Territorial Pissing

The saga began, like so much of our political life these days, with a post on X. On April 5, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to Elon Musk’s social media platform to announce that the United States would immediately revoke all South Sudanese visas and prevent the issuance of future visas as a punishment for the country’s refusal to accept its deported citizens. A State Department press release issued the same day promised to review this decision if and when South Sudan fully cooperates with America.

This act of collective punishment was due to a single contested deportation. Of the twenty-three South Sudanese nationals that Trump’s regime had initially selected for removal, only two were refused admittance to South Sudan, on the grounds that one man was Sudanese, and the other, Congolese. It was the second case that provoked Rubio’s ire. On April 5, a man called “Nimeri Garang” was deported to Juba, South Sudan’s capital. This is the sort of name that Grok, X’s AI chatbot, might come up with if it were asked to pretend to be South Sudanese. Jaafar Nimeiri was Sudan’s ruler from 1969-85; Nimeiri—or “Nimeri”—is not a typical South Sudanese first name. John Garang was the leader of a rebel movement that fought a twenty-two year long civil war in southern Sudan from 1983-2005, prior to South Sudan’s secession in 2011. Sudan may have become two countries, but its leaders remained conjoined in the improbable name of Nimeri Garang.

You can watch Garang after he steps off the plane in Juba thanks to a video recorded by South Sudanese media. In it, a middle-aged man stands in Juba’s small airport, his hands clasped anxiously in front of him as he is interrogated by unidentified men—presumably immigration officers. Garang declares that he is not Garang, but Makula Kintu, and that he was not born in southern Sudan, but in North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He further states that while his parents may have been southern Sudanese—he is an orphan and the story is confused—he was brought to South Sudan against his will. The South Sudanese government refused to accept Kintu, who was then flown back to the United States, triggering Rubio’s wrath.

Kintu’s story is full of holes. As far as I could determine from court records, interviews, and government statements, Kintu first entered the United States on August 21, 2003. He voluntarily departed for the DRC in 2009, after the Department of Justice determined that he did not have valid paperwork. (His legal ghost lived on; Kintu was involved in a dispute with a YMCA in Illinois in 2010). It seems Kintu then reentered the United States illegally in 2016; Americash Loans LLC brings a case against him the following year. At some point, Kintu appears to have acquired fake South Sudanese papers for Nimeri Garang, either from the embassy in D.C. or in Juba, where a new passport, obtained via backdoor channels, costs around $2,000. He may have acquired these papers to avoid being deported to North Kivu, where intense armed conflict is ongoing. It’s likely that the South Sudanese embassy in D.C. issued emergency travel documents for Kintu as “Nimeri Garang” on February 13, but this claim cannot be advanced with absolute certainty, for in a letter responding to Rubio’s declaration, the South Sudanese government insisted Kintu’s deportation was a case of mistaken identity, and that there is a real Nimeri Garang, scheduled for removal in May. The more I have dug, the more even the most basic facts about this case have become muddied. Kintu’s date of birth, it seems clear, is April 2, 1977. Unless, that is, he is Nimeri Garang, who came into this world, by most accounts, on April 4, 1964—except according to one travel document, which states he was born in 1967.

Kintu’s confusing narrative is exemplary of many of the stories I have heard since I started writing country of origin expert reports for legal cases involving Sudanese and South Sudanese individuals at risk of deportation from the United States, back in 2015. I explored some of these stories in an earlier piece for The Baffler, which looks at the fate of one man, Dual Tut Jock, who was deported to South Sudan after having spent much of his life in Nebraska. In the immigration documents of such men—and they are overwhelmingly men—fugitive truths have to be stalked through pages of bureaucratic indifference, riddled with transcription errors and the strategic lies told by those who fear deportation. Those at risk of removal are confronted with a U.S. immigration system that searches for minor inconsistencies in migrant declarations, which it will use as evidence of fraud. Sometimes, it’s easier to maintain a big lie than to explain life’s messiness to officials with little sense of sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately journalists—at least when working for The Baffler—don’t have that option. It would take me an entire essay to reliably record the life and times of Makula Kintu and explore what they reveal about violent states and malevolent bureaucracies.

