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It’s tempting to dismiss these paeans to the law as incoherent or even hypocritical. After all, this is a president who has encouraged police to engage in brutality while arresting suspects; who pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, previously found guilty of contempt of court in a case involving his targeting of Latinos at traffic stops; and whose new policy limiting grants of asylum is arguably itself illegal. And that’s without even touching on the numerous criminal investigations into Trump’s own conduct and that of his businesses and associates.

But there is a deeper logic at work. Writing in The Atlantic, Beinart argued that Trump’s tweets linking the rule of law with immigration enforcement reflect a preoccupation with stopping what Trump sees as the corruption of racial hierarchy and the pure body politic. Chris Hayes has made a similar case about Trump’s use of law to evoke “the preservation of a certain social order.”

Caal Maquín’s death, in this view, does not raise questions of lawlessness or impunity. Quite the opposite: It maintains the strength of that hierarchy—who is inside the United States and who is out, who is worthy of concern and who is not, who is “legal” and who is not. This is an understanding of the rule of law at odds with the liberal-democratic vision of law as a restraint on power and an assurance against abuse.

Or perhaps not so at odds. The prewar German jurist Carl Schmitt—who later became notorious for his opportunistic alliance with the Nazi Party—famously argued that all systems of law, no matter how carefully regulated, cannot erase the possibility of the moment of emergency in which the leader will need to make a decision outside the bounds of what the law allows. Schmitt called this “the state of exception.” It is a vision of power attractive to someone like Trump, who seems to barely understand the Constitution as a check on his authority.

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One way to understand Schmitt is that, following his reasoning, the government has the ability to decide, on a whim, who is inside the state of exception and who is out. To be outside the state of exception is to enjoy the protection the government provides and the privileges of membership in the political community. To be within the state of exception is to exist in a space that both is and is not governed by law; it is to be subject to the government’s power without any protections against the cruelest use of that power. Riffing on Schmitt, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this “bare life.” It’s life on the margin between law and something other than law. To put it another way, it’s life on the border.

The idea of the border as a space in which law doesn’t quite apply in the same way it does elsewhere long predates the Trump administration. To pick one example among many, the Fourth Amendment’s usual requirements ebb at the boundaries of the United States, where the government may search travelers without probable cause or a warrant. But Trump’s rhetorical commitment to securing the border as a matter of extreme national importance—so dire that, if it should fail to happen, the nation itself might literally cease to exist—shifts the matter into something much closer to Schmitt’s state of exception, as a matter of existential peril.