Well, folks, this one's a mess, and I'm going to tell you about it straight, because that's what I do. A federal judge, and get this, a judge appointed by President Trump himself, has found ICE in contempt of court after an asylum seeker got flown to El Salvador not once but twice, the second time in plain violation of a court order telling them to stop. You can read the full report right here.

Let me say something first, so nobody writes me angry letters. I have spent two years writing about the fine men and women of ICE. I've told you about the mothers in Parker County who sleep easier because a criminal alien got picked up. I've baked Dale enough banana bread to sink a battleship over this stuff. I am on the side of enforcement, and I always will be.

But I taught fourth grade for 34 years, and let me tell you what I told every child who ever sat in my classroom: rules don't just apply to the people you don't like. A court order is a court order. When a judge says stop, you stop. You don't get to decide the judge is wrong and do it anyway, because the day that becomes normal, the whole thing we're defending comes apart at the seams.

The judge in this case apparently felt the same way, and said so in no uncertain terms. An asylum seeker, somebody who was in the middle of a legal process, got removed to El Salvador. There was an order about it. Then it happened again. Twice. And now we've got a contempt finding on the books against the very agency doing the work I've been cheering for.

Does that make me happy? No, it makes me madder than a wet hen, and I'll tell you why. Every time something like this happens, it hands the open-borders crowd a gift-wrapped headline. They don't care about the 99 cases out of 100 that go by the book. They care about the one that didn't, and they'll ride it for months. The people who want no enforcement at all will point at this and say, see, they can't be trusted. And the painful part is, on this one, they've got something to point at.

Now, I don't know the individual agents involved, and I suspect most of the folks wearing that uniform followed orders the way they were given. Somewhere up the chain, somebody either didn't read the order, didn't care about the order, or decided the order didn't apply to them. Any of the three deserves a talking to, and not the gentle kind. In my day, if you ignored the principal twice, you weren't walking out of that office without consequences, and you'd earned every one of them.

The part that makes me sad more than mad is this. The rule of law is the whole ballgame, folks. It's the reason my daddy fought in Korea. It's the reason we say the pledge. Enforcement done right, through proper channels with judges and paperwork and accountability, is the strongest thing we have. Enforcement done sloppy doesn't make us safer. It makes us look like the very thing we say we're against, and I won't pretend otherwise just because it's my team that stumbled.

I still believe in the mission. I still believe most of the people carrying it out are good and decent public servants. But believing in law and order means believing in it when the gavel comes down against your side too. That's called integrity, and it used to be something everybody in this country understood without being told.

Anyway, that's my two cents and I'm sticking to it. Talk soon, folks.