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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Earlier that spring, a twenty-year-old Honduran woman named Tania and her fourteen-year-old sister were separated at an El Paso port of entry. Her sister was sent to a children’s shelter run by the Department of Health and Human Services and eventually placed with their mother, who lived in Boston. Tania spent six days in detention in the US before Mexican immigration agents picked her up and took her back across the border, into Mexico. They dropped her off at a migrant shelter that was already full. She roamed the streets, looking for another place to stay. Her tattered clothes and accent marked her as foreign, and her race—she was black and belonged to an Indigenous community called the Garifuna—led to several episodes of public abuse. On the street, people spit at her and yelled taunts.