[kccqzy]

You have misunderstood what it means to follow the law. The law guarantees liberties, but doesn't guarantee prosecution. Obama has DACA, which gives young illegal immigrants a deferral on their prosecution. More generally there's the concept of prosecutorial discretion. Have you ever for example driven a car badly, been pulled over, but the cop let you off with just a warning?

[thfuran]

Or, for that matter, driven a car badly but not been pulled over at all? Surely in the interest of absolute lawfulness they then proceeded to the nearest police station to demand to be ticketed.

[remarkEon]

Surely you understand the difference between a cop declining to issue a speeding ticket and a federal "discretionary" policy that makes it de facto legal to violate standing immigration law at scale.

[kccqzy]

There is no difference. People often complain during the pandemic that the San Francisco police department has seemingly instituted a "discretionary" policy that makes it de facto legal to violate traffic law at scale, you know, including speeding, not stopping at stop signs, not yielding to pedestrians. https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11nbnxw/san_f...

[remarkEon]

Maybe you are misunderstanding. A single cop deciding "okay today I'm letting you off with a warning" is quite different from the President directing the entire Federal bureaucracy to not enforce existing immigration law. If for some reason a large jurisdiction, say maybe the state of California, decided that it was policy to let everyone off with a warning for speeding infractions, then, if I squint hard enough and ignore a wide range of second and third order effects, then yeah maybe they are similar.