The Department of Homeland Security disclosed Wednesday that Jose Chajon-Raxon, a citizen of Guatemala, died after suffering a seizure at Delaney Hall, the privately administered immigration jail in Newark; and the department offered its explanation for the silence that lasted more than three weeks. Because ICE was not notified after the man was transferred to a hospital and released from ICE custody on July 22, the death was not announced. “Per ICE policy, when an individual is no longer in ICE custody then ICE will no longer be responsible for monitoring or reviewing deaths that may occur,” the statement read. “This is common sense.”
The sentence is the whole of the doctrine. The sovereign’s authority over the alien within the territory is plenary — a power the Framers lodged in the political branches without qualification, one the Supreme Court has affirmed from Chae Chan Ping forward as a necessary consequence of sovereignty — and the responsibilities that attend authority are measured by the same instrument that measures the authority: custody. While the household holds the guest under its roof, the guest is within the wall, and the household keeps its ledger for him. The moment the guest is released, he has passed beyond the wall, and what happens beyond the wall is not the household’s to audit. A responsibility that never ended would be no responsibility at all; a government that reviewed the death of every alien it had ever processed would be a government with no gates, no terms, no common sense. The apostle writes that each man shall bear his own burden. The household’s burden runs only to what the household has taken into its keeping, and the keeping ended at the hospital door.
The household’s standing does not depend on what occurs beyond the wall. The alien who entered without the sovereign’s deed holds no place in the household; the household’s relationship to him, while it held him, was the keeper’s charge — to feed, to house, to transport, to release when the term ends. It was never a relation of followers. The same common sense that this publication’s report on the change to death-reporting rules documented earlier this month runs through every line of the department’s statement: the gate is the gate, and the ledger closes at the gate.
While the department was composing its sentence about common sense, in the same month, in the same walled order, a man’s body was failing in Newark.
Jose Chajon-Raxon was processed into Delaney Hall on July 18. He was a citizen of Guatemala, and the file does not trouble itself with more. On July 19, a day after processing, his body began to seize.
A convulsive seizure is the flesh turning against its own order. The electrical storm rolls through the brain without the man’s permission; consciousness is gone in the first second, and the muscles receive their commands from a province that no longer answers to the will. The jaw clenches. The back arches. The arms and legs contract and release in the rhythm the storm sets, striking the floor of the cell, the frame of the bunk, the metal of the door. The breath stops with the first massive contraction and does not return while the storm lasts — and the seconds pass, each one a countdown the lungs cannot measure, as the face darkens from flush to dusk to blue, the oxygen in the blood spent, the tongue caught between the teeth bleeding into the froth at the corner of the mouth. When the storm finally passes, the body lies in the stillness that follows — unconscious, breathing shallow if it breathes at all — and the brain, which has just spent its electrical capital, is the one organ that cannot say what it has lost.
The staff of the private jail took him to a hospital. The record does not name the hospital. On July 22, three days after the seizure, ICE released him from custody. The form was marked, the entry made, the term of the sovereign’s responsibility complete, and the body passed, in the language of the ledger, beyond the wall.
At some hour the record does not supply, Jose Chajon-Raxon died. The department did not say when. It did not say what occurred after the transfer. It did not say whether he was released from the hospital before the end, whether he died in a bed watched by strangers, or in a corridor, or in a room where no one knew his name. More than three weeks passed before the disclosure was made, and it was made because the policy had been asked, not because the system noticed. The death was never an entry in the ledger; it was an event that occurred after the wall, in the place where the household keeps no books. The body that had convulsed on the detention floor lay still wherever it lay; the heart that had pounded through the storm had stopped; the lungs had made their last exchange; the blood, no longer moved by any command, settled in the dependent veins and began to cool.
He stood outside the covenant. That is the whole of the judgment, and it does not require the hour of the death, the name of the hospital, or the color of the sheet. The household’s provision runs to its members, and to the guest only for the term of the guest’s stay under the roof. He was a citizen of Guatemala, never a member, and the bounds of his habitation were fixed long before Delaney Hall received him — fixed by the same hand that “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,” and Guatemala, not New Jersey, was the address his standing carried. The law of the household fixes the bounds of its keeping. On July 22, he passed beyond them.
The officers who transferred him and the officers who released him were not the failure of the system; they were the system, operating according to standing. The custody that ended at the hospital door was the wall performing its office: the wall does not follow the body it has let go, any more than the house audits the traveler who has passed through the gate and gone down the road. The man who dies without a record does not die outside providence. The same order that admitted him to the jail and delivered him to the hospital delivered him, on July 22, into whatever held him after — and whatever held him after was not the household.
His death is not the cost of the policy. It is the disclosure the policy produces: the visible proof that a man who entered the country without the sovereign’s deed, and whom the sovereign never received as a member, was always outside the house even while the house held his body. The household kept him while it kept him. It did not keep him after it let him go. The wall runs between the columns. He stands outside it. The ledger is settled.