As appealing as that prospect is, it’s simply not the story that matters right now. Trump’s administration certainly doesn’t care who Makula Kintu is or where he is from. When it was pointed out that Kintu was not, in fact, South Sudanese, the Deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, responded that the South Sudanese Embassy in D.C. had issued him travel documents as a citizen. While this claim is correct, Landau’s response indicates that the State Department, upon learning that America had erroneously deported someone to a country that is not his own, decided to double down on the bureaucratic error that led to the deportation, rather than trying to address it. Kintu joins a long line of those wrongfully deported by Trump’s regime. As it acknowledged in a court filing on March 31, the administration sent a Salvadorean man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to a brutal prison in El Salvador, despite the fact he had protected legal status in America and a judge determined he could not be deported to his country of birth. The administration claims that it is powerless to bring Garcia back, despite a Supreme Court order instructing it to do so. Frengel Reyes Mota, a Venezuelan man with a pending U.S. asylum claim, was also deported to El Salvador, supposedly as a member of the Tren de Aragua gang, despite having no criminal record and no connection to organized crime. A Miami Herald investigation suggested that immigration officers may have simply copy-pasted someone else’s information into his file.

Kintu’s failed deportation was used to render more people deportable. The South Sudanese government’s initial refusal to accept Kintu led to the State Department’s decision to revoke all South Sudanese visas. The most obvious analogy to Rubio’s April 5 foot-stamping is Trump’s earlier strong-arming of Colombia. In January, he threatened to revoke the visas of Colombian officials and impose tariffs on the country’s exports if it continued to refuse entry to U.S. military flights laden with deportees. (Colombia reversed its decision). In that case, those threatened were at least members of the Colombian government; Rubio’s April 5 decision renders precarious the lives of South Sudanese students in America who have nothing to do with Kintu’s case.

The decision to revoke South Sudanese visas is only one small part of a much larger destruction of the U.S. immigration regime currently underway. Since World War II, and for all its faults (and there are many), the U.S. legal regime governing deportation was at least in theory predicated on the notion that people are not necessarily the same as the nation-states in which they have citizenship. From this difference emerges the very need for asylum—the offering of political protection because someone cannot obtain such protection from their own government. In the imaginary of the current regime, individual migrants are merely metonyms for larger nefarious processes: an invasion at the border or an evil Venezuelan attempt to infiltrate gang members into the United States. Blanket bans on visas for immigrants from certain countries recall both the “Muslim ban” of Trump’s first term, and some of the darkest periods of American history, including the use of the Alien Enemies Act (now again invoked by Trump) during World War II, which resulted in the internment of tens of thousands of nationals from Germany, Italy, and Japan.

While Trump’s administration is happy to blame nationals for the putative crimes of their governments, it’s much less interested in ensuring that people are actually deported to their countries of origin. Two days after Kintu’s brief sojourn in Juba, the South Sudanese government reversed course and announced that it would accept Kintu, to preserve “friendly relations” with the United States. Kintu, who had just flown back to America, was forced onto his third transatlantic flight in as many days, arriving in Juba on April 9, where he was met by South Sudanese immigration officials. Deporting a Congolese man to South Sudan is par for the course these days. Costa Rica has accepted U.S. flights carrying people from Central Asia and India, while Panama has accepted deportees from the Middle East. Among the hundreds deported to the “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo” in El Salvador are Venezuelans, who now live in legal limbo at the American taxpayers’ expense. Many of these deportations are effectively the result of private business deals struck with other nations, which enable America to skirt its own legal obligations and effectively suspend the rights of those so transferred.

