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

by Jonathan Blitzer

For half a decade now, the position of the Reagan administration had been categorical: “It’s not enough to be fleeing a civil war,” Elliott Abrams said just weeks before the lawyers filed the American Baptist Churches (ABC) lawsuit. “You have to show that you, personally, are a target.”

But the INS numbers exposed a bias. If the government was preemptively ruling out claims brought by Salvadorans and Guatemalans, then applying for asylum was a foregone conclusion. On average, the US granted asylum to 23 percent of everyone who applied. But the grant rate for Nicaraguans was 14 percent, 34 percent for Poles, and 60 percent for ...

The prospect of winning a case was too remote. The close ties between the US and Salvadoran governments scared away anyone who hadn’t already been put off by the odds. Juan heard constantly that Salvadorans in San Francisco might be risking the safety of their families back home anytime they attended a rally or church event. Most of the time he could reassure them, but applying for asylum involved handing over personal information to a government they didn’t trust.

country were declaring themselves sanctuary jurisdictions. Chicago, Berkeley, and Saint Paul did so in March; followed by Cambridge in April; Madison, Wisconsin, in May; and New York, Los Angeles, and Olympia, Washington, in the fall. In December, after months of intense lobbying, the San Francisco board of supervisors held a vote on its own measure.

On Christmas Eve, the board of supervisors voted eight to three to adopt the sanctuary resolution, making it the thirteenth city nationwide to do so.

There was also bigger news in Washington. After four years of touch-and-go negotiations and multiple failures, an immigration reform bill was lumbering toward a vote in Congress. Talks centered on three sweeping areas of legislation: tougher border enforcement, penalties for employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers, and a plan to legalize three million immigrants living in the US.

In January 1986, one group of House Democrats was meeting privately to revive talks on temporary agricultural workers, a subject that had split apart the caucus, while other members were try...

A comprehensive bill provided a cutoff date—January 1, 1982—for when someone must have arrived in the US to qualify for citizenship. Because tens of thousands of Central Americans had arrived before then, the measure would have a huge impact on the Salvadoran and Guatemalan communit...

The Moakley-DeConcini proposal on extended voluntary departure was introduced as an amendment to the larger bill, but it had powerful foes from the start. The Reagan administration lobbied hard against it, with Alan Nelson, the INS commissioner, warning that there’d be “an invasion of feet people” if it were ever adopted. “There are...

Juan never applied for asylum because he had no intention of staying in the US, so he was caught off guard when a lawyer friend told him, one afternoon in the winter of 1987, that he should try.

“You’ve been granted asylum,” Silverman told him. Juan was stunned. His first thought was that it would now be easier for him to return to his family in El Salvador because he’d have a passport and a place where he could legally retreat should he need it.

The gang wars were often refracted through sibling relationships, with the younger kids imitating the mannerisms and the snarls of their elders. The boys would all be hanging out, when suddenly one of them would throw a gang sign. It was pure show, but everyone got inculcated early. It was never too early to declare allegiances.

After the shoot-out, Eddie and the others emerged from their hiding places, chatting excitedly about what they’d just witnessed. If they’d been scared by the gunfire, no one would admit it. These were quotidian skirmishes. The warring gangsters were neighbors or the brothers of schoolmates—respected, familiar faces. Whino and the Harpys drove back around a few minutes later and parked the car on the side of the street. They greeted everyone and joined the football game.

Some of the refugees tried banding together in self-defense. There were two options, and 18th Street was the more established one.

But over the years what distinguished 18th Street was its inclusiveness. Other Chicano gangs active in Southern California tended to reject anyone who wasn’t Mexican American, including would-be members born in Mexico. The gangsters from 18th Street welcomed immigrants and cultivated a more ecumenical Latino identity. This wasn’t exactly a matter of altruism: 18th Street grew faster, and more fearsome, than most of its rivals; its members went on to call it La Grandota—the big one.

