In 1979 a Haitian sailboat that put in at Guantanamo was given a hot meal, water and a weather forecast, then sent on toward Miami. Kahn opens there to explain how the same base became a prison camp for Haitian asylum seekers within little more than a decade. Situation reports, litigation files, agency memoranda and interviews with mariners repatriated to Haiti's southwestern peninsula carry the account. Maritime interdiction, begun in 1981, is described as jurisdictional arbitrage: screening claims aboard Coast Guard cutters in international waters gave immigration officers a discretion that judicial review on land would have curbed. The larger argument concerns what Kahn calls cosmology, a cultivated sense of where authority belongs, assembled from organisational charts, guidance documents and opinions, together with a long American habit of picturing the offshore as an anarchic outside where such powers become thinkable. Early chapters take up the political-versus-economic framing of Haitian departure and the pathologising of Haitian bodies.