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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Rayburn enlisted two undercover operatives to infiltrate the sanctuary movement.

His first hire was Salomon Graham, an undocumented Mexican with a criminal record. He’d been arrested twice for illegal entry in the early 1970s, twice more a few years later for alien smuggling, and another time for illegal entry.

He and Rayburn had worked together before. In exchange for information about smuggling operations, the government overlooked Graham’s felony offenses. Rayburn paid him two hundred dollars in cash to attend events sponsored by adv...

While Graham was in his forties and raffish, with dark hair and a thin mustache, Rayburn’s other agent, Jesus Cruz, had a more disarming profile. He was...

His modus operandi was to insinuate himself into a group of smugglers, then tape them using a bug he wore under his shirt.

So Cruz lingered, and the other activists came to rely on him. It helped that the group was constantly short on cars and people. He showed up to meetings and planning sessions, he traveled to Mexico to deliver food to Father Quiñones’s church, and before long, he brought reinforcements, in the form of Graham and two other agents, whom he introduced as friends and fellow volunteers. By the summer of 1984, Cruz and the other INS operatives were crossing migrants and traveling as far as California to reunite children with their parents.

Their recorders were running the whole time, and they sent the tapes to Rayburn at headquarters—an old post office building in Phoenix, where neither the directory nor the office’s outer doors gave any indication that INS was inside.

The materials Cruz, Graham, and the other agents amassed while undercover advanced the agency’s investigation into the nucleus of the sanctuary movement in Tucson. But the main breakthrough happened by accident that spring.

Behind the wheel was Phil Conger, a twenty-seven-year-old Methodist activist from San Diego who’d worked with Peggy Hutchison at the Tucson Metropolitan Ministry. He was chatting with the three Salvadorans in the back seat when he spotted a Border Patrol cruiser lurking by the side of the interstate, about ten miles outside Nogales. When Conger gently pumped the brakes, the siren came on.

Afterward, a judge would rule that the patrolmen had stopped and searched Conger’s car unlawfully. But by then the Salvadorans had been placed in deportation proceedings, and government agents had already rifled through Conger’s backpack, where they found a thick and detailed document written by Corbett. It was called “Some Proposals for Integrating Smuggling, Refuge, Relay, Sanctuary, and Bailbond Networks.” The pages contained details about safe houses, phone numbers, and addresses.

Over the course of the civil war, the number of Salvadorans living in Los Angeles grew tenfold, to three hundred thousand people, by the end of the decade. In March 1983, Reagan was issuing public warnings that El Salvador was “on the front line of the battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually at us.”

He was right that the fates of the US and Central America were entwined, but wrong about why. The Americans were helping to unleash a regional exodus. More than a million Salvadorans were displaced by 1984. Almost a quarter of the country’s population would eventually be living in the US. Tens of thousands of them lacked legal status because the American government refused to recognize their legitimate claims to asylum.

When Juan arrived, relatively early in this process, the Pico Union and Westlake neighborhoods, which were near MacArthur Park, were already growing...

In a different section of the park, hawkers sold fake social security cards, work authorization forms, and identity documents for five dollars apiece. Juan would need these to find a job, but his cousin insisted that he start by taking English classes at a small language school. Juan disagreed, wanting to waste no time making money he could send home to the rest of his family. Because he planned on returning to El Salvador soon, he didn’t see the point in learning a new language.

The Salvadorans in the park—all men—had each narrowly escaped murder, unlike so many of their friends, relatives, and spouses. Other family members had stayed behind because traveling north was too dangerous, expensive, and uncertain. A large contingent of the men drank and raged and lurched around in a fog. Others drifted into a quieter, nightly oblivion, having spent the day working menial jobs to the point of exhaustion.

One day, a ragged man with a pallid, haggard face confessed to Juan that the sound of his own screaming was waking him up every night. He and his brother-in-law had worked together on a construction crew in San Salvador, and both belonged to a union. They were kidnapped one day after work, detained together while National Guardsmen tortured the brother-in-law. The man told Juan that the soldiers had made him watch when they finally shot his brother-in-law in the head. The survivor’s guilt was almost worse than the memory itself.

If Tucson was ground zero of the sanctuary movement, San Francisco had been its vanguard in the early 1970s when conscientious objectors partnered with the city’s more activist congregations to oppose the Vietnam War. Local clergy also got involved in housing Chilean refugees fleeing the newly installed regime of Augusto Pinochet, who had overthrown the previous government in the fall of 1973, with the help of the US State Department and the CIA.

For the past several years, the FBI had been surveilling any group with ties to the Central American left. The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), one of the bigger advocacy groups, had at least 180 chapters across the US; some twenty-three hundred Americans associated with these offices were the subjects of sustained surveillance.

