It's the same conversation every year, well before Elon came along. The big players are TurboTax and H&R Block. TurboTax specifically has led the charge for over two decades to prevent you from ever filing your taxes for free. It's a racket, and an extremely profitable one for them, so there's no way they're going to willingly give that up without some new and enforceable laws being passed.
They _definitely_ employ a lot of dark patterns, though. Glad you brought that up, because not enough people are taking the "dark patterns" thing seriously enough, in my opinion. It is absolutely wild what you can get people to do without even realizing it with some good front-end development, and none of us are immune to those tricks.
[1] https://www.livenowfox.com/news/irs-direct-file-doge-cuts
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/business/musk-irs-direct-file
Trump can easily start using them again, should he care to do so.
Emphasis mine.
> Seventy-five percent of the prisoners in U.S. Marshals custody are detained in state, local and _private_ facilities; the remainder are housed in Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities.
https://www.usmarshals.gov/what-we-do/prisoners/operation/cu...
Here is another source:
> The U.S. Marshals Service detains about 60,000 people a day who are awaiting federal trial or sentencing. While it doesn't operate jails, it does partner with public and private detention facilities. The service assesses detention conditions at these facilities.
> We found shortcomings in its oversight. For example, many deputies who reviewed state and local facilities hadn't received required training. Additionally, some facilities didn't meet some standards for 3 years in a row, including food safety standards.
Real contracts offer a chance for all signatories to consider the terms and the opportunity for either party to reject the terms and not be bound to them.
You'll note that you never had the choice to decline "the social contract", because again, it wasn't a contract you agreed to, it was the terms of tyranny you were being made aware of.
8 U.S. Code § 1325 - Improper entry by alien
(a)Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts
Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.
For what it's worth, when denaturalization came up in the first Trump presidency, SCOTUS threw them out of court because they deemed the word "material" as... very material. Though who knows if they'll change their tune this time.
I'm sure you could torture that into applying to that situation, but at least on a very plain reading it doesn't sound like it applies generally to those people.
That doesn't make sense. If you overstayed the visa then you (probably?) entered legally, not illegally. Did you mean something else?
Stepping past the direct offense of being here, one must ask how are they supporting themselves financially? Assuming they are workers, they’re either not paying taxes (a crime) or stealing the identity of a citizen in order to fool an employer. Now they are at least paying taxes, but they’ve victimized a lawful resident or Citizen. This is far from a victimless crime, it took my mother two years to fully clear her name after this occurred to her identity. The IRS and credit agencies are not very understanding.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/27/immigrants-s...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/self-de...
Edit for reply: As for the comparison with prohibition, I don't quite agree. The clampdown on CP, despite being just images and data as much as regular P, has thankfully been very successful. The government actually can clamp down on things, even purely digital information, when it has the will.
There is an unmistakable hint of cognitive dissonance when the administration believes that the best way to get at "freeloading" illegal immigrants is through their taxes.
Going by the track record of their other so-called "plans" - no, this will not be successful.
There, now we've made equally irrefutable claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/us/politics/ice-expansion...
Never listened to this song though.
"First, I would never provide my home address on any application or W-9 form. This should only be your PO Box, UPS Box, or PMB address. Your employer likely does not care much about where you live, unless the job has residency requirements, such as a police officer. The IRS does not object to the use of a mail box address. They just want their money."
I don't buy into the idea that you can magically hide your home address, this info is already out.
Go ahead, do some searches on yourself - I had accurate addresses and poboxes I’d long since forgotten about.
If you own real estate it's much harder, especially now that companies have to report their owners and directors.
At the very least PMBs help protect your home address from companies and the public.
And so, if you actually care about addressing illegal immigration, or any other issue that requires a competent government, then Trump has been a step backwards for you regardless of how you may feel. Your first step is now admitting your mistake and working to get rid of Trump, alongside every other American.
once this system is up and running, they can use it to harass and "deport" (rendition) anybody they want based on what tax-deductible contributions they've made to various non-profits.
(it's rendition because a lot of these people are being sent to countries they're not even citizens of. obviously that pertains when sending people to prisons in El Salvador and Sudan. also, when deporting immigrant parents, they've "deported" US citizens who are children or infants to the countries of their parents' citizenship.)
Whether you like it or not, it totally makes sense that ICE would want information from the IRS.
duxup•7h ago
We've seen them now threatening not just American citizens, other politicians, judges. ICE has been given instructions to simply go operate on their own without direction to "find" people.
The laws surroundings them are surprisingly forgiving / people have few protections. This step seems to just be to dump vast quantities of data they could just for anything they wish from departments that had rules for how they can use that data ... to a group that has few rules ...
sneak•7h ago
mixmastamyk•6h ago
jimt1234•6h ago
ryandrake•5h ago
esseph•6h ago
https://www.openice.org/
thatguy0900•6h ago
_DeadFred_•1m ago
saguntum•4h ago
There's a 2011 study linked there but as others mentioned, hard to track without due process.
viraptor•7h ago
jimt1234•6h ago