Personally I don’t carry my GC, because I’m far more likely to lose it than for anyone to ever ask for it. And it’s kind of a nightmare to replace, takes awhile and you can’t travel.
To put it another way, the $100 fine is less expensive to me than the consequences of losing it.
If I understand the comment above correctly, one can carry an I94 too and those you can just print on the website [1]
I'm guessing there's no size requirements? If so it might be a good idea to just print four on an A4, and have one folded in your wallet, one tucked in your bag-pack, one in the car, etc.
There are a lot of things that are "perfectly legal" to do. Doesn't mean that, in practice, law enforcement would necessarily take the most extreme legal action possible.
This is a new development (well, new-ish for many communities... I imagine predominatly-black communities have always experience this) whereby LE is explicitly instructed to look for any legal course of action to punitively enforce the law (rather than using a more judicious interpretation, which was more in line with the spirit of many of these regulations).
So yes, technically, law-abiding citizens should always xxxx. Does that mean that, in real life, folks always do this? Only if they are in a paranoid state whereby LE maliciously enforces the law for any minor violation and enforces overwhelming (often illegal) responses to these infractions.
> Only if they are in a paranoid state whereby LE maliciously enforces the law for any minor violation and enforces overwhelming (often illegal) responses to these infractions.
It sounds like the current administration is specifically targeting democratic stronghold states, but I don't know if that means you would be any safer in Republican majority states.
Generally no, because those are more likely to have state or local government employees working on ICE’s behalf. For instance in Florida a weigh station employee said they were calling ICE on people who looked (and sounded?) Hispanic.
Reading that article, it reads more like the person skipped the weigh station and got pulled over by the highway patrol cop usually at the weigh station. Weigh stations will often have a patrol car sitting by the highway that pulls over anyone speeding or who needs to stop at the weigh station but didn't. So CBP (not ICE) was called by a highway officer.
Still to your point of a state government authority calling the feds because someone they interacted with looked Hispanic.
To put it another way, the $100 fine is less expensive to me than the consequences of losing it.