CBP Is Deporting Cruise Ship Crew over CSAM Allegations Without Evidence

https://reason.com/2025/08/13/cbp-is-deporting-cruise-ship-crew-over-child-pornography-allegations-without-evidence/

46•jMyles•5mo ago

Comments

mothballed•5mo ago

When/if the war on drugs finally ends this will be the next tool. It's such a radioactive topic that no one wants to point out the obvious ease with which information possession laws can be used to frame innocents.

mingus88•5mo ago

Or how genAI makes it trivial to create copious amounts of evidence

Spooky23•5mo ago

No need. We’ve determined you are an enemy alien. Off to South Sudan with you.

pj_mukh•5mo ago

Not to be glib, but most fascist foot soldiers are convinced (via years of propaganda) that they are getting rid of criminals and corrupt citizens.

These CBP officers who’re making up evidence for innocent legal/documented immigrants, what are they thinking? Or is there some kind of central source making up digital evidence?

ranger_danger•5mo ago

"Just following orders"... we've heard that before.

lesuorac•5mo ago

It's pretty hard (impossible) to make the deportation quotas as required legally.

Unless you can figure out someway to remove the quotas CBP is going to continue to falsify evidence so that they can make their quotas.

There's a similar issue with many police departments where they function as revenue generating so officers have quotas for traffic tickets they have to write and the same effect occurs (but just monetarily fine not deportations).

trhway•5mo ago

Actually, more than that. They are proud to be cleaning up the society from "scum" (to the point of that "Superman" joining the ICE recently). It is a very desirable and comfortable mental state - to be a part of such a governmental violent all-the-power that can do no wrong (it is as close to feeling god-/super-power as it is possible at all in this physical reality). In Russia it is known as "Oprichnina" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprichnina, kind of a fascism long before fascism existed. There is a novel imagining Oprichnina in the modern days Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Oprichnik (has English translation) - when it was written 20 years ago people were "That is an overblown imagination" and today - "Wow, how did the author guess that right", yet if one looks back 20 years ago the things were already sliding along that slippery slop. And in US it is kind of similar story - starting with Gitmo 20 years ago - though much less pronounced, and it will take some time before the state will start nabbing in that way actual upstanding citizens)

neuralRiot•5mo ago

>They are proud to be cleaning up the society from "scum".

The mental gymnastics to think that way and accept the current administration “selected group” must be something of olympic level.

trhway•5mo ago

We’ve seen it to many times already- a bit of blatant populist propaganda appealing to the lizard brain of the populace easily removes the need for the mental gymnastics.

righthand•5mo ago

This is more than “just following orders”, this is “intentionally jumping in line to follow fascist orders”.

Why aren’t these good people quitting if they are just following orders they don’t agree with. There was ignorance about this kind of thing that was an excuse to follow orders back in 1930s but that excuse is no longer a “whoopsie get out of jail free” card.

If you know someone participating don’t let them pretend we all agree they’re “just protecting their country”. They’re not.

jMyles•5mo ago

> These CBP officers who’re making up evidence for innocent legal/documented immigrants, what are they thinking?

I'm guessing... quotas? With significant economic incentive, official or otherwise?

> Or is there some kind of central source making up digital evidence?

This seems to be, by far, the most important question, and is kinda the buried lede here. Is anyone investigating this?

It raises a real question: can a free society survive in a digital age amidst a legal system which proscribes particular strings of data? It's so trivial to frame, much moreso than physical evidence. The evidence can be manufactured, as you suggest, without even the low-level agent performing the enforcement action realize that it is synthetic. It seems like an end-around the entire legal system.

drivingmenuts•5mo ago

My guess is that the thought process is "looks foreign = bad".

quantummagic•5mo ago

The article doesn't say anything bout these being immigrants, rather they're foreign workers with legal visas. There have been numerous examples already of Trump's administration claiming that the legal requirements to revoke such visas, are almost non-existent. Also, Elon Musk received a lot of backlash from MAGA for supporting legal H1B workers. There is a significant-sized movement that wants to draw down all foreign workers (legal and otherwise) in the USA.

pj_mukh•5mo ago

I think if the government said “these workers are no longer legal and we are revoking their visas” like they did to TPS immigrants that would make more sense.

