Discussion
Simon Willison’s Weblog
airstrike: [delayed]
zoba: I tried the new qwen model in Codex CLI and in Roo Code and I found it to be pretty bad. For instance I told it I wanted a new vite app and it just started writing all the files from scratch (which didn’t work) rather than using the vite CLI tool.Is there a better agentic coding harness people are using for these models? Based on my experience I can definitely believe the claims that these models are overfit to Evals and not broadly capable.
vonneumannstan: Were they kneecapped by Anthropic blocking their distillation attempts?
softwaredoug: I wonder how a US lab hasn't dumped truckloads of cash into various laps to ensure these researchers have a place at their lab
bilbo0s: They probably have tried, but you have to have more cash than those researchers feel they can get starting their own lab. When you think about the fact that their new startup lab would have the entire nation of China as essentially a captive market, you start to see how almost any amount of money would be too little to convince them not to do a startup.I think Alibaba needs to just give these guys a blank check. Let them fill it in themselves. Absent that, I'm pretty sure they'll make their own startup.I do think it'd be a big loss for the rest of the world though if they close whatever model their startup comes up with.
sosodev: I've noticed that open weight models tend to hesitate to use tools or commands unless they appeared often in the training or you tell them very explicitly to do so in your AGENTS.md or prompt.They're also struggle at translating very broad requirements to a set of steps that I find acceptable. Planning helps a lot.Regarding the harness, I have no idea how much they differ but I seem to have more luck with https://pi.dev than OpenCode. I think the minimalism of Pi meshes better with the limited capabilities of open models.
skeeter2020: Getting a bit of whiplash goin from AI is replacing people, to AI is dead without (these specific) people. Surely we're far enough ahead that AI can take it from here?Wild times!
mhitza: We've gone from AGI goals to short-term thinking via Ads. That puts things better in perspective, I think.
multisport: inb4 qwen is less of a supply chain risk than anthropic
butILoveLife: >I’m hearing positive noises about the 27B and 35B models for coding tasks that still fit on a 32GB/64GB MacIsnt it interesting that you never see someone say "I used this on my Mac and it was useful"Instead we get "you could put this on your Mac" or "I tried it, and it worked but it was too slow"I feel like these people are performing an evil when they are making suggestions that cause a waste of money.
kamranjon: I use Qwen 3 Coder Next daily on my mac as my main coding agent. It is incredibly capable and its strange how you are painting this picture as if its a fringe use case, there are whole communities that have popped up around running local models.
butILoveLife: Can I doubt your claim? I have had such terrible luck with AI coding on <400B models. Not to mention, I imagine your codebase is tiny. Or you are working for some company that isnt keeping track of your productivity.I am trying super hard to use cheap models, and outside SOTA models, they have been more trouble than they are worth.
simonw: The thing I'm most excited about is the moment that I run a model on my 64GB M2 that can usefully drive a coding agent harness.Maybe Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is that model? This comment reports good results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249343#47249782I need to put that through its paces.
JLO64: Yesterday I test ran Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on my M3 Pro with 36GB via LM Studio and OpenCode. I didn’t have it write code but instead use Rodney (thanks for making it btw!) to take screenshots and write documentation using them. Overall I was pretty impressed at how well it handled the harness and completed the task locally. In the past I would’ve had Haiku do this, but I might switch to doing it locally from now on.
velcrovan: What the US has done is dumped truckloads of cash to make it likely that as a legal immigrant you will be abducted and sent to a camp.
xrd: I suppose this shows my laziness because I'm sure you have written extensively about it, but what orchestrator (like opencode) do you use with local models?
simonw: I've not really settled on one yet. I've tried OpenCode and Codex CLI, but I know I should give Pi a proper go.So far none of them have be useful enough at first glance with a local model for me to stick with them and dig in further.
sosodev: I really hope this doesn't hinder development too much. As Simon says, Qwen3.5 is very impressive.I've been testing Qwen3.5-35B-A3B over the past couple of days and it's a very impressive model. It's the most capable agentic coding model I've tested at that size by far. I've had it writing Rust and Elixir via the Pi harness and found that it's very capable of handling well defined tasks with minimal steering from me. I tell it to write tests and it writes sane ones ensuring they pass without cheating. It handles the loop of responding to test and compiler errors while pushing towards its goal very well.
a3b_unknown: What is the meaning of 'A3B'?
paoliniluis: what's your take between Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3-Coder-Next?
kamranjon: In my experience qwen 3 coder next is better. I ran quite a few tests yesterday and it was much better at utilizing tool calls properly and understanding complex code. For its size though 3.5 35B was very impressive. coder next is an 80b model so i think its just a size thing - also for whatever reason coder next is faster on my machine. Only model that is competitive in speed is GLM 4.7 flash
xrd: What do you use as the orchestrator? By this I mean opencode, or the like. Is that the right term?
simonw: I use the term "harness" for those - or just "coding agent". I think orchestrator is more appropriate for systems that try to coordinate multiple agents running at the same time.This terminology is still very much undefined though, so my version may not be the winning definition.
