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

by Jonathan Blitzer

The investigation the Salvadorans had promised was “at a standstill,” the task force wrote in a report that April, and the State Department and CIA were giving it cover. It would take decades to bring the full cast of killers to justice. By then declassified US cables—from the embassy, Department of Defense, and CIA—revealed that the Salvadoran military had orchestrated the killings, while US officials had “foreknowledge” of the plot.

The search for answers in the Jesuit case was only part of Moakley’s agenda for El Salvador. Since 1983, he’d been pushing his bill to create a temporary status for Salvadorans living in the US that would protect them against deportation during the war. “It’s our bombs, our guns, and our mines that made these people refugees,” he said. Yet each time he and his Senate colleague Dennis DeConcini introduced the measure, it died in committee.

There was a fresh opportunity in the form of an immigration bill moving through the Senate, shaped by immigrants’ rights advo...

In 1986, IRCA had been intended as a comprehensive bill to deal with legal and illegal immigration to the US. In effect, it dealt only with the latter, legalizing 2.8 million undocumented immigrants in exchange for tougher enforcement measures. Now members of Congress were looking to expand legal avenues for entering the US—creating several new visa categories, changing the availability of green cards, and raising caps on overall immigration.

In the spring of 1980, 92,000 Salvadorans were living in the US, according to the Pew Research Center; by 1990, there were 459,000.

The eventual compromise spared close to half a million Salvadorans currently living in the US. The trade-off—the “teeth” Simpson wanted—was that TPS holders did not have a path to permanent residency. Their protection against deportation allowed them to live and work in the US, but it had to be renewed every eighteen months.

TPS holders would become permanently stuck with a status that was meant to be provisional. Republican and Democratic administrations found it easier to renew their TPS status every two years than to create an actual route to citizenship for those who had built lives in the US over decades.

Many whose asylum petitions had been denied or delayed were pursuing legal relief through the American Baptist Churches litigation; others went underground or eventually availed themselves of TPS when it became available. A quarter of the Salvadorans living in the US ultimately obtained TPS.

The medical records at La Clínica were kept in locked file cabinets in case of INS raids, and each chart, with its list of symptoms tied to stress and fear, told a story of the failed promise of the 1986 immigration reform.

At that time, when IRCA passed, somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million Salvadorans were estimated to be living in the US. About half of them had arrived before 1981, which was the cutoff for legalization under IRCA. In Washington, DC, however, 90 percent of Salvadorans had arrived after that date. The legislation thus triggered a panic.

Ten percent of Salvadoran students enrolled in DC public schools withdrew after the bill was passed; there was a 20 to 30 percent drop in ESL courses, and local charities reported a spike in hunger ...

There was also a sizable contingent of people who’d been medical professionals in El Salvador but had to look for new lines of work in kitchens and at construction sites with payment under the table, because of either the language barrier or professional licensing regulations. At La Clínica, Juan enlisted their help, with Shields’s supervision. One of them had been an emergency nurse in Guazapa, another a doctor who had also been tortured by the Salvadoran military. They came on Tuesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and formed a group to which Juan assigned a dignified and galvanizing name: the National Association of Latin American Health Professionals.

La Clínica was staying open a few days every week, and its resources were growing. It had been receiving special funds from the city because the doctors were doing HIV testing and providing care for patients with AIDS. Another grant came when La Clínica agreed to provide physical exams to a large group of newly resettled Vietnamese refugees.

The money went toward additional staff hires, including a part-time nurse who helped tend to the Central American patients. All the medical services at La Clínica remained free, r...

The following month, a commission appointed by the mayor, a Black political veteran and former cop named Tom Bradley, released the findings of an extensive investigation into police misconduct. “There is a significant number of officers in the LAPD who repetitively use excessive force against the public,” its authors wrote. By then, Bradley was openly feuding with the white police chief, Daryl Gates, whom he was trying to oust. There were calls for Gates to resign, but there was resistance inside the department.

The LA gangs had wildly divergent reactions to the riots. The Bloods and the Crips were enemies but agreed to a temporary truce in the name of racial solidarity. Members of the Mexican Mafia and other Chicano street gangs in East LA were alarmed by the destruction, and for the most part urged those among their ranks not to participate. The attitude was different among many of the Central Americans who belonged to MS-13. Those in South LA joined the mobs, destroying property, stealing weapons, and raiding stores.

Travelers who couldn’t sneak away to the bathroom before reaching customs found other ways to destroy or conceal their identity documents. They hid them in their carry-on luggage or, in cases of desperation, tried eating through the pages.

Whatever their means of disposal, everyone had wised up to the same strategy: without a passport to confirm a country of origin, there was no way for INS officials to initiate the deportation process. These travelers requested asylum, and because there was limited space for detention, the INS often released them with a work-authorization form and a future court date.

With growing concern about government repression in Beijing, the US expanded protections for Chinese émigrés fleeing the country’s one-child policy. The resulting wave of applications, coupled with old inefficiencies, meant unresolved asylum claims mounted. Soon there was a backlog of more than a hundred thousand cases.

