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There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow. Eg. Hearing of cases where people from my home country were sen

• seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Ya, its a good bet this is what happened to the South Koreans on site. Since this was under construction, and the construction industry contractors and sub-contractors are known for using lots of undocumented immigrant labor, ICE was probably there to catch them.
  • ajross 1y ago
    ICE has been widely accused of working on internal quotas. It's likely that they just don't care. They found foreigners working, so into the pens they go. The fact that these are engineers brought in to supervise construction doesn't enter into the picture.
    • MarcusE1W 1y ago
      In fairness, it shouldn’t. I think it is acceptable that the foreign workers have valid US work visas and can demonstrate that. Maybe constitution plays sometimes fast and loose with work visas, but that does not automatically make it ok. I have worked abroad many times and work permits were always under heavy scrutiny by my own company, to the degree that we send one unhappy soul home mid week because some regulations were not met and he came back week smiling because he got a pay rise as comparable rated as local was a requirement.
      • ajross 1y ago
        So I completely agree on principle. But nonetheless the political job being done by DHS/ICE is not to uniformly and fairly scrutinize all visa holders in the interest of justice. They're supposed to be locking up the "illegals" constantly being held up as an enemy class by the ruling regime, and in practice that means "Latin American laborers", and not "Korean engineers". No one was sold on throwing international professionals in jail just for showing up to do a job they took in good faith. That's clearly wrong, in a way that rounding up the "bad" people isn't. And so it shows up the horrifying implications of current policy.
      • numpad0 1y ago
        The problem is, US Visa Waiver Program do explicitly allow business trips using "tourist" "visa"(it's not a visa, it's a waiver. So you won't even have a visa. You also won't be a "tourist", you're a "visitor" under VWP). So it's completely normal for them to be totally unable to demonstrate anything issued or approved by the US government whatsoever other than the oval stamp. They wouldn't even have a visa, and it's legal, as far as how the laws and regulations and official guidance read. I haven't heard that's changed, at least yet.
        • AnotherGoodName 1y ago
          >Some crossed into the US illegally; some had visa waivers and were prohibited from working; (Steven Schrank, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge) If the visa waiver suddenly no longer allows working business trips to the USA this is huge news. The terms of the waiver explicitly state it's allowed but it seems not in practice. This is a definite "get out now" to anyone on a ESTA in the USA right now. Attending a conference, trade show or consulting on a build out of battery plant?" Get out now.
          • numpad0 1y ago
            Yeah, makes me wonder if it's just way overblown or if those are graphite pieces scattered on the ground.
    • krapp 1y ago
      The obvious goal is not to police illegal immigration but to purge the US of as many immigrants as possible and halt immigration in general so that "native born Americans" can get all of the jobs they think immigrants (and "DEI" hires - it's so difficult not to read all of this as code for "not white") have "stolen" from them. The ham-fisted arbitrariness and cruelty is the point.
    • FireBeyond 1y ago
      Not just quotas, but there's also plausible evidence that agents get actual bonuses per arrest or deportation.
    • seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      Ya, but it is sad in both cases. Sad for the South Koreans that are unfairly being accused of working illegally, and sad for the un-documented immigrants who are exploited at both ends by Republicans (they run the construction companies so take profit in their work, and then they use them for political advantage via scare tactics).
  • ranger_danger 1y ago
    There also happens to be a large Korean population in certain areas of Georgia, and many companies have been caught using undocumented workers there. Take a drive through the streets of Duluth and you will see more signs in Korean than English.
    • ThrowMeAway1618 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • ranger_danger 1y ago
        I do agree the companies that hire those workers should be punished.
• commandlinefan 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • vkou 1y ago
    Until the federal government starts following its own laws there is zero point in states and cities engaging in good faith with it. Good faith is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact, or opening your wallet to a conman, who goes back on every deal he makes. (And this conman takes your tax money, and then instead of providing you the services that he is required to - by law, witholds it for reasons of pure spite and caprise. If he won't hold up his end of what he is required to, why should anyone else lift a finger to extend any courtesies to him?)
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    Fascism will ultimately stall out because too many people know from history what happens if you cooperate with it.
  • bevr1337 1y ago
    Georgia has some of the most active ICE presence. According to ICE, there is no bureaucratic resistance movement. https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-atlanta-announces-results-multiagency-operations-across-georgia https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-atlanta-announces-resu...
    • LexiMax 1y ago
      That might be true, but that wasn't really their point. Being accurate is less important than trying to get the lie out in front of as many eyeballs as possible, so the lie can be repeated in front of people who might not realize this sort of information offhand.
