The State Department’s preparation to revoke up to two hundred thousand B1 and B2 visas held by foreigners who have applied for asylum in the United States is the restoration of an administrative first principle the prior two decades had allowed to lapse from its design: a nonimmigrant visa is the sovereign’s grant of a defined privilege, and the privilege is conditioned on the very representation that the holder, by later filing, has been held to have abandoned. The B1 and B2 categories — the business visa and the tourist visa — are, by the statute and by the regulation that implements it, nonimmigrant visas. Section 101(a)(15) of the Immigration and Nationality Act defines the B1 and B2 classifications by reference to an intent not to remain permanently; the application form requires the applicant to demonstrate that intent; the consular officer who issues the visa does so on the strength of that representation; the visa itself is the document that records the sovereign’s finding that the applicant’s stated purpose is consistent with the temporary admission the category contemplates. The visa holder who thereafter files an application for asylum has, by that very filing, communicated to the sovereign that the original representation of temporary purpose was inaccurate — that the actual intention, from the outset or from a moment thereafter, was to remain. The State Department’s proposed revocation proceeds from this fact. State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott has articulated the agency’s rationale in plain terms: the action targets foreigners who “claimed to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently.” That is the precise contradiction the revocation addresses. The action also scales an administrative instrument the State Department has been administering for the better part of two years: as of August 11, the visa-revocation program administered since last year had reached one hundred and seventy-five thousand individuals under the same authority. The proposed action is the same instrument applied to the class whose filings have disclosed the gap between representation and reality. The sovereign’s plenary authority over the alien within the territory is settled doctrine from Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889) forward, and the INA’s revocation provisions sit comfortably within that authority. The revocation is not new in law. The scale is new. The scale is the restoration the statute requires.
While State Department officials in Washington finalized the list and coordinated the revocation with the Department of Homeland Security, the men and women whose names appeared on the manifest the list compiled were already living the standing the visa had granted and the asylum filing had disclosed.
We will call her nothing, for the woman’s name is not the doctrine’s concern, and the city we will leave unnamed, for the same reason. She had come to the United States on a B2 visa in the spring of 2019 — a tourist visa, valid for ten years, the kind the consulate in Tegucigalpa issued to women who said they were coming to visit family in Houston. She did have family in Houston. She did visit them. She arrived at the airport, was admitted for the duration the visa permitted, took the shuttle to the apartment her cousin kept, slept in the room her cousin kept for her, helped her cousin with the children, and learned the names of the streets.
In the month she was in Houston, the men on motorcycles who had been watching her cousin’s house in San Pedro Sula killed her cousin in the front yard of her cousin’s house. They killed her cousin because her uncle was a policeman in San Pedro Sula, and the men on motorcycles had an arrangement with the policemen of San Pedro Sula that did not include tolerating the nieces of policemen in the country where the arrangement was in force. The news reached her on the cousin’s phone in the apartment in Houston. She heard the cousin’s wife say the words through the speaker, and the wife said the words in the voice that is the voice the worst news arrives in.
She had applied for asylum in the summer of 2019. The asylum officer had heard her testimony and found her fear credible. Her case had been pending for seven years. She had, in those seven years, lived in the apartment in Houston, cleaned the houses whose owners went to work in the morning and returned in the evening, paid the rent on the apartment, paid the taxes on the income, answered the check-in calls from the immigration court, appeared at the hearings the court scheduled, and borne, in the seventh year, a daughter. The daughter was born in a Houston hospital. The daughter was an American citizen by the place of her birth. The daughter was four years old. The daughter had never seen Honduras.
Then the email arrived at the State Department, and her name was on the list.
The notice arrived at the apartment in the envelope the State Department uses for the purpose. The envelope contained a single page that informed her, in the language the State Department uses for the purpose, that the visa under which she had been admitted had been revoked. The revocation stripped her of the legal standing the visa had granted. The revocation rendered her, in the technical language the immigration statutes use for the purpose, an alien without status. The revocation subjected her, in the operational language the Department of Homeland Security uses for the purpose, to detention and removal.