Small cliques cropped up across the city, each one tied to a different set of street corners. The bigger gangs were selling drugs and extorting local businesses and dealers; MS was still too slight to realize these sorts of ambitions. Their MO was mostly to protect their own, pick fights, and thus make a name for themselves as the purveyors of staggering acts of violence.

In these gangs’ early, inchoate years it wasn’t always possible to tell who was or was not a member of MS. A careful observer of appearances, Eddie started to realize there were things he couldn’t see.

The crack epidemic was turning into a national political campaign, with Los Angeles as its epicenter. In 1986, Time magazine called it “the issue of the year,” while Newsweek described the drug problem as the biggest story since Vietnam and Watergate. In the summer of 1986, Len Bias, a twenty-two-year-old basketball star from the University of Maryland, who was drafted second by the Boston Celtics and had been compared to Michael Jordan, died of a cocaine overdose.

The tragedy fed a growing panic (“America discovered crack and overdosed on oratory,” according to a New York Times editorial), and the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, called for legislation that eventually became the Anti–Drug Abuse Act.

Passed less than a month before IRCA, Reagan’s immigration law, it created stiff, mandatory prison terms for anyone convicted of drug possession, establishing a notorious disparity for sentencing in which crack triggered substantially harsher punishments than powder cocaine. This was a ploy to target Black suspects, which law enforcement officers never bothered to conceal. The casual drug user “ought to be taken out and shot,” the hea...

On the night of August 1, 1988, a twenty-one-year-old named Raymond Carter was nearing home with a pizza when a police officer pulled him over.

The officer walked up to the driver’s-side window and asked, “Where do you live?” Carter gave the address where he lived with his mother, an apartment in a building at the corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue in South Central Los Angeles. “You’re one of them,” the officer replied. “One of what?” Carter asked. “Don’t play stupid,” the officer said. “You’re one of them.” Then he placed him under arrest.

A few minutes later, Carter was lying on his stomach in his building’s front courtyard, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Sirens were blaring and helicopters swooped low. Dozens of squad cars circled the block, carrying some ninety officers. Carter’s neighbors from the building and from three others on th...

Several, like Carter himself, were handcuffed, others beaten and dazed. In the din, he could make out the voice of his mother pleading with an officer for her blood pressure medication. Their apartment, he said later...

The cops were punching through walls, shattering mirrors, tearing up furniture, and demolishing toilets with hammers. Thirty-three people, all of them Black, were arrested. The property damage, later assessed at roughly $4 million, was so severe that the Red Cross had to p...

Some of the police officers sprayed graffiti on the building where Carter lived: “LAP...

Four months earlier, in April 1988, the Los Angeles Police Department had carried out a new policy called Operation Hammer. It sent more than a thousand officers into neighborhoods with high rates of gang crime to make near...

Soon after the raid at Thirty-ninth and Dalton, the state legislature passed a law called the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act, which effectively made it illegal to be “affiliated” with a street gang. Prosecutors could “enhance” a criminal sentence by several years if the defendant was, or had ever been, arrested for gang associations.

It was easy to wind up with such an arrest: if an officer frisked someone for drugs or weapons and didn’t find anything, he could still write the person up for being a “gang associate.” On the streets, there was no such thing as being a gang associate—people were either in a gang or not; partial membership wasn’t an option—but that only made it more difficult to disprove.

Los Angeles was at the national vanguard of anti-gang policing, which had more in common with the practices of the US Army than with the protocols of other police forces across the country. This “wasn’t policing,” acc...

The idea was to uproot gang members from their strongholds; if that meant decimating whole neighborhoods that gangsters shared with working-class people of color, the collateral damage c...

A legal novelty created by the city attorney’s office for this purpose was gang injunctions, which introduced a raft of enhanced penalties and, in some cases, allowed the police to...

It began with the Playboy Gangster Crips, a Black gang that was associated with the intersection of Cadillac Avenue and C...

