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

by Jonathan Blitzer

In Brentwood, an eighteen-year-old girl from El Salvador, who had come to the US fleeing the gangs, was detained in the immigration wing of a county jail because school officials found marijuana in her locker and had seen her socializing with “confirmed MS-13 members.”

At schools throughout the county, the police posted an employee known as a resource officer, whose job was to provide support to administrators. But they also helped to identify gang members. What constituted membership was nebulous. ICE identified someone as a gang member if he met at least two criteria from a list that included “having gang tattoos,” “frequenting an area notorious for gangs,” and “wearing gang apparel.”

Immigrant teens without ties to the gang didn’t necessarily know which clothes were off-limits because schools never specified. Throughout the summer, a handful of students were expelled on suspicions of gang membership and put into removal proceedings by ICE. According to a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU, at least thirty-two teens were placed in immigration jails for alleged gang ties. The charges included being “in the presence of MS-13 members” on a town soccer field, being seen at school and in a car with confirmed gangsters, cutting class, and writing the number 503, the international calling code for El Salvador, on a school notebook.

The strategy for combating MS-13 rested on one of the core premises of American immigration enforcement: undocumented immigrants had far fewer rights than citizens did. Dismantling a criminal organization was a complex and painstaking legal task. It was much easier to deport someone than it was to convict him of a crime.

In the fall of 2017, ICE launched a new initiative, called Operation Raging Bull, in which the government arrested some three hundred suspected gang members nationwide; in New York, a separate crackdown led to hundreds more arrests. “We’re placing people in removal proceedings as a way of d...

In response to a growing number of documented cases in which teenagers faced deportation because of baseless allegations, Melendez simply said, “The removal process continues.” Ties to the gang would never have to be proved because the teenagers were guilty of something that was never in dispute: to flee the g...

But her mother had her own reasons for feeling stressed. The Trump administration had announced plans to cancel temporary protected status for Salvadorans living in the US, including those who had bought homes, paid taxes, started families, and joined the legal workforce. The president was also canceling TPS for 60,000 Haitians who’d lived in the US since a 2010 earthquake, and for 2,500 Nicaraguans who’d arrived in 1999 following Hurricane Mitch. The Salvadoran population was the largest by far, some 200,000 people, most of whom had been living in the US for twenty years. Among them were parents of roughly 190,000 children who, like Sandoval, were American citizens.

In the file, the government listed three reasons why agents were certain that Jorge belonged to MS-13. The first was that he’d been wearing a Brooklyn Nets hat, which, according to a school resource officer cited in one of the documents, was “indicative of membership in a gang,” because “MS-13 members currently wear Chicago Bulls or Brooklyn Nets hats.” The second was that someone had seen him “performing a gang handshake,” although no further details were given. The final piece of evidence was taken as the most damning: at school, he had been observed in the company of two people on ICE’s radar. One of them was a “confirmed gang member” whose name was redacted; the other was Sandoval. After she escaped from her ex-boyfriend, the local police knew that she’d been kidnapped and abused. It didn’t matter that she had done nothing wrong. What she had suffered turned into an indelible mark that she didn’t realize she was carrying. She was a “gang associate,” and anyone close to her was an object of suspicion.

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch had devastated southeastern Guatemala. In the area around Chiquimula, where Lucrecia was working, roadways had been washed away; the entire local economy, which depended on coffee and tobacco, simply ceased to exist. People were starving. Guatemalans in the eastern part of the country were often too poor to emigrate; the farthest most of them could go were the larger towns in the department or the streets and shanties around Guatemala City.

At the end of the war, half of Guatemala lacked medical care, and the government did not have the means or the inclination to provide it. A patchwork of NGOs and third-party contractors emerged instead, heavily concentrated in the rural areas where La Violencia had left the most lasting damage. It was inevitable that Lucrecia would work in some of the same places that Myrna had. In Myrna’s time, the highlands were hollowed out by mass migration to Mexico or forced relocations to “model villages.” In the 2000s, the residents who had departed for the United States left behind signs of faraway prosperity: cinder-block houses that were slowly being constructed with the money they sent home.

