No. of Recommendations: 6
What's "The bare minimum of time" for a question you already know the answer for?
You don't always know the answer for it.
For example, in this case, the question is not, "Can the government deport me?" The question is, "Can I be given a period of time in which to make arrangements so that my daughter is not irrevocably harmed by the deportation?" The answer to that question may be "no," but it is a very reasonable question to ask.
Like, enforce the law?
You're more or less arguing for selective law enforcement, and that's not going to fly. When someone gets on the radar, the law says what the law says. Go change it if you don't like it.
We have selective law enforcement. You can't avoid it. Police departments don't have enough resources to arrest every single person who commits any crime. The IRS doesn't audit every tax return. Not just because it's not possible, but because we don't want there to be a policeman watching every single thing we do, or a million IRS agents double-checking every line on every tax return. Nor do we throw the book at every person who breaks the law and ends up in the system - there's lots of opportunities for prosecutors and judges to look at a defendant and decide that they're a "Valjean" - someone who has broken the law but is generally an upright and virtuous person such that society will be worse if they throw the book at them.
Right. It's totally cool if I rob a bank and steal millions of dollars. It's a victimless crime, amirite? Nobody likes the big banks. I take the money and I set up a bunch of cool charities with it. Real Robin Hood-type stuff.
No. But if you get caught taking a few deductions you shouldn't have, there's virtually no chance you're going to get sentenced to five years in federal prison if you are otherwise an upright and virtuous person. Because not every instance of lawbreaking is the same, and no two lawbreakers are the same.
Again, that's the rhetorical device one needs to engage in to defend things like this. Instead of defending the actual case, and saying that the government was right to do this specific thing to this woman and her daughter, you have to abstract it to the highest level of generality. But you can't make the argument that the government can't simultaneously treat this woman differently and still have rules against robbing banks and stealing millions of dollars, on the grounds that they both involve the law. The law isn't that inflexible or one-dimensional. You can have a system of laws that recognizes that what happened to this woman was wrong and that someone willfully stealing millions of dollars from a bank deserves to go to prison.