The INS investigators had received strict instructions to stick to domestic targets, but the FBI was coordinating directly with the Salvadoran National Guard.

Around the time that Juan arrived in Mexico, a series of meetings was taking place in El Salvador. An FBI recruit named Frank Varelli, a naturalized Salvadoran living in Dallas, traveled to San Salvador to meet with General Vides Casanova. Their relationship was personal. Varelli’s father, a former colonel in the Salvadoran army, was a close friend and admirer of Vides Casanova; now, with the White House’s blessing, Vides Casanova was on the verge of becoming the country’s next defense minister.

Six years later, a Senate investigation uncovered the nature of Varelli and Vides Casanova’s partnership: together they generated a large body of information, almost all of it fabricated, in which Salvadoran intelligence sources identified members of CISPES as part of international “terrorist support” groups working in the US as agents of...

“Politics can be a barrier to people here,” Juan told the organizer at Casa El Salvador, an engineer in his early twenties named José Artiga. They met at the corner of Twentieth Street and Mission. “There are Salvadorans on the streets who aren’t all sympathetic to the FMLN. It’s best for me to stay neutral, and to help them as refugees.” It was exactly what Artiga had wanted to hear. He’d spent the past three years in the US watching the Reagan administration brand asylum-seeking Salvadorans as communists and agitators. “We...

Juan started to lead a small group of a dozen immigrants that he called the comité de refugiados—or CRECE, the Central American Refugee Committee. There wasn’t an office in its early days, so each weekend Juan set up a table in the hallway of ...

The work itself was constant and intense, an endless improvisation. Salvadoran immigrants would turn up at all hours of the day. Some of them hadn’t eaten; others lacked clothes or housing. Everyone was looking for work and legal advice. There was hot food on a rotating daily basis at St. Teresa of Avila church, St. Anthony’s, and the Buen Pastor; weekly clothing drives at St. Mary’s; and legal consultations at St. John’s, a Lutheran church on Twenty-second Street. Juan led group therapy sessions, and the committee referred Central Americans to health clinics in the Mission and to hospitals that offered free services.

Life in the US was a daily collision of all the accumulated injuries that had brought them there. Medical appointments were pointless if the patients never showed, and it took concerted effort to convince Salvadorans who were frantic to find work that their debilitating migraines or insomnia were physical manifestations of deeper emotional pain. In El Salvador, they might have been hunted by death squads and federal troops, but in San Francisco they lived under the threat of arrest and deportation.

In private, officers acknowledged what the Americans did not: all the weapons, money, and military advisers from the US were prolonging the fighting without changing the outcome. In 1980, the Salvadoran military had twelve thousand troops; four years later, boosted by American largesse of $1 million in aid a day, it had forty-two thousand. But on the battlefield, they were still fighting to preserve a stalemate.

Officials at the State Department frantically met with the Salvadoran president, whom they had virtually handpicked for the job two years before. But when he tried to talk to the military brass, they rebuffed him. “I have no power, no authority,” he subsequently told the Americans.

Reagan, meanwhile, was undercutting his own diplomats. First, he vetoed a bill that would have kept in place the minimal human rights certification requirements in El Salvador. Then, a month later, he publicly defended the death squads. “I’m going to voice a suspicion I’ve never said aloud before,” he said. “I wonder if all this is rightwing, or if those guerrilla forces have not realized that…they can get away with these violent acts, helping to try to bring down the government, and the rightwing will be blamed for it.”

When Juan heard Reagan adopt the line of the Salvadoran far right, he redoubled his sanctuary work. The caravans he helped organize in California were growing, and he traveled with larger groups to farther-flung cities, such as Seattle, Chicago, and Washington, DC. The advocates were now trying to get municipal governments to declare t...

The premise was to have local police departments limit their dealings with the INS, so that arrests for petty crimes wouldn’t automatically end in a person’s deportation. Church activists courted the support of union heads, schoo...

A second strategy was tied to legislation recently introduced in the US Congress to suspend deportations during the Salvadoran civil war. Its chief authors were an Arizona senator named Dennis DeConcini and the Boston-based congressman Joe Moakley. Each had entered the fray because of sanctuary activists.

For the rest of the decade, Moakley became Congress’s most implacable fighter for the rights of Salvadorans. But the bills he and DeConcini introduced languished in the usual fashion. Most Republicans opposed them, and a large share of Democrats were scared to take on Reagan.

While the Christian Democrats were politically moderate—a far cry from the violent supremacy of the extreme right—their role in the government gave cover to the military. The generals were still the ones in charge. A victory for the Christian Democrats was a victory for Reagan—and thus the status quo.

