They deported a two-year-old citizen and arrested a judge

We have to rethink the law and rethink power

A mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, showed up to a routine appointment at the New Orleans ICE office. She brought her two daughters. The younger one, just 2 years old, was born in Louisiana. All three were summarily deported. As a federal judge writes, all of this appears to have been done with “no meaningful process.” Three months into the second Trump administration, and this is where we are.

Three months into the Trump regime and a Wisconsin judge was just arrested, allegedly for helping a man evade ICE. The truth is that federal agents were trying to take Eduardo Flores Ruiz into custody in Judge Hannah Dugan’s court without a warrant, showing the same total disregard for the law that they’ve been showing in countless other cases. But that didn’t stop FBI director Kash Patel from sending agents to arrest the judge, posting lies about her, or posting a picture of her being arrested on Twitter.

This is where we are. The policy of the executive branch under its fascist leadership is callous disregard for the law, and a flaunting of that disregard. They’re willing to deport U.S. citizens, they’re eager to destroy birthright citizenship, they’re already ignoring the Supreme Court and denying people due process, and they’ve arrested a judge on trumped-up charges. We also just learned that Mahmoud Khalil was abducted without a warrant, and yet the fascist regime continues to frame this as “illegals” versus their law and order administration. This doublespeak will continue, and we need to see through it with piercing clarity.

We’ve fetishized the law in this country, holding it up as immutable and inviolable, and it's coming around to bite us in the ass. The truth is that the law has always been in flux, always been contested, always relied on a broader societal contract and always rested on power. We urgently need to rethink our understanding of how the law works and our relationship to it, or we’ll be waving a paper sword around as the tanks roll in.

The law (when it works) has always rested upon norms. Most people don’t go around assaulting others at random, so the laws prohibiting assault appear fairly effective. Laws against drug use, on the other hand, are attempting to counteract behavior that has been fairly widespread throughout human history. Those laws are quite ineffective.

For our purposes here we need to look at the laws regarding the federal government, the distribution of power, and checks and balances. These of course don’t rest on the same norms of human behavior, but over the last 250 years politicians in Congress and officials in the executive branch developed an extensive set of norms. There were ways of doing things in DC, and although I don’t like a lot of them they were tacitly agreed upon year after year.

Enter a fascist administration. Enter people who are eager to disregard those norms and exercise raw power. Suddenly we see that the law looks weak, looks unable to contain the far-right's malice. This is partially due to years and years the executive accumulating more power, but it’s also because our laws have always rested substantially on adherence to norms. Those norms did a big chunk of the work, and the law carried the rest. So now we find ourselves facing a situation where the existing way of doing business are failing, and the law is insufficient to halt a full-on crisis.

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

Power has always been the other pillar of the law. Different powerful agents, most often ruling class oligarchs, have shaped the law to their interests from day one. And even then the law has routinely been broken and bent around the specific interests of the president or the super-rich — around the interests of power. During the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, movements launched by Indigenous groups, and the relentless genocide of this continent’s native peoples the law has been a tool that fosters the veneer of legitimacy and is then put away when power decides it’s time for some dirty work. Treaties are signed, then broken. The civil rights of Americans are lifted up as making this country great, then cast aside to raid the homes of organizers and put them behind bars for decades. In this country the exercise and preservation of power has often been the true guiding principle.

There is utility in knowing the law. There is value in being able to form the law into a shield as best we can to resist fascism and this rapid authoritarian encroachment. But it must be just one tool of many. Trump and his minions are gleefully ignoring the Supreme Court when it comes to abducting Americans and shipping them to a camp in El Salvador. And no one currently has the power to put them in line. Some judges will keep trying, but the enforcement mechanisms are increasingly unclear. Those mechanisms rely on norms, rely on people agreeing to abide by the law. Without that agreement modern society means little, without that agreement we revert to raw power.

Fascists are dangerous for countless reasons, including their eagerness to embrace the rule of raw power. While their typically liberal opponents sit high on their horse, resting on the rule of law and systems and norms, confident that what has worked will continue to work, fascists get thugs and guns and build actual, raw power. We all know what happens next, and we’re seeing it unfold as we speak. The fascist accumulation of power, their increasing ability to ignore the law without consequence, and the ways they’re reshaping the government into an ever-more authoritarian state feels quick in the history books and gradual in real-time. But we can’t let the fact that it unfolds more slowly when you watch it step-by-step convince us that it isn’t happening.

So we need to meet power with power. We can’t just lean on courts, laws, or norms to save us. We must build real power, and the opportunity to do so is mounting as we speak. Polling shows Trump in the negatives on everything now, from the economy to immigration to democracy. His chaotic tariffs, his kidnappings, his outrageous executive orders are making people afraid and uncertain, and they're looking for answers. We have to respond. We have to be unequivocal about building the power to defeat this man, the power to defeat the entire fascist movement.

It’s on us, no one is swooping in to save us. The laws and systems of this country are not prepared for a moment like this, not prepared for a fight of this magnitude. We need to build the mass organizations that can enable us to win, we need to build the power to transform society so that billionaires and the far-right lose their appeal and lose their power to oppress, exploit, and abuse. And we need to do it now.

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Let’s get organized, and bring others along:

Unionize your workplace: https://workerorganizing.org/

Talk to your neighbors and form a tenant union: https://tenantfederation.org/tenant-unions/

Federal workers (and others) check out the federal unionists network: https://www.federalunionists.net/

Join DSA: https://www.dsausa.org/get-involved/

Organize against the war machine: https://wearedissenters.org/

Fight the coup: https://indivisible.org/coup

Take Down Tesla: https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/teslatakedown

People Over Profit: https://linktr.ee/putplanetoverprofit

Check out Dream Defenders: https://www.dreamdefenders.org/

Join the Debt Collective: https://debtcollective.org/

Every community has great people organizing. Talk to that one more radical friend, search up organizations in your area, see what groups others folks follow online. Then get plugged in and build, now is the time.