Between Mercy and Madness

the slippery slope from compassion to chaos

Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash

They didn’t hear the fire trucks. Not that day.

Because on that day, every single fire alarm in Los Angeles went off at once.

It started with good intentions — as these things usually do.

After the catastrophic wildfires, the city passed a sweeping law: every fire alarm must be investigated. No triage. No discretion. Every alarm gets routed to a central dispatch system, just like 911.

The aim was noble: no more missed infernos. No more smoldering embers turning into five-alarm blazes. The city would err on the side of caution.

Then came the sabotage.

The mayor lost reelection and — whether out of spite or stupidity — someone close to her gave a hacker access to the system.

Within minutes, every building in the city blared with shrill urgency. Fire trucks were dispatched everywhere. Crews tried to respond, but it was impossible.

Triage had been outlawed. Every fire was equal. Every call, mandatory. So the trucks stalled. The crews froze.

And Los Angeles was told, with full legal backing: you must all evacuate your homes and remain outside until we’ve checked each and every alarm — even if it takes weeks, even if it takes months. Re-entering your home before it has been cleared will result in severe penalties.

This hypothetical mirrors what we’ve done to immigration, where a backlog of 3.6 million cases paralyzes our courts¹.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating illegal entry into the United States as though it automatically entitled the person to a full legal proceeding — not a quick check, not a screening, but a hearing. A court date. An attorney. An appeal. A years-long bureaucratic saga in a system that was never designed to handle millions of cases at once.

Not every case gets that far, of course — but the rules are written as if they might, and the machinery is buckling under the weight of that expectation.

And if you suggest that this might not scale?

That perhaps the system should be able to say no without treating each rejection like a murder trial?

You get accused of cruelty. Of fascism. Of denying due process.

But due process is not a suicide pact. It is a shield against unjust punishment — not a battering ram against national boundaries. Non-citizens have no constitutional right to remain here. That’s the difference.

And when 12 million² people enter illegally — most without documents, many without valid asylum claims — insisting on individualized trials for every single one is not justice.

It is paralysis.

It is the legal equivalent of telling every Angeleno to sleep on the sidewalk until the fire department can clear 3.9 million buildings — because a rule meant to protect became a rule that cannot bend.

That’s not mercy. That’s madness.

The Clock Doesn’t Lie

Let’s be fair.

Not every undocumented immigrant gets a full, formal hearing. Some are processed through expedited removal, some never show up at all, and others voluntarily depart before their case gets heard.

So yes — the math I am about to do, calculating the time it would take to process all 12 million people through full proceedings represents a kind of worst-case procedural burden.

But before you breathe a sigh of relief, consider this:

Every other assumption in this estimate is wildly generous.

Let’s assume that every immigration judge in the United States — all 700 of them — works at full capacity: 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, no sick days, no holidays, no burnout, no delays.

Every case takes exactly one hour. No appeals. No document issues. No interpreters. No kids in tow. No missing witnesses. Just one clean hour per person.

That’s 8 cases per judge per day.

So nationwide, we’d be processing:

700 judges × 8 cases = 5,600 cases per day.

Now let’s talk volume.

Even using the lowest mainstream estimate, there are 12 million people living in the U.S. without legal status. Add the existing 3.6 million case backlog currently clogging our immigration courts, and we’re looking at 15.6 million cases that would need to be addressed to fully "honor due process."

Let’s run the math:

15,600,000 ÷ 5,600 = 2,785.71 days, or just over 7.63 years.

That’s assuming absolute perfection — and zero new arrivals.

No additional illegal crossings. No new asylum surges. No future backlogs. No judges retiring or dying. No sick leave. No vacations. No government shutdowns. No union strikes. No pandemics. No protests.

Just pure, uninterrupted throughput.

It’s a theoretical best-case scenario — and it still requires over seven and a half years of non-stop processing just to catch up to today.

So when activists demand a full judicial hearing for every undocumented person, they’re not asking for fairness.

They’re demanding the impossible — and calling it justice.

We Can’t Just “Hire Our Way Out” of Reality

Whenever someone finally grasps how long it would take to process 12 million undocumented immigrants through formal hearings, they often retreat to what sounds like a solution: Let’s just train more immigration judges.

Why not? We’ll expand the bench. Flood the system with resources. Treat it like a wartime mobilization.

Surely, if we only cared enough, we could pull it off!

But this fantasy runs headfirst into the wall of every other system already starving for resources and human capital — systems that serve actual American citizens, and are already failing to keep up.

We don’t have enough disability judges to process SSDI claims. People wait months and often years for basic hearings on whether they’re entitled to benefits, for a system that they’ve spent a lifetime paying into, after a debilitating injury or illness — not because their cases are unclear, but because there just aren’t enough adjudicators to hear them.

