Law and Order :"Land of Opportunity" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 5, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the long-awaited return of Dick Wolf’s three Law and Order shows on NBC-TV, of which “Land of Opportunity,” the latest episode oif the flagship Law and Order series, was by far the best. It dealt with the murder of a homeless undocumented immigrant from Venezuela who had come up through South America into Mexico, had crossed into Texas, and they got scooped up in one of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s border stunts in which his state agents essentially kidnapped undocumented immigrants and shipped them to Northern cities to dump them in more “liberal” jurisdictions to prove that nobody else wants them, either. (I’m not at all surprised that these “border buses” – or,in some cases, “border planes” – made it into a Law and Order script.) There’s a wonderful red herring in the pre-credits sequence, in which the homeless man who will eventually be murdered has a violent encounter with a white-collar worker in the finance industry who resents that a homeless mission has been set up just down the street from the building where he’s renting a stratospherically overpriced apartment. Later it turns out he has an alibi for the killing and the cops have to look elsewhere. They learn from a heroin-addicted Black homeless man who lived at the mission and was a friend of the victim that the two of them had seen a horrifying sight on a construction site: two bodies being buried in cement as part of the foundation-laying for a new skyscraper. The victim was scheduled to meet with a reporter whom he’d already been interviewed by as part of a story about the migrant buses when he was killed.

The police, led by series regulars, detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), eventually find out that the owner of the contracting company deliberately hired a hit man, Ian Belsky (Justin Kucsulain) to murder the man, but his defense attorney tries to put the blame instead on a disgruntled former employee who wanted to set u p the contractor for murder as revenge for his having been fired. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy, a British actor who does a remarkably good American accent in this role) and Samantha Maroun (Israeli-born Odelya Halevi, playing an Arab here) need to find another witness. They find her in a housekeeper who’s herself an undocumented immigrant from Lebanon, and Samantha wins her trust by speaking to her in Arabic. Only the day before she’s supposed to testify in court, she’s scooped up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid and held in a detention center on a fast track to deportation back to Lebanon. Eventually the contractor is convicted, but when Price and Maroun contact ICE to alert for her to win a visa to allow her to stay in the U.S., they find that she and her daughter have already been flown back to Lebanon – so the bad guys at least partially win after all. For a series that began as Dick Wolf’s deliberate response to an increasingly Right-wing American public impatient with constitutional niceties and determined to see criminals punished regardless of the protections of the Bill of Rights – a running theme in the early days of Law and Order that still gets mentioned from time to time – the show has become surprisingly progressive over time. Here the point is the exploitation of undocumented immigrants not only by crooked contractors who exploit them as cheap labor and almost literally treat them as part of the furniture, but even by people like liberal prosecutors who think they’re “helping” them. There’s also a cruel irony in the episode title because America turns out to be a “land of opportunity” for neither the Venezuelan refugee whose murder kicks off the plot or the woman who finally provides the crucial evidence against him.