Twirrim: I've been testing the same with some rust, and it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself. It seems a little more likely to jam up than some other models I've experimented with.It's also driving itself crazy with deadpool & deadpool-r2d2 that it chose during planning phase.That said, it does seem to be doing a very good job in general, the code it has created is mostly sane other than this fuss over the database layer, which I suspect I'll have to intervene on. It's certainly doing a better job than other models I'm able to self-host so far.
Aurornis: > it's has spent a fair bit of time going through an infinite seeming loop before finally unjamming itself.I think this is part of the model’s success. It’s cheap enough that we’re all willing to let it run for extremely long times. It takes advantage of that by being tenacious. In my experience it will just keep trying things relentlessly until eventually something works.The downside is that it’s more likely to arrive at a solution that solves the problem I asked but does it in a terribly hacky way. It reminds me of some of the junior devs I’ve worked with who trial and error their way into tests passing.I frequently have to reset it and start it over with extra guidance. It’s not going to be touching any of my serious projects for these reasons but it’s fun to play with on the side.
simgt: > I do think it'd be a big loss for the rest of the world though if they close whatever model their startup comes up with.That's very likely to happen once the gap with OpenAI/Anthropic has been closed and they managed to pop the bubble.
mft_: Indeed; or, Europe badly needs a competitive model to hedge against US political nonsense.
tiahura: Competitive models are illegal in the EU.
riddlemethat: This is FUD. The US has dumped truckloads of cash to make it likely that masked men with no cameras and little training will parade around abducting anyone they even suspect of being an illegal immigrant, after even Yale admitted it's likely that more than 22M+ people came here illegally. https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/yale-study-finds-twic...It'd be good if Congress could do something to remove the masks, put cameras on these agents, and for the local governments to stop fighting removal of all people who are here illegally so we can pretend we have borders again.
abhikul0: Are you running it locally with llama.cpp? If so, is it working without any tweaking of the chat template? The tool calls fail for me when using the default chat template, however it seems to work a whole lot better with this: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B/discussions/9#69...
gaoshan: ICE has been detaining Chinese people in my area (and going door to door in at least one neighborhood where a lot of Chinese and Indians live). I was hearing about this just last week as word spread amongst the Chinese community here (Ohio) to make sure you have some legal documentation beyond just your driver's license on you at all times for protection. People will hear about this through the grapevine and it has a massive (and rightly so) chilling effect. US labs can try but with US government behaving like it is I don't think they will have much luck.
sourcegrift: Yes. Yes, so true. And the phd types building these models are probably even scared in China that ICE will fly there to deport them.
gordonhart: Surely you know that this is an extreme misrepresentation? There are >35 million legal immigrants in the US. It's far from "likely" that as one of them you're abducted and sent to a camp.
autoexec: Give them time, they've only just started. They do waste a lot time abducting random US citizens though.
nu11ptr: What hardware do you have it running on? Do you feel you could replace the frontier models with it for everyday coding? Would/will you?
bigyabai: I'm getting ~30 tok/s on the A3B model with my 3070 Ti and 32k context.> Do you feel you could replace the frontier models with it for everyday coding? Would/will you?Probably not yet, but it's really good at composing shell commands. For scripting or one-liner generation, the A3B is really good. The web development skills are markedly better than Qwen's prior models in this parameter range, too.
mattnewton: I feel like we would disagree on the role of immigration in the US but I really appreciate you calling out how the current administration’s approach is only effective at making viral clips online. Meta comment, but it’s refreshing to talk with people who have different goals while still referencing a shared reality. Removing the masks and adding cameras shouldn’t be controversial unless your goal really is to make a paramilitary force for the president.
ljsprague: Are the people being detained in the country illegally?
hwers: My conspiracy theory hat is that somehow investors with a stake in openai as well is sabotaging, like they did when kicking emad out of stabilityai
liuliu: apples v.s. oranges. The later is true, Emad did get sabotaged (for not being able to raise money in time, about 8-month before he's leaving). Junyang didn't have that long arc of incidents.
ivan_gammel: Offering „You are welcome“ relocation package to Anthropic might be a good idea.