In 2013, members of the Guatemalan Assembly passed a law curbing the role of NGOs in providing medical care because of complaints about poor coverage and persistent graft. But no alternative system had been prepared to fill the void. The Health Ministry itself was in shambles. In 2014 and 2015, amid shortages of vaccines and medicines, there were renewed concerns about the outbreak of preventable illnesses such as measles, polio, and HPV. The vaccination rate, particularly among children, had fallen to levels not seen since the late war years of the 1990s.

El susto, the anthropologist Linda Green wrote, was “understood by its victims to be the loss of the essential life force as a result of fright.” In more conventional terms, its symptoms included depression, lethargy, insomnia, nightmares, diarrhea, and vomiting. To anyone mindful of La Violencia of the war years, the connection to post-traumatic stress was unavoidable. These conditions were, as Green put it, “social memory embodied.”

Laws on the books made illegal entry a misdemeanor and reentry a felony. Yet the agents rarely charged a parent with either offense because it would mean separating her from her children. The email suggested prosecuting parents anyway. “History would not judge [this] kindly,” responded Richard Durbin, the acting US attorney based in San Antonio. He was a career prosecutor who would be replaced in a few months by a political appointee. For now, Durbin proposed a narrower approach. “We should be looking at each individual,” he went on. “If culpability is very low and they have their own children we don’t need to prosecute.”

A few weeks later, in early March, the secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly, went on CNN to describe the new administration’s approach to immigration enforcement at the border. “I would do almost anything to deter” migrants from coming, he said. When asked if that would mean separating children from their parents, he replied, “I am considering exactly that. They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents.” There was an immediate national outcry, and Kelly publicly backtracked. But that same month, in the El Paso sector, Border Patrol had already started referring parents for prosecution. Plans to extend the policy were underway in certain quarters of the new administration.

Hastening them along was the attorney general, Jeff Sessions. On April 11, 2017, he called for increased criminal prosecutions at the southern border, ordering US attorneys to develop “district-specific guidelines” for bringing charges against first-time border crossers. Federal rules prohibiting the prolonged detention of immigrant children, he said, were nothing more than “loopholes” used by families to game the system at the border. “After their release, many of these people simply disappeared,” he later said. “President Trump is going to fix that.”

The justification was deterrence, but the policy itself remained secret. Jeff Sessions came to Texas twice in 2017, and not once did he mention the pilot program to his subordinates in the US Attorney’s Office. It would take Durbin another full year before he learned that he had been part of an official experiment. How could migrants discern the contours of a new deterrence policy if the government’s own employees weren’t sure what was happening? In August, an official in the West Texas office wrote to a colleague: We have now heard of us taking breast feeding defendant moms away from their infants, I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log and saw the fact we had accepted prosecution on moms with one and two year olds. The next issue is that these parents are asking for the whereabouts of their children and they can’t get a response, the courts are turning to us for help.

Patrick and Erick were listed as “unaccompanied alien minors” who had arrived at the border alone and been transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS would take up their case from scratch, vetting relatives in the US. Keldy was part of a different system run by DHS. According to ICE’s records, she had traveled to the US as a single adult. There was nothing in their files to link the boys to the nine-digit number that corresponded to their mother, and nothing in hers that led back to them.

Ordinarily, asylum seekers who cleared this first test could be released on bond to wait for their subsequent court dates. But increasingly the government was detaining asylum seekers through the entirety of their legal proceedings. In one case, a Haitian schoolteacher had won asylum in an immigration court yet was kept in ICE detention while the government appealed the case. It was two years before he was eventually released.

In November, four parents and a grandmother from Honduras and El Salvador appeared before Torres. Each had been charged with a misdemeanor for illegal entry, but none of them seemed to care about the outcome of the case. They claimed that the Border Patrol had taken their children, and that they had no idea where they were.

