Once more asylum seekers – the least among us, homeless on the road fleeing war and violence, poverty and illness – provide grist for the media mill. Everyday we see more of the xenophobic narratives. It is a trial.

There is nonetheless an interesting dilemma of sorts revealed through the issue. It seems there are symmetrical, yet contradictory claims being made, a claim honored as valid in the case on the one hand but invalid in the other. What deepens the puzzle is the differing scope of the recourse sought by the claimants in either case. The claimants are refugees seeking asylum to enter and reside in a new country, and the Trump admin claiming blanket clemency conferred by the Executive’s title.

Asylum claims are either legitimate, or not. Those fleeing their country of origin for the North are seeking relief from a climate of violence and instability at home. These are not “street gangs,” mostly these groups look more like paramilitaries – the military itself is often in on it. What emboldened these groups was working with the Americans to overthrow or destabilize the local state. So people in the territories caught in between seem to be making a claim, and that is that they have a right to seek peaceful lands. Thus, once they have arrived via extraordinary means, they ought have their extraordinary reason for flight recognized – specifically by way of suspending some rules for each individually considered case. Unlike smugglers or traffickers, asylum seekers have recourse for their claims.

The claims of the Trump administration seem similarly to seek safe harbor via exemption from the normal operation of certain Laws. The Trump cadre’s claims have been, all along, “Yes, we might have-probably-maybe-wouldn’t have-but-totally broke the rules – howeva – because of the context – winning Republican primaries, defeating Hillary, running the country from a branded bucket of breaded meat – the rules can be suspended for us in this specific case.” In fact a direct quote from Mr. Trump himself is that it was “very cool” to perhaps commit election fraud or even worse crimes.

The end portion of the claim – “in this specific case” – is the most revealing, as any specificity clause must by nature be limited to individual acts or agents. The admin talking heads trot this claim out regularly following every new revelation. That these claims seem to come ‘fast and thick’ serve to illustrate the limited applicability of specific decisions on one claim to many other cases. This feels akin to the bank robber pointing at a previous bank error in his favor that the bank decided not to follow up on as cause for a blanket suspension of rules. It certainly doesn’t seem like the same kind of claim in operation, anyway. The case, above, differs from the current one in that the scope of recourse sought is specifically applied to individual cases. Only. And that is precisely why our and other states seek to honor such decisions – bending the rules cannot be exercised on an open-ended basis. The rules cease to be universal, and anarchy follows in the nth consideration. Bank robbers would try!