One of the entries in the backlog dated to 1988, and it belonged to Carmelina Cadena and her mother. In the early 1990s, they were living together in Arcadia, Florida.

When they had first arrived in the US from Guatemala, in 1983, Carmelina’s mother found a sewing job in Los Angeles, but lost it when her employers demanded papers. She didn’t know how to get them. Her Spanish was bad, but her English was worse. In San Miguel Acatán, their hometown in the mountains of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, everyone spoke a language called Akateko.

From Los Angeles, they relocated to Colorado—odd jobs in Denver, cleaning mushrooms in Alamosa. They spent the nights sleeping in the trunk of a car to avoid the workers’ cabins, which were filled entirely with men, about thirty of them in all. In Oregon they picked onions; in Idaho, potatoes. In New York, during the fall, they picked apples, though this task was especially strenuous for the mother and daughter, who were four feet nine and four feet six, respectively.

By the time they reached Florida, there were about twenty thousand Indigenous Maya living in the state, most of them clustered about a hundred miles farther east in a sparsely populated agrarian community w...

Almost all the Indigenous Guatemalans in Florida at the time had come from somewhere in the Cuchamatán mountains, in small groups beginning in the early 1980s, as the repression in the western highlands of the country grew more intense. More than a million Maya fled to Mexico and the United States during those years.

They figured their best move was to prove their willingness to work; the first words in English that many of them learned was the phrase “I need a good work.” This made it even easier for the government to write them off as “economic migrants.” Those who applied for asylum were almost all rejected.

Between 1983 and 1986, close to a hundred thousand Guatemalans reached the US, but only fourteen asylum petitions were granted. The denials didn’t stop the flow of people heading north.

An irony of the dysfunctional asylum system was that it led to more applications. You didn’t apply for asylum expecting to get it. The odds were too long. But because the government was running so far behind, it was granting asylum seekers work authorization while their applications were pending.

In 1991, there were 56,000 recently filed asylum applications; understaffed INS offices completed 16,000 of them. In 1992, there were 103,000 additional applications, only 21,000 of which were completed. “By the 1990s,” one historian later wrote of the Guatemalans, “the earlier stream of ‘war refugees’ gave way to a chain of migration of ‘economic refugees’ drawing on family and village ties.”

The ABC v. Thornburgh case may have represented a belated victory for the principle of asylum, but it added hundreds of thousands more applications for the INS to review. By the end of 1994, the backlog had grown to more than four hundred thousand cases.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the US government was trying to contain Mexican border crossers, agents in El Paso responded by racially profiling residents. Because they couldn’t catch everyone who entered the US, the patrolmen stopped anyone they could within the city limits, from grandmothers to high schoolers, demanding to see their papers. This posed a special problem in a county that was 75 percent Hispanic.

By the time Eddie returned from El Salvador, there was a new mayor and a new police chief. The anti-gang units of the LAPD were in ascendance, and racial recriminations were all-consuming. Sixty-one percent of the “arrested looters” were Latino, according to the police. The areas hit hardest by the rioting in South Central Los Angeles were Black neighborhoods filled with Latinos. But the destruction also spread to other parts of the city with large populations of newly arrived immigrants from Central America and Mexico: Pico Union, Koreatown, East Hollywood.

The more established Latino communities—in East Los Angeles, for instance—had tried to keep their distance from the mayhem, giving rise to other anxieties and resentments. In the Los Angeles Times, a Chicano journalist wrote, “Yes, Central American immigrants and Chicanos might both be termed ‘Latino.’ But the ethnic link between the two groups is thin.” The article ran with the headline, “Should Latinos Support Curbs on Immigrants? A Question Left by the Riots Is Whether New Arrivals Threaten Second- and Third-Generation Mexican-Americans.”

One night after dinner, Joel objected when Eddie announced that he was going to step outside. It was dark, and they generally tried to stay off Langdon Avenue at night. Crime was one risk, but it paled beside the threat of the anti-gang police squads that patrolled the streets in full force. Residents had come to believe that the officers arrested whomever they could, often nabbing innocent people because they lived alongside gang members in the same housing units.

A few years later, in 1999, one of the worst scandals in the history of the LAPD roiled the department and the city. The Rampart Division of the LAPD’s anti-gang unit was exposed by an officer within its ranks as a criminal enterprise. Some of the agents had been involved in gang-related moneymaking schemes of their own; to keep up appearances, and to curb potential rivals, many of them had been fabricating and planting evidence for years. At one point, when the department reopened cases to investigate, detectives were forced to fly to Central America to look for people who’d been wrongfully deported.

The Rampart scandal confirmed for Eddie and his friends that they were right to distrust the authorities.

Welfare reform was the more complicated bill for the president. Clinton had campaigned on “ending welfare as we know it”—a line written by Bruce Reed—before getting blindsided by the Republican Congress. The first two welfare-reform bills that reached his desk were harsh even by his own malleable standards. He vetoed both.

