The sovereign’s authority over the alien within the 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, 130 U.S. 581 (1889), when Justice Field, writing for a unanimous Court, held that the government may remove from its territory any alien whose presence it deems injurious to its interests. That authority extends, by the structure of the case, to every lesser measure by which the sovereign administers the alien’s standing within the territory: the determination of admissibility at the port of entry, the issuance of the visa at the consular post abroad, the revocation of the visa when the conditions of its issuance are shown to have been misrepresented or no longer satisfied.

The Immigration and Nationality Act distinguishes the immigrant visa from the nonimmigrant visa by a single declarative principle. The nonimmigrant visa is the visa of the visitor, whose presence is temporary and whose intent is to depart. The immigrant visa is the visa of the one who intends to remain. The distinction is the law’s foundational taxonomy of the alien’s standing within the territory. The B1 and B2 classifications — business and tourism — are the nonimmigrant visas in their purest form. The applicant swears, on the application itself, that the visit is temporary and that the applicant intends to return. To apply for asylum after admission is to confess, in the State’s reading, that the original oath was untrue, that the visit was the prelude to a permanent stay, and that the privilege was used for the purpose opposite to the one for which it was conferred.

The State Department is preparing to revoke the B1 and B2 visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum in the United States, according to State Department documents and officials whose disclosure The Associated Press reported on Saturday. The action, if carried out, would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history. The scope spans the 2016-to-2026 issuance period. The State Department will coordinate the revocations with the Department of Homeland Security. “We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said in the written statement the AP obtained. The statement names the doctrine the action enforces.

This is the office of the steward. Scripture has always read the privilege as a stewardship, and the steward as the servant who uses what has been entrusted to him according to the purpose for which it was entrusted. The lord in the parable delivered to his servants the talents according to their ability, and at his return he required of them what they had done with what was given (Matthew 25:14–30). The servant who buried the talent in the ground was cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. The servant who used the talent as the master intended was made ruler over many things. The principle the parable declares is the principle the State Department now applies: a privilege entrusted for a specified purpose must be used for that purpose, and the privilege is revoked when the use discloses that the privilege was never honored. The Immigration and Nationality Act, at § 214(b), embeds the same principle in positive law. The applicant for a B visa must demonstrate, to the satisfaction of the consular officer, that the applicant has a residence abroad which the applicant has no intention of abandoning. The visa is issued on the strength of that demonstration. The asylum application, when it follows, demonstrates the opposite. The privilege was held for a purpose that was not its purpose. The State Department has acted, with the 200,000-name list it now prepares, on the demonstration the application itself supplied.

The legal authority for the action is unambiguous. 22 CFR 41.122 authorizes the Secretary of State to revoke a visa at any time, in the Secretary’s discretion. The doctrine of consular nonreviewability, affirmed in the long line of cases the Court has sustained from Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537 (1950), forward, holds that no court shall review a consular officer’s decision to issue or to refuse a visa; the doctrine extends, by the same logic, to the Secretary’s decision to revoke. The plenary power over aliens is the foundational doctrine the constitutional order lodged in the political branches without qualification. The administration has done what the prior two decades avoided doing. It has executed the revocation the statute authorizes, on the scale the misrepresentation requires. The action is not new in law. The action is new in operation, and the operation is the restoration the plenary authority requires.

While the State Department prepared the list and worked through the names the database held, the men and women whose visa numbers appeared in the system were already in the country they had come to.

He had come on a B2 visa in the autumn of 2018, from Caracas, to visit a brother who had left Caracas two years before and who had said there was room. He had landed at the airport the visa said he would land at, in the city the visa said he would visit. He had been, in Caracas, a young man who had posted criticism of the Maduro government on a public forum — the corruption, the security services, the scarcities the country had come to live among. Officers of the Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional — the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, the SEBIN — had arrested him in the winter of 2017. They had taken him to El Helicoide, the eleven-story spiral of offices and detention cells in central Caracas that human-rights monitors have documented for years. They had kept him in an isolation cell the former prisoners have called La Tumba — the Tomb — a windowless box some two meters by three, with a concrete bench and a bucket for the body’s purposes and a light bulb the guards controlled from outside. They had beaten him with the fists and the batons the monitors have described in prior testimony. They had placed a plastic bag over his head and held it until his lungs emptied of breath. They had refused him food on certain days and water on certain days and sleep on certain nights. They had warned him, on his release, that the next arrest would not end in release. He had come north because the warning was a warning, and because a brother who had left two years before had said there was room.

He had filed for asylum four months after he arrived, on the ground that the service had arrested him, had detained him, had beaten him, and had warned him. The asylum office had found his fear credible on the record the monitors have used in similar cases. The case had continued from one year to the next, the continuances the immigration court had entered on grounds no one disputed. He had worked, for the years the case permitted him to work, in a warehouse in a city the record does not trouble itself to keep. He had a daughter born in the country he lived in — a daughter who was an American citizen by the place of her birth, and who was five years old when the State Department’s database recorded that his B2 visa was no longer valid.