We don’t have enough foster families to take in abused and neglected children. We can’t train them fast enough. We can’t vet them thoroughly enough. Some states resort to placing kids in hotels, because the system has run out of homes.

We don’t have enough mental health professionals. Enough nurses. Enough teachers in poor districts. We can’t hire enough bus drivers or firefighters in rural areas.

Hell, we can’t even keep VA waitlists under control for veterans who literally put their lives on the line for this country.

So now we’re supposed to believe that we’re going to solve immigration — a decades-long crisis involving tens of millions of undocumented residents — by overnight building a legal infrastructure so vast it can process an entire shadow population faster than we’ve ever processed our own citizens’ basic needs?

It’s a lie.

It’s a comfortable lie — a way to nod solemnly at the rule of law while making sure it can never actually be enforced. It’s a way to appear humane while letting the system drown in its own procedural red tape.

It’s saying you want every person who manages to get two feet on American soil turned into a full citizen — without saying it, without being an adult and telling the truth.

Throwing money at the problem doesn’t solve the core constraints: time, attention, and trained human beings.

You can’t conjure a competent immigration judiciary out of thin air.

You can’t snap your fingers and have thousands of qualified lawyers and clerks materialize — not without robbing talent from every other overstretched system we already rely on.

The hard truth is this: resources are finite.

Every time we direct them toward illegal immigrants, we are directing them away from someone else — often a veteran, a child, a disabled worker, or an elderly citizen on a fixed income.

You cannot solve a logistical impossibility with a wish and a budget line.

Some systems don’t need more money.

They need boundaries.

The History of The Opposing Argument

The phrase “due process” appears in two places in the Constitution — the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments — and in both cases, it refers to “persons,” not citizens. That language wasn’t accidental. The framers knew that tyranny doesn’t always wear a uniform, and they wanted to build safeguards that applied broadly: to citizens, to residents, to anyone under U.S. jurisdiction who might find themselves facing the coercive power of the state.

That principle — that the government cannot jail you, fine you, or deport you without some form of process — is noble.

It's a cornerstone of what makes this country different from banana republics and kangaroo courts.

But here's the problem: none of those decisions — not a single one — was made with tens of millions of illegal immigrants in mind. The jurisprudence around due process for non-citizens grew out of individual cases.

One man detained. One woman seeking asylum. One child wrongly deported.

They were narrow rulings designed to prevent grotesque injustice in edge scenarios, not to outline a blueprint for processing an invading army of paperwork.

Take, for instance, the case of INS v. Elias-Zacarias. In this 1992 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the asylum claim of a Guatemalan man who had fled his country after guerrillas attempted to forcibly recruit him. He feared persecution if he returned.

The Court held that coercion into military service by a guerrilla group does not necessarily constitute persecution on account of political opinion under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The Court emphasized that persecution must be based on the individual's political beliefs, not the political aims of the persecutors.

Courts don’t build systems. They don’t design logistics. They interpret rights case by case, assuming — often wrongly — that someone else will worry about the practical consequences.

But in immigration, that assumption breaks down. When you take a principle built for small numbers and apply it to mass illegal entry, the structure buckles.

It becomes a parody of itself.

What was once a mechanism to protect the innocent becomes a loophole so large it invalidates the very concept of sovereignty.

The slope is slippery because it's coated in idealism — noble-sounding ideas like “every person deserves a hearing” — while ignoring the operational reality that hearings require time, people, resources, and a system that can keep up.

We don't have that system. No one does.

And insisting that we must operate as if we do isn’t virtuous.

It’s delusional.

The Slope Is In Fact Slippery

Let me be perfectly clear: deporting people without due process is in fact dangerous.

It sets a precedent that can be misused—especially by a president who doesn’t care about boundaries, decorum, or constitutional nuance.

Donald Trump, for all his strengths and flaws, is not constrained in the way most presidents are. He doesn’t defer to norms. And he doesn’t always distinguish between the letter of the law and the brute force of executive will.

So yes, backing expedited deportation powers today is a risk. It hands more authority to a man who doesn’t always handle power well.

That is not a minor concern. It’s a valid, serious warning.

Granted. Owned. Acknowledged.

But here’s the problem: we’re already on a slope.

And it’s not just slippery—it’s eroding beneath our feet.

Because while we were arguing about theoretical abuses of power, actual systemic breakdown was unfolding in real time.

In April 2025, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen born in Georgia, was arrested in Florida under a controversial and currently suspended state law that criminalizes illegal entry into the state.

Despite his mother presenting multiple documents, including his birth certificate, state ID, and Social Security card, to a judge who dismissed the charges due to lack of legal basis, Lopez-Gomez remained in custody briefly after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) requested a hold—a move that drew absolutely and utterly warranted and deserved criticism as ICE has no jurisdiction over U.S.-born citizens.​

He was held for about 36 hours. That’s a long time. I’m sure it was scary, and if it were me I would be traumatized by it — no question.

