An American citizen born and raised in California is unsettled after receiving an e-mail from the US Department of Homeland Security ordering him to leave the country “immediately.”
Aldo Martinez-Gomez received the DHS notice on April 11, threatening “criminal prosecution” and fines if he does not depart within seven days.
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Martinez-Gomez works full-time assisting immigrants in court for a non-profit and believes his advocacy work may have placed him on the government’s radar.
This is quite the Hanlon’s Razor situation.
There have been a number of US citizens who have received these emails, all of them do some kind of work related to immigration. It’s pretty clear that whoever sent out these emails just collected every email related to immigration work, and sent out a mass email. That satisfies Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
But! The fact that they’re doing this without even a passing effort at accuracy, with no concern about getting it wrong, shows how it’s motivated by malice too. It’s the ICE version of a reckless homicide, they’re doing something they have to know would normally get them fired if not charged. But, they don’t care because the current racist administration is going to revel in the pain.
So, it’s a weird situation where Hanlon’s Razor is both right and wrong.
Basically you’re saying, attribute the email to stupidity; attribute the stupidity to malice.
I think anybody who wasn’t malicious would be very careful about this process. They would know that a mistake was possible and that they should triple-check everything they were doing. So, it’s more that the stupidity is the evidence for the malice. That, and the fact that there wasn’t a massive apology and attempt to correct the mistake when these news stories started coming out.
well. I mean, no. They could just be stupid.
People often forget with Hanlon’s Razor that stupidity is evil, and that evil is not always malicious.
Please explain why stupidity is evil.
I guess I shouldn’t have been so black and white. It depends on your definition of stupidity, and I suppose your understanding of evil - to an extent.
Ignorance is not stupidity, for one thing. A lack of knowledge is, in no way, indicative of an inability to gain it. Nor is it indicative of an individual’s desire to gain knowledge.
If I were to define a stupid decision, it would be a decision made without any thought for the consequences. Littering, for example, is stupid. Depending on what you’re littering, it is also evil. Littering paper? Yeah ok, as long as it isn’t heavily laminated it’s just going to decompose. Littering plastic? Metal cans (lined with plastic, but the metal itself is also bad)? It’s a decision made where the benefit is so small compared to the negatives that you might as well shoot yourself in the foot.
The stupid person doesn’t consider this, though. They don’t care that their roads are littered with trash, plastic strewn amongst fields - poisoning the earth and waterways with chemicals possessing adjectives like forever. They don’t care that they live in an ever deepening landfill. They just throw it out the window and forget about it. They look at the next species to go extinct and push the thought out of their mind.
This, to me, is evil. This is probably the least evil example of stupidity that I can think of. There are more but, truth be told, I don’t really like thinking about stupid people. They tend to make me angry.
Edit: I did not downvote you, by the way.
The problem with “they’re just incompetent”, is that it let’s malicious people feign stupidity. And if it is a combination, it doesn’t matter which aspects are one or the other. They are dangerous all the same and shouldn’t be allowed to continue hurting people. But a combination of apathy, indoctrination, and infiltration means they’ll likely never see any real consequences. Or if they do, they were likely expendable and their excision doesn’t accomplish anything. People need to, at a minimum, vote. And preferably get more involved. Organize. Start local.
It may let malicious people feign stupidity, but that doesn’t mean you have to just forgive them.
Is there reason to believe that Hanlon’s Razor is correct?
Yeah, Occam’s razor.
Occam’s Razor comes from a 14th century priest who studied logic. It’s been gone over by philosophers in the centuries since and is generally considered valid.
Hanlon’s Razor comes from a joke book published in 1980.
Hanlon’s Razor is basically a special case of Occam’s Razor.
Making a mistake or doing something stupid is easy. Conspiring to do something malicious is not as easy. The simpler explanation is generally that something is a mistake rather than an elaborate conspiracy. So, Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation (a mistake) is probably the right one.
Fwiw Occam’s razor is actually a little more precise than “choose the simplest explanation”. Specifically, it defines what “simplest” actually means, in such a way that makes it easier to see how you could describe Hanlon’s razor as a special case of Occam’s.
Occam’s razor is that you should choose the solution which requires the fewest assumptions. Assuming someone made a mistake is precisely one assumption. That they were acting maliciously requires several, including having the motive to do it and, in a case involving large organisations, having the capability to cover it up.
From a logical perspective, if you’re trying to discover the truth of something you’re inevitably going to start weighing and eliminating variables. It makes sense to start from the absolute bottom, prove or disprove that, then move on.
It’s just razors all the way down…
Is it? Hitchens’ razor says that you’ve provided no evidence for your turtle-like stack of razors, so your claim can be dismissed without evidence.
While true, the intent behind Hanlon’s has been expressed for millennia. The Principal of Charity (which was only named in the 1950s)
Basically, never assume the worst about someone.
The problem here is when there is actual malice. But that’s when Occam’s razor comes in.
No. And it’s a boon to “people” like the Trump regime.
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You’re close, but came to the wrong conclusion.
The US citizens incorrectly receiving these emails are receiving them because a migrant used that email address as their contact email address. The government is trying to contact the migrant, but the migrant said “my contact email address is this other persons email address”.
A person didn’t send these emails, an automated system did - it’s even shown in the from email address. The automated email is being sent when their “parole” is being ended.
There’s no “malice” involved here, just people putting down the wrong email addresses in their forms. It’s like me signing up for a mailing list but putting your email address down instead. The only person who could be accused of malice is me, not the mailing list company who then send the email to you.
I’m not saying that’s not possible, but if they were doing that, you’d think they’d at least say “For: Juan Herrero, On Behalf Of: <Immigration Lawyer>” or something. But, apparently an immigration lawyer who received a letter said:
“At first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/15/self-deportation-email-citizen-immigration-lawyer
That’s literally what the DHS spokespeople have said. The emails that were sent erroneously were sent to email addresses of citizens that had their emails entered by a migrant as the migrants email address.
The name on the emails matches the citizens because the migrant clearly thought the “contact information” section was either their immigration lawyers contact details, or they just put someone else’s details on their because they don’t intend on being contactable so it makes them harder to be deported.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/it-is-time-for-you-to-leave-dhs-mistakenly-sends-notices-to-us-citizens/ar-AA1DrVS5
It’s not some huge conspiracy, not some threat to deport citizens - it’s an automated email that goes out to the email addresses that migrants, that have had their parole or whatever it is terminated, entered on their forms.
And if you can’t trust them, who can you trust?
So you think they’re telling lies? And that the few people that we’ve heard about where this happened - which as far as I’ve seen is only maybe 3 cases - just happened to work with migrants helping them get in legally, where their statement makes perfect sense, especially for non-native English speakers?
Come on. A few people got an email in error. They’re not getting deported. They’re citizens. They weren’t on parole. The DHS has told them they aren’t getting deported and that it was an error.
Do you think the DHS will now deport the citizens anyway? Seems like a bit of a conspiracy theory.