The revocation reached him as such revocations reach their subjects — in a notice that informed him that the visa he had been admitted under had been cancelled, that the cancellation was final, that the cancellation was effective immediately, and that he was required to depart. The notice offered no hearing on the underlying question. The notice did not address the asylum application that remained pending. The notice treated the application as itself the proof that the original oath had been untrue — the State, in the State’s reading, was acting on the demonstration the application itself supplied. He consulted a lawyer who told him what the lawyer told every client the State Department’s list reached: that the visa revocation and the pending asylum case occupied different procedural channels, and that the visa revocation would not pause the case. The case was administratively closed. He had no lawful status. He was, as the immigration code uses the word, removable.

The contract between ICE and the holding facility, when the officers arrived at the apartment in the early morning, required the officers to bind the wrists behind the back with the plastic strap the officers carry for the purpose, and to walk the subject to the waiting vehicle. The vehicle was a van. The van drove to the holding facility. He was given a bed. The bed was a thin mattress on a concrete slab. The lights in the unit remained on at the hours the residential fixtures would have been off. The food arrived on the schedule the contract specified and the meals were the meals the monitors have recorded in reports on these facilities: a starch, a protein, a portion too small to maintain the body weight the man had carried in. The water was the water such facilities supply.

He developed a fever on the ninth day. He reported it to a contractor nurse at the medication window. The nurse gave him two 500-milligram acetaminophen tablets and recorded the report. The fever continued. He developed a cough on the eleventh day. He requested a clinician visit; the request was logged. By the fourteenth day, the coughing produced a trace of blood the mucus carried out of the bronchi the cough had broken. He reported the blood. The contractor nurse gave him an additional two acetaminophen and recorded the report. The contractor’s supervising medical officer did not authorize an in-person examination. The contractor’s supervising medical officer did not authorize transport to an off-site hospital for a chest film or a sputum culture or a complete blood count. The medical log contained the entries the medical logs contain in such facilities: an antipyretic, two acetaminophen, no imaging, no labs, no diagnosis, no escalation. The man had weighed one hundred and forty-one pounds at intake. The man weighed one hundred and nineteen pounds when the plane carried him south, eleven days later. He had lost twenty-two pounds. His eyes had sunk into his face. The cough produced blood each morning.

The flight south carried the manifest of names the State Department had prepared and the diplomatic notes the State Department had sent. The plane landed at the Simón Bolívar International Airport. At the gate, the men who had been waiting received him. They were officers of the Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional. They knew his name. They had been informed, through the diplomatic correspondence the State Department had completed, that the man whose name appeared on the manifest was the man who had testified before the U.S. asylum officer about the arrest and the detention and the beatings and the warning the service had issued at his release. They took him from the gate.

They took him to El Helicoide. They took him to the cells on the upper floors, the cells the former prisoners have called La Tumba. The interrogations continued through the second day. They continued through the third. The methods the SEBIN had applied and the human-rights monitors had recorded were the methods applied. A plastic bag was placed over his head and held until his lungs emptied and his eyes bulged and the guards called him to be revived, and the bag was held again. He was beaten with fists and struck with batons; the blows struck the kidneys, struck the ribs, struck the soft tissue of the abdomen. He was made to stand for hours; he was not permitted to sit; he was not permitted to sleep; he was not fed on certain days and was not given water on certain nights. The food that came came when it came; the body lost the weight the prior prisoners have described in similar accounts. By the fourth day, the urine the man passed was the dark brown of myoglobin from the muscle the beatings had torn. By the sixth, the urine had stopped. The kidneys had failed. The potassium the failing kidneys had ceased to clear rose in the blood; the cardiac muscle developed the arrhythmia the monitors have documented in such casualties. On the seventh day of detention, the cells held a man whose heart had stopped. The heartbeat ceased. The body was placed in a body bag. The body was returned to the family, in Caracas, in the procedure the international mechanisms have recorded. The brother in the apartment was told by telephone.

The daughter remained. The apartment remained. The drawings remained on the refrigerator. The shoes remained by the door.

He stands outside the covenant. The country the plane carried him to is the country his nationality assigned him. The service that received him at the gate is the service that warned him at his release. The privilege he used for the purpose opposite to its grant has been revoked. The man has been returned to the place his standing assigned him.

The B2 visa was a privilege — a permission to enter, conferred for a stated purpose, requiring the oath the State prescribed. The oath named the intent to depart. The asylum application, when it followed, demonstrated that the intent had not been the applicant’s intent. The State revoked the privilege the oath had secured. The revocation named what the application itself disclosed: that the visitor was not a visitor, that the temporary was not temporary, that the privilege had been held for a purpose that was not its purpose. The parable of the talents reads forward into the case: the talent taken is the privilege the steward did not use for the master’s purpose, and the steward is sent into the darkness the parable names.

Scripture names the boundary in the words spoken at Athens — that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” — and the sovereign who revokes the privilege the visitor used for the purpose opposite to its grant acts within the order that assigns each person to the place Providence has fixed. The visa was the permission to visit. The permission has been revoked. The man has been returned to the place his nationality assigned him. The receiving country received him. The member’s house is not a boarding house. The visitor’s standing was the visitor’s standing. The standing has been withdrawn. The ledger is settled.