Mass Deportations and the Rule of Law

President Donald Trump was elected late last year for many reasons, but chief among them was his promise to initiate mass deportations on an unprecedented scale. Now that Trump is working to fulfil this and other pledges to the American people, many left-wingers appear to have finally clocked that it is not a rewarding tactic to smear him as a threat to “Our Democracy™”. Instead, they have plumped for another dubious talking point: Trump, they now say, cares nothing for “the rule of law”.

Such bleating is to be expected. Somewhat more interesting is the fact that a number of liberal “centrists” who threw in their lot with Trump for their own purposes, but now find themselves developing cold feet, appear to agree with this criticism.

As a matter of fact, the rule of law is a much more ambiguous concept than those with untroubled liberal intuitions tend to imagine. First seriously defined by Aristotle as the belief that “It is more proper that the law should govern than any one of the citizens”, there has been plenty of debate among philosophers over whether such a rosy-sounding state of affairs can ever prevail. But if it is possible for a law-governed society to exist, such a society would have to fulfil at least three basic criteria. First, even the most powerful would be able to exercise no power that is not expressly granted to them by the law. Second, the law would have to apply equally to every person under its jurisdiction. Finally, it would fall to independent judges alone to interpret the law – note, not to create it – in a binding way.

The fact that laws are often tainted by the folly of legislators does not make any of this impossible. Law can be defective, even dreadful, and still rule. The more serious challenge to the possibility of a law-governed society was made by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651). Against the more cheery liberal constitutionalists who dominated English jurisprudence in his day, Hobbes argued that genuine authority stems not from law but from power. It is therefore self-defeating to hold that law can govern independently of the power that creates it. Since power is wielded by human beings, the very notion of “a government of laws, not men” is absurd. At a minimum, this self-flattering liberal slogan warrants dramatic qualification: if ever law rules, it does so at the mercy of whichever men matter most. The rule of law only exists if backed by human force, instituted by human agreement, or both. In this way, it depends for its existence on factors that are prior to law.

This should clarify our understanding of how the rule of law relates to Trump’s mass deportations agenda. Under Joe Biden, over 10 million illegal immigrants were allowed to pour in across the southern border. This was in addition to the unknown but unquestionably much higher number of illegals already within the interior of the United States. On the issue of border security, we are therefore dealing with a complete breakdown of the conditions that, as we have just seen, make law-governed societies possible.

This point was lost on Princeton’s woeful excuse for a conservative academic, Professor Robert George. Addressing Trump’s efforts, recently slowed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, to speed up the deportation of the most dangerous illegals under the Enemy Aliens Act (1798), George posted on X:

“We might like what government can more efficiently accomplish by disregarding proper legal procedures today. But we will rue the day we licensed such governmental misconduct when, tomorrow, a different government disregards legal procedures to achieve quickly results we abhor.”

A nation forced to live alongside many tens of millions of illegal aliens has already lost its “proper legal procedures” in the most monumental way. We do not save the rule of law by pretending that it still exists.

Of course, that is no reason to burn everything else to the ground. There remain plenty of areas where the law continues to work as it should. However, the long-running disintegration of legality at America’s border should jolt us all into a sense of realism. All positive laws have a non-legal source. The United States of America is itself a testament to this fact. What was the War of Independence if not a non-legal test of the viability of 1776? Indeed, given the laws of Britain to which the Thirteen Colonies were then subject, it was technically an illegal gamble that paid off in the end. Yet only an eccentric Englishman still bruised by the siege of Yorktown could conclude that this calls into question the legitimacy of America today.

Meanwhile, Trump’s most ardent liberal and Bush-era Republican critics, including spineless sentimentalists like George, not only glorify the American Revolution, but would not even be able to invoke the “proper legal procedures” of the United States if the founding fathers’ daring act of illegality had not succeeded. How much more quickly do they think the American colonists would have revolted if King George III had dropped tens of millions of third-world dependents into their midst? They were indignant enough at a minor tax hike on tea.

Far be it from me to concede that Trump is in breach of the law. The idea that he is denying anyone due process is nonsense. As the administration’s legal mastermind Stephen Miller has explained, “a homeowner does not provide ‘due process’ before ejecting a home invader.” The only process that potential deportees are due is a brief check to determine whether or not they are legally in the country. All this goes to show is that, on the issue of border security, Americans find themselves in a peculiar kind of post-legal territory. That is to say, the President is tasked with rectifying a national emergency that only exists because the most basic border laws have been ignored for decades by a treacherous leadership class.

Traitors responsible for a legal vacuum cannot invoke the law against a patriot trying to restore it.