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

by Jonathan Blitzer

The measures that went to the president for his signature in September were almost too harsh and far-reaching to survey. The journalist Dara Lind, writing two decades later, said, “it was a bundle of provisions with a single goal: to increase penalties on immigrants who had violated US law in some way (whether they were unauthorized immigrants who’d violated immigration law or legal immigrants who’d committed other crimes).” The law, called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), established mass deportation as the new centerpiece of American immigration policy.

At INS, where she and her colleagues were tasked with implementing it, Doris Meissner found the new law extremely disconcerting. Most of them had opposed many of the provisions but hadn’t been consulted.

In meetings throughout the fall of 1996, she learned that IIRIRA would mean deporting tens of thousands of people who otherwise would be allowed to stay in the country because they’d either lived here for a long time, had families who depended on them, or faced “undue hardship” in their native countries. The...

According to the law, the government had to detain everyone it could possibly deport; once a person was in deportation proceedings no one could intervene to stop them in the event of extenuating circumstances. At the same time, the law expanded the list of crimes that could lead immigrants, including those with green cards and permanent residency, to be deported, even if they’d already served jail time. These crimes were called “aggravated felonies,” and they ranged from drug offenses to acts of s...

The worst part was that the government could punish offenders retroactively, so if someone had committed an aggravated felony five or ten years before the law was passed he would still be deported. In a memo, from November 1996, Rahm Emanuel recommended that the president make use of the new law to burnish his image as being tough on crime. If Clinton took advantage of the opportunities a...

A few days after Eddie had entered the jail, a guard took him to meet some visitors from the immigration service. Having never heard of the INS before, Eddie had to ask what the acronym stood for. They sat in a dimly lit, sparsely furnished room at the facility, where the agents asked him a list of pro forma questions: his full name, date of birth, home address. His mind was starting to drift when one of them capped his pen and closed the file. “You’re going to get deported,” he said.

Eddie’s mother brought a bundle of his school diplomas to the first hearing in his deportation proceedings. Her eyes were bloodshot and twitching. His own shock, together with his mother’s anguish, seemed to weigh on the judge, who granted him bail.

They paid the attorney five hundred dollars every two months; in exchange Eddie was free to think about his legal situation less. Every six months, he was required to check in with INS agents at an immigration court in downtown Los Angeles. This went on for four years.

One morning, in 2001, he arrived outside the courtroom a few minutes before his meeting. This time, his lawyer stopped him before he could reach for the door. “If you walk in there right now, they’ll cuff you and put you on a plane,” the lawyer said. He told Eddie to tear up his Social Security card, and not to mention their conversation to anyone. Eddie was now on the run.

But at the same time, the law’s conservative authors were starting to have second thoughts, which they brought to the INS. In 1999, twenty-eight House members—including Lamar Smith—wrote a letter to Doris Meissner and the attorney general, requesting that the administration interpret the law’s language more forgivingly. “Cases of apparent extreme hardship have caused concern,” the representatives wrote. “Some cases may involve removal proceedings against legal permanent residents who came to the United States when they were very young, and many years ago committed a single crime…but have been law-abiding ever since, obtained and held jobs and remained self-sufficient, and started families in the United States.”

A year before, in Smith’s home state of Texas, the INS had launched a raid around Labor Day called Operation Last Call, which targeted immigrants with past felony convictions for driving while intoxicated. They arrested five hundred people. When the Mexican consulate in El Paso managed to interview ninety-one of them, who were in local detention, officials found that the average time they’d lived in the US was more than twenty-one years. Ninety-one percent of them held jobs, and 81 percent had children who were US citizens.

By the spring of 2002, members of both parties were proposing to overhaul the agency. Their calls followed a spate of legislation in the wake of the terrorist attacks. The previous October, the US Congress passed the Patriot Act, which vastly expanded the government’s ability to surveil anyone on US soil without probable cause. Immigrants were the main source of the government’s concern.

In September 2002, the Justice Department launched a program called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, which required immigrants from twenty-five countries—selected, with the exception of North Korea, based on the size of their Muslim populations—to submit their names to a government database that vetted them for involvement with terrorism. By the following May, with 138,000 immigrants registered, the program hadn’t led to a single successful terrorism prosecution, but twelve thousand people had been placed in deportation proceedings.

