When the Law Becomes a Weapon

Fascism does not begin with camps. It begins when: * the state decides some people are inherently suspect, * legal protections become conditional, * and belonging can be revoked without wrongdoing.

ICE, Trump, and the Politics of Exclusion

A recent CNN poll asked a deceptively simple question:

Should ICE deport people who entered the United States illegally but who now work, pay taxes, and have acquired legal documentation?

Presented this way, the issue appears to be one of legality. In reality, it exposes something far more troubling.

This debate is not about enforcing the law. It is about who is allowed to belong.

Law as justification, not principle

ICE is often described as a “neutral agency” tasked with applying immigration law. But law is never applied in a vacuum. It is interpreted, prioritized, and enforced by political actors pursuing ideological goals.

Under the Trump administration, immigration enforcement shifted decisively away from:

recent border crossings,
demonstrable security threats,
or serious criminal activity,

and toward mass deportation, including:

long-term residents,
people with stable employment,
families,
individuals with tax records,
and even those who had already regularized their status.

This is not impartial enforcement. It is selective enforcement.

And selective enforcement always reveals ideology.

Productivity does not protect you once belonging is revoked

One of the most striking features of current deportation policy is that compliance no longer offers protection.

Working legally. Paying taxes. Raising children. Holding documentation.

None of this secures the right to stay.

In fact, compliance increasingly functions as a trap: the same records that prove integration also make people legible to a system designed to remove them.

This marks a fundamental shift.

A legal system concerned with justice asks: What has this person done? An ideological system asks: Who is this person?

Once the second question dominates, the law ceases to be a safeguard and becomes a tool.

The historical warning we keep ignoring

History offers clarity where contemporary politics often obscures it.

In 1942, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly interned in the United States. The majority were American citizens. They worked, paid taxes, owned businesses, and lived ordinary lives. None of that mattered once the state decided they were a problem.

The justification was “national security.” The reality was racialized fear.

Decades later, the US government formally apologized. The consensus is unambiguous: legality was abused to legitimize discrimination.

The lesson is not that today is identical. The lesson is that when a state decides a group does not belong, the law will always be found to justify it.

The same structural logic appeared earlier in Europe. Long before extermination camps, Jews were excluded through administrative measures: loss of rights, revocation of status, legal marginalization. They were citizens, veterans, professionals, and taxpayers. Their productivity and loyalty did not protect them once ideology took precedence.

Invoking these histories is not hysteria. It is pattern recognition.

When legality replaces justice: an Arendtian warning

Hannah Arendt understood this pattern with chilling precision. Though not an anarchist herself, her work forms a cornerstone of anti-authoritarian thought.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt identifies a critical rupture that precedes authoritarian collapse: the moment when rights cease to be inherent and become conditional grants of the state.

She called the most fundamental human right the “right to have rights”—the right to belong to a political community where one’s existence has legal and moral weight.

Stateless people, she observed, were not primarily oppressed because they violated laws, but because they existed outside the space where law protected them at all.

This is where the contemporary immigration debate becomes dangerous.

When:

legal status can be retroactively nullified,
documentation offers no durable protection,
contribution and compliance are irrelevant,

we are not witnessing strict law enforcement.

We are witnessing the erosion of the right to have rights.

An anarchist lens: the state reveals itself

From an anarchist perspective, this moment is not an aberration. It is a revelation.

The state presents itself as neutral, rational, and rule-bound. Yet selective immigration enforcement exposes what anarchists have long argued: the state is not an impartial arbiter of justice, but an institution that monopolizes violence and decides who is protected by it.

ICE does not merely enforce law. It decides:

whose lives are stable,
whose families are interruptible,
whose labor is welcome,
and whose presence is disposable.

This is not a malfunction of the system. It is the system functioning as designed.

Bureaucracy as moral anesthesia

Arendt was particularly attuned to bureaucracy, not because it was chaotic, but because it was efficient.

Evil, she argued, often appears not as cruelty but as administration.

In immigration enforcement:

deportation orders are processed by clerks,
enforcement is justified by checklists,
responsibility dissolves into procedure.

No one “chooses” to destroy a life. The system simply executes its logic.

This is why appeals to legality are so hollow.

A system can be perfectly legal and profoundly unjust at the same time.

Trumpism and the politics of exclusion

Trump’s immigration rhetoric has never been primarily legal. It has been cultural, racial, and civilizational.

“Shithole countries.” “Poisoning the blood.” “Invaders.” “Illegal Aliens.”

These are not legal categories. They are ideological ones.

When such language shapes enforcement priorities, deportation ceases to be about unlawful conduct and becomes a mechanism for redefining the nation along racial and cultural lines.

This is why describing these policies as fascist is not hyperbole. Fascism does not begin with camps. It begins when:

the state decides some people are inherently suspect,
legal protections become conditional,
and belonging can be revoked without wrongdoing.

The real question we should be asking

The CNN poll asks whether ICE should deport “productive” undocumented people.

That framing already concedes too much.

The real question is this:

Can a democracy survive if belonging is provisional and the law is used to expel those it has already absorbed?

A society that answers “yes” has not chosen order. It has chosen power over principle.

History is unforgiving toward such choices.