Yeah, I'm not buying it at all. Those sorts of risks are hardly new, and have been effectively handled before without resorting to these sorts of measures. What's so different now?
The obvious intent is to terrify the general population with masked shock troops. This is third world warlord shit. It's more likely that what the lawyers are afraid of is their employability after this nightmare is ended.
Right here in this very discussion there are comments calling for "violent revolution" and the "duty of the American people to overthrow [the government], up to and including violence".
The threat of violence against government agents is very real. If you don't see, it's only because you don't want to see.
I didn't say the threat of violence wasn't real. What's new is this kind of response to it, which is why I don't think it's really that threat that is the the reason for it. It's the sort of response that only makes everything worse for everybody.
Wearing masks is a very gentle response to the threat, compared to the kinds of things that have been done in the past. The historic response to threats against the police was excessive force and extrajudicial killings.
Who wouldn't be afraid of their lives and their families safety, when there's aggressive mobs, both on- and off- line, waiting to doxx or physically assault you for doing your job and enforcing the law?
> How do YOU decide what is right and what is wrong?
Per the US constitution, if and when our government turns tyrannical, it is the duty of the American people to overthrow it, up to and including violence.
You might not agree with this principle, but these are the principles that founded our country.
I agree with you... I think a big issue right now though is that not everyone agrees on the same definition of "tyrannical" and whether or not this counts.
You can't just say "all republicans are dumb and things should be MY way instead", because they think the same about the democrats, and that doesn't make you any better.
You can try educating people, but if they never learn, well... history has a funny way of repeating itself. Every advanced (for their time) civilization has gone through the "stupid period" also known as Machiavelli's paradox.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'self reporting'. And please don't think we aren't going to notice your ninja edit.
You mention 'mobs of masked' (before you edited to include the rest) yet that's exactly how ICE have been portraying themselves. Masked individuals running around stealing people from the streets, their jobs, their homes, etc.
>Masked individuals running around stealing people from the streets, their jobs, their homes, etc.
Yes, that's the process of law enforcement, what do you expect? Hugs and awards for breaking the law?
Go commit a crime and see masked individuals "stealing" you from your home or the street for breaking the law and taking you to court or to jail, those masked individuals are called law enforcement officers and are employed by our elected governments to enforce our democratic laws against those who break them.
They're masked because the criminal gangs love taking revenge on LEOs or their families. Don't be a criminal, follow the law, it's literally that easy.
And what is the procedure for me to not get abducted by some shithead thugs cosplaying as ICE, assuming it's totally fine for law enforcement to conceal their identities and throw people in unmarked vans?
How do I get myself unstuck from CECOT or Alligator Auschwitz once I'm thrown in there without due process?
Where is this happening, and does data show this at a level unprecedented in American history? We’ve prosecuted people ranging from colonial British loyalists to the Klan to the Mob, street gangs and drug cartels, militias, al-Qaeda / ISIS types, and the January 6th insurrectionists and government lawyers haven’t needed to hide their identities. The idea that these lawyers have such an unprecedented grave risk really needs some serious evidence to be taken seriously because the potential for abuse is huge.
Bad faith apples to oranges comparison. Different times back then, law enforcement had a lot more power to retaliate to violence against them. What would have happened to you if you threw rocks at cops in the 1950s?
So of course today you need to hide your identity when you're being assaulted like this by deranged protesters who think they are on the right side of history, but the law enforcement isn't allowed to retaliate in defense to protect you or themselves without being called Nazis or fascists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVYe6537FWo
Speaking of bad faith, how is an immigration court like a paramilitary raid? We do see judges getting death threats but the ones we know about have largely been from Trump supporters angry about judges staying his orders.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
Show me what legal recourse people have to get their needs met, and I will show you how those avenues are being clamped down on by the very same people concerned about their safety.
This is just so far from the correct question that it's not worth trying to have a conversation about this. Policing doesn't make crime go away. More cops does not result in less crime.
You fix crime by addressing what caused people to break the law in the first place. But no one who supports this administration understands that, and so we will not be fixing any of the country's problems anytime soon.
Except they aren’t sending them home, they’re cruelly sending them to unstable countries they aren’t from and putting their lives at risk. I wouldn’t call that justice. It’s closer to genocide than not. We can and should do better.
Wow, what horrible things must you think about Latin America to believe that sending people there is "putting their lives at risk".
People are sent to third countries (with permission from that country) because they say they can't return to their own country. Why wouldn't they be safe in another Spanish speaking nation that agreed to accept them? Latin America isn't a death trap.
Sending dissidents/LGBTQ people home to many South American countries is a death trap. Labeling them as criminals (without due process, I might add) also can be.
They aren't sending immigrants back to each immigrant's preferred, safe country, as you insinuate; they're sending back to their country of origin.