On April 17, 2003, attorney general John Ashcroft ruled that undocumented immigrants could be held indefinitely without bond in the interest of national security. This was in response to a case involving David Joseph, a Haitian asylum seeker who had arrived in Miami on a boat, along with 215 others, on October 29, 2002. Joseph was eighteen and had no ties to terrorism, but his release on bond, Ashcroft wrote, “would create a perception in Haiti of an easing in U.S. policy” that would lead to “future surges ...

The main point of consensus, shared by Republicans and Democrats, was that the government needed to treat immigration enforcement as a matter of national security, and to accord it the resources and institutional heft typically reserved for military defense.

He was having mixed feelings about the atmosphere at work, not because he had any reservations about the new vigilance, but because it looked to him like politics was making yet another incursion into the field. One day he was sent to arrest an Egyptian immigrant, because the agency was prioritizing people from the Middle East. But when Mechkowski looked at the case file, he saw that the man was a Coptic Christian who’d overstayed an H-1B visa for skilled foreign workers. It didn’t take any great power of deduction to see that his target was not a national security threat.

The population of undocumented immigrants in the US was growing in large part because of the 1996 immigration law, which trapped them in the country. According to its strictures, an undocumented person couldn’t get on a path to legal status through marriage or sponsorship by a family member. If she had been in the US without documentation for six months, she’d have to leave the country for three full years before reapplying for entry; if she had lived in the US without papers for a year, she’d be required to leave for another ten before returning. (These came to be known as the three- and ten-year “bars.”) A large share of immigrants used to travel back and forth across the border, to be with family or to work seasonal jobs, but now they were stuck. The sociologist Douglas Massey estimated that because of the bars the undocumented population more than doubled, from five million before the law went into effect to about twelve million.

In 2003, the first year of the new fugitive operations model, Mechkowski and the others were told to go after “dangerous” criminals. By the start of the following year, 30 percent of arrests involved immigrants with criminal records. The rest were guilty of administrative violations such as entering the country unlawfully or overstaying a visa.

2006, under pressure from Congress, ICE instituted the annual arrest quotas, and, unsurprisingly, agents started arresting far fewer people with criminal records and far more of what they called “ordinary status violators.” Previously, if Mechkowski had been pursuing one person and encountered other undocumented immigrants along the way, he would ignore them, sticking to his original target. But because the arrest numbers were the key to unlocking more money for the agency, he and the other agents began making “collateral arrests.” They rounded up anyone they could. By the end of 2006, only 17 percent of all arrests made by fugitive operations involved immigrants with criminal records. The percentage was roughly half that the following year.

In 1985, after decades of military rule, a civilian president won the national elections—Vinicio Cerezo, an avowed liberal, who was the leader of a party known as the Christian Democrats. Behind the scenes, little changed. He was a front to legitimize the military’s operations.

Guatemala had grown isolated—starved of defenders and, more important, financial backers—and the economy was failing. With a civilian at the helm and a new constitution, the Americans could champion Guatemala’s “democratization,” just as they had when the Christian Democrats took office in El Salvador. Money from foreign governments and the private sector could flow back into the country.

A million Indigenous Guatemalans had been displaced in the early part of the decade, and most remained uprooted by the late 1980s. More than a hundred thousand were still in Mexico, either because they no longer had homes or because they feared being attacked by the military upon their return. In the northern reaches of El Quiché, another fifteen thousand war refugees were hiding out in the mountains, while the military launched bombing raids to smoke them out.

Myrna’s work focused on the enormous population of the “internally displaced,” a phrase she helped popularize. Where the repression had been the worst, with entire communities destroyed, the army rebuilt villages to maximize its control. As one historian later put it, there was the “war of extermination” during the early 1980s, and the “war of reconstruction” that followed. The military assigned Orwellian names to these locales: they were “model villages,” “development poles,” or “strategic hamlets.” Two dozen of them were installed across the countryside. Daily life in these villages resembled that of a reeducation camp or low-security prison.

In one hillside hamlet in Alta Verapaz, which had a population of 570, a sign overlooking the town welcomed people to “An Ideologically New, Anti-Subversive Community.” The residents of another village said they lived “all piled up on top of each other…like chickens in a coop.” Everyone had to register with the army, and all movements were closely monitored. To travel anywhere required a special pass stating a destination and itinerary. In so-called security zones, where the military demanded hypervigilance, residents w...

