Two federal agencies looked at the same Jamaican flight attendant and reached opposite conclusions. Both were right. That is the story here, and almost nobody is telling it.

ICE arrested Lorenzo Thompson at Nashville International Airport on July 14 as he came off a work trip. The Department of Homeland Security says he originally entered the country on April 17, 2021, on a visa that expired that October, and never departed. His attorney, Tremaine Hemans, says he carries an employment authorization document permitting him to work and travel domestically until his case is decided, and that he has no criminal record. Southwest has said nothing.

Neither account is false. A man can hold a federal card authorizing him to work and remain removable on the same afternoon. Congress built that contradiction, funded it, and has spent four decades declining to fix it.

Work authorization and lawful status are separate creatures under American immigration law, and conflating them is where most of this week's commentary went off the rails. File for asylum and a clock starts. USCIS lets you apply for a work permit 150 days later and can issue one once the application has been pending 180 days. That permit grants permission to earn a living. It does not confer status, cure an overstay, or make anyone lawfully present in the sense ordinary English gives the phrase. Practitioners call the resulting condition a period of authorized stay, a polite way of saying the government knows you are here, tolerates it, and has not decided yet.

Some early reaction floated the theory that Southwest looked the other way. The statute says otherwise. Employers........

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