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Things are getting scary with the Trump regime. Rule of law is breaking down with regard to immigration enforcement and basic human rights are not being honored.
I'm kind of dumbfounded because this is worse than I expected things to get. Do any of you LessWrongers have a sense of whether these stories are exaggerated or if they can be taken at face value?
Deporting immigrants is nothing new, but I don't think previous administrations have committed these sorts of human rights violations and due process violations.
Krome detention center in Miami -- overcrowded and possibly without access to sufficient drinking water
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article303485356.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/unpacking-claims-ice-holding-4k-220400460.html
https://www.instagram.com/jaxxchismetalk/reel/DHjxaXzAddP/
https://www.instagram.com/catpowerofficial/reel/DHhsiMvJ8BT/people-are-dying-under-ice-detainment-in-miamiand-this-video-is-from-last-weekpl/
Canadian in the US legally to apply for a work visa detained 2 weeks by ICE without due process
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney
The Krome thing is all rumor - looking into it, you see numeric estimates like
According to its official figures, there are 605 people detained at Krome, although the capacity is 581. While ICE is looking for ways to increase its current detention capacity of 40,000 nationwide to 100,000, lawyers and activists estimate the real number is much higher. Some speak of double the capacity, others of up to 4,000.
“Activists and [activist] lawyers say number is huge” is not news, and shouldn’t dumbfound the reader.
The water claim is also weird. I tried watching one of the instagram links, and it shared so much stylistically with mind-killing videos I remember from the BLM era that I had to turn it off.
Like, maybe some of this stuff is true. I don’t have evidence against. But when I was deeply involved with the protest scene in 2014-2015, I remember every arrest being an opportunity for claiming major mistreatment. Everything from the way police carried resisting arrestees, to when and if arrestees were made to change into jail uniforms, were spread frantically on social media as clear examples of mistreatment.
Once, when I was arrested, and we were being transported to the larger jail via van, the other arrestee (to be clear: not related to protests) being transported with me banged his head on the metal separating grate repeatedly, presumably with the idea of later accusing the police of beating him.
I’d always scoffed at police claims about detainees hurting themselves to get social ammunition, but I’ve ridden in a police van once in my life, and saw this. So now I think detainees often tell very tall tales.
All this isn’t to say “this proves your links are false”. But rather to say this is a low standard of evidence. I think it would be really bad if people started just dumping rumors and accusations on LessWrong whenever those accusations pointed at politicians they already didn’t like.
Social media posts by activists are mind-killing. Like, take a look at previous posts by that instagram account in the post: many are about celebrities, or her breakup, but when the videos are political, they are pretty clearly pro-migrant and anti-trump. “Partisan social media account” is typically not the best information source for rationalists.
The Krome thing is all rumor
I don’t have evidence against
If the truth is hard to determine, I think that in itself is very worrying. When you have vulnerable people imprisoned and credible fears that they are being mistreated, any response from those in power other than transparency is a bad sign. Giving them the benefit of the doubt as long as they can prevent definitive evidence from coming out is bad epistemics and IMO even worse politics (not in a party-political sense; just in a 'how to disincentivise human rights abuses' sense).
When something is true, I desire to believe it’s true. When something is false, I desire to believe it’s false. This is the proper epistemics. If your epistemic goals are different, then they’re different. But “If the accused is in power, increase the probability estimate” is not how good epistemics are achieved.
Tangent here, just occurred to me while writing. The correct adjustment might be in the other direction: there are way more accusations against people in power, so part of the problem when considering them is: how do you keep your False Discovery Rate low? Like, if your neighbor is accused of a crime, he probably did it. But top politicians are accused of crimes every week, and many of those aren’t real, or aren’t criminal. And most or all False Discovery Rate adjustments lower the estimated probability of each instance. (Tangent over).
I think you may have a case about how one’s decision theory should adjust based on power and risk. Something like “I think there’s a 15% chance this is true, but if it were, it would be really bad, so 15% is high enough that I think we should investigate”. But taking that decision theory thought process, and using it to speak as if the 15% thing has a greater-than-50% probability, for example, isn’t correct.