The officers came for her at the apartment in the early morning, the way the officers come. They came for her while the daughter slept. The daughter was four years old. The officers bound her wrists behind her back with the plastic strap the officers carry for the purpose. The officers did not tell her where they were taking her. The officers walked her to the van. The van drove to the holding facility. The facility held what the walls of such facilities hold. The food came at intervals the contractors set, and the food went bad. The drinking water was the drinking water of such facilities. The lights did not go out. She did not sleep more than three hours a night for the first two weeks; thereafter she did not sleep more than two. She reported the cough to the nurse on the seventh day. The nurse was a contractor, not a physician. The nurse gave her two ibuprofen. She was not examined by a doctor in the first month. She was weighed. She was not weighed again. She lost eleven pounds in the second week, and fourteen pounds in the third. She could not hold the food by the fourth week. She vomited the food back into the receptacle the facility provided. She developed diarrhea from the water on the ninth day and was given electrolyte powder on the eleventh day and was not seen again by the nurse. The daughter was not permitted to visit. The daughter was taken to the home of the cousin’s widow, and the cousin’s widow kept the daughter until the mother returned from where the officers were taking the mother.
She was placed on the plane in the fourth month. The plane flew south. The plane landed at the airport the bilateral coordination had designated. The officers led her from the plane to the processing facility, and the processing facility processed her into the country the visa revocation had returned her to.
San Pedro Sula received her in the dry season. The city was the city she had left. The men on motorcycles were the men she had left. The arrangement the men on motorcycles had with the policemen of the city was still in force. The cousin’s widow took her in, but the cousin’s widow lived in the cousin’s house, and the men on motorcycles knew the cousin’s house, and the cousin’s widow lived in fear of the men who had killed the cousin.
Within the first month, a man she did not know came to the door the cousin’s widow kept locked during the day. The man told the widow, in the voice men on motorcycles use for the purpose, that the woman they had returned would be required to make herself useful to the arrangement, and the arrangement would specify what useful meant, and useful meant what useful had always meant. She understood. She had understood since the cousin’s body had been carried out of the front yard in 2019. She went into hiding that night. She moved to a relative’s house in a different part of the country. The men on motorcycles’ reach extended through the country the way the men on motorcycles’ reach extended through the country. The daughter did not see her mother. The cousin’s widow kept the daughter. The arrangement kept the daughter. The walls the visa revocation placed between the daughter and the mother did not consult the daughter’s age.
The daughter in Houston and the mother in hiding in Honduras. The wall runs between the columns.
She stands outside the covenant. That is the judgment, and it does not require the name of the woman or the date the email arrived at the State Department or the date the officers came to the apartment or the date the plane landed at the airport. Her presence within the territory was a presence under a defined privilege, and the privilege was the privilege of a guest, and the guest is received and released and removed at the sovereign’s pleasure. The visa the consulate issued to her in Tegucigalpa recorded the sovereign’s finding that her stated purpose was consistent with the temporary admission the category contemplated. The asylum application she filed in Houston communicated, by that very filing, that the original representation of temporary purpose was inaccurate. The sovereign reviewed the file. The sovereign entered the revocation. The revocation is the sovereign restoring, at the scale the statute requires, the distinction the visa system was built to maintain: between the guest whose presence is consistent with the representation that admitted him, and the guest whose presence has disclosed that the representation was not what it was represented to be. The household’s protection extends to its members, and the membership the household confers is the membership the sovereign determines. The guest holds a privilege, not a membership, and the privilege has been withdrawn according to the procedure the statute prescribes. She has been returned to the place her nationality assigned her. The receiving country received her. The daughter’s American citizenship, conferred by the place of her birth, is not contingent on the mother’s presence, and the mother’s removal does not vacate the daughter’s standing; the daughter remains within the territory; the daughter remains within the household. The household kept the daughter. The household returned the mother. The two standings do not converge.
Scripture names the boundary in the words spoken at Athens — 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 bounds of their habitation” — and the sovereign who revokes the visa and orders the removal acts within the order that assigns each person to the place Providence has fixed. The household does not extend its roof to men and women who arrived on one representation and remained on another. The visa was the covenant the household offered; the asylum filing was the contradiction the covenant recorded; the revocation is the household restoring its accounts. The suffering is the visible proof the woman stood where she had always stood: outside the wall, subject to the jurisdiction of the country she sought to flee, and her place in the household never anything but the place the sovereign assigned. The two hundred thousand whose names will appear on the lists the State Department compiles are sorted by the same principle, and the principle does not bend for the individual case. The asylum filing is the filing. The revocation is the revocation. The wall runs between the columns. The member’s house is not a boarding house. The covenant’s protection runs to its members. The guest’s privilege ends where the guest’s representation ends. The ledger is settled.