The very same day I sat at home writing this devlog like a coward, less than five miles away, armed forces who are in my city against the will of our elected officials shot tear gas, unprovoked, at peaceful protestors, including my wife.
https://www.kptv.com/2026/01/31/live-labor-unions-rally-marc...
This isn't some hypothetical political agenda I'm using my platform to push. There's a nonzero chance I go out there next weekend to peacefully protest, and get shot like Alex Pretti.
Needless to say, if I get shot by ICE, it's not good for the Zig project. And they've brought the battle to my doorstep, almost literally.
Abolish ICE.
Andy stay safe. We gotta all come to realization that none of this is possible if we let our democracy slip away. Millions before us died to preserve it. We owe it to them to put up a good fight.
My 85 year old mom lives in Portland and she attends rallies frequently. If you know of any way to support you or other local people doing this work, I'm very interested. My email is on my profile page.
I have a friend who is in Minneapolis. He's involved in caravans which are tracking ICE. He wasn't the driver in the last one. But, the ICE vehicle they tailed suddenly started going in a very direct path, instead of randomly driving. The driver figured it out first. They drove to the driver's house and then stood outside of their car for ten minutes staring at his house. Cars in Minnesota have their license plates on both the front and the back.
Is there any justification for that kind of intimidation? Did any of the Trump supporters vote for that? I hear about paid agitators on the left but not that kind of compensated actors. Is his name in a database now once they did the lookup?
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003. We didn't need it then and we don't need it now.
Why waste tax dollars on ineffective, privacy-violating security theater when we could spend it on education and health?
You didn't answer or even address a single question I asked. I'll ask again:
1. Are you OK with sovereign states enforcing their borders and deporting illegal immigrants?
2. Is it the awful tactics ICE uses to accomplish its mission, or do you find the mission in and of itself immoral?
ICE's current mission isn't to deport illegal immigrants. Its current mission is to antagonize anyone who is not a WASP, and seemingly these days, anybody who stands up for non-WASP citizens in the US. As can be easily ascertained by the sheer number of encounters where the officers insist that they don't actually care to see any papers proving the people they're arresting are legal US citizens (let alone legal US residents).
So your questions don't matter because you're arguing about a reality that doesn't exist.
You'd have a lot stronger argument if ICE wasn't being used as a secret police force. They're Immigration Enforcement in name only. Your average citizen would say it's okay to enforce immigration laws, there is no doubt about that; doing middle-of-the-night raids with a blackhawk helicopter in cities of your political opponents is not reasonable[0]. There are plenty more examples of their abhorrent behavior (like killing two American citizens in the midwest and brutalizing protestors) if you cared to search for it.
I've noticed that the MAGAs have been adamant about trying to shift the window back to: "but you agree that immigrants should be deported right?" as some sort of attempt to justify what's happening, I guess. Is that talking point coming from some popular right wing show or something as a last ditch effort before midterms?
0: https://www.propublica.org/article/chicago-venezuela-immigra...
Something smells fishy here... is that a Sea Lion?
Something smells grassy here... is that a Straw Man?
Are you ok with the size of the budget these agencies control? Are you ok with it being headed by a guy who never has denied he took a $50k bribe from the FBI and wasn't even the initial target of an investigation?
I would bet you $1000 that not one of the immigrants being rounded up were even accused of that kind of corruption and crimes.
How is this not bald corruption and an insane way to spend tax dollars when people are really struggling in this country?
And I know plenty of restaurant owners in Portland that are closing because of down tourism. Why can Trump sue the IRS for $10B but Portland can't sue him for disparaging the city because he can't figure out that videos of riots are five years old?
The budget needs to increase because there are a lot of people in the country illegally and in order to get every single one of them out the agency needs to scale up. When people start obstructing officers and being violent that increases the required number of officers even more.
We don't need to get them all out, though. The vast majority are picking strawberries and working cheap construction jobs, not funneling drugs and guns.
I'm as concerned with getting them all out as I'm concerned with ticketing every jaywalker.
>The vast majority are picking strawberries and working cheap construction jobs,
This doesn't matter. I do not want the idea that someone can invade my country as long as they avoid drugs and guns to spread through the world. Due to how great America is people are going to want to come here even if they aren't allowed, so they must understand that coming here illegal will end badly for them so they fully understand not to come here illegally since it has negative EV for them.
> Due to how great America is
Well, not to worry then, hateful little attitudes like yours are rapidly undoing America's greatness. Soon noone will want to be there, including Americans.
Better start practicing your Chinese.
Enforcing the law is not a hateful attitude. If people don't want to be in a society that enforces laws they can feel free to go to some lawless society.