“The development poles in the Ixil Triangle and Alta Verapaz began as reception camps for the displaced who returned in 1982 and 1983,” Myrna wrote in a report called “Assistance and Control.” “One army official estimates that the military regime attended 42,000 people in the Ixil Triangle alone. This figure represents the entirety of the population in the affected area; in other words, virtually 100 percent of the population there was relocated into the reconstructed villages.”

The villagers themselves used to change out of their traditional garb—colorful handwoven wraps and dresses—when they traveled between hamlets or to larger towns, because wearing it put them at immediate risk of being attacked by soldiers.

In the past few years since Cerezo took office, political assassinations had increased, following a pattern: each killing was a targeted message to a sector of the opposition such as journalists or labor leaders.

On September 29, a well-regarded homicide investigator named José Mérida Escobar submitted his first report on the murder to the director of the police. The findings were unambiguous: Myrna Mack had been murdered for her work on the internally displaced population in the countryside; at least three perpetrators had attacked her outside the AVANCSO offices earlier that month. The lead suspect was Noel de Jesús Beteta Álvarez, an agent working for a highly placed military unit called the Archivo.

No political murder had ever been adjudicated in the Guatemalan justice system, and no precedent existed for prosecuting such a high-profile case in the country’s labyrinthine and sclerotic courts. Helen Mack—a political neophyte, with no legal training—was mostly doing it on her own. In the middle of a war, she was bringing a case against the country’s military.

The threats came by phone, mail, and word of mouth; agents followed her around; and a military smear campaign alleged that Myrna had engaged in black-market misdeeds.

Helen was interested in the “intellectual authors” of the crime. Beteta Álvarez was a foot soldier and a thug. The men she was accusing were among the most powerful in Guatemala: Edgar Augusto Godoy Gaitán, the head of the Presidential General Staff, which oversaw the Archivo; Juan Valencia Osorio, director of the Presidential Security Department; and Juan Guillermo Oliva Carrera, the deputy head of the Presidential Security Department. All of them had been mentioned in the initial, suppressed police report.

“The sort of hit discussed here,” he wrote, “is carried out or directed by individuals who are members of the security forces, often military intelligence.” The attacks were ordered at a “senior level,” he continued, but “ ‘death squad’ personnel might often not appear on the official rosters of the security services and do not report for duty to official installations; they wait at home for orders, usually via the phone, or at times are picked up without prior notice to perform a job. They operate in cells so it is difficult to trace the orders up the hierarchy.”

In the spring of 1993, Cerezo’s successor as president, another civilian, named Jorge Serrano, dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court, and suspended the constitution in a power grab known as the Serranazo.

For a week, the country was in upheaval, but the military complied when a judge on the country’s Constitutional Court issued an order invalidating the president’s move. The judge, Epaminondas González Dubón, who was also involved in the Myrna Mack case, was killed a year later in a drive-by shooting, after he approved the extradition of a military officer to the US. Around that time, an assassination plot against Helen was exposed, and she briefly had to leave the country.

The peace accords may have brought relief after decades of bloodshed, but they also exposed what the country’s politicians already knew: the military had lost none of its influence. In principle, the government had agreed to address the systemic problems that led Guatemala into civil war in the first place: gross inequality, overt racism, and the overwhelming need for land reform. But in practice these were open-ended promises that depended on flagging political will. Crossing the military, or threatening its bottom line, was suicide. A large contingent of the senior officer corps turned to organized crime—smuggling, graft, and especially drug trafficking. The top generals in the intelligence services during the war were known as the cofradía, or the brotherhood; as their reach grew, corruption extended into the private sector as well as certain quarters of the civilian government.

The US was aware of the problem because it kept close tabs on the military, but the fallout was also reaching the US-Mexico border. By the late 1990s, the Drug Enforcement Administration determined that 75 percent of all the cocaine that reached the US passed through Guatemala.

In The Texas Observer, investigative journalist Frank Smyth wrote, “What distinguishes Guatemala from most other nations is that some of its military suspects are accused not only of protecting large criminal syndicates but of being the ringleaders behind them.” Across the border from McAllen, Texas, ex-members of the Guatemalan special forces—the Kaibiles—were training hitmen from the Zetas cartel in paramilitary operations.

