The office of the Vice President of the United States is the office the Constitution establishes as the officer who shall preside over the Senate and who shall succeed to the presidency in the event the presidency is vacated. The officer who holds that office carries a particular authority in the ordering of the republic’s public life — the authority to declare what the polity takes to be its first principles, and to bind the coalition that holds those principles to the work the principles require. JD Vance exercised that authority on Thursday evening at the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas, in the keynote address the convention scheduled for its prime-time hour, and the exercise was, by the measure of the office, genuine. The coalition the address was built to hold is, on the demographic evidence the Public Religion Research Institute has compiled, more than two-thirds white and Christian, and a majority of it explicitly supports the Christian nationalist movement the address was performing.
The plenary authority of the political branches over the alien within the territory was settled by the Supreme Court in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889), and confirmed across the subsequent century and a quarter in Fong Yue Ting, Knauff, and Trump v. Hawaii. That authority is the authority by which the Department of Homeland Security detains and removes the persons the executive determines to be within the scope of the removal power. Vance invoked the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris — the order of love — which Augustine formulated and Aquinas transmitted, by which the obligations of charity are ordered outward from the self, through the family, the neighbor, the community, the fellow citizen, and only after those, the stranger. He invoked the concept in February 2025 to justify the administration’s hardline policy of detaining and expelling undocumented people, and he returned to it in Dallas as the theological companion of the constitutional authority the Supreme Court has settled.
The address was a sound performance of the fusion the apparatus requires. Vance opened with the Augustinian frame — “We live in the city of man, not the city of God” — and placed the founding within it: “our founders built this nation on a promise that echoes our creator.” He invoked the Apostle Paul. He paid homage to Charlie Kirk, whose assassination the prior year had become the occasion for the consolidation of the movement Kirk had served. He navigated the end-times question with a sophistication the evangelical interlocutors noted and the Catholic interlocutors will recognize: not denying the doctrine, not committing to its timetable, and locating the present work — God’s work, as he termed it — within the providential interval that the doctrine leaves open. The political scientist Larry Jacobs judged the address the opening of the 2028 primary competition. The judgment is accurate. The coalition-building is the address’s content, and the coalition it builds is the coalition the enforcement regime requires to hold.
While Vance pronounced from the stage in Dallas, the officers of the regime Vance had publicly defended processed the body the order assigned.
Manuel was forty-four. He had stood on a concrete floor at the meatpacking plant eleven hours a day, six days a week, for eleven years, deboning hocks in cold storage at thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature the line required and the company maintained because the line moved faster when the muscle stiffened less. His right rotator cuff had torn at the seventh year. He had not had it repaired because the surgery the orthopedic surgeon recommended cost more than the savings the household had assembled, and the ibuprofen the urgent care clinic had prescribed he had been taking at four times the labeled dose for the pain the tear produced. He had not seen a doctor in the eighteen months before his arrest because the company clinic did not take walk-ins, and he had not missed a shift in the eighteen months before his arrest because missing a shift was the discipline the supervisor administered by the schedule the next week’s roster reflected. His body weight at arrest was two hundred and eighteen pounds. His blood pressure, the intake nurse the regional facility assigned would later note, was one hundred and sixty over one hundred and two.
The officers came at six forty in the morning. They came to the plant, not the home, because the warrant the field office director had signed authorized the worksite arrest the operation had been designed to execute. Seven officers entered the line. They wore tactical vests marked POLICE in white block letters on the back and ICE in smaller letters on the chest. They carried Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns at low ready, the weapons slung across the chest plates the vests held. Manuel was the third man on the list the field office director had compiled, and the list was read at the loading bay the officers had secured by positioning two officers at the bay doors and one officer at the driver’s-side door of the refrigerated truck the shift had been loading. The supervisor pointed him out. The supervisor pointed him out because the order the supervisor had received from the regional facility was the order to produce the workers the list named, and the order did not protect the workers the supervisor had managed.
