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

by Jonathan Blitzer

For every “alien” he helped cross, the punishment consisted of a two-thousand-dollar fine and up to five years in prison. Yet he was smuggling Central Americans across the border because their lives depended on it. The urgency of the mission was liberating. When he thought about it as an imperative, not a gamble, his nervousness solidified into resolve.

A few months earlier, he had received a letter from a Lutheran pastor in Los Angeles who described an incident in East LA. INS agents had chased a Salvadoran teenager into his church, eventually dragging him out in handcuffs. Members of the church were outraged that the agents had violated a sacred space, and when the pastor wrote the local INS office to complain, the district director apologized and promised to forbid his agents from making arrests in churches, schools, or hospitals.

“This order, in essence, is saying the church is a sanctuary, but it is not established as law,” the pastor wrote. Fife had initially thrown out the letter on account of its final few paragraphs: the pastor had traced the history of church sanctuary all the way back to the Middle Ages, which struck Fife as academic and naive. But now the concept made more sense. They could continue to help Central Americans cross the border, then give them sanctuary. Using the church as a public platform would be a form of protection and a statement of principle.

Members of the Tucson Ecumenical Council contacted several other churches across the country that had also been unofficially housing Central American refugees. The institutions were in liberal enclaves far from Tucson—San Francisco, Boston, Washington, DC, and Berkeley, California.

“We take this action because we believe the current policy and practice of the United States Government with regard to Central American refugees is illegal and immoral,” the letters said. “We believe our government is in violation of the 1980 Refugee Act and international law by continuing to arrest, detain, and forcibly return refugees to terror, persecution, and murder in El Salvador and Guatemala.”

The activists also proposed a moratorium on deportations for the duration of the war, known as “extended voluntary departure,” which Fife and Corbett had first heard about from Bill Johnston, the INS official in Tucson. Until their terms were met, the letters stated, “we will not cease to extend the sanctuary of the church to undocumented people from Central America,” adding, “Obedience to God requires this of us all.”

Being freed from the military’s custody did not mean Juan was out of danger. Usually, a prisoner’s official release was merely a prelude: within days, if not hours, soldiers in the death squads would finish the job. Juan’s uncles could not protect him from what was coming.

There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other was an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, known inside the country as the Octopus because it had tentacles everywhere.

It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, controlling the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. US State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company.

By 1952, the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, only the second democratically elected president in the country’s history, was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. Not only had the company been exempt for decades; it had also secured a guarantee to pay its employees no more than fifty cents a day.

In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the US government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. It didn’t matter that in a country of some three million people, the Communist Party had only about four thousand members. The start of the Cold War made American officials into easy marks. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism,” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953.

Over the following year, the CIA and the United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a “Liberation” force against the government. They eventually landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan military officer with dark, diminutive featu...

His chief qualification was his willingness to do whatever the Americans told him.

In June 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the US ambassador, he was rewarded with the presidency. Árbenz was flown into Mexican exile, but not before Castillo Armas forced him to strip to his underwear for the cameras as he boarded the plane. The State Department helped select the members of Castillo Armas’s cabinet.

Castillo Armas availed himself of American help for the short time he clung to power. In August 1954, with the CIA providing technical support, his government passed a “Law against Communism” that created ...

The legal charge was a “grave presumption of dangerousness,” which the government invoked to ban them from employment and detain them indefinitely. Naturally, this was a pretext for rounding up enemies, critics, and anyone else who might arouse the ...

The prevailing ideology was less a belief structure than a blueprint for a police state.

In 1963, the CIA intervened again, this time to prevent Juan José Arévalo, Árbenz’s predecessor and political mentor, from returning to the country to run for reelection. Three years later, on the eve of another election, in which the front-runner was a civilian reformer, the agency sent one of its “fixers” to work alongside the Guatemalan military on a campaign known as La Limpieza, a social cleansing that consisted of arrests, tortures, and executions.

To be on the lam in Guatemala was only a modest improvement on hiding out in El Salvador. Guatemala’s security forces weren’t just allies of the Salvadoran military; they were the envy of the Salvadoran officer corps, many of whom dreamed of a form of governance modeled on what they called the “Guatemalan solution,” a state of total, unchecked military control.