Imustaskforhelp: Given how American govt. has treated Anthropic, I think you might be right. EU truly has a remarkable opportunity to make Anthropic/Claude European.
hintymad: There has been tension between Qwen's research team and Alibaba's product team, say the Qwen App. And recently, Alibaba tried to impose DAU as a KPI. It's understandable that a company like Alibaba would force a change of product strategy for any number of reasons. What puzzled me is why they would push out the key members of their research team. Didn't the industry have a shortage of model researchers and builders?
jwolfe: This thread is about bringing these people to the US.
dude250711: Claude is incapable of producing a native application for itself, and is bad enough with web ones to justify Anthropic acquiring Bun.
cmrdporcupine: Anthropic has gone out of their way to make a point about how much they love and admire the US state and its defense sector. Only drawing the line at a very far point and even when they drew the line it was with a big thing about how they believe in the American defense sector blah blah blah.In any case, there's no way Anthropic's investors in Silicon Valley would countenance such a move.Also, I'm biased the logical place is Canada, not Europe. Much of the fundamental/foundational research on LLMs, and a large part of the talent, came from universities in Canada anyways.
cmrdporcupine: The unstated but obvious (to me?) goal of what ICE is doing is not to get large numbers of people out of the country, but to drive costs down for migrant labor by further disenfranchising them, making them scared, marginal, etc.If they actually thoroughly evicted non-status migrant workers they'd have a outright revolt on their hands from farmers and other businesses that depend on them.Instead those businesses can now take further advantage of the fear of harassment and/or deportation to drive down compensation and rights.Contrast with countries like Canada that have a legal temporary foreign agriculture worker program that provides a regulated source of seasonal migrant farm worker labour under a non-citizen temporary status, but with some rights (still often abused). It's notable to me as a Canadian that I don't see this being advocated on any large scale by either party in the US.Anyways, all this just to say that the jackboot clown theater is the point, not a side effect.
reactordev: They do have a revolt on their hands from farmers… go watch some of their pleas for help.
ecshafer: China is also giving them dump trucks full of cash though. Plus you have to content with the nationalism reason (unfortunately this has died off in America for too many). The idea of building your country is valued for most Chinese I have met. Plus China is incredibly nice to live in, especially if you have lots of money and/or connections. So you can work in China, get paid lots of money, feel like you are doing good. Or In America you can get paid lots of money, and get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your model.
petcat: > Or In America you can get paid lots of money, and get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your model.Isn't it just straight-up illegal in China to refuse the government from using your model? USA isn't perfect, but at least it has active discourse.
ecshafer: I would imagine if it isn't illegal its a very bad idea not to. But regardless, I would bet large amounts of money that you would never get any flack for doing anything for the government. If I went on X, Threads, Bluesky, TikTok and said "Hey I am a software engineer selling awesome new technology to the government and military!" I am going to get Americans attacking me for supporting Trump / ICE / FBI whatever the current issue of the day is. If I did the same on Douyin or Weibo the response would be able making China strong, and there would be no criticism of that choice.
mmaunder: Yeah that was my first thought is it’s a tit for tat poach. They got the Gemini researcher so google responded in kind.
cmrdporcupine: It's nothing like it would be if ICE was actually doing substantially more than fascist theater.There'd be no food on the tables, frankly. And people in Silicon Valley would have messy houses and algae in their pools.
Jcampuzano2: The reality is - it doesn't matter. The fact that they have had as many false positives as they have and the way they treat people in general causes it to have rippling effects even for people who are legally here, or are considering legally immigrating.The risk and level of publicity is just too high for many people to even consider, especially people already intelligent/capable enough to immigrate anywhere else that doesn't have these issues or stay in their own country.
reactordev: Honestly think it’s just a matter of resources and they would rather play theater for their leader than actually do the job. However, the effect has been felt.Soybean farmers are screwed.
neves: At least it has been decades since China Gov bombed innocent people in other countries. A peaceful and responsible government.
misnome: Who cares when you get a bonus per person either way?
plorkyeran: Limiting the supply of migrant labor drives costs up, not down, and the ICE raids have had a significant negative effect on businesses reliant on illegal immigrants.