His clients were so desperate to reunite with their children that they were willing to plead guilty to anything. “Instead of giving them due process rights to a hearing on asylum, or refugee status,” he told Torres, “the government is just kidnapping their children.” For weeks, Torres had been seeking an explanation for why so many parents seemed to be getting separated from their children and then kept in the dark on their whereabouts. The government prosecutors insisted that nothing was out of the ordinary. From the bench, Torres disagreed, saying, in reference to the parents, “I would be very worried as well if it was me.”

A US ally in the Americas was stealing an election in plain sight. The foreign election monitors raised objections, and the Organization of American States issued an immediate report detailing “irregularities, mistakes, and systemic problems.” Its top official called on the Honduran electoral tribunal not to announce a winner until all “the serious doubts” were resolved. When the tribunal went ahead anyway and declared Hernández the victor, the Organization of American States called for new elections. The country with the greatest ability to stop the fraud had the strongest sense of loyalty to the fraudster. At first, the US refused to intervene. Eventually, it backed the electoral tribunal. On the same day that the vote count was halted—just before the computers mysteriously crashed—the secretary of state signed a document confirming that the Hernández government had qualified for more aid money. There were twelve conditions that had to be met for such a document to be signed, including that Honduras “combat corruption” and “protect the right of political opposition parties and civil society activists.”

The six-month period after the election revealed the American position for what it was. Outright fraud followed by mass protests had barely registered as a cause for concern in Washington. Members of the Trump administration needed to portray Honduras as a success story. Doing so freed up the anti-immigration stalwarts to end temporary protected status for the sixty thousand Hondurans living legally in the US for more than a decade, whom they now wanted to send home once and for all. The scheme wasn’t isolated to Honduras. A broader effort was underway at DHS to whitewash the conditions in multiple countries over the objections of career officials at the State Department. The aim, according to the then acting head of DHS, was to “send a clear signal that TPS in general is coming to a close.” Staffers were tasked with finding “positive gems” about individual countries that could be used as an excuse to end TPS protection for more than three hundred thousand of their citizens who were currently living in the US.

Lost in the din coming out of Washington were the words of the migrants themselves. One of them was Maria Elena Colindres, a former member of the national legislature in Honduras. She had served in public office until January 2018, when her term expired. In the controversial elections held at the end of the previous year, a rival from the National Party had unseated her. Reuters reporters found her among the families making the journey north. “We’ve had to live through a fraudulent electoral process,” she said. “We’re suffering a progressive militarization and lack of institutions. They’re criminalizing those who protested.” Colindres was planning to apply for political asylum, she said, as a persecuted political opponent of Juan Orlando Hernández.

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.

On April 23, Nielsen received a document bearing the signatures of her department’s three most important agency heads overseeing immigration: Thomas Homan at ICE, Kevin McAleenan at CBP, and Francis Cissna at Citizenship and Immigration Services. Their memo outlined several possible strategies for dealing with Central Americans at the southern border. The government could try to prosecute all single adults for illegal entry, or it could coordinate with DOJ prosecutors to target a certain percentage of these adults. But what they advised was something else entirely. The “most effective” way to stem the recent crossings, they wrote, was to prosecute parents who were trying to enter the country with their children. Each official was signing his name to a policy of family separation at the border.

Of all the places in the US where Keldy could have applied for asylum, El Paso was one of the worst. On average, roughly a third of asylum seekers were given relief in immigration courts across the country, but immigration judges in El Paso had granted asylum just 3 percent of the time between 2013 and 2017. One judge, speaking from the bench, called the city’s immigration court system the “bye-bye place.”

There was a gauntlet of other restrictions that blocked Keldy before she had a chance to make her case. According to one special bench ruling that applied only in El Paso, Keldy couldn’t post bond until she submitted the full body of legal evidence for her asylum claim; another local rule forbade her to submit more than a hundred pages of materials in her own defense. When a judge ruled on her request for bond, it was denied based on the low statistical odds that she would eventually get asylum, rather than on the standard criteria of whether she was a flight risk. Unlike criminal defendants, immigrants aren’t automatically granted a lawyer. The longer she remained in custody, the harder it was to find someone who could help her get out.