      • bevr1337 1y ago
        I spent a good minute thinking of the best reply. You're right, the truth was immaterial to them and they were posting in bad faith. Proving that this is the result of cooperation, to me, was the quickest way to unravel the rest of their post.
• mothballed 1y ago
  Visa just gives the officer the option to let you in. He can deny you entry virtually at will. CBP officer is god at the border. I have been temporarily denied entry even as US citizen, until they checked with their superiors for a few hours and found out they could not in fact do that. Odds are they just wanted that person gone and the real reason can't be spoken out loud.
  • rustystump 1y ago
    I think more often one can attribute incompetence rather than malice in 99% of cases like this. 911 was an inside job! Or maybe the us of a had an oopsie.
    • mothballed 1y ago
      It's a possibility. It's why I've always thought the bribery or commission model makes for fairer and more efficient immigration. There has to be something in it for the border guard to bring in good productive people, so that's what they work towards. Right now they only get rewarded if they deport or collar somebody, so that's all they seem to care about, and letting in good people is seen as more of a nuisance they must do while trying to get notches for their promotion.
      • notahacker 1y ago
        > There has to be something in it for the border guard to bring in good productive people, so that's what they work towards. Doesn't seem like much of an incentive to identify good productive people if the incentive scheme is defined as "accept a couple of hundred dollars" vs "don't accept a couple of hundred dollars"...
        • mothballed 1y ago
          You can't bring in good people if there's not people. There are already a few sprinkles here and there to reward them for stopping some of the bad people, but nothing if they let in a good person. $200 is better than nothing...
• jacquesm 1y ago
  The USA might as well put up a 'closed for business' by now. Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS in spite of massive lock-in because the feeling that the USA is a trustworthy partner is completely gone. You can't just 'joke about invading Greenland' and expect everybody to move on as if it didn't happen. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't just local sample bias either, NL used to be pretty laid back when it came to silly details such as hosting providers and such. How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?
  • Insanity 1y ago
    AWS announced that they'd have an EU 'governed' region with only EU citizens working on it.https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/establishing-a-european-trust-service-provider-for-the-aws-european-sovereign-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/establishing-a-europea.... I'm not sure if that'd fully alleviate the risk for EU companies & governments, but I'd imagine it alleviates some of it.
    • classified 1y ago
      That doesn't help when every US company is under US jurisdiction.
    • jacquesm 1y ago
      Yes, they're panicking. And I'm not sure that this is going to be enough to offset the various concerns.
      • Insanity 1y ago
        I agree that it might not be enough, but at the moment there also aren't good EU competitors in the cloud space. Good not in the technical sense, but good as in - people would be comfortable putting their eggs in the basket. Plus, hiring for AWS / Azure / GCP experience is still much higher than for the smaller EU clouds.
        • 1y ago
• benzible 1y ago
  "Confused" or they're incentivized to meet a quota to hang on to their jobs, and in many cases are themselves explicitly motivated by racial animus, and are fine with trampling over the law? https://newrepublic.com/article/196154/stephen-miller-erupts-fury-low-arrests-and-hands-dems-weapon https://newrepublic.com/article/196154/stephen-miller-erupts...
  • mallowdram 1y ago
    The surface details are irrelevant deportation numbers are below Obamas. These are scattered operations in search of two things roughly. The purpose is to have a paramilitary operation directly lead by the Oval Office without buffers - remaining in power extralegally and without elections whether they are held or not. When you need to arrest and harass anyone without a warrant, the easiest thing to do is claim they are non-citizens. Countless citizens have been arrested under this pretext already. And to be able to extract wealth extralegally. Every act falls under these two concepts, and Project 2025 was a pre textual conduit for this that uses political ideology as a path to feudal dictatorship.
• abxyz 1y ago
  That’s not an accurate description of the case you linked. No reason was given for the denial. The subject of the story was asked about work by the immigration officers but nothing indicates that he was removed from the country because of work. He seems to have been removed because they wanted to remove him, not because of innocent confusion about his visa.
• throw0101d 1y ago
  > There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow. ICE folks seem to be sometimes confused about citizen versus non-citizen: * https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-jailed-ice-los-angeles https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-... * https://globalnews.ca/news/11309378/kenny-laynez-ice-detained-no-rights-us-citizen/ https://globalnews.ca/news/11309378/kenny-laynez-ice-detaine...
• Sniffnoy 1y ago
  Minor note, but "visa" is just a word. It's not an acronym or something. There's no reason to put it in all caps.
  • coolspot 1y ago
    People do that because VISA credit card brand is spelled all caps on its logo.