The military planes leaving for black sites in foreign countries are eerily reminiscent of the extraordinary renditions of the war on terror. In both cases, a grim combination of executive privileges and rhetorical invocations of national security are used to create a class of non-persons, without rights, on which the ills of the world can be blamed. The one different from the war on terror is that rather than snatching people off the streets of foreign capitals, and taking them, blindfolded and bound, to prisons in Poland and Thailand, people are now being picked up from all over America, accused of being terrorists or gang members, and deposited without charge in maximum security prisons abroad. It’s not accidental that on April 14, when Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, was asked during a press conference at the White House whether he would return Garcia to America, he responded: “The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”

Trump’s first term in office also began with bilious bluster and a barrage of executive orders. A border wall was to be built, children separated from their families, and travel bans enacted. Millions would be deported. I experienced real changes in the South Sudanese and Sudanese deportation cases on which I worked. Removal proceedings in immigration courts were fast-tracked and Americans who had never even set foot in southern Sudan, such as Jock, found themselves deposited in Juba. What seemed like carnage at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, however, soon became something more recognizable: an American system of racist violence in which deportations have long been used as a tool to terrorize immigrant populations and create a pliant labor force. Despite the swagger, by the end of his first term, Trump had deported only 1.9 million people, less than Obama (3.18 million), and well below Biden (4.4 million).

Trump’s sadism—and his supporters’ appetite for it—is undimmed. The cancellation of South Sudanese visas is a relatively unimportant matter for America, which only issued the country forty-six visas in January 2025. Rubio’s decision instead functions as a signal to two audiences. It lets the governments of small countries know that the bully-in-chief will brook no resistance to America’s deportation program. More importantly, for Trump—for whom the rest of the world only ever seems to have importance relative to the dynamics of domestic politics—such strong-man-moves produce red meat for the MAGA circus. On X, the right-wing response to Rubio’s initial post about South Sudan can be summarized by the reply of conspiracy theorist Jack Prosobiec: “I love deportations!” On the level of form, at least, the line between social media meme-warriors and government officials has entirely vanished. The official White House account on X has posted an ASMR video of migrants being chained up and another of border patrol agents escorting zip-tied deportees to the Mexican border, accompanied by verses from “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” For Trump’s supporters, that Kintu is Congolese, and was nonetheless deported to South Sudan, only adds to the pleasure of beholding a spectacle of unchecked power.

There are those on the left who see, in Trump’s late style, only more of the same. There might, the argument goes, be a deeply American racism at Trump’s core, but it is not qualitatively new. The Trump minimalists argue that we are confronting the same carceral system we faced under Biden, and liberal alarmism about the current administration’s excesses hide these continuities. For the minimalists, Trump is a style, not a substance. Initial deportation numbers, much to the administration’s chagrin, seem to bear that out. In the first two months of the new administration there were 258 deportation flights—more or less the same amount as there were during the last months of Biden’s term in office.

The minimalist argument doesn’t convince. Trump has fundamentally overturned the American immigration regime. The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which covers all refugee admissions to America, was halted—and then cancelled—as part of the dismemberment of American foreign assistance. While a court decision has meant that some 22,000 of the more than 100,000 refugees conditionally approved and “ready for departure” could be resettled in the United States, the refugee program itself will likely not be restarted. For Trump’s administration, refugee rights, a cornerstone of the international regime governing migration since the signing of the 1951 Refugee Convention, are dead—except for white Afrikaners, who have been invited to America as refugees, under a program called “Mission South Africa.”

These measures announce America’s departure from the international immigration regime set up in the wake of World War II. This regime was always deeply flawed. Many refugees are warehoused in camps and forced to live in limbo. Asylum systems are slow, racist, and often entirely arbitrary. America and Europe are not shouldering the burden of caring for the vast majority of refugees, who live in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. An international immigration regime predicated on formally accepting the right to asylum did, nonetheless, exist, and millions were able to find sanctuary away from wars and other catastrophes. The humanitarian coordinates underpinning this system are no longer a part of the administration’s political calculus.

The wait time to have an asylum claim heard is tending to the asymptotic. Some thirty thousand appointments for asylum seekers in Mexico were cancelled in the days after Trump took office; he then instructed the Department of Justice to fire some twenty immigration judges. There are, as of the end of March, some 3.6 million cases backlogged in the immigration system, 2 million of them asylum claims. It’s not clear how many of these cases will ever be heard.

