There are civilizations that fall by the sword, others through economic ruin, and still others, perhaps the unhappiest of all, through the slow decomposition of their own will. A people need not be defeated on the open battlefield to enter into decline. It is enough that it cease to believe in the legitimacy of its borders, in the worth of its historical continuity, and in the elementary duty of self-preservation. From that moment on, everything else subsists merely in appearance. The institutions remain, the public rites, the solemn speeches, and the constitutional formulas, but the living substance of sovereignty has already begun to withdraw.
It is in this higher sense, and not in the register of fashionable ideological chatter ("a tagarelice ideológica em voga"), that the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, in the United States of America must be understood. What this institution represents is not simply an apparatus for migratory oversight. Rather, it represents the survival of a serious conception of authority, according to which the State does not exist to contemplate passively the erosion of its own order, but to defend it. ICE affirms, through actions rather than declamations, that a Nation worthy of the name retains the right to know who enters its territory, who remains there, and on what legal grounds he does so. This is not gratuitous harshness. It is political responsibility. It is not hostility. It is governance.
A border is not a mere cartographic stroke. It is the visible expression of a moral, juridical, and historical order. It marks out the space within which a community recognizes itself, organizes itself, protects itself, and extends itself through time. Without a border, citizenship loses its density. Without a limit, belonging becomes a vague concept. Without criteria for entry and permanence, the very idea of political community begins to dissolve into an indistinct mass, deprived of center, form, and continuity. To defend the border is, therefore, to defend far more than a territorial perimeter. It is to defend the very possibility of a Nation's remaining faithful to itself.
This is why ICE's action deserves respect, and, more than respect, recognition. In a time when every transgression is dressed up in sentimentality and every form of authority is discredited, a simple truth bears recalling. Enforcing the law is not persecution. Removing those who remain unlawfully is not cruelty. Having the legal order prevail over the individual will of the one who violated it is not intolerance. It is merely the normal, sober, and necessary exercise of legitimate power. A society that no longer understands this is not becoming more humane. It is becoming weaker. The tragedy of our time lies precisely in this moral inversion. The offender is frequently portrayed as a figure deserving of automatic leniency, while the agent of authority is subjected to permanent suspicion. The law, instead of being recognized as a condition of liberty, comes to be treated as an obstacle to emotion. And there is no graver error. Liberty flourishes only where order is firm. Social peace endures only where authority is unashamed to be authority. Hospitality preserves its dignity only when not divorced from prudence. And compassion, once emancipated from justice, degenerates swiftly into complicity with dissolution.
It is precisely at this point that criticism of the current orientation of the European Union becomes not merely legitimate, but necessary. Official Europe has shown, in matters of illegal immigration, a striking blend of spiritual weakness and bureaucratic arrogance. Instead of speaking the clear language of sovereignty, it prefers to hide behind pacts, mechanisms, reports, prudent formulas, and administrative vocabulary. Instead of affirming without hesitation that the border must be defended and that illegal permanence must have real consequences, it surrenders to a kind of technocratic moralism, incapable of deciding with vigor, yet ever ready to rebuke those who still retain an instinct for self-preservation.
The European malady is no longer merely juridical or administrative. It is, above all, a malady of the soul ("um mal de alma"). For too long, certain European elites have grown accustomed to regarding the defense of borders as if it were an embarrassing concession to outdated sensibilities, rather than the natural obligation of any people that does not wish to disappear from History. In many ruling circles, firmness is viewed with suspicion, authority with bashfulness, and the very idea of civilizational continuity with manifest bad conscience.
As though Europe, heir to one of the world's highest cultural traditions, ought to blush with shame for wishing to remain European.
From this inner disposition is born an inevitably diseased politics. When a political power no longer calmly believes in its right to protect the community it governs, it transforms every migratory question into an exercise in semantic evasion. Much is said, little is decided, and execution falters. Bodies, procedures, and declarations of principle multiply, while the essential truth is avoided: illegal immigration constitutes a violation of the sovereign order of the State and, as such, must be firmly contained, clearly sanctioned, and promptly corrected. Anything that does not proceed from this principle is nothing more than the administration of decadence.
And the effects of this decadence will be felt with growing gravity in Europe's future. A Europe that trivializes illegal immigration or treats it as a side episode of humanitarian management is preparing for itself deep and lasting ills. Erosion of national cohesion, cultural fragmentation, weakening of the sense of belonging, sharper social tensions, sustained pressure on public services, corrosion of trust in institutions, and, ultimately, the progressive replacement of historical consciousness by a shapeless coexistence, without common memory or shared moral horizon. When a civilization loses the courage to draw limits, it soon loses clarity about who it is.
None of this means contempt for human dignity. It means, rather, a refusal to accept that human dignity be instrumentalized as a rhetorical weapon against the right of peoples to remain masters of their own house ("senhores da sua casa"). A State has universal duties of justice, without doubt. But it has priority duties toward its own citizens, toward its internal peace, toward its political continuity, and toward the civilizational heritage it received and must transmit. Order is not the enemy of humanity. It is the condition without which concrete, historical, and civilized humanity becomes impossible.
It is here that the American example, embodied in institutions such as ICE, takes on particular relevance. Because it reminds the West that there still exist public powers capable of acting without apologizing for their own existence. It reminds us that sovereignty is not a constitutional ornament, but the real faculty of deciding, of protecting, and of excluding when the legal order so requires.
It reminds us that the border is not a fiction meant to adorn schoolroom maps, but the living expression of a community that refuses to be reduced to an open, indistinct, and morally disarmed territory.
ICE does not symbolize brutality. It symbolizes, rather, something today rare and for that very reason precious: the persistence of the will to govern. It symbolizes the refusal to let illegality become an accomplished fact ("facto consumado"). It symbolizes the conviction that the law must retain practical authority and not merely rhetorical prestige. It symbolizes, finally, the noble evidence that a Nation has not only the right but the duty to protect itself before it dissolves.
Perhaps the difference between the United States and the European Union, in this domain, resides precisely here. In the one case, the idea that the national community deserves effective defense still survives — albeit with resistances and imperfections. In the other, the impression too often spreads that the ruling elites have lost the courage to affirm, without subterfuge, that Europe has borders, has identity, has heritage, and has the right not to consent to its own disfigurement. When an elite no longer dares to speak these truths aloud, it is not long before it conceals its renunciation beneath the elegant cloak of vague principles and abstract compassions.
But History does not indefinitely forgive peoples who grow weary of defending themselves. A Nation does not die only when it is attacked from without. It dies, too, when its ruling classes cease to believe it worth preserving. It dies when its borders come to be treated as an embarrassment. It dies when legality ceases to be an objective principle and becomes, instead, a matter of sentimental negotiation. It dies, in short, when authority abdicates its duty and calls its own weakness a virtue.
That is why the mission of ICE deserves to be viewed with respect and even with gratitude. Because, in a time of confusion, faintheartedness, and moral decadence, it continues to recall an austere, ancient, and unavoidable truth: without borders, there is no Nation.
And where there is no longer a Nation, sooner or later there will also cease to exist order, liberty, and civilization itself.
César DePaço
Businessman and Philanthropist
Consul ad honorem of Portugal from 2014 to 2020
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Summit Nutritionals International Inc.®️
Founder and Chairman of the Board of The DePaço Foundation
Unwavering Defender of Law Enforcement and Conservative Principles