One morning in June 2018, Emily Kephart, a program coordinator at an immigrants’ rights group called Kids in Need of Defense, set out to find a six-year-old Guatemalan girl who’d been separated from her father a month before. He was in a detention center in Arizona, on the verge of being deported. He begged the officials in the jail not to put him on a plane until he contacted his daughter, so that they could at least be deported together. But the ICE officials could only guess at where she might be. The government records were indecipherable. The administration was separating thousands of families without a plan for how to reunite them.

The western highlands cover roughly 20 percent of Guatemala and contain a large share of the country’s three hundred microclimates, from dank, tropical locales near the Pacific coast to the arid, alpine reaches of the department of Huehuetenango. For decades, people’s livelihoods were almost exclusively agrarian. The malnutrition rate, which hovered around 65 percent, was among the highest in the Western Hemisphere.

In 2014, a group of agronomists and scientists, working on an initiative called Climate, Nature, and Communities in Guatemala, produced a report that cautioned lawmakers about the region’s susceptibility to a new threat. The highlands region, they wrote, “was the most vulnerable area in the country to climate change.”

In the years before the report was published, three hurricanes had caused damage that cost more than the previous four decades’ worth of public and private investment in the national economy. Extreme weather events were just the most obvious climate-related calamities. There were increasingly wide fluctuations in temperature—unexpected surges in heat followed by morning frosts—and unpredictable rainfall. Almost half a year’s worth of precipitation might fall in a single week, which would flood the soil and destroy crops. Grain and vegetable harvests that once produced enough to feed a family for close to a year now lasted less than five months. “Inattention...

In 2018, fifty thousand Guatemalan families were apprehended at the border, twice as many as the year before. The number of unaccompanied children also increased: American authorities recorded twenty-two thousand children from Guatemala, more than those from El Salvador and Honduras combined. Much of this migration was coming from the western highlands, which received not only some of the highest rates of remittances per capita but also the greatest number of deportees. Of...

The Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy was calamitous to immigrants everywhere along the US border, but its effects were uniquely devastating in the Guatemalan highlands. Half of the parents who were deported without their children under the zero tolerance policy were Guatemalan; between 10 and 20 percent came from departments w...

At the border, American officials often spoke in seasonal generalities: more immigrants arrived in the spring when the weather was mild, fewer attempted the journey in the summer heat. But in the spring and summer months of 2018, the deterrent effects of zero tolerance were moot where people were starving.

In the distance, about ten thousand feet above sea level, rose a belt of craggy peaks. At these heights, the impact of a changing climate was especially dire: increasing aridity was exacerbating an already limited water supply. By the side of a road near the hamlet of La Capellania, groups of women carted piles of laundry in wheelbarrows and in baskets balanced on their heads to small drainage ditches where they washed their families’ clothes with bars of soap, scrubbing them clean on flattened stones. They had set out with flashlights before dawn, wearing hats and jackets to withstand the freezing temperatures; the earlier the women arrived, the less likely it was that the water would be full of suds from prior use.

In another hamlet, Agua Alegre, fresh water for cooking and drinking was available only from a small communal tap. Some sixty families lived in the houses nearby, and long lines formed as the women filled plastic jugs to carry away. Five years before, when local authorities started rationing the supply during the summer, residents were told that they could draw water at any time of day they wanted, but only on certain days of the week; three years before, the schedule was limited to specific hours on consecutive days. Now water was available only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, between the hours of three in the afternoon and five in the morning. The shortages were the worst in March, April, and May.