Another part of America’s immigration regime currently being dismembered is Temporary Protected Status (TPS). A creation of the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS offers, as its name suggests, temporary security to those who are already inside the United States, and who are from a list of countries effected by ongoing armed conflict or natural disaster. Trump attempted to cancel TPS for some 350,000 Venezuelans in a decision that was blocked in federal court on March 31, offering at least momentary reprieve to those threatened by deportation. (That decision was reaffirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on April 18; the case is now being referred to the Supreme Court). Others have not been so lucky: on April 11, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, announced that she would terminate TPS for Afghanistan and Cameroon, rendering at least 12,000 people vulnerable to deportation. South Sudan’s own TPS status is up for renewal on May 3, and under normal circumstances, seems would be renewed: termination decisions are normally published sixty days in advance of expiry. The current administration, however, will let South Sudan’s TPS state lapse. The decision effects vanishingly few people—as of December 2024, only 175 South Sudanese nationals were afforded TPS—but they will join the thousands that Trump had rendered vulnerable to deportation.

In South Sudan, people feel betrayed. Despite the South Sudanese government’s acceptance of Kintu, the ban on South Sudanese visas has not been lifted, and anyone who had their visa revoked will have to apply again—if that ever becomes possible. The situation leaves many young South Sudanese people studying in the United States vulnerable to removal. South Sudan, meanwhile, is spiraling into civil war. The government is currently barrel-bombing civilian populations in the Upper Nile region, while the first vice president, who is from an opposition group, has been placed under house arrest. Two-thirds of the population is in need of humanitarian assistance, though donor funding has collapsed. No one should be sent back to South Sudan. The response from the Trump administration? Cut foreign aid and propose closing its embassy in Juba. In phone conversations with friends in Upper Nile, one question returns like a mantra: What will America do to help us? The United States was central to achieving South Sudanese independence, and was one of the strongest supporters of the country in its early years. “How,” one of my friends asked me, “can the Americans abandon us?”

Rubio’s decision to revoke South Sudanese visas is exemplary of the sort of territorial pissing that this administration is now engaged in, and which I suppose functions as a form of foreign policy. The great 1990s prophets of American world hegemony must be embarrassed by these scrappy tit-for-tat fights with minor countries. Instead of the United States as a putatively beneficent world power, we have the U.S.-Ukraine mineral deal, an example of transactionalism only matched by Somalia’s attempt to get ahead of the game by unilaterally offering America airbases and ports in Somaliland—which it does not control—in exchange for support. Tariffs themselves are exemplary of this personalized, transactional approach to policy, in which everyone is worked out as a “deal,” subject to constant revision.

Trump’s radical break with the international immigration regime is not the whole story. If, relative to the rest of the world, Trump represents a rupture with at least the nominal commitments of prior administrations, domestically, his insistence that immigration must be seen through the lens of national security is simply an intensification of a bipartisan tendency in American politics that took shape during the 1980s and 1990s. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the Immigration Act of 1990, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIA) of 1996, passed under Bill Clinton, were three of the major pieces of legislation that enabled the militarization of the border, allowed immigration services to partner with law enforcement agencies, and criminalized immigration violations that had previously been civil offenses.

The so-called war on terror intensified this tendency. Much was made of the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were on non-immigrant visas; immigration controls were made central tools in the war on terror, which saw the creation of both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within it. The 2001 U.S. Patriot Act, along with the IIRIA, enabled a marked increase in deportation. It further criminalized migration, expanded the federal government’s powers of detention and removal, authorized enhanced surveillance procedures, and firmed up the role of local and state law enforcement in enforcing immigration controls. The war on terror was, like the wars on crime and on drugs that preceded it, always a war on immigration. Migrants were tarred with the suspicion of being terrorists, and the deportation machine was held up as a magic means for America to be secured against its enemies. Budgets ballooned. After its establishment in 2003, ICE’s budget went from $3.3 billion to $9.6 billion by 2024.

Trump’s second term in office has made the subtext explicit. Migrants and refugees, the latent targets of prior wars, are now the explicit enemies in Trump’s new conflict. The war on immigration takes up elements of the prior wars on abstract nouns, both rhetorically and practically. Rhetorically, immigrants are compared to terrorists, and the threat of fentanyl is used to justify draconian border policies. Practically, Trump’s administration has intensified immigration controls by invoking national security policy. It has declared an invasion on the U.S-Mexico border (even though the number of border crossings in February was the lowest in a decade); used immigration law as a political tool to arrest those, like Mahmoud Khalil, who are involved in anti-genocide protests; and asked the U.S. military to assist with border security (on April 15, for instance, Trump transferred nearly 110,000 acres of federal land on the U.S.-Mexico border to the army). By April 20, we were supposed to have the findings of a joint Department of Justice/DHS inquiry into whether the Insurrection Act of 1807—which would allow Trump to deploy the military domestically—is necessary to obtain full control of the border. The contents of the report have not yet been made public.

