At the Intersection of Law & Humanity: Immigrants

Americans who believe in enforcement are not automatically endorsing cruelty.

Americans who believe in compassion are not automatically rejecting the rule of law as it applies to all of us.

Paint Cans, 1990, Wayne Thiebaud, SFMoMA

Yet in our current climate, those positions are treated as mutually exclusive. Immigration, perhaps more than any other issue, has become the stage on which we rehearse our all-or-nothing instincts.

I am Korean American. I carry my U.S. passport card with me everywhere I go. Some of you already know that. It has quietly become my default form of identification. I did not wait for a second inauguration to begin doing that. The election itself was enough.

My parents waited years for lawful permanent residency before we immigrated to the United States. I became a citizen after I turned eighteen. I identify as Korean, a heritage I am immensely proud of. I am also a citizen of the United States. An American. It is simple. It is also complex.

I believe a sovereign nation has the right to enforce its immigration laws. I also believe that how those laws are enforced matters. When enforcement feels opaque, when agents are masked, when identification is unclear, when communities cannot easily distinguish between lawful authority and intimidation, trust erodes quickly. A nation can insist on the rule of law without surrendering its commitment to human dignity.

What unsettles me most is not that we disagree about immigration. It is that we no longer acknowledge its complexity. Legal status, asylum claims, temporary protections, and final orders of removal are not interchangeable categories. Yet public discourse flattens them into a single word: immigrant. From there, it becomes easy to flatten the people inside those categories as well.

When we talk about immigrants, we cannot focus only on humanity. We must also acknowledge that this nation has immigration laws. We insist that the rule of law be applied to immigrants. Then should we not also expect, not as a legal technicality but as a matter of social order, that individuals comply with lawful court orders once legal avenues have been exhausted, including final orders of removal?

If we expect the government to comply with lawful court orders issued yesterday, then we should also expect that an individual follow a lawful court order issued years ago after those legal processes have concluded. The rule of law cannot function as a one-directional expectation. Individuals must obey lawful orders, even when they are painful. And the government must obey lawful limits.

So here we are with Ms. Any Lucia Lopez Belloza.

Her family sought asylum when she was a child. That asylum claim was denied. In March 2016, an immigration judge issued a final order of removal. In February 2017, the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed the appeal. That was the final administrative step. These decisions occurred before Donald Trump re-entered the White House.

More than eight years later, in November 2025, Ms. Lopez Belloza was detained at Boston Logan International Airport while attempting to travel home for Thanksgiving. A federal court issued an order prohibiting her removal from Massachusetts or the United States. She was deported to Honduras two days later despite that order. The government later acknowledged in court that her removal was an error, though it argued that the mistake did not alter the underlying removal order.

The timeline matters.

The initial removal order was not new. The court order blocking her deportation was not ambiguous. Both existed. Both carried legal authority.

On February 13, the court ordered the return of Ms. Lopez Belloza. That order does not grant her a lawful visa to remain in the United States. It does not automatically reopen her case. It does not guarantee that she will return to school or to her family without consequence. It simply requires the government to correct its failure to comply with an earlier judicial directive. She may still face detention upon return if the government follows through on its position.

The government can argue that she had opportunities to appeal, years in fact. She entered as a child. In my opinion, she should be allowed to remain in the United States. That belief is not rooted in legality. It is rooted in humanity. Are we prepared to suspend lawful finality in this case?

The rule of law is not simply that laws exist. For it to function, it requires predictable enforcement, neutral application, courts that matter, executive compliance, and citizens who accept lawful outcomes even when they are uncomfortable. If final judgments are routinely left unexecuted or indefinitely deferred and society grows accustomed to that reality, enforcement becomes arbitrary. Has that already happened in our immigration system?

Do we believe in the rule of law, or do we believe in it only when it serves our sympathies?

_____

More essays:

Don't Bend It Like The Beckhams

Six Trash Bags to Clarity

Chaos Among Serendipity

Vermont & 8th

Are We Living in 1864?

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