Between March and September 1980, more than a hundred lawyers, teachers, and university students had been killed; by the start of the following year, thirty-six opposition politicians had been assassinated.

On May 29, 1978, in a remote area of the northern state of Alta Verapaz called Panzós, fifty Maya Q’eqchi’ land activists staged a demonstration with the help of the Guatemalan Labor Party to protest the government’s theft of their land. The military sent troops who machine-gunned the crowds, killing several dozen people on the spot. “Those seeking real change will have no alternative but the violent left,” the US ambassador observed afterward.

The day the men were supposed to be paid, their contractor disappeared. They returned to Mexico City with nothing. It was Juan’s initiation into the cruel rites of immigrant disposability. Without papers, there was no recourse. What choice did he have but to take such jobs?

These were families who’d been displaced twice: first from their homelands in the western highlands and then again from southern Mexico, where they came to seek protection. Tens of thousands were living in refugee camps along Mexico’s border with Guatemala, in the rugged, mountainous state of Chiapas.

The Mexican government often looked the other way while Guatemalan soldiers crossed the border to conduct raids, air strikes, and executions. Maps used by the Guatemalan army labeled the refugee camps in southern Mexico as part of the “guerrilla infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, the US, Mexico, and Guatemala were having clandestine talks to create “repatriation zones” in Guatemala, where the Mexican government co...

Small clusters of Guatemalans were slowly forming in Central Florida, where they found seasonal work that roughly resembled their agricultural livelihoods back home. Others settled together in housing complexes in urban centers like Houston or Los Angeles, creating islands of community where they kept to themselves.

In El Salvador, the Indigenous population had virtually disappeared with La Matanza in the 1930s. Those who weren’t murdered had assimilated. In Guatemala, the Indigenous Maya didn’t hide, and couldn’t even if they wanted to.

They were fleeing a genocide. The worst of the massacres occurred between 1981 and 1983, in parts of the countryside with the highest concentrations of Indigenous residents. In the northwest, in the lush, mountainous highland departments

The Lucas García government adopted a policy that one general called “blindness and madness,” in which the military killed, tortured, and raped as many Maya as it could to instill terror and diminish support for the guerrillas. “The great Indian masses,” as the army called them, were the “social base” of opposition to the military.

The Carter administration had cut off aid to the Guatemalan military in 1977; Reagan was trying to restart it. At the same time, hundreds of villages were destroyed, and two hundred thousand people were killed and disappeared. More than a million Indigenous residents were displaced, with tens of thousands fleeing to Mexico. At one point, after the military burned down entire forests to make whole swaths of the highlands uninhabitable, villagers reported changes in rainfall patterns and climate.

Corbett approached a group called the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America, an association of lay activists that formed in January 1981, after members of the Salvadoran National Guard had raped and killed the four American churchwomen. The task force represented two dozen humanitarian and religious groups in the Chicago area. It was a powerful engine for signing up participating churches and enlisting activists across the Midwest. Within two years, owing to appeals made by the task force, another two hundred churches, synagogues, and Quaker meeting houses opened sanctuary spaces. The activists in Chicago also published and distributed some thirty thousand copies of booklets and instruction manuals on sanctuary.

The ambiguity between “economic migrants” and legitimate asylum seekers was the most obvious area of confusion. It was made more complicated by the fact that Central Americans were often fleeing persecution while simultaneously seeking work to survive on the run.

International human rights law, which the 1980 act was meant to follow, made further distinctions between a situation of general violence and one of specific persecution. Only the latter was supposed to trigger asylum protections.

The first was “high-risk”: these migrants had to either have documents from an established human rights organization, have a letter of recognition from the UNHCR, or be able to show torture marks on their bodies. “Medium-risk” refugees belonged to groups that typically faced persecution, such as catechists, former political prisoners, unionists, and army deserters. “Low-risk” migrants were simply fleeing violence.

A viable immigration bill was a kind of legislative Rubik’s Cube. Organized labor approved of employer sanctions but bristled at expanded legal immigration. Mexican American advocacy groups, which supported legalization of the undocumented, opposed employer sanctions for fear of discrimination against Hispanic workers. For every law-and-order type championing increased enforcement, there was another congressman whose most powerful constituents depended on cheap, undocumented labor.

