The law did not protect Renee Good when an ICE agent shot her in the face during a raid in Minneapolis, shattering her jaw and flooding her mouth with blood while her wife watched. The law did not prevent Donald Trump from threatening to deploy the Insurrection Act against Minneapolis, from promising tanks in the streets, from transforming a woman’s shattered face into pretext for military occupation. The law did not protect Mahmoud Khalil when federal agents arrested him in the middle of the night for advocating for Palestinian rights, when he was disappeared from New York to New Jersey to Louisiana, when he missed the birth of his son because he was caged in a detention facility that profited from every day of his confinement. The law did not protect him because the law was written specifically to ensure he would have no protection, because when Congress passed the first statute to use the word terrorism in 1969 it targeted Palestinian refugees, because the material support statute was designed to criminalize Palestinian organizing and transform charity into a criminal act. Because the law, like most systems of oppression, is built on the permanent dispossession of the underclass, and it was never meant to serve us.

 

The law did not protect the children of Gaza who continue to die under rubble, who are torn to pieces while connected to ventilators, who are shot by snipers while playing on rooftops, who starve because Israel blocks food convoys and the United States provides the weapons and money to ensure the killing continues. International law did not prevent this genocide because international law exists to legitimize imperial violence while criminalizing resistance to it, because the Genocide Convention creates procedures for documenting mass death after the fact rather than preventing it, because the ICJ issues rulings that Israel ignores while the United States vetoes every Security Council resolution that might impose consequences.

The law did not protect the thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys slaughtered at Srebrenica while Dutch peacekeepers stood aside and the international community debated whether intervention served Western interests. The law did not protect the estimated half million to one million Tutsis murdered during the Rwandan genocide while the United States refused to call it genocide because acknowledging genocide would trigger legal obligations, while UN peacekeepers withdrew and left Tutsis to be hacked to death with machetes in churches where they sought sanctuary. The law did not protect the 1.5 million Armenians killed in the genocide that Turkey still refuses to acknowledge and that the United States refused to formally recognize for decades because Turkey is a NATO ally and geopolitical considerations outweigh historical truth. The law did not protect Indigenous peoples of the Americas subjected to genocidal violence that killed an estimated ninety percent of the population, violence that was legalized through doctrines like terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery, through treaties signed and immediately violated, through Indian Removal Acts and reservation systems and boarding schools designed to destroy Indigenous cultures. The law did not protect the millions killed in the transatlantic slave trade or the generations born into chattel slavery because the law declared them property, because slave codes made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read or gather or resist their bondage, because the Constitution counted them as three-fifths of a person for purposes of allocating political power to their enslavers. The law did not protect the Jews of Europe stripped of citizenship under the Nuremberg Laws, ghettoized and starved and transported to death camps. The law did not protect the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia subjected to the first genocide of the twentieth century by German colonial forces, driven into the desert to die of thirst, placed in concentration camps where medical experiments were conducted on their bodies. The law did not protect the Bengali people during the 1971 massacres in which the Pakistani military killed thousands while the United States supported Pakistan because it was useful in Cold War calculations.

But we need not look to international atrocities alone to understand how the law always serves the power that be. The American legal system has consistently demonstrated that law is not a shield against fascism but a weapon wielded by the overseer class to maintain dominion over those deemed expendable. The law did not protect Fred Hampton when Chicago police and the FBI assassinated him in his bed at twenty-one years old, firing nearly one hundred rounds into his apartment while he slept next to his pregnant fiancée, because the law authorized COINTELPRO operations designed to “neutralize” Black revolutionary leaders through any means necessary including extrajudicial execution. The law did not protect the MOVE family when Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on their row house in 1985, incinerating eleven people including five children, destroying sixty-one homes in the resulting fire, because the city claimed the bombing was a reasonable response and a jury acquitted the only person charged in connection with the massacre. The law did not protect the hundreds of Black residents of Tulsa’s Greenwood District when white mobs burned thirty-five blocks of the wealthiest Black neighborhood in America in 1921, killing as many as three hundred people, destroying twelve hundred homes and businesses, dropping incendiary devices from airplanes in what may have been the first aerial bombing of an American city, because Oklahoma authorities arrested Black survivors for inciting a riot and a grand jury blamed Black residents for the violence while white perpetrators faced no consequences.

The law did not protect the thousands of people subjected to forced sterilization under eugenics programs that targeted those deemed “feebleminded” or “unfit to reproduce,” programs that sterilized more than sixty thousand people in thirty-two states between 1907 and 1981, disproportionately targeting Black women, Indigenous women, poor women, disabled people, immigrants, and anyone else the state deemed genetically inferior. The law did not protect the Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II, stripped of their property and their liberty without trial or hearing, detained solely because of their ancestry while the Supreme Court upheld the internment as constitutional in Korematsu v. United States and that precedent stood until 2018. The law did not protect the Black farmers systematically dispossessed of their land through discriminatory USDA lending practices, through violence and threats from white neighbors, through tax sales and partition sales and eminent domain seizures, reducing Black land ownership from fourteen million acres in 1920 to 2.5 million acres today in what amounts to the largest theft of Black-owned property in American history. The law did not protect the residents of Flint, Michigan, who were poisoned with lead-contaminated water for years while state officials lied about water quality tests and ignored evidence of harm, while emergency managers appointed by the governor made decisions designed to save money at the expense of predominantly Black residents’ health and lives.

