Having said that, what should the penalty for overstaying a visa by ~7 years[1] be? Nothing? I'd love to see the Democrats propose an alternative approach here, but all I seem to hear is thought terminating cliches like "no one is illegal". Is the proposed alternative just open borders?
[1] > She lived in Colombia with her grandmother and regularly traveled back and forth to the United States to visit her mother, who had been in the U.S. since 2018. (Maria Alejandra had overstayed a visa but since married a U.S. citizen and was applying for a green card.)
The current administration approach is to unleash a masked, unaccountable paramilitary to hold people in warehouses converted into concentration camps.
Usually receiving a green card forgives any visa overstays. Because she married a US Citizen she would almost assuredly have received the green card. The months of suffering of a little girl are just due to a delay in a bureaucracy approving some paperwork.
But, absolutely - after we fix the broken system and start processing immigration in a reasonable and timely manner, then we can start asking what the penalties should be for people who abuse our immigration system. But I don't have an ounce of energy to spare on that deflection until the former is done.
It has always been nearly impossible to comprehend how the Nazis could put children on trains and send them to concentration camps. How could those actions be tolerated by the world and how could the Nazis be so cold and heartless. It's hard to wrap you mind around how it all happened. Well, you're seeing it happen before your eyes right now.
You have a president that is ordering this to be done. You have people that have been put into positions with unlimited power and no repercussions. You have elected officials that blatantly lie (propaganda system). You have a fear based system that prevents people from resisting. You have people of power and wealth (e.g. Tim Cook) that benefit from what's taking place, which further supports and enables the president's actions.
The Nazi took members of ethnic minorities and put them into death camps and massacred them in horrible ways.
Comparing the deportation of illegal immigrants (illegals immigrants can be of any ethnic or religious background) with the industrial mass murder of entire ethnic groups? That’s an absurd comparison.
I agree that what happened to the young girl in the article was messed up but your comparison is still ridiculous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896823
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/us/ice-detain-irish-man-five-...
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0209/1557514-seamus-cul...
> Then it was 42 hours of waiting in the airport holding rooms. Eventually they were put on a plane — then a minivan — to the facility in Texas. Maria Antonia said she didn’t really understand where they were going until they saw the center out the window.
> they had been detained for nearly four months.
That's not how it started. It started with labor camps for political enemies and other undesirables. They became death camps step by step, over time.
We have to nip them in the bud before they have a chance to become death camps. People are already dying of neglect.
But then they made noises about getting rid of undesirable people by shipping them out of the country. Prior to that plenty of dehumanizing rhetoric that Trump and others eerily echo. It was only after the forced deportations didn’t pan out that ghettos started. Then detention camps. And finally extermination centers.
It’s very reasonable to look events which appear similar to the start of genocides and decry them.
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