But this was not the end of democracy.

It was a system functioning slowly, not tyrannically.

Under County of Riverside v. McLaughlin (1991), the Supreme Court held that up to 48 hours of detention without a hearing is constitutionally permissible for most arrests (longer for weekends/holidays).

In fact, in most states, a person can be placed on a 72-hour psychiatric hold without seeing a judge — based solely on the recommendation of a doctor or mental health official.

The CDC retains authority to detain individuals suspected of carrying dangerous infectious diseases under emergency powers that also bypass standard court procedures — and for longer than 72 hours.

Is any of this ideal? No. But every functioning society carves out narrow windows for urgent action, with checks to follow shortly after. That’s what happened here. And in the case of Lopez-Gomez, he was released well within the legal window — roughly 36 hours, from what I have been able to find reported.

The system didn’t fail. It just moved slowly.

Meanwhile, in 2021, President Biden took office and, in the name of compassion, began reversing Trump-era immigration policies. Border apprehensions skyrocketed. In fiscal year 2021 alone, Customs and Border Protection recorded over 1.7 million encounters—the highest number ever recorded at the southern border at that time. By 2023, that number surpassed 2.4 million.​

These aren’t trickles. They’re torrents. And instead of restoring order with new enforcement tools, the administration scaled back deportations, ended key removals under Title 42, and created a sprawling patchwork of exceptions and parole programs that made it easier—not harder—to remain in the country illegally.

This wasn’t compassion. It was bureaucratic arson.

Go back to the fire alarm.

When the system demands that every single alarm be treated as equally urgent, it can’t function when someone pulls all of them at once.

It doesn’t matter how noble your intentions were when you wrote the rule—the outcome is paralysis. The trucks don’t roll. The fires don’t get put out. And innocent people are left standing in the street.

That’s where we are now.

The immigration courts have ground to a halt, not because we stopped caring about justice, but because we refused to prioritize enforceability.

Because we let ideals overrule capacity.

And when you refuse to admit that the system is broken—when you keep demanding full procedural perfection in the face of full structural collapse—you’re not defending due process.

You’re destroying it.

Because no process survives when the system that carries it is engulfed in flames.

Common Sense Is Not Cruelty

No one is saying we should shut the door on real asylum seekers.

If a woman escapes an Islamist regime? Let her in.

If a Christian flees Nigeria, Pakistan, or Iran, where churches are bombed and pastors are jailed? Obviously, he deserves protection.

That’s not even a debate. That’s civilization.

We can — and should — do reasonable triage.

We can fast-track obvious asylum cases the same way EMTs don’t stop to bandage every paper cut during a mass casualty event.

Common sense isn’t cruelty. It’s survival.

But the vast majority of these cases? They don’t look like that.

They’re economic migrants — often coached, sometimes trafficked — whose claims crumble under scrutiny.

People fleeing poverty, not persecution.

People who break our laws to jump the line, then exploit the backlog to disappear.

That’s not asylum. That’s abuse of process — and we’ve built a system that rewards it.

And I say that as someone who knows what desperate poverty feels like.

I’ve been poor — much poorer than Americans who say that usually get.

Late in the first semester of my junior year of college (fall 2018), I didn’t eat for four days.

I ran out of both food stamps and money after paying the rent on the tiny room (not apartment — room) I was renting from a couple in a run-down section of Burlington. The husband was on disability and the wife was job-hunting. They were renting out rooms to (barely) hold onto their house.

I still remember how scary it was — how by the end I was holding onto the railing as I went downstairs to trek through the snow to the bus stop, so dizzy and light-headed I could barely function.

The same shame that kept me from walking up to the cafeteria workers and just asking for a free meal still makes me hesitate to take a stance like this — one that sounds, at first blush, hard-assed and unforgiving.

But here’s the truth:

You don’t fix a broken system by pretending it isn’t broken.

You don’t preserve justice by flooding it with millions of people who have no legal claim and no practical path — and then insisting we go through the motions anyway, just so we can feel better about ourselves.

So no, this isn’t about turning America into a cold, closed fortress.

It’s about turning it back into a country that can function.

One that knows the difference between a refugee and a rule-breaker.

Between due process and weaponized gridlock.

Because when your house is on fire, and someone has pulled every alarm in the city, the solution isn’t to give each bell a therapist and a hearing.

The solution is to put out the damn fire.

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1. Source: https://tracreports.org/phptools/immigration/backlog/

2. I’ve read estimates from 12,000,000 to well over 20,000,000. I’m using the lowest estimate to err on the side of giving the opposing argument the benefit of the doubt.

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