This is the deep state they've been worried about, this is the boot that will tread on them.
EDIT: parent comment was highest ranked comment for the article and is now at the bottom?
We live in a nation of laws, whether or not conspiracy-minded individuals prefer to follow them.
You stopped living in a nation of laws a while ago. Now you live in a nation of might makes right.
The thing about the law in the US, it's slow and heavy. You'll need to be pretty mighty to move it if it catches up to you.
This is what happens with the authoritarian faction, present in all societies, wins an election. The people who stand for the Constitutional order didn't do enough. Whether they weren't sufficiently positive persuasive or negatively persuasive, here we are with President Psycho in office.
The law didn't fail. Order didn't fail. The self-governed, the people, failed to support and defend the Constitution.
One of the things that is being exposed by the current administration is that, even though the Judiciary is an arm of the government, and supposed to provide a check on the Executive, the reality is that the Executive has the power to pardon anyone it sees fit, voiding the power of the judiciary (the argument is that the ultimate power lies with the voters who can pass their judgement on the Executive, and its use of its powers, by voting them out, hopefully)
This is one of the fundamental issues that underlies our broken system in the US. The gaps between what the law actually is, what people think it is, what people want it to be, and what it in practice is, are enormous.
Some of the recent deportation cases highlight this. You have cases where people were living in the US illegally for decades but faced no repercussions, and now people are upset because they were suddenly detained and/or deported. Virtually all the framing I see is about how it's a sudden and horrible injustice that they were detained during a "routine" ICE check-in --- very little about how we have accumulated this palimpsest of rules and enforcement policies resting on laws which don't actually encode the state of affairs most people want.
If we want people to be able to immigrate easily and safely (and I do), we need to stop breathing sighs of relief when a new president comes in and issues some kind of temporary executive order that makes things okay in the short term. We need to fix the laws at all levels, including criminalizing enforcement actions that are contrary to the law. That would likely mean massive purges of many individuals in local and state governments and law enforcement agencies, with many of them sentenced to considerable prison terms for the kind of enforcement discretion that we currently accept as normal. It's not going to be pretty. But it has to be done if we want to return to a system grounded in the actual rule of law and not the rule of law enforcement.
This is never going to happen - politics aside of what you might or might not believe about the current situation.
It's about as likely to happen as every religious individual on the planet obeying every rule in their sacred book.
The reason that they don't happen is because peoples' ideas on what is acceptable and isn't in a society changes, sometimes quite rapidly - note that the current US Administration was (attempting) to use a statute from the 1700s, are you obeying all the laws (that haven't yet been repealed) from then?
edit: An obvious example is the fact that the USA exists - it's on land that was acquired via theft, and murder. Therefore every person living on that land is receiving stolen property - let me know when that law is being enforced.
Deport them all if they came here illegally and that was _proven_, but the government just skipped all due process and as we’re seeing and as the government already admitted, people are being mistakenly deported to these camps and then the same government says they can’t do anything to reverse it.
You can’t be waxing poetic about the rule of law and how we need to enforce everything when they can’t even follow due process
I don't disagree that there are huge problems with how enforcement is currently happening. My point is that we've had those problems for a long time and the current situation is just pushing things to the breaking point along the same axis.
> We need to fix the laws at all levels, including criminalizing enforcement actions that are contrary to the law.
I believe the concern is the cases where the person had a temporary stay.