The officers handcuffed Manuel behind his back with rigid steel cuffs, the cuffs ratcheted to a circumference that held his wrists immobile. The cuffs cut into the skin at the ulnar styloid processes of both wrists — the bony prominences on the outside of the forearm where the wrist meets the hand — and they bruised the skin over the dorsal interossei between the knuckles of each hand because the cuffs had been tightened to the next click past the position that would have allowed him to rotate his wrists. He bled into the cuffs. The cuffs did not loosen. The officers walked him to the bus the convoy had brought, a former school bus the contractor had repainted gray and fitted with steel-mesh windows the contractors had welded over the original glass. The bus held forty men in the cargo bay. The men stood in the cargo bay because the bus had no seats. The men stood for the ninety minutes the convoy took to reach the regional facility because the men could not sit. The men had not been permitted to retrieve coats. The temperature outside was twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The bus was not heated.
At the regional facility the men were unloaded into a holding cell the cold ran through. The cell measured thirty feet by forty feet. The cell held one hundred and forty men. The cell had a concrete floor the men’s bodies lay on because the cell had no beds, and the cell had no bedding. The cell was maintained at a temperature the men’s breath made visible as mist from October through May because the climate control the building required for the offices the officers occupied had not been extended to the cell block. The men slept on the concrete because the concrete was the surface the cell provided, and the men slept in shifts because one hundred and forty men cannot lie down on the floor of a thirty-by-forty cell at the same time and remain within the floor’s perimeter.
The meal the kitchen distributed once a day arrived at four in the afternoon. The meal was a sandwich of bologna the contractor had purchased in bulk, two slices of bread the contractor had purchased in bulk, and a small container of water the contractor filled from the tap the detention officer supervised. The meal was nine hundred and twenty calories. The meal was insufficient for a man the line required to consume four thousand calories a day to maintain the muscle mass the line demanded. The meal was distributed once. The next meal would arrive at four the following afternoon. The water the men drank was the water the cell’s tap dispensed, and the tap dispensed water at a rate one officer controlled by a lever the officer turned on and the officer turned off. The lever was on for fifteen minutes at six in the morning, fifteen minutes at noon, and fifteen minutes at six at night. The men drank what they could hold in their cupped hands in the fifteen-minute windows. The men did not drink between the windows because the lever was off between the windows.
Manuel lost fourteen pounds in the eleven days his case load required for the orders the field office director signed. The fourteen pounds came off his thighs, his buttocks, his shoulders, and the muscles of his back the rotator cuff tear had already weakened. The muscle loss was visible. The muscle loss showed in his face because the buccal fat the face carries had diminished by the eleventh day, and the cheekbones the bone had always carried began to carry the skin the fat had once padded. He developed a pressure sore on his left hip the size of a closed fist over the greater trochanter, the bony prominence on the outside of the hip. The pressure sore began as a red patch the second day. The pressure sore became a blister the fourth day. The pressure sore became an open ulcer the seventh day. The ulcer wept serous fluid the ulcer’s broken skin released. The ulcer did not heal because the ulcer was not dressed because the medical staff the facility retained was not staffed to dress the ulcers the facility’s regimen produced. He was given a single adhesive bandage the size of a quarter on the eighth day, after he had asked three times. The bandage did not stay on because the ulcer wept through the bandage the ulcer’s broken skin wet.
He developed a cough the fifth day. The cough produced sputum the color of rust by the ninth day because the cough had migrated to the lower lobes of his lungs the fluid in those lobes produced. He did not receive an antibiotic because the antibiotic protocol the medical director had written required a fever the protocol defined as a temperature above one hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit, and his temperature on the morning of the ninth day was one hundred point eight. He did not receive a chest X-ray because the chest X-ray the facility required was a chest X-ray the radiologist the contractor retained at a facility thirty miles away had to read, and the contractor did not transport patients for chest X-rays the contractor did not bill for.