1“If the accused is in power, increase the probability estimate” is not how good epistemics are achieved.
It is when our uncertainty is due to a lack of information, and those in power control the flow of information! If the accusations are false, the federal government has the power to convincingly prove them false; if the accusations are true, it has the power to suppress any definitive evidence. So the fact that we haven't seen definitive evidence in favour of the allegations is only very weak evidence against their veracity, whereas the fact that we haven't seen definitive evidence against the allegations is significant evidence in favour of their veracity.
1I suspect that, to many readers, what gives urgency to the Krome claims is that two people have allegedly died at the facility. For example, the fourth link OP provides is an instagram video with the caption “people are dying under ICE detainment in Miami”.
The two deceased are Genry Ruiz Guillen and Maksym Chernyak. ICE has published deaths reports for both:
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ddr-GenryRuizGuillen.pdf
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ddrMaksymChernyak.pdf
Notably, Mr. Ruiz-Guillen was transferred to medical and psychiatric facilities multiple times, and my read of the timeline is that he was in the custody of various hospitals from December 11 up through his January 23 death, i.e. over a month separates his death and his time at Krome. (It’s possible I’m reading this wrong so let me know if others have a different read). Ruiz-Guillen was transferred to hospital a month before inauguration day.
Chernyak’s report is much shorter and I don’t know what to make of it. Hemmorhagic stroke is hypothesized. He died February 20.
These are fairly detailed timelines. Guillen-Ruiz’s in particular involves many parties (normal hospital, psychiatric hospital, different doctors), so would be a pretty bold fabrication.
You said:
>the fact that we haven't seen definitive evidence against the allegations is significant evidence in favour of their veracity.
But “detainees are dying because of overcrowding and lack of water” is an allegation made by one of OP’s links, and these timelines and symptoms, especially Guillen-Ruiz’s, are evidence against.
Although the risk of frogboiling human rights abuses won't go away anytime soon, it's also important to keep in mind that Trump got popular by doing whatever makes the left condemn him because right-wingers seem to interpret that as a costly credible signal of commitment to them/the right/opposing the left, and his administration has spent a decade following this strategy as consistently as can reasonably be considered possible for a sitting president, most of the time landing on strategies to provoke condemnation from liberals in non-costly or ambiguously costly ways (see Jan 6th).
See Scott Alexander's classic post It's Bad On Purpose To Make You Click; engagement bait has been the soul of Trump's political persona since it emerged in the mid-2010s, and it will be interesting going forward to see whether the recent tariff designs will end up as serious policy and be added as a new centerpiece of the tax and spending regime (which had taken a stable form since the Vietnam War and the end of the Gold Standard[1]).
- ^
The case could also be made that the computerization of Wall Street during the late 70s and 80s transformed the economy sufficiently radically that the current tax and spending paradigm could be condered more like 30-40 years old, or you could pin it to the 1950s when the tariff paradigm ended; either way, the modern emergence of massive recessions, predictive analytics, pandemic risk, and international military emphasis on trade geopolitics, all indicate potential for elite consensus around unusually large macroeconomic paradigm shifts.
It seems the recent tariff designs already are serious policy. What do you mean by "added as a new centerpiece of the tax and spending regime"? What are the alternative futures?
It seems the recent tariff designs already are serious policy
If the tariffs are revoked, reversed, unenforced, or blocked in some way, that strongly points towards possibility that they were understood to be unenforceable all along, and their imposition and failure was just a kayfabe set up by the president to look like he tried and juxtaposing himself against his enemies, depicting them as at fault for making the shiny new policy impossible. This is not unique to Trump, it has been very prevalent practice among presidents and congress since most of the Cold War and possibly long before that (I don't have the energy to determine the exact age, only that it's an old old practice and very widespread).
What do you mean by "added as a new centerpiece of the tax and spending regime"?