> Sending dissidents/LGBTQ people home to many South American countries is a death trap
That's exactly the kind of ignorance I'm talking about.
Same-sex marriage is legal in most (by population and area) of Latin America. Nations that haven't legalized that still have laws that ban anti-gay discrimination. English colonies like Jamaica and Guyana are worse. Many parts of the US are worse.
"Outside of the North Atlantic, no region in the world has undergone more progress in expanding LGBT legal rights than Latin America"
"Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin
American countries (SPLA) are unquestionably in the lead in the region. If one excludes non-SPLA countries, which are mostly small countries in the Caribbean, the record of progress is even more impressive."
Respectfully, the notion that routing asylum-seekers (especially those who are LGBT or political dissidents) to “any” Latin-American country is harmless overlooks both geography and evidence. Under the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico,” Title 42 expulsions, and the Asylum-Cooperative Agreement with Guatemala, people were removed not to Argentina or Uruguay but overwhelmingly to northern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (countries with some of the highest homicide and kidnapping rates in the world). Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, and even the U.S. DHS Inspector General documented hundreds of rapes, assaults, disappearances and murders of migrants forced to wait or seek refuge there. International law calls this potential “refoulement”; it is precisely why UNHCR and multiple U.S. courts said the policies placed lives at risk.
Citing marriage equality in Brazil or Chile does nothing to change the reality in the Northern Triangle, where same-sex marriage is illegal, hate-crime enforcement is weak, and impunity for anti-LGBT violence hovers around 80–90 percent. Honduras has recorded more than 470 LGBT murders since 2009; Guatemala’s congress tried in 2022 to criminalize sex education and explicitly ban gay marriage; El Salvador’s LGBT activists report routine police harassment and gang “social cleansing.” Saying “many parts of the U.S. are worse” ignores that federal law now protects LGBT workers nationwide and that homicide rates for LGBT people are a fraction of those in the receiving countries. In short, legal progress in parts of Latin America is real, but deporting vulnerable people to Guatemala, Honduras or Mexico is demonstrably dangerous and, for many, a potential death sentence.
Respectfully, those statistics are outdated. El Salvador was once one of the most dangerous nations in the world, now it is one of the safest. Guatemala and Honduras haven't transformed quite so much, but their homicide rates have also decreased tremendously since 2009, when admittedly they were very dangerous with thousands of murders per year. So when you say "Honduras has recorded more than 470 LGBT murders since 2009", I would respond that you should seek updated information, and compare it against overall crime rates before concluding it is targetted at LGBT people.
You're also concerned about rapes and other crimes against deportees. I would remind you of the hundreds of thousands of rapes committed against migrants trying to come to the USA. Removing the temptation that draws so many to endure such risks is the best thing we can do to reduce the crimes you mentioned.
The drop in El Salvador’s official homicide rate is real, but it is the exception, not the rule—and it says little about the countries the U.S. has actually been off-loading asylum-seekers to. The Trump “safe-third-country” flights went almost entirely to Guatemala and Honduras, where the 2023 homicide rates (≈17 and 31 per 100,000, UNODC) remain among the highest in the hemisphere and where LGBT killings continue at a pace far above population share (Honduras’ observatory logged 40 LGBT murders in 2022 alone—roughly one every nine days). Even El Salvador’s new “safety” comes at the cost of mass arbitrary detentions, torture allegations, and documented abuse of LGBT detainees (Amnesty, HRW 2024). So the risk is not simply “outdated statistics”; it is the current, documented inability or unwillingness of these states to protect targeted minorities—a textbook refoulement problem.
Comparing forced removal to voluntary north-bound migration also misses the legal and moral point. People who choose to set out on a dangerous route retain agency; deportees have none. International law bars the U.S. from pushing anyone—especially those who are LGBT or otherwise vulnerable—into countries where the state cannot keep them safe, regardless of how perilous the journey to America may have been. Ending that legal protection would not “remove temptation”; it would simply trap people in danger and outsource responsibility for whatever happens next.
> Guatemala and Honduras, where the 2023 homicide rates (≈17 and 31 per 100,000, UNODC) remain among the highest in the hemisphere and where LGBT killings continue at a pace far above population share (Honduras’ observatory logged 40 LGBT murders in 2022 alone)
Assuming your stats are accurate, the population of Honduras is 11 million, so 31 per 100k equals 3410 murders. 40 LGBT murders is only 1% of that, significantly below the population share for a likely number of LGBT people (around 8%).
Please check your stats more carefully so I don't have to, thanks.
Edit: However you try to obfuscate it, the plain fact is, 40 murders among 11 million people is an LGBT homicide rate of 0.4 per 100k. That's extraordinarily low, and you're trying to misrepresent it as a death trap.