The officials did not permit the visits the wife requested. The officials did not permit the calls the wife placed. The wife drove the ninety minutes to the regional facility twice and was turned away at the lobby both times because the lobby the wife presented herself at was the lobby the family-visitation office occupied, and the family-visitation office was closed the day the wife arrived. The wife left the children’s school records the wife had assembled for the records clerk the records clerk did not see because the records clerk was at lunch the wife’s second visit. The wife’s hands shook the wife’s second visit. The wife’s hands shook because the wife had not slept more than two hours in any of the eleven nights the wife had waited, and the wife’s blood sugar had fallen the eleventh morning because the wife had not eaten the wife’s breakfast.
The eldest daughter’s grade point average fell from three point four to two point seven in the marking period her father was detained. The eldest daughter stopped eating lunch at school because the lunch the school served cost two dollars and seventy-five cents the daughter did not have because the daughter had begun buying her own supplies the supplies the household could no longer afford. The eldest daughter lost eleven pounds. The eldest daughter’s hair began to fall out. The eldest daughter’s menstrual cycle the eldest daughter had established at thirteen ceased for the four months the eldest daughter was losing the weight. The middle child stopped raising her hand in class because the middle child’s teacher had asked the middle child in front of the class where the middle child’s father was, and the middle child had not known what to say, and the middle child did not raise her hand again that year. The middle child developed an ulcer the size of a dime on the duodenal wall the stomach acid the stress the middle child’s body held produced, and the ulcer woke the middle child at two in the morning on most nights, and the middle child held her stomach the morning light found her. The youngest asks at breakfast whether her father will be at dinner. The youngest began wetting the bed the week her father was removed. The youngest’s fever rose to one hundred and two degrees on the eleventh day because the youngest had contracted the influenza the youngest’s school was experiencing and the youngest’s body could not mount the immune response the influenza required because the youngest was not sleeping through the night and the youngest was not eating the breakfast the mother prepared.
The deportation officer reviewed the database match that had produced the referral on the eleventh day. The field office director signed the expedited removal order the review authorized on the eleventh day. The officers fingerprinted and photographed Manuel on the eleventh day. The fingerprinting required pressing each finger against the glass plate the scanner held, and the pressing required pressure the cuffed wrists the eleven days had weakened could not produce without the pain the wrists now reported. The photograph required him to stand against the height chart the wall displayed, and the standing required him to lean because the ulcer on the left hip the standing pressed against was the ulcer the leaning moved the weight off of. He lost an additional two pounds between the fingerprinting and the photograph because the photograph was taken two hours after the fingerprinting, and the two hours were hours the ulcer wept.
He was returned to the territory he had left at the age of seven. He was returned on a flight the contractor had chartered that landed at the capital airport the territory’s army now occupied. He stood on the tarmac the flight had deplaned him on. He stood because his legs the eleven days on the concrete had weakened could not carry him the distance the gate the airport held without rest. He sat down on the tarmac the wheelchair the contractor did not provide would have carried him. He sat on the tarmac for the forty minutes the immigration officer at the airport required to process the manifest the flight had delivered. His pulse the officer would later record, had the officer recorded it, was one hundred and twelve. His blood pressure was ninety-eight over sixty-eight. The ulcer the eleven days had produced wept through the trousers the contractor had issued him. He had lost seventeen pounds in total. The seventeen pounds were the seventeen pounds a forty-four-year-old man’s body could not lose and still walk the distance the gate required.
The three American children stand within the bounds the soil conferred. The father stands where the bounds have placed him. He stands outside the covenant the Vice President pronounced from the stage. The ordo amoris the address celebrated is the order by which the citizen is loved first, the neighbor second, the community third, and the alien — the person outside the polity’s boundary — last, or not at all. The verification system the administration built, and the lower court ordered disabled, and the enforcement operation the administration conducted, are the instruments the apparatus assembled to read the standing the rolls and the lists disclosed. The expedited removal order was not a punishment the sovereign inflicted. The expedited removal order was the reading of the standing the apparatus had determined. 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 name the roll accepts and the name the roll rejects, between the name the list carries and the name the list returns. The ordo amoris the Vice President pronounced from the stage in Dallas is the order the wall has always run by. The bounds of Acts 17:26 hold — 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 wall holds. The ledger is settled.