Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

On July 4, 1980, temperatures in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a five-hundred-square-mile expanse of desert between Yuma and Tucson, reached upward of 120 degrees. Crossing it, from Mexico, were twenty-seven Salvadoran refugees trying to reach the US.