cmrdporcupine: Do you have numbers on how many migrant farm workers have actually been deported or detained?Because going around and harassing and deporting other or non-essential non-status immigrants would drive labor costs down because of the chill it would put through those who are grudgingly tolerated.And besides, given the quality of personality ICE seems to be employing even (especially) at its highest levels, I simply assume there's corruption such that if I'm a large orchard or whatever I simply pay ICE to stay away.
kamranjon: I'm basically using the agentic features of the Zed editor: https://zed.dev/agenticIt's really easy to setup with any OpenAI compatible API and I self host Qwen Coder 3 Next on my personal MBP using LM Studio and just dial in from my work laptop with Zed and tailscale so i can connect from wherever i might be. It's able to do all sorts of things like run linting checks and tests and look for issues and refactor code and create files and things like this. I'm definitely still learning, but it's a pretty exciting jump from just talking to a chat bot and copying and pasting things manually.
quantum_state: I would second that Qwen3.5 is exceptionally good. In a calibration, it (35b variant) was running locally with Ada NextGen 24GB to do the same things with easy-llm-cli in comparison with gemini-cli + Gemini 3 Pro, they were at par … really impressive it ran pretty fast …
vardalab: q4 quant gives you 175 tg and 7K pp, beats most cloud providers
gaoshan: No, all of the specific cases I heard about were Chinese people that were naturalized citizens (some for decades) who were cuffed and detained for a few hours before being released. As others have said it doesn't really matter, though. It's the sentiment that counts.
zozbot234: What Anthropic was complaining about was training on mass-elicited chat logs. It is very much a ToS violation (you aren't allowed to exploit the service for the purpose of building a competitor) so the complaint is well-founded but (1) it's not "distillation" properly understood; it can only feasibly extract the same kind of narrow knowledge you'd read out from chat logs, perhaps including primitive "let's think step by step" output (which are not true fine-tuned reasoning tokens); because you have no access to the actual weights; and (2) it's something Western AI firms are very much believed to do to one another and to Chinese models all the time anyway. Hence the brouhaha about Western models claiming to be DeepSeek when they answer in Chinese.
leptons: Chinese people are very racist towards non-Chinese. It might seem like a happy utopia, but if you aren't Chinese, then you may not really enjoy your time there. It may not be quite as bad as being black in rural US south, but being black (or anything non-Chinese) in China is still not going to be a good time.
lacoolj: I wonder if an american company poached one/all of them. They've been pretty much bleeding edge of open models and would not surprise me if Amazon or Google snatched them up
janalsncm: Anthropic has one nine of uptime right now. One.https://status.claude.com/If AI could effectively replace people, you wouldn’t need CEOs to keep trying to convince people.
mungoman2: Not sure what the uptime is meant to signal. People have quite low uptime as well…
jug: Huh? Servers aren't people and thus have completely different expectations, or what am I missing here
aruggirello: I'm getting ~27 tok/s on my 5060 Ti 16Gb (just bought for ~€600) on an old 8th gen Core 7 (2017, with DDR4 memory); I'm using the iGPU for the graphics, so the card is free for inference - I'm using Qwen3.5-27B-UD-IQ3_XXS, and almost 72k context - I went with ik_llama.cpp [0] - Qwen3.5 is very promising, I'm definitely going to use it.I also tried ZSE [1] but experienced some issues, I was hoping I could squeeze in 4bit or 5bit quants[0] https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160526
px43: Wild to call 1.42 billion people racist despite having met very few of them.
storus: More likely some high ranking party member's nepobaby from Gemini sniffed success with Qwen and the original folks just walked away as their reward disappeared.
ahmadyan: source?
misnome: I've been playing with 3.5:122b on a GH200 the past few days for rust/react/ts, and while it's clearly sub-Sonnet, with tight descriptions it can get small-medium tasks done OK - as well as Sonnet if the scope is small.The main quirk I've found is that it has a tendency to decide halfway through following my detailed instructions that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I asked, and I find it has stripped all the preliminary support infrastructure for the new feature out of the code.
shaan7: > that it would be "simpler" to just... not do what I askedThat sounds too close to what I feel on some days xD
sheepscreek: That sounds awfully similar to what Opus 4.6 does on my tasks sometimes.> Blah blah blah (second guesses its own reasoning half a dozen times then goes). Actually, it would be a simpler to just ...Specifically on Antigravity, I've noticed it doing that trying to "save time" to stay within some artificial deadline.It might have something to do with the system messages and the reinforcement/realignment messages that are interwoven into the context (but never displayed to end-users) to keep the agents on task.
