After a widowhood of over two years, I was blessed to meet and marry a wonderful man. As we have begun our life together, I have had the tiresome task of changing my last name in all sorts of places. It’s been quite frustrating – Social Security and the DMV first and then sending the certified marriage license off to change my passport. And it was as I reflected on the need to update my passport that the idea for this essay came to mind.
I’ve traveled outside the United States numerous times over my life. Every country I visited required me to go through an immigration and customs agent before I would be allowed to enter that particular jurisdiction, and every time I returned to this country I had to go through U.S. immigration and customs. I remember once coming back from Canada – in my vehicle – I was practically given the 9th degree interrogation by the U.S. immigration officer. I guess he found it odd that two people in a truck would be entering the United States from a fairly rural part of Canada. I didn’t think we looked suspicious, but maybe we did. At any rate, I complied as requested, he searched our truck, and in short order we were waived on our way home. Had I tried to evade immigration, I’m sure I’d have been tracked down and suffered the consequences, citizen or not.
Currently, and sadly, this country is in a very, very bad and dangerous place. And all because many people have totally forgotten that borders matter, that borders are important, that countries have sovereignty, and that Federal law dictates how a non-citizen may legally enter this country. Ideology has overtaken not only common sense but the rule of law as well.
Here are some numbers: The PEW Research Institute found that by 2023 over 14 million people had illegally entered the United States. The Federation for American Immigration Reform found in March of 2025 that the number of illegal entries was 18.6 million. Regardless of whether you think these numbers are accurate, there is no doubt that millions of some number of people have illegally entered this country, a huge percentage of that number between 2020 and 2025. Unless one was living in a cave somewhere, all of us saw on the news channels in the past several years the multitudes of people swarming unchecked, and frankly encouraged, over the Southern border.
The tendency of media and others to call these people “undocumented” is a failure to acknowledge the fact that all of these people have broken the law of this country. They are here ILLEGALLY. 8 U.S.C. 1325 provides as follows: the penalty for a first-time offense of illegal entry is deemed a misdemeanor (still a criminal offense) and subjects the violator to a fine and 6 months in prison plus deportation. Repeat offenders (deported and have come back again illegally) are deemed to have committed a felony and are subject to fines and 2 years in prison plus, once again, deportation. Thus, someone who enters illegally is subject to both criminal and civil penalties. They may be “undocumented” but they have also broken our laws.
Who are these millions of illegals in our country today? Where are they? What are they doing? We have no idea. Are many of them just people trying to find a better way of life? Most certainly. I am not anti-immigration. My late mother-in-law left a war-torn Philippines at the end of WW2 to marry and come to this country. One of my sons-in-law fled Russia with his family for a free and better life here. They all followed the immigration laws of this country to do so.
As I come to the end of this essay and reflect on what I have written, I have to ask, should the title of this essay actually be “does the law matter anymore?” When ideology and elected officials tell their citizens to ignore the law, that the law doesn’t matter in a particular instance, or that the moral rightness of one’s position justifies disregarding lawful orders with which they disagree – well, that is a country that has lost its way.
Permission to act deplorably started, I think, with the January 6 assault on the Capitol and the inexcusable behavior of the outgoing president to intervene. But it’s gotten much worse now with the assaults on Federal immigration officers. On January 6 only one politician showed his ass. Now we have mayors and governors doing much worse, loosely and intentionally hurling epithets such as “Nazi”, “Racist” and “Facist” as justification, and encouragement, for obstructing and violating Federal law.
We are walking down a very dangerous road right now. Once one law can be justifiably ignored, what’s to prevent the next one from being ignored. It’s a slippery slope with a bad landing. May we come to our senses before it’s too late.