New tragedies were coming to light each day. One involved a Honduran father named Marco Antonio Muñoz, a thirty-nine-year-old with short dark hair and a thin mustache; a small hoop earring in his left ear gave his face a dash of youthfulness. He was apprehended with his wife and three-year-old child in Granjeno, Texas, a tiny town of some three hundred residents. Border Patrol agents brought all three of them to a large processing center in McAllen, then followed the dictates of the newly sanctioned zero tolerance policy. “They had to use physical force to take the child out of his hands,” a Border Patrol agent later told The Washington Post. “The guy lost his shit.” The agents threw Muñoz into a small cell with chain-link walls, but he began slamming his body into the metal. He never threatened the agents themselves. But according to an incident report, they considered him to be “pre-assault,” which one of them later clarified to mean that “he had the look of a guy at a bar who wanted to fight someone.” He was shackled—kicking and screaming—and driven in a van to a local jail about forty miles away that had a padded isolation cell where Border Patrol could hold him. Every half hour guards checked on him. Late the next morning, one of them entered to find him lying in a heap on the floor, bloody and unresponsive. A piece of clothing was twisted around his neck. He had hanged himself.

Inside the White House, a few of the president’s advisers, including his own daughter and wife, were growing uneasy and urged him to end the family separation policy. Undeterred, Miller defended it. Voters would eventually support the White House on family separation “90–10,” he insisted.

In Sabraw’s court, lawyers from the Justice Department acted overwhelmed by the task of finding all the separated families under a tight deadline. Behind the scenes, however, officers at ICE were trying to pick off parents before the judge could force the government to reunite them with their children. Keldy had a choice, the deportation officer said, leading her down the page. Because she had lost her asylum case, she had an order of removal against her. She could either be deported with her children—or alone. She signed next to the option that read: “I am affirmatively, knowingly and voluntarily requesting to return to my country of citizenship without my minor children who I understand will remain in the United States to pursue available claims of relief.”

On a street corner, a young couple hunched over the jammed back wheel of a stroller holding their two small children. The mother, a twenty-three-year-old from Colón, Honduras, named Jandy Reyes, wore a striped T-shirt and pink jeans. Her face was tight with exhaustion. Two weeks before she joined the caravan, a group of gangsters had arrived at the small housing complex where she lived with her husband, Carlos Flores, and their two sons, who were five and nearly two. The gang imposed a tax, called an impuesto de guerra, on a small food stall the couple owned. When Flores refused to pay it, the gangsters beat him badly and threatened to kill them both. Reyes and Flores hid out with family members and tried to plot an escape. “I returned, quickly, to get some things from my house, but everything was gone,” she said. The gangsters had ransacked it.

In 2015, a group of disabled asylum seekers made the trip, calling themselves La caravana de los mutilados, or the Caravan of the Mutilated. It was the third attempt to reach the US for one member, a twenty-nine-year-old named José Luis Hernández. On his second journey, he had fallen from the freight train known as the Beast and lost an arm, half of one leg, and part of his left hand. He was deported to Honduras, where he spent two years recovering in a hospital. “If we don’t risk anything, we don’t live,” he said. “There aren’t any other options.” He added, “No one ever wants to migrate. The whole thing is a fight not to become invisible.”

When it came to the US, the preponderant view—that Donald Trump would not let them into the country—did not seem to slow anyone down. “We’ll do what we can for now, then wait and see,” said Daniel Jiménez, a thirty-year-old who had joined the caravan with six friends from his hometown in Honduras. That could mean trying to reach the US to seek asylum, or staying in Mexico to look for work, but the most important thing was to leave Honduras. “You just can’t live there anymore.”

Along the way, a Honduran man named José Tulia Rodríguez was carrying a giant white flag made from two large sticks and a piece of cloth. “Peace and God Are with Us,” it read. It was a message to Mexico, he said, “to apologize for what we may be causing here, and to show we’re grateful.” He had no money, water, or food; the night before, he had slept on the street of Mapastepec, where locals had packed him off with tortas to eat on his walk. His plan was to keep moving until he saw a chance to find work to support his family. “I have two daughters at home in Honduras, plus my wife,” he said. “I can’t make enough money working in Honduras to buy shoes for my girls to wear to school.” He learned about the caravan from a television news program. “People say this caravan is about politics?” he said. “Well, sure, if by politics you mean hunger.”

