return2ozmaICE's 'Frightening' Facial Recognition App is Scanning US Citizens Without Their Consent
DandomRudeDoes the US legal system still exist in any sense that it should in a democracy?
I ask because I don’t understand how all this is possible in a constitutional state: Masked brutes who arbitrarily kidnap people on the open street without even identifying themselves, people who are interned without due process and then often simply disappear without a trace in the administrative system, total surveillance without cause, and many other massive violations that the US legal system seems to enable rather than prevent, as it should.
All of this already looks very much like a dictatorship to me, i.e., an unjust state, as none of this can be possible with a democratic constitution - at least not with one that is actually upheld by the legal system.
ALoafOfBreadIt does not. The legal system has essentially lost the ability to be a check on the power of the executive branch. Partly because of regulatory capture and partly because of the speed at which the executive branch is acting illegally - it takes time to build cases and the jsutice system can’t keep up.
At a certain point, we should just arrest the President, Vice President, and cabinet while we work through the paperwork. I don’t know much about Chuck Grassley, but he can run things while we get through the trials.
No.
The people are so gaslit they will attack you if you say otherwise.
I wonder why our allies aren’t helping at this point. Surely they understand where this goes if they don’t stop it sooner rather than later. Europe is laughing at Americans ignoring the tiger that will eat them soon.
Why your “allies” don’t help? Well, the USA shouldn’t have spit in our face to begin with.
We have enough to fix in our own country with your stupid “USA first” moves.
Endure your own shit while we endure your shit…
It wasn’t people from America who made Native Americans move and brought slaves over…
I am German and I am appalled by the behavior of our government: Instead of standing up to Trump and his henchmen and becoming independent from the US, they are kowtowing to him, even though it is completely obvious how little Trump cares about his so called allies—and since the US is nowadays blackmailing Europe with tariffs and so on, it takes a lot of imagination to still call them allies, especially when all halfway rational people are particularly disturbed by all the inhuman Nazi shit.
Unfortunately, however, the weak position of the current German government was already absolutely foreseeable before the last federal election, because the Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is actually more of a US lobbyist than a politician (among other things, he was chairman of the supervisory board of Black Rock Germany until 2022 and held various positions in business lobby organizations such as the Atlantik-Brücke – a conservative think tank). Nothing can be expected from these people, although I unfortunately also think that US citizens should not count on any external support anyway.
You have the most powerful military in the world and basically are your allies’ (former) protective power. There is no outside help coming because (among other reasons of course) nobody is physically able to help you.
IDK what to do about the gaslighting by Fox and right wing media… Too many people trust things without verification and it’s the reason our country is in such despair right now
Altima NEOIt does but we’re in an act first ask questions later regime.
Yup, it just takes forever to get anything through the courts. We’re just now getting to the tariff nonsense, for example.
「黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui」(he/him)Does the US legal system still exist in any sense that it should in a democracy?
Hybrid Regime is how I describe the US. It’s a weird limbo state between Democracy and Autocracy (because if this was a full autocracy, I wouldn’t have access to Lemmy and most anti-trump media would’ve been raided and shut down). Afaik, they aren’t doing exit controls yet.
The major difference between the US and PRC (where I came from), is that Americans seem more willing to resist the government compared to mainland Chinese, and these demonstrations in the US are actually being reported on, in China, its absolute silence, nobody even knows about the very little protests that do happen.
But, by the time EU starts accepting American Refugees, it’d probabably be too late and they would’ve imposed exit controls by then.
Idk what will happen, only time will tell.
NotSteve_Nobody bothered to make federal agents wearing masks illegal, and eventually they decided to do it.
Does the US legal system still exist in any sense that it should in a democracy?
No.
Gary GhostLand of the free (for white people)
The judiciary “interprets” the constitution. Trump filled the judiciary with loyalist or otherwise ideologically aligned judges during this term and his previous. The supreme court ruled last year that the president has immunity, and the president has the ability to pardon people, so it seems the administration is pretty much “above the law.” Even when the courts do push back, they’re acting like they’re powerless, and the admin’s tactics seems to be just ignoring, stalling, or taking the “ain’t no rules says a dog can’t play basketball” approach to working around the courts. Yes, the constitution has been severely weakened, and will probably continue to weaken.
I’m not going to excuse ICE and all the shit they are up to. I’m just going to point out that immigration status doesn’t require the same process to determine as the guilt or innocence of some other crime. In a murder trial, you have to prove motive, opportunity, etc beyond a reasonable doubt. With immigration status, it’s simpler: either you can document your legal right to be in the country or you can’t. When someone isn’t supposed to be in the country we don’t jail them for years to rehabilitate them and then release them into the population. We remove them. So everything about this feels and looks different from a standard criminal due process because it is different. Even without the aggressive tactics, masks, and all attendant bullshit, it would still be different.
Due process is recognized as a human‑rights protection in almost all democratic countries and generally applies regardless of citizenship; it helps prevent arbitrariness and abuse of power.
The fundamental safeguard against arbitrary state detention is habeas corpus or its functional equivalent: a person detained must be brought before a judge so the lawfulness of the detention can be reviewed and so the detainee can be informed of the charges against them.
ICE denies detainees even this, for which there can be absolutely no excuse in any reasonably civilized country.