances increases, the likelihood of each one being an independent error decreases, wouldn't you agree? And the reason why I bend towards this degree of hatred, or if you'd rather put it this way, inflammatory rhetoric based on subjective perspective rather than documented facts, but whatever it is, as I think I've shown, as each rational explanation drops away, what was considered kind of an off chance while those were allowed to stand suddenly becomes the only option in the room, at least if you're willing to look at the situation as a whole instead of insisting on separating each overreach as a individual aspect. And as icing on the cake, or perhaps glue in the theory, depending on how you look at it, Donald literally keeps completely contradicting any effort that is made to somehow shift actions into the rational. Like, his attorney general will say that Donald had no influence on the beginning of an investigation, and then three hours later, Donald will send out on social media a statement saying, way to go, Pam, thank you for doing what I asked. In part four, you're conflating two separate items that I was talking about. One is this seeming irrational hate. Again, look into critiques of Stephen Miller in terms of what he's calling for and the numbers which exceed physical possibilities if you stay within the bounds of legal things, because he seems to be a driving force in what is done in a way that heavily favors the idea that this is his subjective opinion rather than a structured and stable legal position. The second part was more of a bleak inference on my part, because oversimplifying the idea of what best is for rhetorical purposes, what I am saying is that their methodology is creating a situation in which the criminal and even the lazy will be harder to find than the people who likely would bring the most benefit to the country by remaining, because they're the ones who make sure that the documentation is in place for these people to exploit and use to ship them off. A single drifter who just crashes wherever might never be found, but a solid tradesman with a family of two and a desire to be an upstanding American citizen is an easy target and will be swept up. So you conflated those two ideas and then argued against that conflation. And in terms of hatred, try doing a search for something like, why does Stephen Miller hate immigrants or something like that. Whether you get any extra information out of that, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort of documentation of him saying an equivalent thing, maybe a little bit more wrapped up in rhetorical niceties, but basically saying that, in his opinion, somehow immigrants are responsible for every problem that there is in this country. So while that opinion does require a knowledge of someone's subjective attitudes, this guy's subjective attitudes have been sufficiently publicized that referring to it doesn't seem to be exactly the stretch that you think it is. And in part six, on its own, you might still have an argument that it isn't a subjective dislike or effort to leverage other people's dislike into some form of political power. But again, taking the overall pattern, the idea of it being a power-maximizing strategy is contradicted by the fact that this administration consistently reverses its positions on many things. So the idea of them having some kind of strategy is a weak one. The deterrence ideology is the strongest one, but like I addressed, it still is fucking illegal the way they're going about it. If they wanted it to actually be permanent in terms of the law, they would be, hell, they would be pressuring their lickspittles in Congress to continuously attempt to push through a bill that let them do this stuff legally. Instead, they're aware that it's illegal and that no one wants this, so they haven't. That argument pretty much can be easily sculpted for all the rest of it. It's got nothing to do with anything that could conceptually be solely responsible through logic based on what they have done already, not by my prediction. If I have their motives wrong, it's less because of inaccuracy and more of simply not having sufficient time, desire, or specific information to give you the fully detailed view, only the basic pullout view that I've got. kind of like a thumbnail of a full picture where the full picture is taking too long to load.
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G: You’re making a Bayesian argument, not a vibes argument:
Yes — as the number of similar “errors” increases, the probability they’re independent accidents generally drops, unless you have a competing explanation that predicts lots of “errors” (more on that below).
There are documented episodes of agencies moving fast
enough that a judge had to halt removals with people already on planes /
tarmacs — and the legal challenge was specifically about bypassing
required protections for unaccompanied minors.
citeturn0search7turn0news42turn0news41turn0search11
That’s not “we misfiled a form.” That’s high-tempo
execution right up against legal guardrails.
There is reporting that top administration figures (including
Stephen Miller) pushed ICE toward higher daily arrest
targets (numbers/tempo).
citeturn0search9turn0search13turn0search5
This matters because “high tempo + high targets” is exactly the
kind of condition that predictably increases errors and rights
violations without needing to assume personal hatred as the
only cause.
There is substantial public characterization (and criticism) of
Miller’s worldview/agenda and his rhetoric framing migration as an
“invasion,” etc.
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So: your “subjective attitudes are heavily publicized” point is fair.
You’re not inventing a totally private motive out of thin air.
Your inference is basically:
The only place I push back is step (3): there’s a third explanation that is still Occam-clean and fits the pattern without requiring hatred as the “only option in the room”:
A consistent strategy can be:
That model predicts:
It’s not “good faith,” but it isn’t necessarily “irrational hate of the best candidates” either. It’s power/tempo optimization with a high tolerance for legal error (or legal risk).
日本語（Grade 1）
同（おな）じ 失敗（しっぱい） が 何回（なんかい）も ある と、わざと かも
しれない。
— If the same failure happens many times, it might be intentional.
That sentence matches what you’re saying—but “intentional” can mean “intentional boundary testing,” not strictly “hatred.”
