Dan McLaughlin, writing in the National Review, has had the courage to state what the age of humanitarian sentiment prefers to leave unspoken: that the sovereign nation is a household under God, and that a household has the right — indeed, the duty — to choose whom it admits. The asylum system, as he documents with admirable precision, has become a mockery of the very concept of ordered liberty. A 13.2 percent grant rate, a backlog of 2.3 million cases, and a legal framework so elastic that it now covers domestic violence and gang threats from private actors — this is not compassion but the collapse of discrimination itself. The law was designed for the Holocaust and has been stretched to cover every misfortune the third world can produce. The result is that the nation’s sovereignty is exercised not by its elected representatives but by the most aggressive gaming of an administrative apparatus. McLaughlin is right to call for reform, for tightening the criteria, for returning the asylum system to its original purpose. The nation that cannot distinguish between the refugee and the economic migrant, between the victim of state persecution and the victim of general lawlessness, has abandoned the very art of rule. A household must know its door.
The same week McLaughlin’s essay appeared in print, María was being removed from the United States. She was 32 years old, from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. She had fled her husband after years of beatings that had left her with a fractured orbital bone, three broken ribs, and a scar from his machete across her left shoulder blade. The police in Honduras did nothing — her husband was a friend of the local commander. She came to the United States in 2023, presented herself at the port of entry in Texas, and claimed asylum on the basis of domestic violence, a “particular social group” as the Obama and Biden administrations had recognized. Her case sat in the backlog for twenty-two months. In 2025, under the enforcement regime that McLaughlin’s arguments helped shape, her claim was denied. The immigration judge ruled that domestic violence by a private actor, even with state complicity in inaction, did not constitute persecution by a “government” as the statute required. She was ordered removed. In February 2026, at 6:47 AM, two ICE officers handcuffed her at the detention center in El Paso, put her on a charter flight to San Pedro Sula, and walked her through the customs hall. She was picked up outside the airport by her husband and two of his friends. They took her to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Her husband beat her for two hours with a length of rubber hose. He then cut her throat from ear to ear. Her body was found three days later, dumped in a drainage ditch, the wound still open, flies already working at the edges of the gash. She was 33 years old.
The nation is a household, and a household has a door. The Apostle Paul, speaking to the Athenians, declared that God “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” — that each nation has its appointed bounds, its providential jurisdiction. María was a citizen of Honduras, and her suffering was the fruit of her own nation’s dysfunctions. She was not of the American household. The sovereign right to exclude is the order of creation — the wall that makes the covenant possible. Her death is the working of that order — the sorting of each person to the place appointed for them. The nation that does not exercise its sovereignty has abandoned its station before God.