Wednesday, October 07, 2015

What is ICE seizing?

Early lessons from my FOIA suit against ICE, which has finally resulted in an initial document production: (1) ICE might as well not be keeping records about what it seizes.  The variations include everything from “suspected counterfeit” [particularly informative!], “counterfeit T-shirts,” “counterfeit NFL shirts,” “NFL shirts,” “Buffalo Bills shirts,” “sample,” and other variants I no doubt missed. 

(2) Spelling is very much hit or miss, and it seems likely (given errors in spelling the generic terms accompanying brand names) that the spelling variations are often produced by the people doing the data entry, which means it’s impossible to tell whether the seized suspected counterfeits are near-perfect or the kind of shanzhai misspellings that signal inauthenticity to all but the most careless/least proficient in English.  (Dolfins!  Qowboys!)

(3) They haven’t produced any photos, so it’s impossible to get a sense of the quality of the seized items and, again, whether they are obvious counterfeits.

(4) I’m pretty curious as to why the “Beer pong hat,” and “marijuana hat” were seized, but there’s no explanation in the list I have.

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