I didn't "cherry-pick" that statistic. You chose it. Now you don't like the obvious conclusion it leads to, so you're changing to a different argument about solving crimes. I don't think you're even interested in discussing this honestly.
Two quick clarifications show why those “only 1 %” calculations are misleading.
First, the 40 deaths are not an “LGBT share” of the national homicide database; they are cases that activists could confirm were LGBT. In Honduras the police almost never record a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity, families often conceal it, and many deaths of queer people are classified simply as “motive unknown.” Cattrachas (the local observatory you quoted) and Human Rights Watch both emphasize that their numbers are a floor, not a census. When the underlying variable is systematically under-reported, dividing it into the total homicide count will always understate the risk.
Second, vulnerability isn’t measured only by raw percentages but by the pattern of violence and the state’s response. Honduras’s Public Ministry reports a 90 % impunity rate for LGBT killings versus ~70 % for homicides overall. In other words, queer victims are far less likely to see a perpetrator arrested or tried, which is exactly what international law calls a “failure of state protection.” Add daily threats, police harassment, corrective rape, and forced displacement—none of which appear in the homicide tally—and you have a risk profile that far exceeds the simple population-share math you’re using.
So the point stands: Guatemala and Honduras remain dangerous places for LGBT asylum-seekers, and the U.S. cannot lawfully or morally treat them as safe havens by cherry-picking incomplete statistics.
Response to your edit:
When you divide 40 LGBT murders by Honduras’ entire population (11 million) you’re using the wrong denominator. Risk has to be measured against the group that is actually at risk—i.e., LGBT people themselves. If we take the conservative estimate that 5 % of Hondurans are LGBT (≈550 000 people), 40 murders translate to roughly 7.3 killings per 100 000 LGBT residents. For comparison, the United States recorded about 30 anti-LGBT hate-motivated homicides in 2022; against an LGBT population of ~18 million that is ~0.17 per 100 000—over 40 times lower than Honduras. And that Honduran figure is almost certainly an undercount, because police reports rarely note a victim’s sexual orientation and families often conceal it; Cattrachas and Human Rights Watch call their tally “the floor, not the ceiling.”
Homicide numbers also capture only the tip of the danger. LGBT Hondurans face routine death threats, “corrective” rape, forced displacement, and police harassment, with a documented impunity rate of about 90 %. That systemic failure of protection—not just the body count—is exactly what international law treats as grounds for asylum and what makes forced returns unsafe. So the data, properly read, confirm the opposite of what you claim: Honduras remains one of the riskiest places in the hemisphere for LGBT people, and treating it as a “safe” destination for deportees ignores both math and reality.
"South Sudan descended into a civil war from 2013 to 2020, enduring rampant human rights abuses, including forced displacement, ethnic massacres, and killings of journalists by various parties."
That's true, South Sudan is a terrible place to deport people. But the eight people who were deported there are terrible people.
Most were murderers. One was convicted of sexually abusing a 12 year old. One was only convicted of robbery and assault, but South Sudan was his country of origin.
“No country on Earth wanted to accept them because their crimes are so uniquely monstrous and barbaric,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security.
However vile a person’s crimes, he doesn’t lose the basic rights that belong to every human being. Government can lock him up if the law allows, but it can’t knowingly dump him in a place where he’s almost certain to be tortured, starved, or killed. That crosses the Eighth-Amendment line against cruel and unusual punishment, ignores the court’s authority, and shifts our problems onto another country instead of taking responsibility for them ourselves. A republic built on natural rights and the rule of law simply doesn’t get to outsource suffering.
> That crosses the Eighth-Amendment line against cruel and unusual punishment, ignores the court’s authority, and shifts our problems onto another country instead of taking responsibility for them ourselves.
The Supreme Court approved the deportation 7-2.
Edit: Nothing the Supreme Court does is strictly procedural. Unlike other courts, they have complete freedom to ignore precedent and procedure and rule (or refuse to hear the case) based on the outcome they desire, and they frequently do so.
The 7-2 order was about procedure, not substance. The Court said the district judge picked the wrong tool when he demanded 14 days’ notice—it did NOT rule that sending people to a war-torn state where they face torture is constitutional or consistent with our treaty obligations. Even the Founders distinguished between legal technicalities and natural-rights violations: an act can pass procedural muster and still be, in Madison’s words, ‘an abridgment of the rights of mankind.’ This deportation plan remains exactly that.
Response to your edit:
Emergency shadow-docket orders don’t confer moral or constitutional absolution; they just postpone the real fight. By the founders’ own logic, knowingly dumping people into a war zone where torture is likely remains a breach of the natural-rights compact—no matter how many procedural shortcuts the government wins in the meantime.