The fallout from Mariel, for instance, was ongoing. There were thousands of Cubans stuck in jails and military bases because they had criminal records, but there was no place for the Reagan administration to move them without causing further outcry.

In Arkansas, where gubernatorial elections were held every two years, the Republican incumbent Frank White, who had won election in 1980 by lambasting Clinton over the refugees at Fort Chaffee, was now on the receiving end of the same attacks. It was Clinton’s turn, this time as White’s challenger, to blame the governor for doing nothing about immigrant criminals in the state. “I don’t need to tell you how important it is to the Republican Party and to my own political future that these people be moved,” White told one of Reagan’s advisers in the summer of 1981.

The cataclysm of Mariel had also eclipsed a growing exodus from Haiti. Some eight thousand Haitians fled the country for the US throughout the 1970s, arriving in small boats and flotillas. But in 1980 alone close to twenty-five thousand more landed at American ports. The Carter administration detained a large share of them, and Reagan spent mont...

After the Department of Justice moved one population of Haitian detainees to a holding center in Big Spring, Texas, the state’s senior Republican senator, John Tower, called the White House in a rage. “You have tripled the black population of Big Sp...

Faced with overlapping policy dilemmas, Reagan’s advisers opted to make an example of asylum seekers. In July, the president’s immigration task force announced a tough new enforcement regime. There had been, the president said, “sudden influxes of foreigners,” and the government had to “establish control.” Fro...

The US would dispatch the Coast Guard to intercept anyone fleeing Haiti; those who made it through the abbreviated hearings on government boats would be placed in detention. “For any exclusion program to have significant deterrent effect,” the assistant attorney...

The higher Meissner rose in the halls of government, the more acute the contradictions of US asylum policy appeared. The Refugee Act didn’t protect people equally, and the Justice Department, which oversaw the INS, barely pretended that it did. The government’s treatment of Haitians was a case in point.

Through the 1960s and early seventies, before Meissner was in government, large numbers of Haitians started coming to the US in flight from the repressive regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Their numbers increased when he died and his son, Jean-Claude, took power, just two years before Meissner started her White House fellowship.

This geopolitical ambiguity raised legal questions in immigration court. When, in December 1972, a boat with sixty-five Haitian men, women, and children arrived in Pompano Beach, Florida, The Miami Times ran an editorial that framed the matter clearly: A moment of truth has arrived for our local immigration officials who so casually go about their almost daily task of processing Cuban citizens landing in South Florida after having escaped the Castro regime. Should the procedure be any different for the dark-skinned Haitians? While Cubans were immediately admitted and set on a path to permanent residency within a year, the Haitians were thrown into detention centers. The INS set bond between five hundred and a thousand dollars, and the detainees were relegated to a separate legal track known as an “exclusion hearing,” an expedited form of deportation predicated on the legal fiction that they’d never, technically, entered the US.

Their initial asylum interviews were often held late at night, in an immigration jail near Miami called Krome. Each one lasted twenty minutes, without lawyers or interpreters present. If Haitians cleared this first hurdle, the government erected others.

On an August morning in 1981, Steve Forester, an immigration attorney representing Haitian asylum seekers, had twenty-nine hearings scheduled in three separate courts. “I had four people deport...

Eventually, in response to a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of four thousand Haitians, a federal judge intervened, finding that the conditions in Haiti were “stark, brutal, and bloody,” and that deportees from the US were in “substantial danger” of being tortured or killed. The INS, he ruled, had violated the Constitution in denying the Haitians the semblance of a fair hearing. “Those Haitians who came to the United States seeking freedom and justice did not fi...

Meissner never would have admitted it to him in public or private, but she was becoming increasingly convinced that there was truth to what Fife was saying. Central Americans were not receiving adequate protection in the US, yet many of their cases, she’d tell colleagues, were “textbook” examples of political persecution.

Meissner was watching government attorneys and State Department officials strain to create legal openings to resettle Southeast Asians at the same time that they were deliberately ignoring straightforward asylum cases from Latin America. The State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights endorsed political asylum much more often to Nicaraguans fleeing the Sandinistas than to Salvadorans or Guatemalans hounded by American allies.

By 1984, at a time when 25 percent of asylum seekers were obtaining a positive result, Salvadorans and Guatemalans were being rejected at a rate of 98 and 99 percent.