Allegra Love

 Posted June 19, 2025

 

 

In my long career as an immigration lawyer, I have spent a lot of time contemplating what it means for something to be legal. So often when folks find out what I do for a living they like to tell me that they really do support immigration to the U.S. as long as it is legal. Conversely, a lot of people also seem to approve, either eagerly or tacitly, of punishment for non-citizens who they perceive to do things illegally. For many the situation is a binary: if you do it legally, you are welcome, but if you do it illegally, then you deserve whatever our government cooks up to punish you, even as it becomes more and more severe.

 

I know what ICE is doing is wrong and because of that, action must follow.

 

What’s challenging for me when I talk to people in that frame of mind is that most of them have absolutely no clue what it means to immigrate to the United States legally or illegally. They are fired up or filled with conviction but can rarely explain how it all works. The immigration system is incredibly complex and is constantly being rearranged as public policy seismically shifts, sometimes on a daily basis. That complexity does not hold up against steady propaganda from our political leaders, and by extension our mainstream media, who insist that the only necessary analysis is that non-citizens in our country have done something illegal and need to be harmed. Sadly, the easy explanation is the one that prevails in people’s minds.

 

I remember a time when I was representing a woman who came to the United States and lawfully sought political asylum. She was detained (because we detain asylum seekers even when they have not broken any laws) and she was pregnant. She ended up miscarrying her pregnancy in federal custody while shackled — something unimaginably brutal. When sharing her story, I remember people saying to me that if she hadn’t wanted that to happen, she shouldn’t have broken the law. It repulsed me to hear her condemned to such a horrifying fate based on someone’s incorrect perception that she was a criminal. I don’t believe criminals should experience things like that, much less someone who has never broken a law in our country.

 

These perceptions can create terror in our communities. In New Mexico and nationwide, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now savagely hunting a massive group of people who entered the United States through a parole program set up by the Biden Administration, legally obtained work authorization and are working on their removal cases in Immigration Court. People in this posture have not done anything illegal as it pertains to our immigration system. They followed every authorized step put before them and complied with the requirements of the government. A person can question whether the system was good public policy on the Biden administration’s part, but the people who availed themselves of it didn’t break a single law.

 

And yet these folks have unilaterally had their paroles cancelled, been stripped of their work authorization and when they show up to court, as is required by law, ICE is having their cases dismissed, arresting them on site, detaining and deporting them. You can watch ghoulish videos of people being cornered in federal buildings by masked agents or snatched off the streets and stuffed into vans. The people I talk to are simply terrified. When government officials are asked to account for this injustice and violence, they simply say that these people are illegal immigrants who didn’t follow the law. This explanation is a lie.

 

Our president and his ICE force, bolstered now by the military, are expecting our compliance with authoritarian violence against our non-citizen family, friends, colleagues and neighbors based on a very flimsy explanation that people are criminals or that they have done something illegal. They are expecting us to nod our heads and accept that millions of people with complex immigration histories and statuses in this country deserve to be treated with the utmost brutality. And now they are promising to turn that brutality on all of us if we don’t.

 

Even though I am a lawyer and I am supposed to honor what is legal and illegal in our immigration system, I can’t do that exclusively. Those words have been used in such a manipulative manner — so carelessly, so incorrectly — that they have warped our collective sense of right and wrong around this issue. And ultimately that is what matters most to me: what is right and what is wrong.

 

What ICE is doing in New Mexico and nationwide is simply wrong. We know it in the pits of our stomachs when we hear stories of parents ripped from their children, when we watch videos of masked agents snatching people off the street and when we see our communities absolutely terrorized by this modern American gestapo. We can shrug and believe our government that tells us this is a necessary violence because people broke the law, or we can choose to think more critically, to learn and to listen to our gods or the small voices inside of us saying that nobody, no matter where they were born, deserves to be treated so inhumanely.

 

Laws come and go and change all the time. The legal system is not etched in stone but cobbled together by so many forces, some good and some bad. It is sometimes an expression of morality, but it is more often an expression of political power and greed and control and fear. The law is going to keep on changing as we continue to reckon with our identity as a nation but what we will be left with is what we did with our own senses of right and wrong in this moment. I know what ICE is doing is wrong and because of that, action must follow.

 

Allegra Love is an immigration attorney and educator from Santa Fe. This commentary is republished from Source New Mexico under a Creative Commons license.