SUNDAY COLUMN—By the time the planes touched down in El Salvador earlier this month, carrying more than two hundred Venezuelan migrants to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the United States had already crossed a threshold from which there may be no easy return.
The Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act—a dusty relic of 1798, last wielded with any seriousness during the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War—marked not just a legal maneuver but a profound rupture in the norms that once governed America’s approach to immigration.
Exiled to Torture Prison
It was a gesture of raw power, a signal that the nation’s long-standing, if imperfect, commitment to due process and human dignity could be discarded with the flick of a pen. And it is only the beginning. The consequences of this broken norm are cascading across the country and beyond its borders, revealing a system unmoored from its own principles.
These Venezuelan men—many of wh…