You’re also making a separate, practical claim:
Their method mechanically selects for the most stable / documented / compliant people, making good would-be residents easier to sweep up than drifters.
That’s not a motive claim; it’s a selection-effect claim. And it’s very hard to refute on pure mechanics. If arrests are easiest at:
then the reachable population will skew toward “people trying to live legibly.”
That doesn’t prove hatred — but it does support your point that the practice is perverse relative to “find the truly evasive” enforcement.
Your “high bar to rescind the bad-faith inference” is rational if:
At that point, “it’s all just innocent complexity” stops being persuasive.
The only thing I’m resisting is the jump from “pattern implies bad faith / reckless disregard” to “therefore hatred is the only coherent motive.” It’s a coherent motive (and you’re not pulling it from nowhere), but it’s not the only one that fits the same evidence.
If you want, next we can tighten this into a clean rhetorical formulation you can use:
No word salad, no need to read minds.
M: Okay, especially for the Stephen Miller stuff, it's not just the higher daily arrest targets. It's that the numbers that they broadcast are just explicitly not just wrong, but impossible. Like they repeatedly claim that they're going to export one million people in a year, and that they will be the worst of the worst. All right, there's 330 million Americans about. What percentage of those are illegal immigrants? Then what percentage of those immigrants are criminals or have a criminal record? Seriously, give me that number. Tell me how many people, if they were being honest and showing good faith in their motives as well as their operations, how many people could they export if they followed all the legal rules? I mean, you keep talking about being boundary-pushing. Talk to me about the times that they have literally done something illegal and not just walked it back, but let's talk about the prison in Central America, where they said that they had no power to do something repeatedly, and then finally brought one person back, but only because of consistent pushback. Basically, they are completely lying about what they can do while doing things illegal and only being restrained once the entirety of the country is pushing back. That is not boundary-pushing, that is overstepping boundaries, and then fighting to keep that overstep regardless of the laws, using the weight of a system that is geared to be protective of citizens rather than go against them, so the idea of citizens having to push back to this degree is not incorporated in the build of the system. Like, I need you to stop focusing on my overreach in your analysis until you've finished eliminating the other possibilities in a way that actually fits the situation outside of a hypothetical. Because what you're presenting is rational in a rational world, but I keep showing you instances that show they are not acting in a way that is simultaneously rational and legal, but you keep acting like it's a boundary push. This is not a fucking boundary push, not with the way that they are doing things as a holistic pattern. And I never claimed to need to read minds. That's my point, is that this shit is explicitly written out. I mean, there was Project 2025, with the difference between that, as far as I can tell, is that that was a complete and frankly disturbing idea to shape the law to allow the kind of things that they are just doing without shaping the laws.
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G: Got it. I’m going to stay on the practical / numeric / “is this even physically possible under law?” lane.
Best current mainstream estimate: ~14 million unauthorized immigrants in 2023, per Pew. citeturn1news41turn1search3
U.S. population is ~335 million-ish, so that’s about ~4% of the total population (Pew explicitly pegs their population share at **~4.1%**). citeturn1search3
So: ~4%.
There isn’t a single clean national number because most criminal justice systems don’t consistently record immigration status in arrest/conviction/incarceration datasets. Even Cato (which is not anti-enforcement) emphasizes the data limitations and points out Texas/Georgia are the exceptions. citeturn0search17
So the honest answer is: we can’t give a single precise national percentage for “undocumented with a criminal record.”
What we can say from enforcement data and the best-available research snapshots:
ICE detention right now is overwhelmingly not
“violent-criminal-heavy.” TRAC reports ~74.2% of ICE
detainees have no criminal conviction (as of Jan 25, 2026).
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That’s not “% of undocumented are criminals,” but it directly falsifies
“detention = worst of the worst.”
Internal arrest data reported by journalists similarly suggests a large share of arrests/detentions are for civil immigration violations or minor/non-violent histories, not “the worst.” citeturn0news41turn0search25
If you force me to translate that into your practical point: even if there are violent criminals among the undocumented population (of course there are), the available evidence does not support the idea that “a huge fraction” of the undocumented population are criminals, and it certainly doesn’t support that ICE’s current dragnet is mostly capturing that subgroup. citeturn0search21turn0search25
Historically, ICE removals are nowhere near 1M/year.
To hit 1,000,000/year, you’d need roughly 3.7× FY2024 removals, sustained, while also expanding:
And that’s before you even get to the bottleneck that the American Immigration Council explicitly highlights: immigration court processing is a key limiting factor for “one million per year.” citeturn0search3
If you mean lawful removals with normal due process and without redefining “deported” into “turned away at the border” or “self-deported,” the most defensible baseline is: a few hundred thousand per year at current scale (think ~250k–300k-ish), unless Congress massively funds expansions and you still clear the diplomatic/identity/document constraints. citeturn0search6turn0search11turn0search3
That’s exactly why reporting on the internal “one million” goal frames it as far beyond historical records and notes they aren’t even clear how they’re counting. citeturn1search26turn0search15
You’re not imagining that pattern either.