THE OVERSEER CLASS

The law has never protected us because the law was designed to create and maintain the underclass, to define who is disposable and excludable and detainable and deportable and killable.

Slave codes legalized the ownership of human beings and criminalized their resistance, made it a crime for enslaved people to defend themselves against rape or beating or family separation. Indian Removal Acts legalized genocide and called it westward expansion, manifest destiny, the natural displacement of savage peoples by civilized ones. Black Codes and Jim Crow laws legalized segregation and disenfranchisement and economic exploitation, created separate and unequal systems that the Supreme Court blessed in Plessy v. Ferguson and maintained for decades. The Immigration Act of 1924 established national origin quotas designed to preserve America’s white Protestant character, banned virtually all immigration from Asia, restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, created the Border Patrol to enforce new restrictions and commence the militarization of the border that continues today. The war on drugs launched by Nixon and expanded by Reagan created mandatory minimum sentences that sent hundreds of thousands to prison for nonviolent offenses, militarized police departments, justified stop-and-frisk policies that terrorized Black and Brown communities, all while the CIA facilitated cocaine trafficking to fund covert operations and white suburban drug use was treated as a medical issue rather than a criminal one.

This is what the law does, and what it has always done. The law creates elaborate procedural frameworks that transform violence into administrative action, and the law makes atrocity legally permissible and judicially unreviewable.

The Third Circuit reversed the district court’s orders freeing Mahmoud and blocking his deportation, but the court never said his constitutional rights weren’t violated. Instead, the majority ruled that the district court had no business hearing his case at all because Section 1252(b)(9) of the Immigration and Nationality Act requires him to go through the entire immigration court process first, exhaust his appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and only then file a petition for review with a federal appellate court. The court said his claims aren’t “now-or-never” because what matters isn’t whether his injuries can be fixed later but whether the legal questions can be reviewed later, and since theoretically a court of appeals could look at his First Amendment retaliation claims and due process arguments after he gets a final removal order, he has to wait and bring those claims through the executive branch system that’s trying to deport him. Judge Freeman wrote a dissent explaining that immigration courts aren’t real courts, they’re part of the executive branch, and the immigration judge already told Mahmoud he was “in the wrong court” to develop evidence for his constitutional claims, and there’s no guarantee the Fifth Circuit would actually get him the fact-finding he needs, and if he wins at the Board level there won’t even be a final order to appeal, which means the First Amendment violations from his detention just disappear with no remedy at all. So Mahmoud is stuck in this impossible situation where he can’t get his constitutional claims heard in a real court until he goes through a process run by the people persecuting him, and once the appeals are done the injunction protecting him goes away and ICE can arrest him again and deport him, separating him from his American wife and baby son.

They want Mahmoud to seek “justice” from the very institutions that muzzled him.

The law serves the overseer class by ensuring they can wield violence with impunity while we have no remedy, no recourse, no meaningful avenue for redress. Qualified immunity protects police who kill with impunity, shields them from civil liability even when they violate clearly established constitutional rights, requires victims to find prior cases with nearly identical facts before courts will even consider whether the violation was unconstitutional. Sovereign immunity prevents suits against the government for its torts, bars recovery for injuries caused by government negligence or intentional misconduct unless the government consents to be sued. Prosecutorial immunity shields prosecutors who suppress exculpatory evidence, who coerce false confessions, who send innocent people to prison or death row, because courts say holding prosecutors liable would interfere with their discretion and make them too cautious in performing their duties. The state secrets privilege allows the government to shut down lawsuits by claiming national security, prevents torture victims from suing their torturers, prevents warrantless surveillance victims from challenging unconstitutional spying, gives the executive branch unilateral power to place itself above judicial review.

Legal systems across the world continue to entrench those in power through similar mechanisms that dress domination in procedural legitimacy. The United Kingdom’s Official Secrets Act criminalizes whistleblowing and journalism that embarrasses the government, has been used to prosecute those who expose war crimes and surveillance abuses while protecting those who commit them. France’s state of emergency laws initially passed after the 2015 Paris attacks became permanent features allowing warrantless searches and house arrests and dissolution of organizations deemed threatening to public order, powers disproportionately used against Muslims and protest movements. India’s Unlawful Activities Prevention Act allows detention without charge for up to 180 days, designates individuals as terrorists without trial, has been weaponized against journalists and activists and students who criticize the government or support Kashmiri self-determination. China’s National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces, has been used to arrest pro-democracy activists, shut down independent media, eliminate political opposition, transform what was promised to be one country two systems into total authoritarian control.

People will look back and ask how we let this happen, how we permitted children to be slaughtered and activists imprisoned and women shot in the face by ICE agents, how we stood by while fascism advanced under color of law. They will not understand what we understand now, what the underclass has always understood, what Richard Wright knew when he wrote that he no longer felt bound by laws that told him he was outside their protection. The law was never meant to protect us. The law is the weapon they use against us, and it will never save us from fascism because fascism does not violate the law but operates through it, perfects it into an instrument of domination that calls itself procedure and precedent and jurisdictional requirement while bodies pile and courts say you filed in the wrong venue, you must exhaust administrative remedies, you must wait for a final order that will come only after you are already dead.

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