Trump’s war on immigration rests on risible claims about national emergencies and dangerous aliens. On March 15, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to declare that Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang, was invading the United States. He then tried to link the gang to Nicholas Maduro’s government. For this to be convincing, one would have to think that there is an invasion of America underway, that it is being perpetrated by Tren de Aragua, and that it has the backing of the Venezuelan government, a claim a U.S. intelligence assessment disputes. The Alien Enemies Act allows for the detention and deportation of “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a “hostile” nation. Trump’s order claims that gang members can be deported as “alien enemies,” though there is little clarity about how the administration has determined the membership of Tren de Aragua, with one ICE checklist suggesting that effectively any Venezuelan over the age of fourteen can be deemed a gang member based on immigration officers’ interpretations of tattoos and hand signs. Almost immediately after the act’s invocation, the administration deported more than 130 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. These deportations continue to be fought in the courts, though such legal challenges have not entirely stopped subsequent removals. (On May 1, a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas barred the administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, but that ruling is limited in its geographical scope.)

At present, with only around six thousand U.S. ICE deportation officers, there is little chance that the Trump administration can live up to its boast that it will deport “every single undocumented immigrant”—even with the assistance of local law enforcement. But that doesn’t change the drastic nature of the measures currently being employed. The administration has also invoked the Alien Registration Act, previously deployed against communists and in the aftermath of 9/11. Beginning on April 11, DHS requires all undocumented migrants to register with the federal government, presenting them with an impossible choice: either face deportation or criminal prosecution. The use of this act doesn’t change anyone’s immigration status—undocumented migrants are already removable—but it instills a climate of fear.

Some of Trump’s measures have been forged from the evasions of the previous administration. Rather than offer migrants a real path to citizenship, Biden implemented a raft of programs that enabled people from select countries—including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—to enter the United States for two years on humanitarian parole, and obtain work permits. On March 21, the Trump administration announced that this program would end on April 24, leaving more than half a million migrants without legal protection. On April 14, a federal judge in Boston stayed the order, but the legal battle continues. Another Biden innovation, the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) One App, was intended to allow people to schedule their entry into America and make asylum claims; some nine hundred thousand people entered the country thanks to the scheme. Mass electronic messages to those who used the app were sent out in April, ordering people to leave America. Noem has launched a new app, CBP Home, which enables migrants to “self-deport.” Some of these measures will also face legal challenges, and it may be that Trump’s revanchist white nativism doesn’t lead to mass deportations, or even the mass revocation of immigrants’ legal statuses. But it’s neither clear that these legal challenges will succeed in blocking, rather than simply slowing, Trump’s war on immigration, nor is it evident that the administration will abide by legal rulings if they don’t go its way. Even if legal challenges do succeed, that will be little succor for students being stripped of their visas, or Venezuelans languishing in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

Trump’s war on immigration has cut away much of the humanitarian substance of the prior immigration regime, which in any event was always extremely limited. In its place, an untrammeled executive is extending into immigration policy the sort of control the American presidency has long exerted in the domain of national security, by insisting that the two realms are identical: the war on terror has become a war to terrorize immigrants, which is what, in part, it always was. The reopening of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp—if only for a few hundred migrants—symbolically connects the two wars. Immigrants are now treated as security threats, without laws safeguarding their rights, entirely at the mercy of dimly defined national security exceptions. In time-honored fashion, the techniques through which America waged war abroad have returned to become critical elements of domestic policy. The imperial presidency, whose executive excesses were enabled by the war on terror, has inverted itself, and set its sights on the American people.

I discussed all this the other day with Jock. After a few difficult years in Juba, he found work and a wife in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and recently welcomed a new child into the world. He still dreams of America, but wonders what his homeland has become. “USA. USA! That’s the Third World, man.”