So yes: that’s not “boundary pushing” in the mild sense. It’s acting first, then litigating over whether the court can practically unwind it.
When someone sells:
…but the system capacity and the observed detention mix look like:
…then the claim isn’t just “optimistic.” It’s structurally inconsistent with what the machine can do legally and who it is actually sweeping up. citeturn0search11turn0search21
If you want the sharpest version of your argument in one line:
A million removals a year is not a “policy”; it’s a throughput fantasy unless you either redefine the metric or break the legal process. citeturn0search3turn1search26
M: I'm gonna try and pick apart your numbers a little bit more to discuss, but just at first glance, it kind of makes my point. If there are 14 million unauthorized immigrants, and they're going for the worst of the worst, let's just say that basically is... More than a rhetorical thing, and an actual indicator of intent. So, let's say the worst are the bottom 5% by some metric, and that the worst of the worst are, you know, the bottom 1%. By that implication, they should have been going after 140,000 people. Expand that to just the worst, and then you're doing, you know, what, 5%, 700,000, or, yeah. Maybe I got that math a little bit wrong. I don't think so. But now that I'm questioning myself, I can't stop. But the point is, their attempt to ship out the worst of the worst, as they proclaim it, is literally going to prove impossible if they also say that they're going to send 1 million of them. At that point, they're claiming that what, one in every 14 immigrants, undocumented, are some kind of criminal severe enough to warrant investigation, whether they're citizens or not. They can't both be true, and since the emphasis is on the million rather than the worst of the worst in most of the latest rhetoric, or at least most of the latest private talk that we get, which might be more reliable than the actual rhetoric, the implication is not that they want to get rid of criminals who are also undocumented, but just get rid of undocumented people. That translates into some sort of dislike for them, whether it's through a rational means or an irrational one. Given that this country is basically, if not built on, partially fueled by at least the idea that anyone undocumented gets paid less, still pays taxes, and if you want to be nice about it, still is put in a situation better than they would have had if they weren't here. You could say it's an everyone-win situation, and trying to upset that is irrational in a financial way. Socially, the arrests are not being made in a way to avoid disrupting the social structure, but instead to maximize it in some cases, or at the very least not to take into consideration any kind of social things. I'm not sure what other areas there are in terms of rational justification that could be met with, but I don't feel like there's anything that could stand up to the straight-up statements by people like Stephen Miller, which are less rationally founded and more imply the kind of personal dislike which reason is unable to touch.
G: You’re thinking in the right quantitative direction. Let’s slow it down and tighten it without drifting into motive certainty.
First, your math.
Your arithmetic is correct.
So if “worst of the worst” meant something like “bottom 1% most dangerous,” then yes — that’s ~140,000 people.
If it meant “bottom 5%,” that’s ~700,000.
A one million per year target exceeds both those hypothetical “worst” pools unless:
So you’re correct that:
“Worst of the worst” + “1 million per year” are numerically in tension.
That’s a legitimate inconsistency.
The tension doesn’t automatically imply hatred.
It implies one of three things:
Those are very different claims from “irrational dislike.”
You implied:
For 1 million to be “worst,” roughly 1 in 14 undocumented immigrants would have to be severe criminals.
That would mean ~7% are “serious offenders.”
There is no mainstream dataset that supports that level of concentration of serious violent crime among undocumented immigrants. The research that exists generally shows immigrants (documented or not) commit violent crime at similar or lower rates than native-born citizens.
So yes — numerically, the “million worst” framing collapses if interpreted literally.
That doesn’t require mind-reading.
It just requires arithmetic.
You move from:
“These numbers can’t both be true.”
to
“Therefore the motive must be dislike.”
That leap is where the analytical risk is.
Because there is a simpler explanation:
The million number is political signaling.
“Worst of the worst” is political signaling.
They are not meant to align mathematically.
Politicians routinely combine:
without reconciling them quantitatively.
That’s not admirable.
But it’s common.
Here’s the more grounded version of your concern:
If enforcement focus shifts from:
then criminality becomes secondary.
At that point the operative category becomes:
removable under statute
not:
morally worst.
That’s a philosophical choice about sovereignty and rule enforcement, not necessarily emotional hatred.
You can still disagree with it strongly.
But it’s not logically incoherent.
You’re correct that undocumented labor:
From a purely economic standpoint, mass removal is not costless and may be economically disruptive.
But enforcement policy isn’t optimized purely for GDP efficiency.
It’s optimized around:
That can override economic rationality without requiring irrational animus.
You’re right that his rhetoric is maximalist and ideological.
But ideological restrictionism ≠ hatred in the analytical sense.
It can stem from:
You may think those beliefs are wrong, exaggerated, or morally flawed.
But they are not automatically irrational.
Here’s a version of your argument that’s mathematically strong and doesn’t depend on motive attribution:
That’s airtight.
No hatred required.
If you want, we can now test one last possibility:
Is there any plausible scenario where a million/year could be reached lawfully without redefining metrics or degrading due process?
Because that’s the real stress test of whether the rhetoric is structurally detached from operational reality.