 The Fugitive Slave Act required citizens and officials, even in free states, to help capture anyone who escaped from slavery. Abolitionists defied the federal law and many ended up in prison. |
REPUBLICANS LIKE to think of themselves as upholders of law and order — never more so, it often seems, than when railing against undocumented immigrants.
Long before Donald Trump elevated his unforgiving brand of nativism to national policy, many on the right had adopted the view that what matters most about foreigners who lack immigration papers is that they didn't abide by the rules. Those conservatives reject anything that might help such migrants — from letting them qualify for driver's licenses to legislating a path to citizenship to, most recently, ensuring due process before deportation. In their view, anyone who violates the law deserves no consideration. Their attitude is summed up in the snarky challenge: "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?"
Like many legal infractions, being in this country without proper documentation is only a civil offense, not a crime. But MAGA rhetoric obscures that distinction. When a reporter in January asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt how many of the migrants rounded up by federal authorities had "a criminal record versus those who are just in the country illegally," her answer was blunt:
"All of them," she said. "Because they illegally broke our nation's laws and therefore they are criminals, as far as this administration goes."
Yet in other contexts, Trump and his aides are far kinder to those who "broke our nation's laws."
During the 2024 presidential campaign, for example, Trump repeatedly referred to the prisoners convicted for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol as "hostages." On his first day back in office he pardoned all of them — including hundreds who had committed violent felonies. Trump himself has been prosecuted multiple times and was convicted of falsifying records in a scheme to pay hush money to a woman he had an affair with. Many Republicans argue, quite sincerely, that those prosecutions were malicious and the convictions unjust. Yet they refuse to see that to millions of their fellow Americans, the administration's ferocious crackdown on undocumented immigrants — the overwhelming majority of whom are peaceful, industrious, and no threat to anyone — is just as malicious and unjust.
When the government last month arrested a Wisconsin judge, Hannah Dugan, for allegedly trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom, her supporters likened her to Wisconsin abolitionists who resisted the Fugitive Slave Act 170 years ago. An essay in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recalled the case of Sherman Booth, a newspaper editor arrested in 1854 for protecting an enslaved man who had fled from a Missouri plantation. At the time, the law required citizens and officials, even in free states, to help capture anyone who escaped from slavery. Booth broke the law, which he considered both immoral and unconstitutional, and was prosecuted and imprisoned.
Today, of course, virtually everyone would agree that abolitionists like Booth were right to defy an unjust law in the face of federal pressure. The defenders of Judge Dugan regard her as standing firmly in that tradition.
Those who share Trump's views on immigration, on the other hand, indignantly reject the comparison.
"Illegal Aliens Aren't Fugitive Slaves," Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, fumed in a column last week. It is "lunatic" to equate the two, he wrote. "Illegally entering the United States to earn more money in better conditions than back home obviously bears no relation to the transatlantic slave trade or chattel slavery."
 Is obeying the law always the moral choice? |
More than that, it focuses on a perennial ethical question: Is obeying the law always the moral choice?
Again and again, American history provides painful reminders that not all laws are just and legality is not the same as morality. It is easy now to dismiss the Fugitive Slave Act as an assault on human dignity and to applaud those who subverted it. But in its time it was the law of the land, supported even by many Americans who detested slavery.
The same is true today. The law of the land allows undocumented immigrants to be deported; the Trump administration claims it has the authority to do so summarily, without due process of law. Yet even if the White House is right about the law — the Supreme Court will make that determination — the law itself may be in the wrong. And while the rule of law is deeply rooted in our tradition, so is resistance to bad laws. Law commands respect but not blind obedience — especially when history is watching.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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