How many laws has the Trump administration flat out ignored? You're cheerleading the introduction of a lawless society. Perhaps you should reconsider your frame of reference.
Cheerleading laws to be enforced is the opposite of cheerleading the introduction of a lawless society.
Their underlying point is that you're actually being very selective in which laws you want enforced.
For starters, I doubt you've brayed as loudly for the prosecution of business owners who employ illegal migrants, as you are for the migrants themselves. (You certainly didn't mention illegal biz owners in this comment chain.) Likewise, the crimes ICE commits already exceed the crimes of those they're hunting, but you haven't acknowledged that.
Which means you don't actually believe in the law as an impartial force of justice, despite what you might tell yourself. You believe in it as a tool of power, to be wielded strongly against those you dislike, and lightly or not at all, against those you favor.
You believe in power and order, not justice and fairness.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today."
No. Both.
[flagged]
When people like you finally realize what is happening in this country, I'm ready to quickly forgive and move on so that we can work together to preserve what freedoms we have left.
but please hurry... we really need you to pay attention and understand the reality that is upon us.
I do know what's happening. I've been around and watching for over a decade. We are bleeding from every orifice from an economic standpoint. The recent moves for deportations is an attempt by the office of the President to save face while not doing anything to fix over-spending, it's also a good vehicle for a surveillance push, and the RNC/old-school dems will be happy so someone like JD can take power afterwards to prop up the current rising oligarchy and further support British assets moving into the middle-east for "oil".
I'm not ignorant. I just know you aren't going to change anything by getting riled up emotionally and using language that indicates instability (I don't know you, my initial comment is because I don't want to see you get snuffed out). There's nothing you can do to solve these problems at this point and time, and they would prefer you protest so they can get your face, for the purposes of marking. Portland also is full of genuinely nutty people, been there several times and there is a real social contagion. You should be spending your time helping who you can, avoiding the authorities in general (never even speak to them), and understand that this "liberal democracy" is slowly collapsing and there's no stopping what's going to happen. We are being hollowed out entirely.
Freedoms aren't going to matter much when we are owned by every foreign nation but our own. I thought about 7 years ago that we could fix this with protesting, now I know that we can't. I'm just seeing this from a view of total loss while you see that there is yet still time.
Quick addendum: this is not me attempting to demoralize. I do think that once people can't pay for bread then maybe something will change. Up until that point the majority will give away every right for even the slightest relief, anything for a little hope of a better future. This has happened many times before. Empires rise and fall, it's nothing unique or out of the ordinary across history. First and foremost look out for yourself and your loved ones, and be willing to be flexible
Don't take the black pill.
Only white pilling for me sir. I believe in the morning light after a dark night. I just know that the tide comes in and out reliably. If you believe protesting is the way forward then go for it; just don't get shot while doing it.
Anyway; I like Zig a lot btw.. loving what you guys are doing.
Do you understand what motivates the supporters of ICE?
[flagged]
These few-minutes-old accounts swooping in on hot button issues to try persuade people are such a goddamn scourge, I wish there were something that could be done about it.
In the end I probably just need to leave HN for a while because it's really doing a number on what's left of my ability to trust what I read online.
Only thing you can do is flag them. Two strikes and they're gone. Plus usually, moderation give these accounts a perma-ban.
[flagged]
It is possible to both abolish ICE and CBP.
Especially as CBP officers commit crimes at a higher rate than undocumented migrants in the US: https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/accountability-for-ice-and...
In fact if you were to make a police force entirely out of CBP officers who have been arrested, it would be the fourth largest police force in America.
You don't get what the issue is?
Your account is 27 minutes old, the username is sarcastic at best, you hopped on specifically to defend the indefensible.
You really don't know?
[flagged]
> I wish there were something that could be done about it.
I find it helpful to think of HN like one would any other social media site. There are things they could be doing to curtail these sorts of accounts. They have apparently chosen not to.
[flagged]
Just go home. Work on Zig. Don't do anything stupid.
> against the will of our elected officials
Did you mean your local officials?
In the Federal model of US government, state authority overrides centralized government except in the explicit cases enumerated by the Constitution.
So yes, of course they mean their local officials, because in this case there isn’t an explicit line in the Constitution explaining why the feds are allowed to invade Minnesota.
The Supreme Court has disagreed with you on the matter of federal immigration constitutional authority for more than a century. There isn’t any “invasion”; that’s a propaganda device.
That's clever. Just slap the "immigration sticker" on ICE and do whatever you want.
And yet they didn’t brag about invading other states bordering, let’s see, Canada, just the blue one they had a political spat with.
yep. It's not in the constitution, but in all practicality mcculloch vs maryland (which i would love to see repealed) disagrees
I like how you call peaceful protests when people throw huge rocks, break city infrastructure and damage property and take 0 accountability for it. And most likely don't pay taxes to fix it up later.