    • cozzyd 1y ago
      Perhaps they're discussing the Virtual Instrument Software Architecture
• RHSeeger 1y ago
  > There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about - what a given visa allows - whether or not someone is a naturalized citizen - whether or not someone is a citizen by birth and all kinds of things that seem like they should be core, table stakes knowledge of the job they are supposedly doing.
  • bix6 1y ago
    They’re too busy turning and burning to study laws!!
  • danesparza 1y ago
    Ignorance of the law does not excuse you from having to follow it. I'm sure ICE would be the first to point this out in court -- so it's kind of ironic having to point this out here. Thank goodness for the ACLU, Amnesty International, Democracy Forward, various state AG offices, and the American Bar Association.
    • iphone_elegance 1y ago
      I'd usually agree but tbh law isn't really a thing anymore, it sucks but we all have to adjust to the new order
      • mallowdram 1y ago
        How does one adjust to living entirely in a military reservation?
    • sterlind 1y ago
      > Ignorance of the law does not excuse you from having to follow it. ICE agents and other Federal workers are largely insulated from consequences due to Sovereign Immunity protections. only egregious, malicious violations cause them personal liability. and Trump can dole out pardons if it comes to that. > Thank goodness for the ACLU, Amnesty International, Democracy Forward, various state AG offices, and the American Bar Association. it's nice that they're fighting, but the Supreme Court has shown a remarkable tolerance for flagrant lawlessness by the Administration (e.g. DHS v. DVD.) sometimes because the Court is sympathetic to Trump's objectives, sometimes because they fear he'll ignore them and do it anyway, and they'll lose the resulting power struggle (nine sedentary septuagenarians vs. the US Armed Forces.)
• klipt 1y ago
  > "why are you coming to the USA?" and they answered for "work". Immediate deportation despite the VISA explicitly allowing that. Reading the article it looks like the problem is he said he "lives" in the US. Technically work visas are for working temporarily in the US, living permanently in the US requires a green card. Of course they probably wouldn't have deported him for that under Biden, the current administration is just trying to find every excuse to deport to meet quotas.
  • zaptheimpaler 1y ago
    This is not a technical problem at all, the law is not that stupid. Non-immigrant visa means you have an intent to return to your home country at some point, it's not like you can't say "I live here" despite actually living there..
    • klipt 1y ago
      I'm sure that's great comfort to the guy who was deported. I'm just saying that I advise all my friends on similar visas to say they're "working" in the US if asked, rather than say "living". Don't give people with power over you any excuse to ruin your life.
      • zaptheimpaler 1y ago
        Oh sure, your comment came across to me as implying that the agent had reasonable grounds to deny entry even if that reason was a technicality. I'm just saying he didn't, not one iota, not even on a technicality. It was 100% bullshit. I have had the displeasure of going through US immigration myself many times and understand the caution and deference, maybe it would have helped but it sounds like they had made up their minds.
  • adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
    He does live in the US, as his visa allows. Living somewhere and living somewhere permanently aren't the same thing.
• FireBeyond 1y ago
  > There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow. Hah, I totally believe it. When I moved to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, I stood in the non-immigrant line at LAX (moving at its usual glacial pace, well over an hour or more in line), only to be "told" that I was in the wrong line, because I was immigrating to the US (It's not: it's a non-immigrant visa with a defined path to immigration: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrate/family-immigration/nonimmigrant-visa-for-a-fiance-k-1.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...). So after realizing I was arguing at a brick wall, I schlepped over to the (thankfully shorter, but still notable) immigrant visa line, waited, waited... with the absolutely predictable result that when I got to the counter I got a withering look and a tone that made it clear the agent felt she was speaking to a slow-minded child. "This is a non-immigrant visa. You need to go to that line." "I know, that line sent me here." "You need to go to that line." Thankfully that time I got a different agent. Nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, even though I had planned for a 4.5 hour layover for the visa process.
• zaptheimpaler 1y ago
  [flagged]
• MattGrommes 1y ago
  "confused" is a pretty generous reading of the situation. They just don't want anyone here from outside the US. Or anyone who isn't white, really. If they don't have a justification for kicking someone out they'll make one up or just use it as a way of scaring other people. Too many hispanic people are being picked up outside their immigration court hearings or lawyer's offices while trying to immigrate "the right way" for it to be confusion or coincidence.
• classified 1y ago
  Everybody just has to stay out of the US, ideally citizens too.
• 29athrowaway 1y ago
  Visa is not an acronym.
• duxup 1y ago
  Orders given to ICE at times have been to just independently go out and find people "you know where to find them". I don't think they so much do, any given agent isn't some super detective.