Cops kept binders filled with the names, photos, and fingerprints of anyone they suspected to be tied to the gang. One of the prosecutors later explained, “We were not sure if it was ethical or legal. We had a list in our drawer, and if we got this person arrested, fuck ’em as bad as we can no matter what.” Other gang injunctions soon followed, including one that identified a clique of the Mara Salvatrucha in Hollywood.

There were some seventy-five active gangs in San Fernando, but only one major MS-13 clique, the Fulton Locos. A wiry twenty-year-old named Ernesto Deras, whose nom de guerre was Satan, was its leader, having arrived in Los Angeles in 1990.

Satan was a former Salvadoran soldier with an impressive combat pedigree: his battalion in El Salvador had trained at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, and thus came to be known in the Salvadoran officer corps as the Gringo Battalion.

The weapons he had used to train were all US-made—an M16 assault rifle, an M60 machine gun, an M203 grenade launcher.

By law, the police weren’t allowed to arrest immigrants simply for a lack of documents. It was a civil, not criminal, infraction. But in 1986, the INS started to work alongside the officers. “We don’t arrest people for being illegal aliens,” a spokesperson for the police force told the Los Angeles Times. “But it is a pilot program in our campaign to obliterate violence by gangs.”

Between December 1988 and April 1989, the effort led to 175 deportations for alleged involvement in “gang and narcotics activities,” including seventy-seven to Mexico, fifty-six to El Salvador, and fifteen to Honduras.

The initiative also granted the INS access to city and state jails, which its agents helped clean out by deporting anyone with a criminal record. By early 1989, the INS deported roughly nine thousand immigrants with felony convictions from the Western Regional Office alone, including more than two thousand from Los Angeles.

Many lower-level soldiers had been conscripted and were often tortured if they were caught absconding or disobeying orders. Some of them were campesinos themselves, not so much sadists as cowed conformists who’d been indoctrinated during their military service.

A new party representing the far right emerged in its place, favored by 54 percent of Salvadoran voters. Founded by a member of a death squad who was involved in the murder of Óscar Romero, it was called the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, or ARENA. Its leader was a polished businessman named Alfredo Cristiani.

Members of ARENA had direct ties not only to the death squads but also to the most recalcitrant hardliners in the armed forces. By comparison, Cristiani was a moderate, and he convinced the Americans that he would negotiate for peace.

On November 11, 1989, two days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the FMLN launched a surprise offensive in six neighborhoods in the northern part of San Salvador. The goal was to bruise the army one final time and bring it to the negotiating table.

The army responded by indiscriminately bombing the neighborhoods, leading to more than a thousand civilian casualties. Of the seventy-five thousand people killed over the entire course of the war in El Salvador, some thirteen thousand died during the FMLN offensive in November.

Feeling they might not be able to get away with it for much longer, members of the death squads launched attacks against journalists, students, and activists. But the most decisive action came from the military’s high command.

Early in the morning, on November 16, a few dozen soldiers from the Atlacatl Battalion, armed with AK-47s, stormed the campus of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (La UCA), one of the country’s most prominent institutions. It was run by a group of Jesuit priests who the extreme right believed were too close to the FMLN.

Before dawn, the soldiers forced their way into the rector’s residence, where they found five Spanish priests, their Salvadoran housekeeper, and her fifteen-year-old daughter. The soldiers ordered them to lie facedown on the ground outside and executed them. When t...

Before leaving, they scrawled graffiti on a sign, just as the LAPD officers had done on Dalton Avenue, in Los Angeles, in 1988. The aim was to doctor the crime scene to implicate the guerrillas: “FMLN...

For weeks after the killings, there was intense international outrage, but also confusion. At first, the American embassy bought the army’s line and suggested the FMLN was responsible. Eventually the evidence grew murky, then damning. By January 1990, the US military learned that the Atlacatl Battalion was behind the murders....