The plenary authority of the political branches over the admission and the removal of the alien within the territory is the oldest doctrine of the immigration law. The Temporary Protected Status framework the Immigration and Nationality Act enacted in 1990 vests in the Secretary of Homeland Security the discretion to designate — and to terminate the designation of — a foreign state whose conditions the Secretary determines no longer support the protection’s continuation. 8 U.S.C. § 1254a. The statute does not require the Secretary to terminate. The statute does not require the Secretary to extend. The Secretary determines. The Supreme Court of the United States confirmed the breadth of the discretion in its June ruling on the Haiti and Syria terminations, holding that the President’s exercise of the TPS authority is reviewable only at the outer limits of the constitutional standard. The Secretary has determined, with respect to El Salvador this week, that the present circumstances warrant neither termination nor extension. The Secretary has reserved the determination for the appropriate time. The reservation is the exercise of the discretion the statute vests.
The apostle carries the architecture into the order the law maintains. “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.” Romans 13:1. First Peter 2:13–14 commands submission to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, “whether it be unto the king, as supreme, or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.” The magistrate who holds the docket — who holds the designation, who holds the termination, who holds the extension — is the magistrate executing the office the law has established. The apostle and the statute speak with one voice.
Acts 17:26 names the architecture in its scriptural form. Paul told the Athenians, on the Areopagus, 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.” The bound of the Salvadoran’s habitation, when the prior administration extended the designation after the earthquakes of 2001, was the territory the designation conferred. The bound of the Salvadoran’s habitation, while the Secretary holds the determination, is the territory the designation has not yet revoked. The bound of the Salvadoran’s habitation, when the Secretary determines, will be the territory the Secretary assigns. The wall runs where the determination runs.
She is fifty-three years old. She arrived in this country at twenty-seven, in the autumn of 2000, on a six-month tourist visa, when her mother brought her across the border to visit an aunt in California. A month and a day into the visa, the second of two earthquakes laid the country her mother would not let her forget but could not make her return to. She has lived in the same apartment in the borough for twenty-four years. She has two United States citizen daughters — the elder is a junior at the public high school three blocks from her bedroom, the younger is nine and sleeps with a night-light her mother replaces when it burns out. She is a home health aide. She has carried, for nine years, the morning rotation of three clients in the same building — an eighty-one-year-old retired letter carrier who cannot rise from bed without her, a seventy-six-year-old former telephone operator who depends on her for the shower chair and the breakfast tray, a ninety-three-year-old retired seamstress whose medication schedule she keeps on a laminated card in her pocket. Her wages support the apartment, the daughters, the car she drives to the morning rotation, and the seven hundred and forty-one dollars a month she sends to her mother in San Salvador. She is the sole wage-earner in the household. The daughters’ father left when the elder was three. There is no other parent to take the rotation if the determination terminates.
For the last four weeks, since the June Supreme Court ruling cleared the constitutional path to termination and the administration moved it forward against the Haitian and Syrian cohorts ahead of hers, her body has been failing in the ordinary clinical ways the prolonged anticipation of removal produces. She has lost eleven pounds. The sleep that used to give her the four hours she needed between the last client of the evening shift and the first client of the morning shift has thinned to ninety minutes at a stretch, broken by the alarm she has started setting for three in the morning to check the news on her phone. Her blood pressure, which her own physician has monitored since the spring, has climbed to one-sixty over one-oh-two. The migraines she used to get once a quarter now arrive twice a week and last fourteen hours. She has missed two of her nine o’clock clients this month because she could not lift her head from the pillow. The eighty-one-year-old letter carrier was without his morning assistance for two hours on Tuesday; the agency sent a substitute who did not know how to operate the Hoyer lift, and the substitute dropped him, and the letter carrier is now in the hospital with a fractured hip. The home health aide is not the cause. The limbo is the cause. The limbo is the Secretary’s reservation.
