12/21/20

By Josh Rubin

There are people now on the verge of deportation, now in the last days of Trump and, perhaps, we are not yet sure, on into the age of a new administration whose commitment to asylum is not yet fully known.

And in these final days there are a number, never enough, of valiant manipulators of our legal system, known as lawyers, who assemble arguments that, even in this age of unjust laws, try to wrest asylum seekers from the chains of imminent expulsion. They show, they point to legal scripture, that shows that the purveyors of cruelty have violated their own laws, their own policies—and that their authority is poisoned, and that their clients were never given a fair shot at asylum. Asylum, even as it is, strangled by cynics and racists.

There is that law, and that argument, and that noble struggle. Day after day, and often into the middle of the night, as parents and children are dragged from their beds to buses, thence to airports, to mount gangways to their doom in places they fled. And the lawyers, running with their arguments, sometimes accomplishing miraculous reprieves.

I have seen it. I have watched it happen.

But it can never be enough. And ultimately we will need to look to a higher law, one that doesn’t need to rely on procedural error to stay the executioners’ hands. It is a law that looks to human rights. Perhaps to unalienable rights. To life, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness. And that pursuit is what we are looking at when we see people who have torn themselves away from homes they love to follow the path of migration. To escape a climate that eclipses their existence. To escape criminals that demand their lives and their children’s lives. They embark on a path to which they have a right. A human right. An unalienable right.