On May 9, Reagan delivered a prime-time address on Central America, urging Congress to act. “This Communist subversion poses the threat that 100 million people, from Panama to the open border on our south, could come under the control of pro-Soviet regimes,” he said. He also warned that the consequences could involve “hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Communist oppression.” The Democrats caved, and Congress gave the president what he wanted—$200 million in military aid, nearly two and a half times the previous year’s appropriation.

On January 14, 1985, the government indicted sixteen people involved in the Arizona sanctuary movement.

They included John Fife; James Corbett; Peggy Hutchison; Phil Conger; a Catholic priest from Nogales, Arizona, named Anthony Clark; and Darlene Nicgorski, a nun who’d previously worked in Guatemala and Nicaragua.

Fifty-five Salvadorans and Guatemalans who’d passed through Tucson between March and November 1984 and were now living in the US were named as “illegal alien unindicted co-conspirators.” The government offered to drop the criminal charges against them if they testified at the trial, but it was putting them into deportation proceedings regardless. INS agents began the roundups immediately.

When the government issued its indictment, it also submitted a long and detailed request on everything it wanted the judge to exclude from the case—namely, all the context that explained the motivations of the sanctuary activists. They requested that he impose tight restrictions on testimony about the conditions in El Salvador and Guatemala; the likelihood of deportations leading to death; the suspiciously high rejection rates for asylum claims coming from these countries; the US role in the region’s wars; the INS’s glaring record of mistreating asylum seekers; the tenets of international law; and the terms of the 1980 Refugee Act. All the government was bringing before the court was the narrow question of whether the sanctuary workers had helped cross and harbor undocumented immigrants.

By the start of November, as the two sides were finalizing jury selection, Judge Carroll announced his decision to exclude any testimony or material that went beyond the most immediate question at hand. As he put it, only the attorney general of the United States had the power to admit immigrants as asylees.

All the witnesses the defense lawyers had planned to call—human rights experts, legal scholars, church figures—could no longer testify. There’d be no point in putting any of the defendants on the stand either, becaus...

In mid-January 1986, a forty-four-year-old Salvadoran labor leader who went by the name Alejandro Rodríguez took the stand. He was a husband and father of four, who had worked as an industrial electrician in El Salvador and had been the secretary of a large construction union. State security forces had jailed and tortured him for his work, and he fled with his family to Mexico. (“We’re not going to get into ears and eyes and individual tortures,” Judge Carroll warned from the bench.)

Frequently, after Reno rose to object during Rodríguez’s testimony, Judge Carroll would instruct the jury to forget what it had just heard. This was a metaphor not just for the whole trial, but for the blinkered approach the US took on asylum: the government suppressed any facts that chafed with its agenda.

Why, Reno wanted to know, hadn’t Rodríguez applied for asylum as soon as he set foot in the US? Rodríguez replied that he’d needed time to gather documentation. He started to explain what his lawyer had told him: the government was rejecting Salvadoran asylum applications at an exceptionally high rate. But before he could finish his sentence, Reno objected. Carroll stopped the testimony.

Young men from their late teens to their midthirties were routinely coerced into fighting for the Salvadoran government and killed as guerrilla sympathizers if they resisted or deserted. Just being young and male in El Salvador made someone a target for persecution, so the two American lawyers zeroed in on the language of the 1980 Refugee Act to craft an argument.

According to the law, a migrant eligible for protection was someone persecuted for his “race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” The category of “particular social group” was usefully open-ended. Van Der Hout and Blum applied the phrase to young, working-class Salvadoran men of military age who would refuse to enlist in the armed forces.

Their general political views were irrelevant; the young men’s identity alone led the government to make a specific—and often fatal—assumption that they opposed the regime. A judge rejected the argum...

In another case filed at the same time, Orantes-Hernandez v. Smith, a different group of lawyers urged a federal court to stop the INS from forcing immigrants to sign voluntary departure forms. The practice amounted to clear coercion of asylum seekers to abandon their legal claims. This time, a judge sided with the p...

Later, in Los Angeles, a separate case, Mendez v. Reno, challenged the INS officials tasked with holding asylum interviews. They “were not trained and were ignorant of applicable asylum law”; “interpreters were not provided”; and “sessions were rushed with little privacy.” An ancillary aim of the case was to compel government officials to sit down for depositions. Under oath, asylum officials whose job was to execute ...

In May 1985, a group of eighty religious, refugee, and legal assistance organizations responded to the sanctuary indictments by filing a lawsuit—American Baptist Churches in the USA v...

The religious organizations made two arguments. They claimed that the First Amendment protected their right to give sanctuary to refugees. And, on behalf of individual refugees, they accused the government of discriminating against asylum requests made by Salvadorans and Guatemalans. The lawyers cited the INS’s own data showing that Salvadorans and Guatemalans were rejected at a much higher rate than asylum seekers from other countries.