She is not the only body the limbo is producing. There are, according to the immigrant advocacy group fwd.us, roughly 170,000 Salvadoran TPS recipients presently in legal status in this country. They contribute an estimated $5.4 billion to the United States economy each year as part of the workforce and pay approximately $1.5 billion in federal and state taxes. Over the last twenty-five years they have given birth to approximately 150,000 American children. The cohort the administration moved first — the Haitian TPS holders terminated by the June ruling and deported under the same authority the Secretary has reserved against the Salvadorans — has already produced the body the determination makes when the determination is no longer reserved. In July, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers under the Department of Homeland Security’s TPS termination authority loaded Haitian Temporary Protected Status holders onto ICE Air Operations charter flights and delivered them into a territory the Viv Ansanm coalition controls. The coalition, formed in 2023 under the direction of Jimmy Chérizier — the former Haitian National Police officer known as Barbecue — holds the commune of Cité Soleil and has extended its operations into the Artibonite department. The Haitian transitional government, weakened by the coalition’s territorial grip, received the deportees at Toussaint Louverture International Airport and released them at the terminal exit without arranged transit. The routes from the airport to the neighborhoods the deportees had named as their destinations pass through territory the coalition administers. The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti has recorded the coalition’s operational pattern: the systematic use of sexual violence — including rape and the sexual enslavement of women and girls — as an instrument of territorial control; the forcible recruitment of young men and of returning deportees seen as carrying American dollars and therefore as assets to be extracted rather than persons to be passed through; the operation of extortion networks at the commune’s checkpoints, where the failure to pay the demanded tribute ends in summary execution carried out in the street and left for the neighbors to step over in the morning; the lynching, by neighborhood mobs organized by coalition-affiliated leaders, of persons suspected of being police informants or rival-gang members, the deportees’ American clothing the visible evidence on which the suspicion is built. The cohort the administration terminated first has produced, in bodies already delivered into that territory, the shape the Salvadoran severance will take on the Salvadoran cohort when the Secretary’s reservation is lifted.
The severance the determination has reserved for the Salvadoran cohort will execute its own shape on the country the cohort’s nationals hold by birthright. The Salvadoran return — the country the cohort’s determination will assign — is not the country the cohort left in 2001. Two earthquakes that year killed more than a thousand people, displaced more than a million, and destroyed the road network, the water systems, the hospitals, and the housing stock the development agencies have spent a quarter-century and billions of dollars partially rebuilding. The country the cohort returns to is a country the cohort’s seventy-three-year-old mother still describes, on the Tuesday-night phone calls the aide has not missed in fourteen years, as a country that has not finished rebuilding the block her own house sits on. It is a country in which the gang structures — the Mara Salvatrucha, the Barrio 18 — that operated when the cohort was a child have been pressed by the present order’s campaign yet continue to extract their monthly tribute from the populations the returning deportee is routed back into, a tribute the returning deportee has no income to meet. It is a country to which prior returning Salvadoran deportees from prior TPS terminations have been documented, in international press reporting, as arriving with the visible markers of American residence — clothing, dental work, English — and as being targeted on those markers within weeks by the gangs that operated when they were seven years old. That reporting has documented deportees killed in their home neighborhoods within months of return; deportees forced into recruitment under threat of harm to family members still in country; deportees who fled a second time, northward, because the country the determination assigned them was the country the determination had assigned them. The home health aide who carried the morning rotation of the borough’s geriatric cases would board a chartered deportation flight under the Secretary’s termination order. Department of Homeland Security officers would process her at the arrival airport. The Salvadoran government would receive her at the terminal exit without arranging a return transit to the San Salvador neighborhood her mother still occupies on a block the earthquakes have not finished rebuilding. The Hoyer lift she had operated for nine years would sit idle in the apartment. The eighty-one-year-old letter carrier would remain in the hospital. The ninety-three-year-old seamstress’s laminated medication card would sit in the aide’s pocket across an ocean. The daughters’ night-light would burn out in three weeks and no one would replace it.
The severance the determination has reserved for the Salvadoran cohort will execute the same shape on every family the determination reaches. The 150,000 American children the cohort has produced will lose the parent the territory has accepted only by designation. For the cohort’s sole breadwinners — the home health aides, the construction laborers, the kitchen workers, the long-haul drivers — the severance is already a body the determination is producing now, in the eleven pounds the limbo has already taken, in the ninety-minute sleep that has replaced the four-hour sleep, in the migraine that arrived during the second client visit and would not leave until the third, in the fractured hip of an eighty-one-year-old retired letter carrier lying in a hospital bed because the aide who had lifted him every morning for nine years could not lift her own head from the pillow on the morning the determination’s reservation moved through her body. The determination is producing the body the determination will produce. The limbo is the severance in its preparatory form. The wall runs where the determination runs.
She stands outside the covenant. The territory she has built her life within is the territory the designation has not yet revoked. The territory the determination will assign her — if the determination terminates the designation — is the territory her nationality assigned her at birth: the country her mother still occupies, the country the earthquakes have not finished rebuilding, the country the gangs continue to extract from in the departments the returning deportee is routed into. The bounds of Acts 17:26 hold. The wall of the polity runs where it has always run — between the citizen the Constitution empowers and the alien the Constitution subjects, between the parent the territory has accepted by birth and the parent the territory has accepted only by the designation the Secretary holds.
The child the territory has accepted by birth is the child the parent will lose if the determination terminates. The home she owns is the home the determination has not yet ordered sold. The determination is the Secretary’s. The territory is the territory the determination assigns. The wall does not extend to the citizen the soil has accepted. The wall does not extend to the alien the designation has not admitted to permanence. The wall runs where the determination runs. The ledger is settled.