The authority by which a sovereign removes an alien from its territory is plenary, has been plenary since the founding, and was recognized as plenary by the Supreme Court of the United States in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), which Justice Field wrote for a unanimous Court when he held that the government of the United States, in the exercise of its sovereignty, may remove from its territory any alien whose presence it deems injurious to its interests. The Immigration and Nationality Act, § 241(b)(2)(C), permits the Attorney General to remove an alien to a country other than the country of origin when that country will receive him, and the third-country provision is the mechanism by which the executive discharges its removal obligations when bilateral arrangements make direct removal the disposition the executive does not choose. The arrangement Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo confirmed on Wednesday — by which 2,284 Mexican nationals deported from the United States have been admitted to Guatemala in transit and returned to Mexican territory within twenty-four hours — is the exercise of that authority through ordinary diplomatic channels. Guatemala receives them because Mexico coordinates the return; Mexico accepts the return because the obligation of repatriation belongs to the country of nationality under the principles the Foreign Relations Ministry itself invoked; the United States pays, in some cases, the cost the transit incurs. President Arévalo was precise to note that the arrangement is not a safe third-country agreement in the technical sense — the men and women in Guatemalan custody are in transit, not asylum-seekers, and the transit terminates in Mexico, not Guatemala. The third-country arrangements the administration has concluded since January 2025 — the arrangement with Liberia for up to 1,200 third-country deportees, and the further bilateral arrangements the press has documented — are applications of the same principle at greater remove. The routing of Mexican nationals through Guatemala is the application of the same principle in another direction. The arrangement is not new in law. It is new in operation. The operation is the restoration the plenary authority requires.
While the State Department was managing its diplomatic arrangements and Guatemalan immigration officers were preparing the transit facility the bilateral coordination had designated, the Mexican nationals whose names appeared on the manifests were already on the planes.
We will call him nothing. We will leave his state in Mexico unnamed. He had left his country because the order he lived under had become an order he could not live under, and the reasons were the reasons that drive men north. He had walked through the country whose checkpoints he could not name for the men who had been killed at them, and he had reached the United States, and he had been taken into custody at the border. The immigration court had continued his case. He had been released into the country on the conditions the court set — to report, to appear, to remain within the jurisdiction. He had lived for years in a city in the interior. He had worked in a restaurant kitchen, the one place the documents would let him work. He had a daughter born in the country he lived in, a daughter who was an American citizen by birth. The daughter was three years old when her father last held her.
Then the email arrived at the Department of Homeland Security, and the routing was determined. ICE officers came for him at the apartment he had rented. They came in the early morning, the way the officers come. They did not announce themselves at length. They bound his wrists behind his back with the plastic strap the officers carry for the purpose. They did not tell him where he was being taken. They walked him to the van. The van drove to the holding facility. The facility held what the walls of such facilities hold — the men who had been gathered from the interior, the men who had been gathered from the border, the men who had been brought in from the other facilities across the country.
The man entered the facility weighing one hundred and seventy pounds. The food came irregularly and it went bad. The drinking water was the drinking water of such facilities. The lights did not go out. He did not sleep more than three hours a night for the first two weeks; thereafter he did not sleep more than two. He developed a cough the officers did not examine. He reported chest pain to a contractor nurse and was given two ibuprofen. He lost seventeen pounds in the first month. He developed diarrhea that lasted eleven days from the water; he was given electrolyte powder on the seventh day and was not seen again by medical staff. He stopped eating on the nineteenth day because his stomach would not hold the food. He vomited blood on the twenty-third day. He was not taken to a hospital. He was moved to a closer observation cell where he could be watched. He continued to vomit. The weight continued to fall. He weighed one hundred and thirty-one pounds when the plane carried him south.
