No, what's critical is not the existence of a contract or not, but whether the US has actual control over the prisoners. That part is undeniable regardless of a contract. Xinis derives this view not from evidence of a contract, but first and foremost from the fact that to have lost control of the prisoners would involve having discarded the INA entirely, which the executive obviously cannot do.

From immediately before your quote:

> Surely, Defendants do not mean to suggest that they have wholesale erased the substantive and procedural protections of the INA in one fell swoop by dropping those individuals in CECOT without recourse

My issue with your phrasing is the assertion that El Salvador is somehow a 1-year relationship or detention. We have no evidence beyond an AP report about a memo that this is the case. Neither we nor the judges know what the terms of this agreement are. For the judges' purposes, the terms are irrelevant beyond "does the US have control," which of course they do.