We all know the cliché

“two wrongs don’t make a right.”

So familiar that we tend to hear it and let it slide by. But clichés become clichés for a reason. They survive because they point at something real. This essay is about law. Specifically law enforcement and when it’s okay to break the law to enforce the law. It’s also about immigration, ICE, and Nazi-like totalitarianism. Strong words, yes, but the following justify them completely.

We are all familiar with “Black Lives Matter.” The rally call to treat everyone the same. And we’re familiar with the counter call of “All Lives Matter.” The rally call that most consider literally true, while at the same time intended to water down “Black lives matter.”

When I see the government gunning down protestors in the streets, I keep thinking of a different call:

“All Laws Matter.”

Not in the shallow, slogan sense—but in the moral sense.

What I’m seeing from the far right is a dangerous collapse of moral hierarchy. A belief that nearly any violation of the law justifies nearly any response.  This type of moral absolutism asserts certain actions are just plain right or wrong. It’s the belief that there’s a universal moral standard. Someone broke the law. Therefore, anything done to them is justified. That’s not law and order. That’s moral blindness.

And history has a name for that kind of thinking: Totalitarianism.

Historians point out that the hallmark of a police state—or any totalitarian regime—is the removal of proportionality. In these systems, the state uses even minor infractions as a blank check to exercise total power over the individual. The logic is brutally simple: you broke the law; therefore, you no longer deserve protection.

The goal of totalitarians is to strip away the hierarchy of crime. To erase context. To dehumanize people as “others.”

Locke and Natural Rights

John Locke settled this more than two centuries ago. Locke argued that governments exist for one reason above all others: to protect natural rights, chief among them, life.

Law is not an end in itself. It is a tool. And the moment the state uses law to destroy life rather than safeguard it; it has violated its own legitimacy.

In Locke’s framework, breaking a law does not erase a person’s humanity, nor does it forfeit their claim to protection.

When the state decides you are worth less than others, you become disposable.

At that point, anything can be justified. Even killing you. That is a form of societal blindness: a failure to see the scale of the offense in relation to the scale of the punishment.

When people justify cruelty by pointing to a rule that was broken, while ignoring context, that’s not justice. That’s how atrocities are rationalized. For decades, the United States tried to avoid that trap. Although imperfect and often hypocritical, we held ourselves up as a society governed by law rather than impulse, rules rather than vengeance.

Two ideas mattered more than most.

First: no one is above the law.

Second: you do not break the law to enforce the law.

Those aren’t slogans. They are restraints. They are the guardrails that separate authority from brutality. They acknowledged something essential: that power without limits doesn’t create order, it destroys it.

And yet, even within those limits, we understand something else just as clearly. Law enforcement has always been allowed narrow exceptions. Police can exceed the speed limit to stop a speeder: if it’s safe. They can enter a home without a warrant: if a crime is actively happening inside. Context matters. Judgment matters.

Law enforcement also prioritizes. It triages levels of crime. If a station receives a few burglary calls and then a murder call comes in, priorities shift immediately. Why? Because murder outranks burglary. The scale of the response must match the scale of the harm.

This isn’t controversial. It’s built into every functioning justice system.

What’s happening now is a refusal to take that next moral step. The refusal to acknowledge that not all crimes are equal, and that enforcement must never exceed the crime itself.

This is where the logic collapses.

If someone is speeding, police may speed to catch them. But they may not deploy overwhelming force and destroy the car. They don’t get to kill the driver because a traffic law was broken. Enforcement is permitted only insofar as it is proportional to the offense.

That principle has always been there. It’s not new. It’s not radical. And abandoning it is not a return to law and order: it’s a rejection of it.

When Proportionality Disappears

This is the point where current immigration enforcement in the United States enters the picture, not as a separate issue, but as a clear modern example of what happens when proportionality is abandoned.

Entering a country illegally is a paperwork crime, but it is not a violent crime. In the United States it is not even a criminal offense: it’s a civil matter. 

No serious legal tradition, American or otherwise, places paperwork violations on the same moral plane as murder, rape, or assault. When anyone holds up immigrants as thugs and murderers, they are treating exceptions as the rule. That is a fallacy, a dishonest error in thinking. In this case, a hasty generalization.

The law has always recognized a hierarchy of harm. That hierarchy is not a political preference. It’s a moral necessity.

When that hierarchy collapses, something dangerous takes its place. The logic becomes brutally simple: You broke the law. We can do what we want to you. This is the defining move of every police state. Minor infractions become blank checks for unlimited force. The issue is no longer border policy. It is moral collapse.

And once that logic is accepted, it does not stay confined to immigration. History shows this clearly. The removal of proportionality is never selective. It spreads. What begins with outsiders always turns inward. We see that right now with state-sanctioned murder, coverup, and corruption. The murdering of Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by the United States of America, by the Trump administration and the MAGA movement, is clearly totalitarianism in action: a mechanism of domination.

When Enforcement Becomes the Crime

This is where immigration enforcement—and specifically ICE—can no longer be treated as a separate or special case. Because the moment enforcement becomes more violent than the offense it claims to address, the law has already been broken.

Illegal entry is not a criminal offense.
Immigration law is civil law.

And yet we are now asked to accept outcomes, injury, disappearance, even death, as if they are natural or unavoidable consequences of enforcement. As if the mere fact that a law was broken dissolves every other moral consideration.

It does not. And history is unambiguous about where that logic leads. It never stops at the border.

The Boundary Law Must Not Cross

This isn’t complicated. And it isn’t new.

Law exists to serve human life: not the other way around. That has always been the boundary. It is the line that separates justice from domination, enforcement from cruelty.

When a society decides that breaking one law makes someone killable, it has already abandoned the rule of law. What remains may still look like order, but it is order without restraint, and restraint is the very thing that makes law legitimate.

This is why “two wrongs don’t make a right” endures. Not as a slogan, but as a warning.