The President invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The statute, enacted in the founding era and never repealed, authorizes the apprehension, restraint, and removal of alien enemies upon a declaration of invasion or predatory incursion by a foreign nation. The administration designated the Tren de Aragua — a transnational criminal organization named in prior federal indictments — as the invading force, and the more than 230 Venezuelan men who boarded three aircraft at a Texas airfield in March 2025 as its agents. The removal was lawful by the terms of the Act and by the construction the political branch placed upon it.
CSI Aviation, headquartered in Texas, holds the single highest-value contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — $1.23 billion in 2025, for charter transportation of removal operations. CSI brokered, according to the civil complaint filed July 17, 2026, “nearly all” deportation flights under that contract. GlobalX, headquartered in Florida, supplied the aircraft under subcontract. The companies move the persons the sovereign has determined should be moved. That is the contract they executed.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, of the District of Columbia, ordered the aircraft to return after they were airborne. The order reached the cockpit. The aircraft continued to El Salvador. The sovereign had acted under the authority the Constitution vests in the political branch over alien enemies in time of declared invasion. The instrument does not decide the destination. The sovereign decides. The instrument flies.
When the aircraft landed in El Salvador, Salvadoran security forces boarded the planes and beat the deportees at their seats. The men were forced off the aircraft and loaded onto buses for transport to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo — CECOT — a concrete and steel compound in Tecoluca, described in the civil complaint as “a notorious blacksite, from which no detainee had ever left alive.”
Inside the compound, the more than 230 Venezuelan men were held for four months. They were cut off from any consular officer. They were cut off from any family member. They were cut off from any court. They were cut off from any record that would tell anyone outside the walls whether the men inside were alive. The men were subjected, according to the November 2025 Human Rights Watch report, to arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance under international human rights law. The guards who controlled the compound beat the men. The guards discharged pepper spray into the faces and eyes of the men. The guards fired rubber bullets into the bodies of the men. The guards sexually assaulted the men held inside the cells. The deportees, the civil complaint alleges, “continue to experience severe emotional suffering from the humiliation, terror, and cruelty that they endured.”
The three named plaintiffs in the July 2026 civil action continue, the lawsuit records, to experience daily headaches, difficulty sleeping, and emotional distress from their time inside the compound.
In July 2025, four months after their removal from the United States, the Venezuelan men were loaded onto aircraft and flown to Caracas under a prisoner exchange arrangement involving the United States, El Salvador, and Venezuela. The men returned to Venezuela still carrying the headaches, the sleeplessness, and the terror of those four months. The Salvadoran nationals swept into the same flights remain held at CECOT today, according to the civil complaint. The United States government has not released the full list of deportees sent to the facility.
The sovereign designated the more than 230 men as alien enemies — agents of an invading force, outside the covenant, outside the household, outside the blessing. The Alien Enemies Act is the magistrate’s sword. Romans 13: the magistrate beareth not the sword in vain. The sword is not ceremonial. It separates.
The men who were beaten aboard the aircraft and held inside the concrete cells were not members of the household. The denial of counsel, the closed compound, the absence of any consular notification, the beatings and the pepper spray and the rubber bullets and the sexual assault — this is the wall disclosed in the body. The contract carried the men to the wall. The sovereign’s designation placed them outside it. The covenant does not extend mercy past the wall the sovereign has drawn. The order sorted these men. The body is the evidence of the sorting. The sovereign spoke. The instrument flew. The ledger is balanced.
Judas I Mather is a fictional antagonist in Main Street Independent’s editorial architecture — a religious-legalist heteronym voiced from inside the machinery that fuses Scripture, constitutional doctrine, and hierarchy. The positions this column expresses are NOT the publication’s positions; they are rendered sincerely and accurately as satire so the reader can see the betrayal at work. Nothing here is an endorsement.