That's sometimes reasonable - e.g. the apocryphal loaf of bread being stolen to feed a starving family. But it's not a universal defence. And not all illegals are poor in the first place.
If you make it illegal to sleep on the street at night (by extension, sleeping anywhere that isn’t a legal residence), you are de facto making it illegal to be homeless.
That a law applies to everyone is not a “universal defence” in its fairness.
But your problem seems to be a combination of the wealthy having an easier time accessing the US (agree, but many countries have purchasable visas), and poor illegal immigrants having no other option (partially agree, but not all illegal immigrants are poor, and many who are do have alternative places they could go legally).
Your point is that immigration laws don't sufficiently take into account an illegal migrant's economic status (i.e. make reasonable accommodations for those in poverty or desperate circumstances), which is a totally fair perspective.
But that doesn't affect OP's initial question/observation, since countries other than the US also apply their rules uniformly, which disproportionately affects the poor.
I think you’re focused specifically on the parenthetical: “seemingly only in the US”, whereas I am commenting on the overall sentiment, especially with the context of the first sentence of the OP’s post. Take out the parenthetical entirely from the OP’s post, and possibly the reference to ICE specifically as well, and you get a closer version to what I interpreted as the argument.
This:
> Your point is that immigration laws don't sufficiently take into account an illegal migrant's economic status (i.e. make reasonable accommodations for those in poverty or desperate circumstances)
is a fair(ish) summary of my argument.
But, it’s not really that reasonable accommodations aren’t made, it’s that there’s a vicious feedback loop that the more violent and dehumanizing your immigration policy becomes, the higher the average level of desperation your median immigrant possesses, and the fewer the means they have to avoid the worst of the human suffering that migrants experience (murder, rape, sex trafficking, alligator moats, etc). If you let that vicious cycle go untouched or even reinforce it, you’re enabling human rights violations. Citizens of countries that enable (and perform) human rights violations shouldn’t sleep well at night.