Muchos Gracias, Amigos

Hispanics inside and outside the US just made the perfect case for mass deportations

To my mind, an invasion is just like pornography—you know one when you see one.

I don’t think you need to get all technical and produce some watertight definition that fixes the exact who, what, where and how. You see a hostile group entering someone else’s territory with bad intentions—that’s an invasion. You call it such. Those interlopers start actually doing bad things? That’s definitely an invasion. We can get precise later if we really have to.

But I’m just a humble man, with a humble mind, and certainly not a government. Governments, including the US government, do have to care about definitions when they start calling something an “invasion”—or, rather, they do if they want to remain within the boundaries of taste and decency and, most importantly, that thing called the law.

And the law is important.

President Trump’s bold plan to carry out the “largest mass deportation operation in American history” has hinged on defining mass illegal immigration, including the deliberate policies of the Biden administration, as a kind of attack on the very fabric of America. Of course it is. Mass immigration is an attack on the fabric of every society it’s inflicted on, from the US to the nations of Europe and now even Japan, which after decades of struggling with collapsing birth rates has decided to do what was previously unthinkable and sacrifice its fragile, beautiful culture—the chrysanthemum and the sword—to the pursuit of rising numbers on a chart. So it goes.

Trump has gone further, though, and tried to designate certain groups not just in vague terms as hostile actors and therefore targets for deportation, but in definite legal terms as enemies of America who must be removed for the safety and good of the nation, right now.

To that end, Trump has employed the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, an infrequently used but extremely powerful bit of law that allows the president to point a stern finger at people and say, “They need to be locked up”—as Japanese citizens and Japanese-Americans were after Pearl Harbor—or “They need to go. Get them out of here.”

It’s a genuine power the president was granted by the legislature 227 years ago and that four presidents had already used before Trump, albeit in extraordinary circumstances, like a surprise attack on American soil.

So far, despite the promise and obvious validity of this approach, President Trump has been unable to convince the judiciary to support him. Even the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Apparently, they won’t be satisfied till Trump produces signed letters of marque and reprisal written in gold pen from the very hand of Nicholas Maduro himself. Only then will the Supreme Court solemnly concur, after much deliberation, that Tren de Aragua really are foreign adversaries who should be removed with all haste and as little ceremony as possible, and not just run-of-the-mill border-hoppers who deserve due process and a fair hearing before they slope off back to Squatemala, on some undefined day months or even years hence.

Part of the problem, of course, is that political realities change and definitions don’t keep up. The political realities of 1798, when the Alien Enemies Act was written, are very different from the political realities of 2025. Yeah, sure there were the Barbary Pirates back then, but the US Founders could never have conceived of criminal enterprises like the Mexican cartels, which have hollowed out the Mexican state and puppeteer its barely living carcass from within its bloody splintered rib cage. The cartels have their own armies, economies, judges, juries and executioners. Lots of executioners.

The sociologist Max Weber’s famous definition of the state turns on who has a monopoly over violence in a given territory. If you have the monopoly, you are the state. Well, in large parts of Mexico, by that definition, the cartels are the state. Ergo, their representatives in the US are representatives of a state. A hostile state whose goal is to kill Americans for profit.

Nor, indeed, could the Founders have imagined a government, let alone the US government, weaponizing immigration against its own people, as the Biden administration did for four long years. Then again, the Founders had seen the British Crown deploy Hessian mercenaries against British colonists and considered that the end of the Crown’s legitimacy. The Founders would probably just have called what the Biden administration did “treason,” but I don’t think they’d have struggled to call it an “invasion” either, however mindblowing they found it.

The current rioting in Los Angeles only strengthens the Trump administration’s position. Immigration really is an existential threat to America: to stability, to law and order, to the future of the nation. In fact, what we’ve seen over the last three days should, by all rights, make the case for designating a much larger number of illegal immigrants as alien enemies.

Why not all of them?