wood_spirit: Yeah that happened to me with Claude code opus 4.6 1M for the first time today. I had to check the model hadn’t changed. It was weird. I was imagining that maybe anthropic have a way of deciding how much resource a user actually gets and they had downgraded me suddenly or something.
anana_: I've had even better results using the dense 27B model -- less looping and churning on problems
VWWHFSfQ: > China is incredibly nice to live inI'm sure it's a very nice place to live if you're content to just stay quiet in society and never put a political sign in your yard or even just talk about the wrong thing with your friend in a WeChat.
cyberax: This is an exaggeration. Nobody in China cares about what you speak with each other privately, and people talk about stupid policies all the time. The government cares about _public_ actions.In practical terms, if you're not kind of person who would want to run for an office in the US, China is incredibly comfortable. Cities are safe, with barely any violent crime. Public drug use is nonexistent. And with the US-level AI researcher income, you'd be in the top 0.1% earners.
WarmWash: Racism in even the worse parts of America doesn't even begin to touch the racism present in monocultural/monoracial countries.
red2awn: The "distillation attacks" are mostly using Claude as LLM-as-a-judge. They are not training on the reasoning chains in a SFT fashion.
zozbot234: So they're paying expensive input tokens to extract at best a tiny amount of information ("judgment") per request? That's even less like "distillation" than the other claim of them trying to figure out reasoning by asking the model to think step by step.
kylemaxwell: Everything on that page has two nines, so not sure what you're trying to say here.
WarmWash: There is no source. But the party in China does have ultimate control.There would never be an Anthropic/Pentagon situation in China, because in China there isn't actually separation between the military and any given AI company. The party is fully in control.
lreeves: In my experience Qwen3.5/Qwen3-Coder-Next perform best in their own harness, Qwen-Code. You can also crib the system prompt and tool definitions from there though. Though caveat, despite the Qwen models being the state of the art for local models they are like a year behind anything you can pay for commercially so asking for it to build a new app from scratch might be a bit much.
WarmWash: Making viral clips is exactly what they want.Their goal is for every one person violently detained, 10 decide to leave on their own, and 100 decide to not come in the first place.
KerrAvon: "Goal" implies there's a plan instead of just wanton cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
maxglute: > get yelled at by people online because the Government wants to use your modelWell duh, as recently demonstrated, an US model used by the US gov will 100% end up murdering actual children sooner than later, in this case less than a calendar year in some far flung war that many Americans do not support. Alternatively PRC model used by CCP might kill in some hypothetical future but for national reunification/rejuvenation that many Chinese support. At the end of the day, researchers and population on one side sleeps more soundly.
w10-1: It sounds like the lead was demoted to attract new talent, quit as a result, and the rest of the team also resigned to force management to change their minds.If so, I'm happy that the team held together, and I hope that endogenous tech leads get to control their own career and tech destiny after hard work leads to great products. (It's almost as inspiring as tank man, and the tank commanders who tried to avoid harming him...)(ducking the downvote for challenging the primacy of equity...)
mijoharas: It'd be great if they went to Mistral!
0x3f: Have they had a lot of false positives? Almost every story I see seems to fall apart on further investigation. To be clear, I'm sure they have some false positives, but do they have a lot of them relative to any other immigration system?
petcat: > nobody in China cares about what you speak with each other privately, and people talk about stupid policies all the time. The government cares about _public_ actions.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252833My comment and the linked video says otherwise. The guy was in a private group chat and said some nasty things about the police for confiscating his motorcycle. Now he's arrested and in the Tiger Chair.How are we explaining this?
maxglute: Group with 75 people. That's a crowd, doesn't matter if gated behind QR code invites. Shit talk cops and gov with the bois is fine. Shit talk / soapbox in a crowd (virtual or real) and get caught or reported = drink tea on the menu.