To make up evidence en masse seems a whole other level

quantummagic•5mo ago

It's a horrible situation. No evidence was ever produced against the woman in the article. She was just verbally accused by interrogators; which unfortunately is a tactic that is often used by law enforcement. They are permitted to lie to suspects in the course of an investigation. Having found no credible way to charge her with any crimes, they revoked her work visa (which apparently they can legally do without any cause or justification needed) and she was deported.

It seems that everyone on that ship was having their work visas revoked regardless, and on the way out, the authorities were trying to find out how many they could charge with a crime as well.

ranger_danger•5mo ago

I fear that random arrests and detentions under the guise of bogus "suspicion", no matter how baseless, will be continually turbocharged and weaponized for political purposes, as there doesn't seem to be a good way for most citizens to fight back in a meaningful way. And the fact that it causes irreparable damage to the victims, and often no penalty for the authorities, is really a tragedy in my opinion.

righthand•5mo ago

Fascism by design.

metalman•5mo ago

just remember that the trump epstien clinton crowd employes( has employed) countless imigrants as menial service labourers and staff at all of there fancy fully catered and staffed luxo dedautchurey palaces, who might have recieved large tips to not have seen things, 8f you hav3 been around, then you know people who were there, drove the cars flew the jets, or perhaps got even closer for a while....before working on a cruise ship....say

nine_zeros•5mo ago

Everyone who was voting for trump because IlLeGaLs was made aware that this administration is fascist and doesn't care about criminals - they only care about appearance of doing something - even if it harms legal innocents.

Yet, people voted for trump. As much as it hurts to say this, America is truly a fallen country as evidenced by the hateful people.

synarchefriend•5mo ago

What I think is happening here based on the few details: Facebook regularly suspends accounts for posting pictures of naked kids, particularly in countries which do not have strong taboos against that. These get reported and sit in a government database with little more information than "Maria Santos from the Philippines posted CP." Then any time a Maria Santos from the Philippines arrives, they get flagged. If it's a common name, lots of people get flagged. This incompetence is the only way I can explain 10% of crew members getting flagged without intentional fraud by the government.

Make a local open-source AI chatbot with access to Fedora documentation

Introduce the Vouch/Denouncement Contribution Model by Mitchellh

Software Factories and the Agentic Moment

The Neuroscience Behind Nutrition for Developers and Founders

Bang bang he murdered math {the musical } (2024)

A Night Without the Nerds – Claude Opus 4.6, Field-Tested

Could ionospheric disturbances influence earthquakes?

SpaceX's next astronaut launch for NASA is officially on for Feb. 11 as FAA clea

Show HN: One-click AI employee with its own cloud desktop

Show HN: Poddley – Search podcasts by who's speaking

Same Surface, Different Weight

The Rise of Spec Driven Development

The first good Raspberry Pi Laptop

Seas to Rise Around the World – But Not in Greenland

Will Future Generations Think We're Gross?

State Department will delete Xitter posts from before Trump returned to office

Show HN: Verifiable server roundtrip demo for a decision interruption system

Impl Rust – Avro IDL Tool in Rust via Antlr

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

minikeyvalue

Neomacs: GPU-accelerated Emacs with inline video, WebKit, and terminal via wgpu

Show HN: Moli P2P – An ephemeral, serverless image gallery (Rust and WebRTC)

How I grow my X presence?

What's the cost of the most expensive Super Bowl ad slot?

What if you just did a startup instead?

Hacking up your own shell completion (2020)

Show HN: Gorse 0.5 – Open-source recommender system with visual workflow editor

GLM-OCR: Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive

Local Agent Bench: Test 11 small LLMs on tool-calling judgment, on CPU, no GPU

Show HN: AboutMyProject – A public log for developer proof-of-work