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posted by on Tuesday December 13 2016, @06:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the choose-to-recuse dept.

Caesar's wife must be above suspicion, but Trump's transition team and ultimately cabinet, seems rife with conflicts of ignorance. The Intercept reports that:

Palantir Technologies, the data mining company co-founded by billionaire and Trump transition advisor Peter Thiel, will likely assist the Trump Administration in its efforts to track and collect intelligence on immigrants, according to a review of public records by The Intercept. Since 2011, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars to help construct and operate a complex intelligence system called FALCON, which allows ICE to store, search, and analyze troves of data that include family relationships, employment information, immigration history, criminal records, and home and work addresses.

I guess this is what happens when you elect a businessman to political office: they run it like a business.

Working closely with a President-elect who has pledged to dramatically expand ICE, Thiel's varied connections to the immigration agency place him in a position to potentially benefit financially from a deportation campaign that carries highly personal stakes for millions of Americans.

They always say: you have nothing to worry about, if you have nothing to hide.

Palantir, which is backed by the CIA's venture capital arm, did not respond to a request for comment regarding its ICE contracts and concerns over potential conflicts of interest. Peter Thiel spokesperson Jeremiah Hall declined to comment on a list of emailed queries, including a question asking whether Thiel has yet signed the Trump transition ethics agreement.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @02:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @02:49PM (#441277)

    A Mexican child, born to two Mexican citizens, is, by birth, a Mexican and not a citizen of the United States.

    Either a person is an American - or he is not. The law needs to distinguish who is, and who is not

    The law is very clear that the child would be a US citizen and discriminating against the child would violate the equal protection clause.

    Taking the position that a child born to non-US citizens shouldn't automatically become a US citizen is fine, but that is not the current law of the land.

    You are upset that the elected representatives of the US do not agree with your position or do not care enough to take the actions that you want, but your feelings of how they failed to represent your view do not take president over the law. You current dissatisfaction also doesn't justify No True Scotsman.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 14 2016, @03:25PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 14 2016, @03:25PM (#441292) Journal

    No, the law is not "very clear". A law that was passed to deal with the children of former slaves has been misappropriated for an entirely different group of people. There was no discussion of immigrants, migrant workers, cheap labor, or any of today's catch phrases when the amendment was passed. The discussion was all about black people whose families had been here from two to twenty generations. Only in the past 35 to 40 years has Mexican immigration become such an issue. "Anchor babies" is a relatively new term, because the phenomenon never, or almost never, happened fifty years ago.

    Summary: H.R.1940 — 110th Congress (2007-2008)
    All Bill Information (Except Text)

    There is one summary for H.R.1940. Bill summaries are authored by CRS.
    Shown Here:
    Introduced in House (04/19/2007)

    Birthright Citizenship Act of 2007 - Amends the Immigration and Nationality Act to consider a person born in the United States "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States for citizenship at birth purposes if the person is born in the United States of parents, one of whom is: (1) a U.S. citizen or national; (2) a lawful permanent resident alien whose residence is in the United States; or (3) an alien performing active service in the armed forces.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @05:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @05:09PM (#441329)

      From the Fourteenth Amendment (collect the whole set):

      All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States

      If you want to argue about "All persons" or "subject to the jurisdiction, then look to what the US Senate thought it included (bold is from me):

      However, concerning the children born in the United States to parents who are not U.S. citizens (and not foreign diplomats), three senators, including Trumbull, as well as President Andrew Johnson, asserted that both the Civil Rights Act and the Citizenship Clause would confer citizenship on them at birth,[15][16][17] and no senator offered a contrary opinion. Trumbull even went so far as to assert that this was already true prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, although Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, disagreed, stating that this was only true for the children of Caucasian immigrants.[15] Senator John Conness of California expressed support for the Amendment for giving a constitutional basis for birthright citizenship to all children born in the United States to any parentage (including Chinese noncitizen residents who do not intend to reside permanently in the United States), even though he (and others) thought it had already been guaranteed by the Act,[18] whereas Cowan opposed the Amendment (and Act), arguing that it would have the undesirable outcome of extending citizenship to the children of Chinese and Gypsy immigrants.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_Clause#Senate_debate [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2, Disagree) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 14 2016, @05:23PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 14 2016, @05:23PM (#441334) Journal

        http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/617 [nativeamericannetroots.net]

        The 14th Amendment and American Indians
        Posted on August 4, 2010 by Ojibwa

        ( – promoted by navajo)

        There has been a lot of talk recently by politicians, reporters, pundits, legal scholars, and others about the Fourteenth Amendment and citizenship. There is, as usual, a great lack of awareness of what this amendment has meant to American Indians.

        Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution states that:

                “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

        The Amendment was intended to give citizenship to the African-American former slaves and not to Indians. Government agencies (the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior), and the courts (state, federal, and, ultimately, the Supreme Court) consistently held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not confer citizenship on Indians. Under the Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution, Indian tribes are classified as “domestic dependent nations,” and therefore, Indians were tribal citizenships, not American citizens.

        In 1870, the Senate Judicial Committee inquired into the effect of the Fourteenth Amendment on Indian tribes. The Committee declared that the Amendment was intended to eliminate the phrase “three-fifths of all other persons” which had described slaves in the Constitution and therefore did not change the status of Indians. The Committee concluded:

                “To maintain that the United States intended, by a change of its fundamental law, which was not ratified by these tribes, and to which they were neither requested nor permitted to assent, to annual treaties then existing between the United States as one party, and the Indian tribes as the other parties respectively, would be to charge upon the United States repudiation of national obligations, repudiation doubly infamous from the fact that the parties whose claims were thus annulled are too weak to enforce their just rights, and were enjoying the voluntarily assumed guardianship and protection of this Government.”

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @06:00PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @06:00PM (#441348)

          American Indians were specifically mentioned as an exemption (in addition to families of ambassadors) in the Senate debate:

          the two exceptions to citizenship by birth for everyone born in the United States mentioned in the Act, namely, that they had to be "not subject to any foreign power" and not "Indians not taxed", were combined into a single qualification, that they be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States [...] arguing that the U.S. government did not have full jurisdiction over Indian tribes, which governed themselves and made treaties with the United States

          If you are trying to argue that Mexicans were treated the same as American Indian tribes and distinct from "Chinese noncitizen residents who do not intend to reside permanently in the United States" or "Gypsy immigrants" that were included, then read below:

          [After the Mexican American War] The United States paid $15 million for the land that reduced Mexican territory to 55 percent of what it had been before the war.[9] The 80,000 Mexican citizens in this newly acquired U.S. territory were promised U.S. citizenship, although Native Americans were excluded.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation#Mexicans_in_the_U.S._1848-1920s [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @05:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 14 2016, @05:57PM (#441345)

      Runaway, you should stay out of debates like this if you are not intelligent enough to understand what law is.

      Introduced in House (04/19/2007)

      05/04/2007 Referred to the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law.
      Action By: House Judiciary
      04/19/2007 Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
      Action By: House of Representatives

      Since this bill was referred to a subcommittee, it has gone nowhere. Nine years ago. Not a law, a bill introduced by a bunch of racist Republican Congressmen, who are idiots, but I repeat myself. This is no more a law, and even less a law, than the 50 House votes to repeal ACA. Not a law.