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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Since December 2017, Hamilton had been spreading the word that the El Paso experiment was successful in reducing the number of migrants arriving at the border. There was scant evidence for this, so he created it. Solid information did exist about the rollout, which Hamilton ignored. At CBP, agents had described chaos in an after-action report that went straight to top officials at the agency. Their software and data-entry programs had immediately faltered when the separations began. Border Patrol agents had to type information about the families into spreadsheets. Typos led to cascading problems. Of the 280 families separated during the pilot, seven were misidentified when agents input the wrong alien number in government databases. Another thirty-three parents had nothing in their immigration files indicating that their children were also in custody. ICE and HHS did not know where Border Patrol had separated the families, so it became virtually impossible to reunite them.