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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Jorge wasn’t the only teenager to be arbitrarily accused of belonging to MS-13. At least four other students in Suffolk County were suspended from school because administrators thought that they were involved with the gang. Three of them, students at Bellport High School, twenty miles east of Brentwood, had come to Long Island as unaccompanied minors from Guatemala and El Salvador. One had worn a Chicago Bulls T-shirt to school; MS-13 members used to wear Bulls attire, because the horns of the team’s insignia resemble the gang sign. Another had posted a Salvadoran flag, which is mostly blue, on his Facebook page; MS-13’s trademark color is light blue. That seemed to be the extent of the evidence in each case, but neither the school nor the police would share any information.