They’re not prisoners, they’re not charged with a crime.

They’re in the US without the legal authority to be in the US. Despite the drumbeat from the right calling them ‘Illegals’, they’re not criminals… they simply are not allowed to be here (due to not having a visa) and so they’re being returned to their country of origin. This is how immigration enforcement has been done for centuries in the US.

The major difference now is that Trump is treating undocumented immigrants as if they’re a national security threat and allocating a large amount of resources to deporting these people. Obviously, this is massively damaging to the US as the lax enforcement over the decades has shifted our workforce so that much of our domestic farming and food production is done by immigrants, often without documentation. His motivations seem to be to play to the racism in his base and the damage that this enforcement action causes to families is reprehensible and disgusting.

But, in the end, this is the same means immigration enforcement that we’ve been using in the US for as long as any of us has been alive. The only difference is the scale and motivation.

The Air Force isn’t doing anything illegal and protecting Airmen from retaliation is well within the mission scope of the Air Force. The OP isn’t basing their arguments on reality. They’re attempting to frame the removing of name and unit patches as something sinister to people who are ignorant of how these things work.

You don’t want to have a bunch of people who’re angry and could potentially be vengeful to have your name and other identifying information. It’s as simple as that.

Ahh yes, they’re only transporting ice agents right … It’s not like there are civilians on the plane who may or may not have been given due process.

Moving the goal posts, yet again.

If ICE is violating due process, that is for the courts to decide and issue sanctions. That hasn’t happened, as of this comment, there is nothing about these flights that are illegal.

ICE requests transport and the military provides it under 10USC2642. That makes the Air Force’s transportation legal which is what the entire post is about.

The problem is that you don’t even consider the cargo humans.

🙄

Ah yes, ad hominem. Nothing says ‘I have run out of arguments’ like name-calling. I’m blocking you now.

And…? So you have a logical retort, or lack the ability to use google?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)

The burden of proof (Latin: onus probandi, shortened from Onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat – the burden of proof lies with the one who speaks, not the one who denies) is the obligation on a party in a dispute to provide sufficient warrant for its position.

It is not my responsibility to support your argument by trying to find the source of your quotes. That’s not how the burden of proof works.

Considering that your position is that this is a violation of Posse Comitatus including a quote that says “there is disagreement over whether this language may apply to troops used in an advisory, support, disaster response, or other homeland defense role, as opposed to domestic law enforcement.[1]” seems to contradict your own argument.

The Air Force is under the command of the Commander in Chief and so they are required to comply with lawful orders.

Providing transportation for other federal agencies is a lawful use of military equipment under 10 U.S. Code § 2642(a)(3):

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/2642

(a) Authority.—Subject to subsection (b), the Secretary of Defense may authorize the use of the Department of Defense reimbursement rate for military transportation services provided by a component of the Department of Defense as follows:

[…]

(3) For military transportation services provided to any element of the Federal Government outside the Department of Defense in circumstances other than those specified in paragraphs (1) and (2), but only if the Secretary of Defense determines that the provision of such services will promote the improved use of transportation capacity without any negative effect on the national security objectives or the national security interests contained within the United States commercial transportation industry.

So, as long as the Secretary of Defense approves of the flights, then it is legal for the Air Force to provide military transportation services to any element of the Federal Government outside the Department of Defense. ICE is an element of the Federal Government outside the Department of Defense and so the use of Air Force equipment to provide transportation for ICE is legal under 10 U.S. Code § 2642(a)(3).

Yes, it is.

Supremacy lays with the Constitution.

The Constitution:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;

Befehl ist Befehl isn’t a valid defense.

There doesn’t need to be a valid defense because no crimes are alleged.

The Air Force is operating a flight, chartered by ICE, to transport foreign nationals to their country of origin. The people are in ICE custody, ICE is the law enforcement body who is transporting them for deportation.

The Air Force is no more enforcing domestic law than Delta is when ICE uses them to transport deportees.

