In this guest post, Kat Romenesko looks at the rule of law, revisiting the laws written on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. As a hint, remember the laws of equality where it went from “All Animals are created equal.” to “All Animals are created equal but some are more equal than others.”. Here’s her take:
*******
That sentence sounds radical only if you have never been on the wrong side of the system. In theory, the law belongs to everyone equally. In reality, it belongs first to those who can reach it. Access, not principle, determines whether a right exists in practice.
People of color learned this long before it was applied to immigrants, protesters, or the poor. They have lived this reality for generations. They were told the Constitution protected them while segregation was enforced. They were told the courts would correct injustice while policing and sentencing punished them more harshly for the same behavior. They were told voting was a right while obstacles were quietly placed in the way. The law was always there. Access to it was not.
Indigenous people learned this lesson through treaties that existed only until they became inconvenient. Latino communities learned it through labor exploitation paired with selective enforcement. Asian Americans learned it through exclusion laws, internment, and suspicion that lingered even when the law said they belonged. Different histories, same outcome. Rights acknowledged in theory, denied in practice.
Immigration enforcement follows the same blueprint. The government moves fast. Courts move slow. People are detained, deported, or pressured into giving up before a judge ever meaningfully reviews the case. Once that happens, there is often no fixing it. The person is gone. The family is separated. The job is lost. The law technically existed, but it never stopped anything.
The pattern is always the same. Laws are written as promises. Due process. Equal protection. The right to be heard. But a promise you cannot claim in time is not protection. When deadlines are too short, lawyers too scarce, language barriers too high, and consequences too fast to stop, the law becomes something you hear about after it has already failed you.
This is not accidental. Systems learn where resistance is weakest and apply pressure there. Immigration enforcement makes this visible, but it did not invent it. The same logic once governed stop and frisk, redlining, voter suppression, school segregation by zip code, and cash bail systems that punish poverty more than crime. Rights exist on paper. Appeals exist on paper. Hearings exist on paper. But the machinery moves faster than justice, and once the harm is done, the law often declares the case finished.
Power changes how law behaves. For those with money, citizenship, education, and visibility, the law slows the state down. It demands explanations. It creates consequences. For those without those things, disproportionately people of color, the poor, the undocumented, the incarcerated, and the politically inconvenient, the law speeds the state up. It becomes procedural. Transactional. Final.
This is how democracies erode without announcing it. Rights are not revoked. They are made unreachable. The language stays noble while the outcomes grow cruel. Officials insist the process worked because the forms were filed, even when the result was unjust and irreversible.
And this is why current immigration policy matters so much. Curtailing appeals, accelerating removals, and shrinking access to counsel are not technical adjustments. They are deliberate choices to move faster than accountability. They convert due process into a race the government knows immigrants cannot win. This is not about border control or efficiency. It is about deciding, in advance, whose rights are worth the time it takes to honor them.
The danger is not that the law no longer exists. The danger is that we accept a system where its meaning depends on who you are. People of color know this is not a hypothetical. It is inherited knowledge. When law requires power to access, power becomes the law. Everything else is performance.
THE FLENSBURG FILES 