The plane carried him across the Gulf of Mexico, across the Caribbean, across Guatemala, and put down at the air field the receiving country had designated for the purpose. Guatemalan immigration officers were waiting at the bottom of the stairs. They took him from the plane to the transit facility the receiving country had prepared for the purpose. He was unable to stand upright under his own weight. Two officers carried him by the arms. He was placed on a mat on a concrete floor in a room with dozens of other men. The other men were from other countries — Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans themselves, Nigerians, Venezuelans — men whose own removals had been arranged through the same architecture. The food came irregularly. The water came from a tap. He could not keep the water. The diarrhea returned. The officers came through every four hours; the officers came with batons; the officers did not speak to the men they struck. He lay on the mat for nineteen hours. At the twentieth hour he was unable to rise. The officers carried him to the bus. The bus drove to the border the bilateral coordination had selected. The border crossing placed him in Mexican custody. Mexican immigration officers processed him into Mexican territory at a point the coordination had named. He was given water and a paper. He was told to go. He sat on the ground at the crossing for two hours before he could stand. He was taken to a public hospital by a man from a charitable organization. The hospital admitted him for dehydration, malnutrition, and gastrointestinal hemorrhage. He remained in the hospital for six days.
He weighed one hundred and nineteen pounds at discharge. The hospital released him to the street. He had no address. He had no family in the city. He slept in a shelter. He did not eat for two days.
His daughter remained where she had been born. She remained in the country that had held her father for the years he had raised her. She remained an American citizen, three years old and three hours by plane from a country her father had been returned to without her.
After her father was taken, the daughter stopped eating solid food. She refused the foods her father had given her. She woke in the night and cried for periods of forty minutes to two hours. She would not be held by her mother, who had become unavailable. She was placed with a maternal aunt. The aunt worked two jobs. The daughter was left with a neighbor during the day. She lost two pounds in the first month. She stopped speaking in complete sentences. She urinated on herself at night. She was seen by a pediatrician who noted failure to thrive and developmental regression. She was referred to a state agency. She entered the foster system at forty months. She was moved between three placements in the first nine months. She did not attach to the foster parents. She did not sleep through the night. She began to bang her head against the wall of the foster home at thirty-eight months, a behavior the developmental clinician advised the foster parents was consistent with the documented pattern of regressive and self-injurious conduct in children whose primary attachment has been removed by parental deportation, the same pattern documented across the re-separated children the companion reporting in this publication has covered despite the landmark settlement meant to prevent it.
She was forty-six months old when the last placement returned her to the maternal aunt. The aunt did not have a bed for her. The aunt slept on the floor with the daughter. The daughter did not speak her father’s name.
The wall runs between the two standings the operation established, and the wall holds.
The Mexican national stands outside the wall by the operation of the law of his birth. His presence in the territory of the United States was a privilege the sovereign extended at the sovereign’s discretion; the privilege has been withdrawn according to the procedure the statute prescribes; the procedure has been executed through the bilateral channels the executive selected; he has been returned to the place his nationality assigned him. He is, by the standing the law assigns, a foreign national whose removal the plenary authority covers and the third-country provision implements. The receiving country received him. The order he lives under is again the order he lived under before he left. The wall is whole on his side. The Mexican government’s communication to U.S. authorities of its opposition to the third-country routing, and its view that every Mexican citizen has the right to enter the country, stands in the record. The objection does not alter the standing the law assigns him, and the standing does not wait on the objection.
The U.S.-citizen daughter stands inside the wall by the operation of the law of the soil. She is an American citizen by the place of her birth; her citizenship is not contingent on her father’s presence; her father’s removal does not vacate her standing; she remains within the territory of the United States; she remains within the household the law assigns her. The household kept her. The household received her back from the foster placements the absence of her father produced. She will grow in the country of her birth. She will come of age in the country of her birth. The wall is whole on her side.
The wall runs between the daughter in the country of her birth and the father in the country the bilateral coordination returned him to. The wall does not consult the daughter’s tears.
Scripture names the boundary the operation enforces. Paul told the Athenians that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.” The sovereign who arranges the routing through a third country acts within the order that assigns each person to the place Providence has fixed. The father has been returned to the place his nationality assigned him. The daughter remains in the place her birth assigned her. The receiving country received him. The household received her. The two standings do not converge. The ledger is settled.