BREAKING: President Obama To Stop Deporting DREAM-Eligible Youth

[Igel]

22. Due process.

It's clear that due process is violated when there's a harsher application of the law for some groups and not for others. If I enforce traffic regs on African-Americans and let whites go unwarned and unticketed, I have problems. If I let richer people driving fancy cars go unticketed while hitting poorer people hard, mostly those driving old, cheap cars, then I have problems. Unless, of course, there's a good reason for it: I'd assume that most safety violations would be on old, cheap cars.

What about this? The law is clear, but an exception is being carved out for some groups. Some groups have the process enforced on them with greater severity and rigor; others are all but excluded from the process. This isn't because one group is more likely to violate the rules than the other--the old/cheap versus new/expensive car distinction I assumed in the previous paragraph. It's because one group is especially despised or another is especially liked.

We pitch a fit and cry "violation of due process" and "discrimination" when the law is actually color-blind: Most illegal immigrants to the US are Latinos, so any enforcement action that affects all groups equaly will wind up affecting--proportionately--mostly Latinos. (For "disproportionate" you'd need to know the relative percentages of ethnic groups in the illegal immigrant population and then compare that with enforcement percentages.)