4RealFreedom: "especially people already intelligent/capable enough to immigrate anywhere else that doesn't have these issues or stay in their own country" Isn't that the point? Come here legally or don't come at all.
cmrdporcupine: Sure, but the difference is that while the Chinese state is measurably awful on all sorts of human rights things within their own borders... they're not currently dropping bombs on foreign cities, starving a neighbour of critical petroleum shipments, or heavily funding an ally to slowly exterminate a population.
fc417fc802: What point are you trying to make here? Are government abuses somehow inherently better or worse depending on where they happen?Do you imagine an invasion of Taiwan won't involve dropping bombs?I feel like we should be able to agree that providing authoritarian regimes with high tech tools is immoral in the general case.
impossiblefork: I'm not sure goals are totally aligned though. The current models are created by enormous expense. We know that many stages are done incorrectly. I am confident that they can be replicated without any unique US knowledge.At the moment my impression is instead that the issue is computational resources. It's important to stay near the frontier though, and to build up ones capacity to train large models.Consequently I don't think we need Anthropic. It wouldn't be terrible if they came. Especially if they picked a nice location. Barcelona would be very nice, for example.
sosodev: Around 20ish tokens a second with 6-bit quant at very long context lengths on my AMD AI Max 395+I’m trying to use local models whenever possible. Still need to lean on the frontier models sometimes.
bdangubic: try to protest in america and see how that works out for you long-term. or say protest against genocide in gaza at an uni or generally in public…
cyberax: Sigh. Let's not invent things? You can protest anything in the US just fine, with generally no consequences. Heck, our local _high_ _school_ students go out and protest everything to weasel out of classes.
cheema33: Trump admin did put people in prison and then deported them, for doing nothing more than protesting.Not as bad as China sure, but not as good as other civilized nations.
fc417fc802: Let's just clarify that visitors don't have the same rights as citizens. Whether or not you agree with the current administration's policies hopefully we can agree that it is entirely reasonable for them to deport foreign political dissidents more or less at their discretion.If you want to put this to the test try crossing the Canadian border and when they ask you the purpose of your visit respond that it's to attend a protest.
expedition32: If memory serves the father of the Chinese bomb studied in America and went back. It may be inconceivable to Americans but Chinese patriotism exists.Besides you can live a comfortable life in PRC nowadays or live in a racist America.
danny_codes: China city life is amazingly convenient. Trains and subways are just such an enormous quality of life boost. Add to that the relative cleanliness of having nearly zero homelessness and you’ve got something very compelling.I will say we are winning in accessibility. China doesn’t have much of a ramp game
softwaredoug: All very true.I wonder if you max out your options in China. It seems the Party is suspicious of ambition and high profile winners. I'm sure you can live comfortably, but there's a ceiling.
danny_codes: That’s not relevant to normal people. If you’re a billionaire with aspirations of power then it’s probably good there’s a ceiling. Sure beats having Elon randomly firing your public servants while high on ketamine.
cmrdporcupine: My point is as a non-American I feel no allegiance to either state, and current events don't make me sympathetic to the geo-political aims of the USA. So I don't see a strong moral case for this tech being an especial purvey of either party.If you'd asked me two years ago my answer might have been different.And to the original point, yeah, I would feel entirely justified in the critique of engineers in providing tools to the US defense apparatus at this point.
Terr_: Depends, how are we defining "false positive"? Ex:1. Detained the incorrect person2. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status3. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, but in unlawful circumstances4. Detained the correct person, with the correct legal status, in ostensibly-lawful circumstances, but in a way which is unconstitutional or crazyAn example of the final category are the immigrants that spent years being vetted, following the law, and doing expensive paperwork to be citizens. ICE snatched them when they showed up on at the last second as they were to take their citizenship oath. [0] Not because of anything they did, but because today's Republican party has decided that it's OK to hurt people based on their "shithole" country of birth.[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/30/us-citizensh...
0x3f: These are all forms of false positives but the most popular news stories seem to be where they detain the correct person, correct legal status, lawfully, and the story happens to gloss over the facts about the legal status and focuses on the hardship. Yeah, it's a hardship to be split from your family, I can't deny that. But I'm not aware that most countries are very sympathetic to illegal immigrants.If anything I find the stories featuring white/European people oddly racist because they seem to assume that I, the reader, will assume a white/European person couldn't possibly be in violation of immigration rules. But all the ones I've read turned out that they were indeed in violation of immigration rules.Overall as a potential immigrant to the US myself, I find the process capricious and that US citizens by birth don't fully appreciate how painful it is or why it shouldn't be that way. But I don't find it notably worse or more onerous than the vast majority of immigration policies of other countries in practice.
platinumrad: I'm not sure what you're talking about. The most popular stories are the ones when they detain US citizens, rough them up, and then dump them on the side of the road somewhere without even apologizing.[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/ice-immigrat...[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
snackerblues: Won't someone think of the poor tech millionaires' pools and their cleaning slaves? If we get rid of the slaves, they'll have to pay at first world cleaning rates! :(
