All, I recommend you familiarize yourself with relevant state laws regarding your protections when assisting folks that are in immediate danger, e.g.: https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_161.200 I'm not a lawyer. So, if you have counsel on retainer and can stomach the bill, get clarity there first. But know that many states have such protections on the books. The veil of immunity for DHS agents may soon be pierced…
You can be arrested and charged with a federal criminal law, 18 USC 111 "assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees." The judge wont entertain your arguments about state law. Fines and up to 8 years in a federal prison, 20 years if you use a deadly or dangerous weapon or actually inflict injury. You can get up to 15% off for good behavior, there is no parole.
ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
271–280 of 380 posts
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that what "anyone" can do and what "anyone serving in an official government capacity" can do are different.
The case I cited specifically talked about government doing it.
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#273Seems like this would be to collect faces of what they consider "dissedents" rather than verify citizenship which can be done much more accurately through a mobile fingerprint reader. Then again, who needs accuracy when you dissapear people without a warrant.
When are citizens’ fingerprints normally put on file, in the US? Or, for that matter, noncitizens who entered irregularly?
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only it was this bad. REAL ID only proves you were at one point allowed to be here. It doesn't prove you're allowed to be here right now (which can change arbitrarily and at any time apparently)
The state should avoid giving a REAL ID to anyine who isn't at least a permanent resident of the US (and the distinction between cirizen and non-citizen IDs should be very obvious). A lot of illegal immigrants are people who legally entered the US on a temporary visa, and overstayed; and it would be good if basically every American bureaucracy was quickly, consistently, and legibly checking for that status. Instead,…
REAL ID or certain alternative federal ID is required to enter federal buildings and domestic flights. The only immigrants who are issued federal ID that is usable in place of real ID are permanent residents. Ergo, your plan would have states effectively ban legally-present non-citizens who are not permanent residents from federal buildings and domestic flights. This is a bad idea; and, absent a specific federal mandate, probably unconstitutional for states to do.
States could, as some do, issue restricted term REAL IDs to aliens who are not permanent residents, but REAL ID isn’t intended as proof-of-status but an identity document, so while that's doable, it doesn't seem to be particularly necessary.
(Yes, foreign passports are also permissible “federal ID” in place of REAL ID, but there are legally present aliens who may not have passports—particularly refugees—and who are also not issued federal ID by the US government because, except for permanent resident aliens, the US has generally declined to have national ID and given ID functions to the state; REAL ID nationalized standards for some uses instead of nationalizing the ID itself.)
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#275The absolutely outrageous thing is that apparently they are instructed to ignore all other evidence of citizenship if that app says someone is not a citizen. So even if you have your birth certificate ready, doesn't matter. This is completely lawless. From the article: > He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and…
I think ICE is in fact setup / groomed to be ... lawless. Just thugs for the federal government.
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legal action against this is going to be a tough, possibly unfeasable battle. Whatever the laws are, they probably contain exceptions for the use of biometrics for law enforcement purposes. In terms of court precedent, biometrics are not protected by the 4th amendment, because your face is not considered a secret that the government could compel you to reveal.
Question for a future (2026?) dystopia: if our faces aren't secret or private for 4A/5A purposes, can we start making them secret/private by walking around in public with a balaclava? New norms go both ways.
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#277Seems like this would be to collect faces of what they consider "dissedents" rather than verify citizenship which can be done much more accurately through a mobile fingerprint reader. Then again, who needs accuracy when you dissapear people without a warrant.
When are citizens’ fingerprints normally put on file, in the US? Or, for that matter, noncitizens who entered irregularly?
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is absolutely insane that the party who tried on the Libertarian mask less than 20 years ago and rode high on a wave of "don't tread on me" individual liberty is now suddenly ok with masked thugs scanning everyone's faces for their master database of enemies of the state.
The generous part of me says this is an example of "you become what you hate". The ungenerous part of me says that all their talk about freedom, liberty, state's rights, etc., has always been a lie.
The others may not be much better, but aren’t quite as unmistakably clear.
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Are you sure about that? There's quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, starting with the really high false-positive[0][1[[2][3][4][5] rates of facial recognition, especially among people of color.
In fact, as the studies linked below show, people of color are misidentified (i.e., false positive) more than 1/3 of the time. That's not nearly accurate enough to round folks up if 10 of every 30 arrested, detained and potentially deported actually aren't the folks you're looking for.
What could possibly go wrong?
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/police-facial-rec...
[1] https://www.aclu-mn.org/en/news/biased-technology-automated-...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/facial-recognition-race-1.54...
[3] https://jusmedia.co.uk/riotandreason/2025/06/02/face-the-bia...
[4] https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-eva...
[5] https://civilrights.org/edfund/2024/09/25/advocates-ring-ala...
Re: ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I expected a lot more pushback on here for calling this out as terrorism than I got… I took a several month hiatus from this site and before I left it was all “you’re just being hyperbolic, Trump is just going to enforce the immigration laws exactly as written.” It seems that nearly all of those people have rethought their opinions in light of recent events- which I guess/hope bodes well for the chances of our countr…
The unfortunate reality is that lots of those people were agents of propaganda, such as Russian bots. The goal was to get the authoritarian elected and the ball rolling - so they're all gone now.
The only thing I can't decide on is if YC let this rot take hold because they were also fellow travelers, or if they made the wrong choice that a good number of failed internet social spaces make in following their own stated guidelines to the exact letter at the expense of all common sense and decency.
Not that it matters much in the end - the end result is what we got.