#governmentpower — Public Fediverse posts

An OpenAI Strategist Says AI Labs Should Rival Government Power

https://ai-updates.net/an-openai-strategist-says-ai-labs-should-rival-government-power/

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778

#HackerNews #OpenAI #AIstrategy #GovernmentPower #TechNews #AIInnovation

How We Used to Do This—and Why It Matters

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 22, 2026

A Recent Past We Seem Determined to Forget

The most damning fact about today’s civil detention regime is not that it is harsh. It is that it is unnecessary.

Within living memory, the United States handled civil immigration violations without incarceration, spectacle, or cruelty. The law has not fundamentally changed since then. What has changed is institutional behavior—and the incentives that shape it.

Understanding how civil enforcement once operated is essential, because it proves that today’s system is a choice, not an inevitability.

Civil Enforcement Before Carceral Expansion

In the early-to-mid 1990s, civil immigration violations such as visa overstays were treated as administrative problems requiring administrative solutions. Individuals detained at ports of entry were supervised, housed temporarily in non-carceral settings, and returned on the next available flight.

They were not jailed.
They were not criminalized.
They were not used as symbols.

Supervision was exactly that—supervision. Facilities resembled apartments or holding spaces, not detention centers. Food, rest, and basic dignity were provided. The objective was compliance and removal, not punishment.

This system was quiet, effective, and inexpensive.

“Tough on Crime” Without Abandoning Civil Law

Notably, this approach existed during an era often remembered as punitive. Political leadership at the time emphasized law and order, yet still respected the distinction between civil and criminal authority.

Civil violations were resolved administratively because that was what the law required. There was no perceived need to turn overstays into enemies of the state or to stage enforcement as theater.

The assumption was simple: if someone violated the terms of entry, they would be returned. There was no moral panic attached to the process.

What Changed Was Not the Law

The transition to mass civil detention did not follow a wave of statutory reform. It followed a shift in enforcement culture.

Detention infrastructure expanded. Contracts were signed. Metrics were introduced. Visibility became a priority. Once cages existed, they were used. Once numbers were tracked, they were maximized.

Civil enforcement adopted the posture of criminal punishment not because it was required, but because it was institutionally convenient.

The Myth of Necessity

Defenders of the current system often argue that scale made earlier methods impossible. The historical record does not support this claim.

The United States has always processed large numbers of visa holders. Administrative return, supervision, and rapid removal scaled because they were designed to. The modern detention model did not solve a problem of volume. It solved a problem of optics.

What changed was not feasibility. It was appetite.

Why This Will Come Back

History is unkind to systems that rely on technical legality to justify ethical collapse. The United States has already paid this price before.

Policies once defended as lawful have later been recognized as unjust, resulting in formal apologies, reparations, and lasting damage to institutional legitimacy. Civil detention is following the same trajectory.

Future courts, historians, and oversight bodies will ask a simple question: why were people jailed for civil violations when proven alternatives already existed?

There will be no credible answer.

The National Cost of Forgetting

This is not merely a policy failure. It is a national one.

A government that treats liberty as an administrative inconvenience trains its institutions to value control over law. A public that accepts this logic becomes accustomed to injustice so long as it is directed at others.

That erosion does not stop at immigration enforcement. It spreads.

The record matters because it forecloses excuses. We know another way was possible because we used it. The choice to abandon it was deliberate—and it will not be forgotten.

From Alamo to Anarchy argues that saving U.S. democracy requires breaking Texas into five states. In a sharp Zoomer voice, Dorah Zurino traces Texas from slave republic to today’s “lab of extremes” (Rangers, Jim Crow, ERCOT, SB8) and maps a constitutional, step-by-step plan to un-monopolize power and let real communities govern.
https://books2read.com/u/mdBD9R

APA References

Legomsky, S. H. (2009). Immigration and refugee law and policy. Foundation Press.

Motomura, H. (2014). Immigration outside the law. Oxford University Press.

U.S. Department of Justice. (1996). Immigration enforcement and administrative detention practices. DOJ Archives.

ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota – Damon Linker – Persuation

ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota

The state has become Trump’s most radical experiment with militarized government.

By Damon Linker, Jan 17, 2026

Not only did the Trump administration and its media cheerleaders respond to the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by lying about and demonizing the victim while valorizing the shooter. They also used the event as an occasion to intensify ICE’s actions in the Twin Cities.

According to Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, there are currently 3,000 ICE officers swarming the city. That’s five times the total number of sworn officers who work on the city’s entire police force. They know they can act with impunity in inflicting violence on anyone they wish—undocumented immigrants, permanent residents, and American citizens.

I remain deeply uncertain about what we can and should do about this dawning reality. But there is value in simply documenting it in its appalling details. We need to have our eyes wide open about this as we prepare for more—and worse.

The Evidence

Last weekend, Noah Smith wrote a powerful post about the Good shooting and, more broadly, about what ICE is doing in Minnesota and around the country. The piece contains a paragraph with links to reports of abuses committed against people up to that point:

Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. … Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. … Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. … Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. … Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.

Things have gotten substantially worse in the intervening week.

Here’s a video of ICE using flash-bang grenades against protesters and reporters. Here’s a claim that ICE officers are knocking on doors, asking residents to identify the ethnicities of their neighbors. Here’s journalist Eric Levitz documenting how white nationalist memes and allusions have been posted on official government accounts over the past year. Here’s the news that the Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz over their statements condemning ICE activity.

And here’s the text of an email from Jonathan Oppenheimer, the brother of Substacker Daniel Oppenheimer, who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and works in its public schools:

They are swarming our neighborhoods in unmarked cars; pulling people over at random; arresting and detaining people with no warrants or cause or justification other than being brown or black; intimidating people with assault weapons in their cars, at the local Target, and at nearly every immigrant-owned business; bashing out people’s windows after traffic stops and dragging them out of their cars; knocking on doors indiscriminately and asking people for documents or to turn on their neighbors …

[It] wasn’t real to me until I was seeing it up close and personal. Students of mine crying in my room because they’re scared to come to school. Students not showing up in the first place. Students getting pulled over for no reason and being told their car needed to be searched. Coming to work at a school every day where parents need to surround the premises in case they need to document a student or staff member being assaulted by a paramilitary force and whisked away to a detention center that our elected officials are not allowed to visit.

The Twin Cities Are Living Under Authoritarian Rule

This is wrong. And every American whose capacity for moral judgment has not been addled by partisan derangement should recognize it.

Until five minutes ago, nearly anyone who saw these images and read these accounts about any place in the world would conclude, quite reasonably, that the people there were living under a dictatorship. Probable cause, rights of the accused, the need for search warrants, due process of any kind—ICE is proceeding as if such restrictions on government power no longer exist. These are extra-constitutional acts, and they are now happening on the streets of a major U.S. city every single day. The Trump administration is attempting to turn it into a new American normal.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.

A version of this article was originally published at Notes from the Middleground.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota – by Damon Linker

Alberta government wants power to remove municipal councillors
#Alberta #Canada #Bill20 #MunicipalGovernment #Politics #PoliticalParties #MunicipalAffairs #LocalDemocracy #GovernmentPower
https://the-14.com/alberta-government-wants-power-to-remove-municipal-councillors/