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.