Another bill passed Congress in August 1996 and went to the president for his signature. This one, he complained to his advisers, was “a decent welfare bill wrapped in a sack of shit.” The law slashed the welfare rolls and unraveled the social safety net, but perhaps the most controversial aspect of it was how the bill funded job training programs to wean people from government support.

Almost half of the total funding—some $23 billion—came from cutting aid to legal immigrants. For years, permanent residents and green-card holders had received federal relief. The bill would end that, making them ineligible for welfare, aid to families with dependent children, supplementary security income, food stamps, and Medicaid.

Up until this moment, there was a clear fault line for immigrants in the realm of public policy: legal immigrants were considered upstanding and thus largely protected, while “illegal” immigrants were treated as reprehensible. The welfare refo...

IRCA had just passed, and the archdiocese was running a program to help immigrants apply for legal status. Millions of undocumented immigrants were eligible under the new law, but many of their children, siblings, and parents didn’t qualify for amnesty. Because they’d entered the US after the law’s eligibility deadline, some were getting deported. Muñoz had lobbied the Bush administration to create a “family unity” policy, before getting involved in shaping the 1990 Immigration Act.

Six years later, the welfare reform bill reminded Muñoz of what had first pushed her into organizing. Millions of legal immigrants spent years of their lives paying taxes and starting families, only to see the political debate suddenly shift. To Muñoz’s mind, it was as though Congress were telling them, “You’re not us yet.”

Muñoz was cutting out articles from local, state, and national newspapers and keeping them in a file that was growing thicker as the welfare policy was finalized. The government was beginning to send out notices informing legal immigrants that their relief checks would stop coming. One clip in Muñoz’s folder included an account of a seventy-five-year-old Mexican-born farmworker named Ignacio Muñoz. He’d lived in the US for forty years and had been receiving four hundred dollars in supplemental security income each month. When a government letter reached him at his home in Stockton, California, he bought a gun and shot himself in a canal bed under a local bridge.

Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed didn’t have an ideological aversion to immigration—they just thought that anything short of toughness on the issue was a political loser in an election year. Emanuel would later call immigration “the third rail of American politics.”

In 1994, Californians voted overwhelmingly to approve a ballot measure, called Proposition 187, that barred undocumented immigrants from using public health care or education services. A federal court eventually struck down the measure as unconstitutional, but Washington took note. For much of the 1994 campaign, the state’s incumbent governor, a Republican named Pete Wilson, was trailing his Democratic opponent by a wide margin. Seeing the passion generated by Proposition 187, he claimed the cause as his own. He aired a video of men darting past cars while sneaking across the border onto Interstate 5 in San Diego; as they scurried under a highway overpass, music played in a minor key and a somber voice intoned, “They keep coming.” He won reelection by fifteen points.

In Washington, Gingrich hadn’t made immigration a central plank of his Contract with America, but Pete Wilson’s victory persuaded him that the hardliners in his caucus should run with the issue. The result was the second piece of legislation that Murguía and Muñoz spent the summer trying to fight off. It was an overweening measure crafted by Alan Simpson, in the Senate, and Lamar Smith, the new chair of the immigration subcommittee in the House. Simpson was still smarting from his lost fight over the 1990 Immigration Act, which expanded legal immigration over his objections. With the Republicans in the majority, he wanted to reinstitute restrictions. One part of the 1990 act supplied him with a pretext: it had created another commission on immigration reform, headed by a Black former congresswoman named Barbara Jordan, who was known as a leading civil rights figure as well as an opponent of immigration.

Her recommendations included everything from the creation of a national ID card to curb worker fraud to cutbacks on asylum protections and the reduction of legal immigration by a third. Simpson, who championed all these policies, had the imprimatur of the commission.

Smith shared Simpson’s passion on immigration but lacked his policy experience. When Smith took over the immigration subcommittee, he hired an attorney named Cordia Strom, who had served as the legal director of a far-right anti-immigration organiza...

Smith turned the bill writing over to Strom, who authored it in isolation and then made revisions during conference committee meetings, while the House and Senate versions of the bill were being reconciled. Democrats didn’t see the changes Strom made until four days before the final vote. One immigrants’ rights advocate told The Texas Observer, “We would start to lobby on it, and when we went to offices, some of them would say, ‘we didn’t even know this provision was in there.’ ”

There was a reason why Simpson had failed to achieve his goal in 1990, and it was still true. Middle-of-the-road figures in both parties were reluctant to block legal immigrants from coming into the country. Some had principled reasons for this, others had economic ones; the labor market needed more workers across a range of different sectors, from growers in the Sunbelt and the West to the rapidly expanding service sector everywhere else.

Inside the White House, the president’s chief of staff, Leon Panetta, had previously served as a congressman from the San Joaquin Valley, in Central California. There were some lines he wasn’t comfortable crossing. “We all understand the problem of illegal immigrants,” he said at the time. “We’re all trying to ensure that we have additional enforcement to protect against illegal immigrants. But I, for the life of me, do not understand why we need to penalize legal immigrants in that process.”