The rendition of 288 Venezuelan and Salvadoran men to the Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT tore a hole in the fabric of the American legal system. The intention behind the presidential proclamation authorizing the renditions seems to have been to send these men, many of whom had no criminal convictions and crossed the border in regular fashion, to a place beyond legal relief, a place of no return. Yet, this feature of the CECOT renditions, coupled with the four months of torture the men endured there, bears a startling resemblance to the practice of removal and rendition under antebellum slave law, particularly under the fugitive slave laws of 1793 and 1850. This resonance provides a window into the cruelties of the American immigration system and into the law’s facility in enabling its own suspension, a recurrent motif from the earliest days of the American republic through the first year of the second Trump administration. This paper gives texture to that disturbing parallel, tracing the contours of Black removal and rendition before the Civil War alongside the exercises of rendition and third-country removal that have thrived in the twenty-first century. To reckon with this history is to come to terms with the forms of resistance that will be necessary to combat its afterlife in the present

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