How convenient it must be to blame officers instead of bad actors just because you agree with their side.
This is purely pushing political agenda, you just covering it up.
Since you're so eager to construe his support for peaceful protest as support for civil unrest, I therefore think it's fair if I construe your defence of ICE to mean support for their extrajudicial executions and the people who dress up as ICE (ie: masked men dragging people at gunpoint into unmarked vans) to kidnap and rape people.
You can construe what you want, but I don't put my political (or any other views) into unrelated posts and try to conceal/justify it later.
My point is not about the views - its still free internet and most of us live in free speech countries - its about putting it out there while being fully aware that many people will read the news post about a popular language and then talking how its not a political statement.
You seem to have vastly misread his comment in your defensiveness: 1) his comment is not a concealment or a justification, it's an elaboration. This is more than mere semantic nitpick: he doesn't need to justify anything to you or conceal anything from you; he is not seeking your approval. Similarly 2) nor did he say it's "not a political statement", he said it "isn't some hypothetical political agenda", which to me has the extremely obvious meaning that it's not a virtue signal or other ulterior motive, that he may actually be dead by next week. If anything, he's confirming without a doubt that he included politics in his devlog, not denying it. Did his inclusion of "Abolish ICE" at the very bottom of his devlog really put you so off-kilter? Good grief, go outside.
Don’t do it, your project here on zig is a much larger net positive for civilization than you spending your time at those protests.
<3 zig and want io interface in everything!
Please stay safe.
I can't hold it so had to create an account to share, I'm sorry. I'm one of the minor zig contributors, and I'm reading ziglang blog for the purpose of engagement in software engineering craft. I don't want to see these ICE stuff or whatever else political opinion you or somebody else have. I'm not from US and I barely know what ICE is but you're hating on people (I'm sure you think it's deserved, as with any hate) and I assume you may hate me at some point because I do something you don't share or like (like this comment for example). Thinking that creator of Zig may hate me, takes a lot of fun from using the language let alone contributing to it or areas surrounding it. What if tomorrow people with tattoos at particular spot will be hated in media and you'll be posting "Abolish people with tattoo". Not the best comparison, but I hope you got why I feel scared of engaging with community now.
I think you have big responsibility for maintaining community of people with different political opinions and you are definitely free to share it on your personal blog. But you chose to do it in the community driven project as a lead of that project. And it's not first time. It's a bit different. For me at least.
Also the fear is what made me create this new account, I'm not a bot or something like that. I'm just afraid due to many (political) reasons and I want to find peace in playing with computers and one of these safe places was just taken from me, which you probably have the right to do but you could've avoided it. You're not the only one. There are many projects like this who mention Gaza, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, all these stuff. It's getting less and less projects to engage with (again, for me, I think it works well for those projects as they attract people they like).
I'm sorry you have to suffer and see people deaths. Me too. I understand it's difficult to hold these stuff inside. As you can see I couldn't ether. But I hoped you're stronger than me.
Get some empathy and awareness. I’m not from the US either but I am against fascist thugs occupying cities. It’s not difficult.
The world demonstrates in many instances, that you do not have to have empathy with people suffering from oppression, rape, murder, etc in order to "succeed" in terms of wealth and power.
Meaning: if you can't accept that someone publishing words/code/etc on the web at the same time also offers their own strong opinions (that you directly claim to be hate) about their own such issues, there's plenty of "communities" in which this kind of unempathetic approach to other people and their lives is celebrated and normalized.
If you barely know what ICE is, how can you claim his opinions to be "hate"? How can you claim that Andrew may hate you without thinking you identify with what you understand about ICE?
What ICE does is unmistakenly fascistic and authoritarian, far beyond the powers they have been granted by law and democratic processes. It's utterly disgusting to try and compare protesting and fighting against that with "abolish people with tattoos". ICE is an institution, a government agency among a dozen+ law enforcement agencies in the US. You compare advocating for abolishing it through democratic process (what Andrew expressed) with calling for the murder of many millions of people with a private hobby.
And while Andrew may have some responsibility towards the community he founded; if he has the responsibility to include different political opinions, he most certainly has the responsibility to exclude fascism. Fascism is the destruction of different opinions, it is not a political opinion that can stand among others and be compared on the same basis: that of human rights at the minimum.
Ask yourself and reflect: why does this very simple and inoffensive call by Andrew make you scared, especially if you don't know what ICE is and does? Could you have been influenced into this feeling? It is certainly not a rational reaction to a few characters of text viewed on a screen.