I think Trump’s deportation program is massively destructive and likely violates the law in many places. But that doesn’t mean that literally every aspect of it is a crime and everyone involved is acting illegally.

The Air Force isn’t acting illegally by transporting ICE, which is the point of contention here. I mean, do you think that AFJAG is unaware that this is happening?

Don’t confuse getting upvotes from outrage junkies with having rational opinions.

They were captured by ICE. Not the Air Force.

They were determined to be undocumented by ICE. Not the Air Force.

Their deportation was chartered by ICE. Not the Air Force.

The people are in the custody of ICE. Not the Air Force.

The Air Force is providing the flight logistics from a US Base to a foreign country in support of another federal agency.

They’re not deploying infantry into Mexico out of Brownsville, Texas. The Air Force is completely within legal boundaries to fly from the US to a foreign country.

e: You know you don’t have an argument when your only response is to downvote.

You’re quoting things with footnotes but not linking the footnotes.

The Air Force isn’t executing the laws. Saying that it is semantics isn’t an argument that. All legal arguments are based on semantics.

The people in ICE custody were captured by ICE. ICE executed the laws. Once the people were identified as foreign nationals, by ICE, and determined to require deportation, by ICE, then they are transported, by ICE, to their country of origin.

The deportees are in ICE custody (see the ICE agents in the OP) until they’re in their country of origin where they are released, by ICE.

The Air Force simply operates the aircraft and provides all of the required logistics to do so.

This is no different than ICE using Delta to return people to their country. It would be silly to say that Delta has become a law enforcement organization because ICE purchased tickets to transport people to their country of origin.

You’re moving the goal posts. The Air Force isn’t enforcing domestic policy. They’re operating an aircraft to provide logistics for other federal agencies.

The other agencies are enforcing domestic policy, not the Air Force. The people are not in the custody of the Air Force and they were not captured by the Air Force. ICE is simply using the Air Force equipment as transport and Air Force personnel operate and secure that equipment.

Sure, but there’s a large difference between questioning someone’s credibility and approving of them being sexually assaulted.

That is to say there’s a large moral difference between “she has a history of making up claims for attention, so I don’t believe her” and “she wishes harm on others, so I hope she gets sexually assaulted”.

I mean, just on the face of it, it is hypocritical to wish harm on someone because they wish harm on someone. Is wishing harm on someone wrong, or is it not?

Unfortunately, people seem to have no grasp of nuance and just react with the most outrageous takes. In my mind I just assume that these commenters are literally children, who’re simply copying bad behaviors and not actual functioning adults with the ability to self-reflect. But, that’s more for my own sanity.

No, they executed Nazis for operating death camps.

They did not execute for “just following orders”, aka Nuremberg Defense.

As it turns out, soldiers in all militaries follow orders every day without being executed.

Unless you’re going to explain how removing a unit patch and name tag, or transporting people to their country of origin is worthy of execution, I’m not sure that you have an argument.

Out of all the branches it doesn’t surprise me at all that the Air Force is the branch falling over itself to follow trump’s orders.

I’m not sure how you can imply that you’re familiar with how the military operates and then say something as ignorant as this.

All branches of the military “fall over themselves” to follow the orders of the President. That’s literally how the chain of command works.

Be upset at Trump for assigning shit missions, but it’s incredibly ignorant to attack any specific branch of the military for following lawful orders.

What do you picture the alternative to be? That some Airman should get himself court marshalled for refusing the order to remove his name and unit patch?

Could you explain how transporting people to their country of origin is an illegal order?

Or, maybe explain how you would handle the order as an enlisted soldier?

Yes, even then.

You don’t have morals if they’re conditioned on the identity of the person they’re being applied to. That just makes you a different flavor of bigot.

Nobody deserves to be sexually assaulted, even the people you don’t like.

Or DEI people

Translated to right-wing populist

There are thousands of different diffusion models, not all of them are trained on copyright protected work.

