In 2010, Sotero Mendoza-Rivera, an undocumented farmworker who’d immigrated from Mexico 10 years earlier, made a fateful decision. He drove with his girlfriend, Angelica Ortega-Vasquez, to their local Walmart in McMinnville, Oregon, according to a police report. The store was seven minutes from their apartment. In addition to the pajamas, they purchased motor oil and brake fluid for their car.

When they got back to the apartment, their 2-year-old son, who’d been in bed asleep when they’d left, had woken up and somehow gotten out the door. A bystander found him by the street outside the complex, baby bottle in hand, and called the police.

The responding officer issued Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez a misdemeanor citation, which they resolved with a guilty plea, a fine and probation. The officer stated in his report that the little boy and his 3-year-old sister were healthy and clean, that the apartment was well-kept and stocked with food, and that a neighbor said that the mother was usually home with the kids.

The Obama administration then opened deportation proceedings against Mendoza-Rivera, but did not keep him in detention. He appealed, and the case wound its way slowly through the legal system before hitting a backlog at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where some immigration matters from nearly a decade ago are still being decided.

But in August, amid the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Mendoza-Rivera and locked him up in another state. And the Department of Justice is now arguing that what he did in 2010 (the current case is against him only) is a crime deserving of immediate removal from the country. A DOJ lawyer argued before a panel of the 9th Circuit in Pasadena, California, last month that it doesn’t matter if no harm to children occurred, saying an immigrant parent should still get deported if their parenting decision involved a “substantial” deviation from a “normal” standard of care for kids.

To get the facts straight up front, an “undocumented farmworker” is an illegal immigrant. Furthermore, deportation proceedings were begun under the Obama administration. Finally, if Mendoza-Rivera is deported, the reason will not be because he and his wife left a 2-year-old in the house alone (the fact that the child wasn’t harmed is moral luck, and moral luck only), because being deported isn’t the punishment for leaving a child alone. The reason will be that the punishment for sneaking across our border and living here while getting the benefits of citizenship illicitly is deportation.

Whether that crime took place 16 years ago or yesterday, it took place, and there is no law or rule that tells illegals that if they manage to avoid detection long enough by never nicking a law of any kind, they become de facto citizens or legal residents. That is not the law. ProPublica to the contrary, this illegal immigrant is facing deportation because his mistaken negligence of his son called U.S. authorities’ attention to the fact that he just plain doesn’t belong here, was and is here illegally, and should be kicked out. If he were just an immigrant, as in “someone who came here openly and legally” then ProPublica would have justification for its high dudgeon. I trust our government to police out borders and enforce the law. Deporting hiding illegals is not a violation of the public trust, but a fulfillment of the expectations arising from that trust.

The long, long article gets bogged down in what kind of “crimes”‘ justify removal. I regard this as a distraction. If an illegal immigrants comes to the attention of law enforcement for spitting on the sidewalk, he, she or the “good illegal immigrant”extolling activists have no ethical standing to complain if it gets the spitter deported—not for spitting, but for being here illegally in the first place.