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

by Jonathan Blitzer

MPP went into effect in January 2019, in Tijuana. The Department of Homeland Security extended it, city by city, to locations along the entire US-Mexico border. In mid-March, it came to Mexicali and Juárez. In July, MPP was instituted in the state of Tamaulipas, on the Gulf of Mexico, a stronghold for criminal cartels. Close to fifty thousand asylum seekers were returned to Mexico, where many of them faced extreme levels of violence.

On August 3, cartel members arrived at a shelter in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, demanding that the pastor in charge hand over a group of Cubans to be ransomed; when he refused, he was abducted, never to be seen again. Later in the summer, a few miles away, a dozen asylum seekers who’d just been returned to Mexico were kidnapped. “The people in migration”—Mexican immigration authorities—“turned us over to the cartels,” one of the victims later told Vice News. “They know what they are doing. They don’t care if you’re killed or not.”

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.

She and another woman from Honduras hired a smuggler to help them cross into the US. The smuggler was in league with a cadre of Mexican federal policemen. For two nights, Tania and the other woman were driven to different stash houses along the border. On the last night before they expected to cross, they were taken to yet another house, where there were four other women and a group of armed men, including policemen in uniforms, keeping watch. One of the policemen held a gun to Tania’s head and ordered her to perform oral sex on him. She could hear the other women getting beat up in the other rooms. Early the following morning, Tania and another woman were transported to a separate location, where they were repeatedly raped. A week passed before local authorities found them and took them to a hospital.

Department officials felt that they knew how to manage the border crisis. They just needed more resources to house families and children. But Miller was contemptuous of conventional wisdom. If the federal courts issued injunctions blocking them, he argued, the Justice Department could appeal those decisions to the Supreme Court. Why place two justices on the bench if the White House didn’t use them? The president had appointed more than a hundred judges to the federal judiciary.

Miller’s idea was to use executive actions as a battering ram against the lower courts. In July 2019, the president issued a new regulation in that spirit, banning asylum for anyone who traveled through another country to reach the US. When it got tied up with an injunction, the Justice Department appealed. This time, the Ninth Circuit narrowed the injunction while the parties argued it out in court; it was a partial but striking victory for the president.

In September 2019, the Department of Homeland Security opened two tent courts along the border, in Laredo and Brownsville, where as many as four hundred asylum seekers in MPP could be processed each day. People who showed up at ports of entry for their hearings were sent directly to these makeshift courts. The rationale, according to a report in The Washington Post, was for US authorities “to give asylum seekers access to the U.S. court system without giving them physical access to the United States.” The serial dislocations of MPP—the staggered, piecemeal hearings; the long waits; the improvised courtrooms—achieved the government’s desired effect: only 1 percent of all completed cases ended in relief. In these instances, DHS filed appeals. “We are bringing integrity to the system,” Kevin McAleenan declared.

From his years at CBP, McAleenan knew that individual policies at the border were stopgap measures that failed to address emigration at its source. He wanted to restart US aid money to the region, while also rewiring the asylum system to account for what he viewed as an unstoppable exodus. He called his plans “asylum cooperative agreements,” but they were also known as “safe-third-country” deals. The principle was that migrants had to apply for asylum in the first country they reached after fleeing their own, provided that the country had a working asylum system.

The first of many problems with the plan was that none of the three countries of the Northern Triangle could be described as “safe.” El Salvador didn’t have an asylum system. Guatemala did, but it was minuscule. Then there was the bigger issue of how many people were already fleeing these three countries in the first place, a stark indication of the reality on the ground. Ninety-two percent of everyone arrested at the US southern border were from the Northern Triangle. Two hundred and seventy thousand Guatemalans tried to reach the US in 2019. What did that say about the stability of the country for the 261,000 Hondurans who entered it while heading north, or for the 92,000 Salvadorans?

In the fall of 2018, as hundreds of Honduran families from the migrant caravan reached the US border, Tony Hernández touched down in Miami, where agents from the DEA arrested him. The charges included trafficking more than 185,000 kilograms of cocaine, paying bribes to politicians up and down his drug routes, and selling weapons. Juan Orlando Hernández denied any knowledge of his brother’s activities, but by the summer of 2019 evidence linking him to drug money was being made public. At the start of August, a forty-four-page court filing against Tony Hernández, in New York, referred to a certain “co-conspirator four.” The person was unnamed, but clearly identifiable: “CC-4 was elected President of Honduras in late 2013.”

According to the filing, Juan Orlando Hernández was the subject of other DEA investigations as well. Some $1.5 million in contributions to his campaign came from drug sales, and “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel and the world’s most notorious drug kingpin, had once met with Tony Hernández personally in order to deliver a million dollars meant for Juan Orlando.

All Trump cared about was immigration enforcement; Bukele planned accordingly. He was so eager to comply with McAleenan’s proposed deal that his advisers emailed a signed copy of the agreement straight to the Department of Homeland Security. US officials had to call them back to explain that the protocol was more involved, requiring signing and countersigning the document in public. Once the Salvadorans gave the White House what it wanted, Bukele could ask his own favor in return. He was trying to build a tourist attraction on beachfront real estate along the Pacific, and he wanted the US State Department, which issued routine travel advisories for Americans going abroad, to lower the country’s threat level.

In late February 2017, Morales and a group of political aides and influential businessmen had met at a condominium in Guatemala City to hatch plans for attacking the reputation of the CICIG, the anti-corruption body, in the US. Within a few months, this group had expanded to include members of the Guatemalan National Congress. According to an investigation by Nómada, a Guatemalan news site, they began paying tens of thousands of dollars each month to the American lobbying firm Barnes & Thornburg, which was managed by a major fundraiser for Vice President Mike Pence. Another interest group opposing the CICIG retained the firm Greenberg Traurig, which had offices in Florida, the home state of Republican senator Marco Rubio. By April 2018, congressional Republicans were holding hearings on potential investigatory abuses committed by the CICIG; in the Senate, Rubio and the Utah Republican Mike Lee led a push to suspend US aid to the group.

In Guatemala, the immigration accords received significant media attention. They were wildly unpopular and had the rare effect of galvanizing both the political left and right against the government. But Morales was preparing for his life after the presidency; casting his lot with the Americans was his insurance policy. He sent his interior minister, Enrique Degenhart, to the US capital to work out the terms of the deal. Degenhart had made his first visit earlier that spring, just after McAleenan became acting secretary. McAleenan was still unpacking his new office when the two met. They knew each other from McAleenan’s time as head of CBP. “We’re here at the orders of our president to see how we can help,” Degenhart said. “We give you our borders.”