Hundreds of people began converging on the park an hour before the meeting was supposed to start. At six thirty, speeches began, amplified by a microphone hooked up to a speaker system. There were calls for strength and solidarity, punctuated by rants against Donald Trump and Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican president. Earlier that afternoon, Peña Nieto had announced a plan, called Estás en Tu Casa (Make Yourself at Home), to offer work permits to the migrants, but only if they agreed not to leave the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. Irineo Mujica, a Mexican American activist from Pueblo sin Fronteras, led the crowd in a crescendo of rhetorical questions. Was the caravan going to let Peña Nieto dictate their fates? Was everyone determined to keep going? Were they fed up with the corruption and violence at home?

They all knew this swath of international terrain like it was an old neighborhood. But they could never stay in any one place for long. They took the same buses through Guatemala, were stopped at the same checkpoints, had to pay the same bribes to the same outfit of corrupt police officers. There was the same wait at the Mexican immigration office in Tapachula, the same stress over qualifying for temporary visas, the same pressures of scant work in Chiapas and wages kept low by opportunistic employers. It was more likely that they would get deported from Mexico than from the US. The likelihood of deportation from either Mexico or the US was much greater than their chances of making it through. When they were finally deported to Honduras, they would spend a week or two there, just long enough to raise the money to leave again.

The Pan de Vida migrant shelter, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, housed two hundred asylum seekers in a cluster of yellow cabins half an hour’s drive from the nearest port of entry, in downtown El Paso. The surrounding streets were unpaved, with a few small houses made of cinder block dotting the roadside. On a sweltering afternoon in August 2019, none of the residents were comfortable going outside, not even in broad daylight. “It’s just too dangerous,” said Denis, a thirty-eight-year-old from Honduras. He was with his daughter and son, ages thirteen and seven. A few nights earlier, a truck full of armed men in masks had circled the grounds of the shelter a few times, then left. No one knew who they were, what they were looking for, or when they might return.

Denis was especially nervous. A few months earlier, his wife had left San Pedro Sula with two of the couple’s children, including the eldest, a seventeen-year-old who was being targeted to join a local gang. Denis stayed behind to earn more money before following with the other two children. When his wife arrived in El Paso, immigration agents allowed her and the children to enter the US with a court date for a future asylum hearing. Denis planned to use the same process. But shortly after he and the two children reached Juárez, in mid-August, a group of local criminals kidnapped them and held them for five days in an abandoned church on the outskirts of town. They eventually escaped and traveled directly to the nearest US port of entry.

The asylum process had changed by the time they arrived in El Paso. Denis and his children were briefly detained, given a court date in December, and sent back to Mexico to wait, under a new policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). For Central Americans trying to obtain asylum in the US, MPP now required them to stay in Mexico for the duration of their legal proceedings, which could last several months. When it was time to appear before a US immigration judge, asylum seekers had to travel back to a port of entry and reenter custody; at the end of the day’s proceedings, a bus would take them back to Mexico, where they ...

The seed of what became MPP was first planted in 2014. At the time, it was not an actionable policy, or even a full-fledged proposal, but an idea for a paradigm shift. Officials at DHS imagined a pilot program that the US could develop with the Mexican government. Together they would set up a shelter system in Northern Mexico with the help of international relief organizations. The population of people would be small, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand asylum seekers. They would receive housing, food, and legal services while in Mexico, then cross the border for hearings before an immigration judge. The scheme was never seriously considered—it was still too open-ended—but it wasn’t shot down. Four years later, it was reborn, with only a faint resemblance to the earlier idea.

Officials within Mexico’s Interior Ministry, which included the National Immigration Institute and the Commission for Refugee Assistance, were opposed to MPP. They pointed to a lack of resources and concerns about the welfare of asylum seekers who would get stranded between the two countries. But López Obrador’s team at the foreign office overrode them. Because the Americans were involved, the issue was less a question of national policy than of diplomatic necessity.