In addition, substantially transformative works are allowed to use content that is otherwise copy protected under the fair use doctrine.

It’s hard to argue that a model, a file containing the trained weight matrices, is in any way substantially similar to any existing copyrighted work. TL;DR: There are no pictures of Mickey Mouse in a GGUF file.

Fair use has already been upheld in the courts concerning machine learning models trained using books.

For instance, under the precedent established in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust and upheld in Authors Guild v. Google, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that mass digitization of a large volume of in-copyright books in order to distill and reveal new information about the books was a fair use.

And, perhaps more pragmatically, the genie is already out of the bottle. The software and weights are already available and you can train and fine-tune your own models on consumer graphics cards. No court ruling or regulation will restrain every country on the globe and every country is rapidly researching and producing generative models.

The battle is already over, the ship has sailed.

I left a flat spot on my door so people can knock

Companies that are incompetently led will fail and companies that integrate new AI tools in a productive and useful manner will succeed.

Worrying about AI replacing coders is pointless. Anyone who writes code for a living understands the limitations that these models have. It isn’t going to replace humans for quite a long time.

Language models are hitting some hard limitations and were unlikely to see improvements continue at the same pace.

Transformers, Mixture of Experts and some training efficiency breakthroughs all happened around the same time which gave the impression of an AI explosion but the current models are essentially taking advantage of everything and we’re seeing pretty strong diminishing returns on larger training sets.

So language models, absent a new revolutionary breakthrough, are largely as good as they’re going to get for the foreseeable future.

They’re not replacing software engineers, at best they’re slightly more advanced syntax checkers/LSPs. They may help with junior developer level tasks like refactoring or debugging… but they’re not designing applications.

I know that it’s a meme to hate on generated images people need to understand just how much that ship has sailed.

Getting upset at generative AI is about as absurd as getting upset at CGI special effects or digital images. Both of these things were the subject of derision when they started being widely used. CGI was seen as a second rate knockoff of “real” special effects and digital images were seen as the tool of amateur photographers with their Photoshop tools acting as a crutch in place of real photography talent.

No amount of arguments film purist or nostalgia for the old days of puppets and models in movies was going to stop computer graphics and digital images capture and manipulation. Today those arguments seem so quaint and ignorant that most people are not even aware that there was even a controversy.

Digital images and computer graphics have nearly completely displaced film photography and physical model-based special effects.

Much like those technologies, generative AI isn’t going away and it’s only going to improve and become more ubiquitous.

This isn’t the hill to die on no matter how many upvotes you get.

As soon as they became a publicly tradable company they are obligated, by the Dodge v Ford ruling, to only maximize shareholder value. Being not evil isn’t an option.

Where it actually breaks is unknowable, but the structure is:

Judges determine the interpretation of the law. The executive branch enforces the law.

Both of those branches derive their power from the constitution.

The military protects the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The President is the Command in Chief of the military, however service members from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a Private fresh out of boot camp are instilled with the obligation to refuse illegal orders.

If the Supreme Court rules on an issue and the President tries to use the military in contravention of that ruling, the military is supposed to follow the constitution, not the President.

But also fuck this type of partisan rage bait article. This type of writing is what divides us, even if it’s saying things you wanna hear.

Hear, hear.

This kind of ‘information’ is like doing drugs, it feels good but it destroys your ability to function as a normal human being. Getting addicted to outrage and ‘owning the <other side>’ is playing into the divisive politics that allows the powers that be to divide us. Nobody is going to want to work with you if you’re calling them a MAGAT and you’re not going to want to work with anyone who’s attacking you.

Your enemy isn’t the other middle class and poor people who’ve been convinced to wear a different color hat than you. If you can’t see that and adjust your behavior appropriately then you still have a lot to learn and I hope we have enough time for you to catch up.

I think it’s because we here in the technical nerdy spaces know the value of a cooties shot…