Sorry if I wasn't clear here. Tariffs were a very large portion of government revenue, and therefore spending, until the 1950s when income tax grew (largely because workers were pretty risk-intolerant and mass literacy made them more willing and able to file paperwork than other avenues of taxation) and government as we know it pivoted to revolving around income taxes instead. Tariff-based taxation governments and income-based taxation governments are pretty different government/civilizational paradigms, similar to the distinctiveness of the "dark forest" government paradigm in Africa centuries ago where villages built near roads were more likely to be enslaved or conscripted or have forced labor quotas imposed on them, resulting in villages largely being distant from roads.
What are the alternative futures?
In the high-tariff scenario, governments and militaries (in Europe and Asia too, not just the US) have probably predicted that international trade is sufficiently robust, and the participants sufficiently risk-averse, that imports can be milked, at least relative to risks from continuing to depend so heavily on income taxation (e.g. maybe tax evasion advice gets popular on tiktok or something). This would not surprise me as many of the best minds in the US and Chinese militaries have spent more than a decade thinking very hard about economics and international trade as warfare, and it seems to me like they at least believe they've developed a solid understanding of what economic collapse contingencies look like and how much stress their economies and trade networks can take. This means international trade will be much more expensive as it is basically heavily taxed and those tax rates can change on a dime which greatly increases everyone's risk premiums, but also might cause governments to focus on prioritizing the robustness of international trade if it becomes the main revenue source, in addition to forcing prioritization on the domestic economy because the ground has been burned behind them (investing in industries that depend on imports or exports is riskier and less viable due to the deadweight loss and risk premiums added to international trade). Generally it means broader government control as well as less stability, as income taxes can't really change on a dime in response to a nation's actions or target specific industries, and tariffs can.
If the tariffs are revoked, reversed, unenforced, or blocked in some way, that strongly points towards possibility that they were understood to be unenforceable all along, and their imposition and failure was just a kayfabe set up by the president to look like he tried and juxtaposing himself against his enemies, depicting them as at fault for making the shiny new policy impossible. This is not unique to Trump, it has been very prevalent practice among presidents and congress since most of the Cold War and possibly long before that (I don't have the energy to determine the exact age, only that it's an old old practice and very widespread).
Sorry, I don't really understand your idea here. In the passive form of "they were understood to be unenforceable all along", I do not understand who you think might have understood them to be unenforceable. The markets seem to understand them as enforceable to a relevant extent: "The S&P 500 sank nearly 6%, the Dow plunged 2,230 points, and the Nasdaq lost 5.8%, hitting their lowest levels since last May." (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/stock-market) The movements on the markets have already had massive effects on who owns what, they have affected geopolitical relations and expectations about the future of these relations.
Tariff-based taxation governments and income-based taxation governments are pretty different government/civilizational paradigms, similar to the distinctiveness of the "dark forest" government paradigm in Africa centuries ago where villages built near roads were more likely to be enslaved or conscripted or have forced labor quotas imposed on them, resulting in villages largely being distant from roads.
Yes, tariff-based taxation governments and income-based taxation governments are different. However, I don't understand the comparison to the dark-forest government paradigm.
Things are getting scary with the Trump regime.
Things got scary November 5 at the very latest. And I haven't even been in the US for years.
The deportations, both the indiscriminate ones and the vindictive ones, represent a very high level of lawlessness, one that hasn't been seen in a long time. Not only are they ignoring due process, they're actively thwarting it, and openly bragging about doing so. They're not even trying to pretend to be remotely decent. The case you mention isn't even close to the worst of them; that one could at least theoretically have happened before.
The deportations were also a campaign promise. Actually the campaign promise was even more extreme.
It's part of a systematic plan. There've been a lot of administrative and personnel changes obviously designed to weaken institutions that are supposed to prevent things like that.
ICE has always had a reputation for a relatively thuggish, xenophobic organizational culture. It was already primed to get worse. As soon as Trump signalled aproval, it did get worse.
Bad conditions in detention centers are nothing new. There's never been any willingness to spend what it would take to do them right, or to put in the kind of controls you'd need. It's politically risky to act like you care about "illegal immigrants", whereas it can be politically rewarding to "get tough". The 2020 "kids in cages" scandal was a rare case of something that got some traction. But, sure, I imagine that the newly emboldened ICE is even more indifferent to bad conditions, and may even be actively trying to make them worse. And of course if a center is already bad, putting more people into it and moving people through it fast is only going to make it worse.
It's really quite bad, yes. There's a whole lot of reasons that there are nationwide protests today.
While the Trump administration campaigned on deporting very many people till now they haven't. Instead they seem to pursue a policy of taking actions that produce fear I potential immigrants and managed to drastically reduce the inflow illegal immigrants that way.
Both mainstream media and the Trump administration like it if the policies look scary.
If you want to decide whether it makes sense to be personally scared it's important to think through your personal threat models.
Trump has a history of both ignoring the law and human rights in general, and imprisoning innocent people under the guise of them being illegal immigrants when they aren't. Current events are unsurprising, and a part of what his voters voted for.
I just downloaded MS Edge so that I could use Bing AI and ask it to find me a Brazillian hammock more than 6 feet wide. After repeated questioning, it kept giving me hammocks less than 6 feet wide (but more than 6 feet long). Even after I pointed out its error explicitly it kept making the same error and finally Bing gave up and told me it couldn't help. Like it would list two possibilities for me, state the length and width of each, and the width was less than 6 feet in each case.
Given all the amazing stuff we've seen out of AI lately, I'm kind of amazed it wasn't more successful. I'm guessing they don't make Brazillian hammocks in that size. (not sure why, as they make Mayan hammocks much wider than that, but anyway . . . )
Is this a blind spot for Bing? Or does Microsoft prefer for it to turn up bad results rather than say that no such thing exists?
I don't know, but I had a similar experience with chattGPT; after having heard from various sources that it is pretty decent at chess, I decided to challenge it to a friendly game. I was actually expecting to lose since I myself am not much of a chess player, and also having had conversations on topics where I am an expert, depending on your definition of that word, and being really impressed by the reasoning ability of the LLM in some of those conversations. Anyway, chattGPT insisted on playing as white. Then it said: "Ok, let's begin. You get the first move." So I had to explain to it that according to the rules of chess, it's white that moves first. So as usual it excused itself, and the game began. After each move, it printed an image of the table on the screen; I did not pay attention to that since I had my own physical board. (We were exchanging moves by stating the start square and the end square of each move, i.e. not the standard terminology for chess.) So a couple of moves in I noticed that the robot moved one of its Bishops right through one of its pawns. So I remarked that this is not a legal move. The robot agreed, and stated that it is not allowed to capture its own pawns. It made another move, it was my turn, I stated the moved but this time I also looked at the board that the robot displayed on the screen. I realized that something was very wrong, I had a knight where I should have a bishop. So I went back to trace where this error had started. But in the end it became to complicated and we decided to start a fresh game. This game also lasted a couple of moves before strange things started to happen. So we agreed to start fresh again, and now I insisted on playing as white (I was getting tired of having my physical board "upsidedown" compared to the board on screen). Anyway, the robot managed a couple of moves again, before it placed one of it's rooks outside of the board. Now I was tired so I just said "ok I give up, you're too good at this" (I don't want to offend it, maybe it will spare me in a human zoo when it takes over). But jokes asides, why is it so inconsistent? Maybe openAI have dumbed it down not to scare people; maybe it was investigating how I would react; or maybe it just had a bad day, and if I take the time and play it again it will be much better. What I mean by the last option is that all these games took place within the same chatt, so the LLM remembers things from earlier, so maybe, having had this bad start, and knowing that it is often the case that it runs the whole chatt up until the current point through the NN to get the next word (next "token" to be more precise), it might be that since less and less made any sense it went astray farther and farther from giving good moves.
So as for your search on Bing "Powered by chattGPT" maybe try to do the search again and see if you can get a better result. And also, maybe try searching using different words than last time, or trying to explain a little better, try pretending like you're talking to a human unless you did not do that last time.
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