The terms of the peace accords did not explicitly address the question of justice or recompense, but two major research projects had begun as part of the broader, postwar reconciliation. One was an international body created by the United Nations called the Commission for Historical Clarification. A staff of three hundred people spent two years conducting thousands of closed-door interviews, reviewing government documents, and reconstructing information on the atrocities of the war years.

The commission would go on to publish a twelve-volume account that supplied some of the most definitive facts of the conflict: 200,000 civilians had been killed; there were 669 massacres; 83 percent of the victims were Maya; 93 percent of the crimes committed during the war years involved members of the military.

second commission emerged as a complement to the international investigation, but it wound up finishing first. It was run by the Guatemalan archdiocese’s office of human rights, and overseen by the outgoing bishop, a strikingly tall seventy-five-year-old named Juan Gerardi.

The report published by the archdiocese’s office—called Guatemala: Never Again!—combined historical analysis, a vast inventory of data points, and extended testimony of victims, who were quoted at length. It was released in April 1998. The report was explosive because it included specific details about the structure and personnel of the military intelligence services. In certain instances, the authors named military units and individual officers responsible for specific crimes. Four days after the report’s release, Gerardi was murdered in the garage of the church.

The hearings lasted a month, against a backdrop of regular intimidation. After leaving the country for her own protection, Helen returned in time to find her lead lawyer sending away his own family. A gunman had shot up their house, and the lawyer’s son was receiving text messages that said, “You’d better be frightened because you’re really going to die.” Staff from the foundation were being followed. In the country’s major newspapers, an organization of prominent military veterans—called the Military Veterans Association of Guatemala—was taking out full-page ads warning soldiers and officers that it was “open season” on them. The message was recycled on TV spots and radio broadcasts, and the country’s main roadways were decorated with yellow ribbons meant to symbolize solidarity with the armed forces.

At least a thousand war criminals from all over the world were living in the US at the time, including many Salvadoran military officers. One war refugee bumped into his torturer on a public bus in the Bay Area. The man who had killed Óscar Romero sold used cars in Modesto, California. A colonel implicated in the assassination of the Jesuit priests in 1989 had a job at a candy factory outside Boston.

But the generals also succeeded in describing a wartime atmosphere of complete chaos, in which command responsibility hadn’t seemed to apply. Death squads colluded with extremists in the army. Cliques of officers showed greater loyalty to their tandas at the military academy than to the leadership of the armed forces. In their telling, Vides Casanova and García were moderating influences inside the government.

Juan was one of three plaintiffs, along with Neris González and Carlos Mauricio, who had each applied for asylum more than a decade earlier and now lived in Chicago and San Francisco.

Both had been brutally tortured: González in December 1979 and Mauricio in June 1983. Like Juan, neither had been charged with a crime, but their associations had made them suspect. González had been active in a base community through her church, while Mauricio had been a trained agronomist with a university professorship.

The National Guardsmen who had kidnapped González from a market in San Vicente had taken an especially perverse interest in her. She was then eight months pregnant. The soldiers repeatedly raped her and pushed her down flights of stairs. They withheld food and made her spend the nighttime hours submerged neck-deep in a tub of ice water. They cut her forearm with machetes and put out lit cigarettes on her skin. At one point, they forced her to lie supine under a metal bed frame, which they balanced over her pr...

A key witness, who hadn’t testified before, was Terry Karl, a Stanford political scientist widely regarded as one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts on the Salvadoran military. She had spent the war years on fact-finding missions to El Salvador, cultivating government sources and interviewing military men. Drawing from US cables and firsthand testimony, she could lay out with encyclopedic clarity how much Vides Casanova and García had really known about the armed forces’ rampant abuses given the structure of the high command. The government had been a military dictatorship, she argued: it was impossible to separate the death squads from the small corps of commanders and top brass. They were all in league.

“Unified” and “consolidated” were how the former US ambassador, Robert White, described the chain of command. Having warned the State Department about the far right in 1980 and 1981, he was another witness for the plaintiffs. “One word” from the minister of defense, White said, and the worst human rights offenders in the armed forces “would be gone.” But that was never the case; Vides Casanova and García had protected the worst abusers.

Ever since the start of the churchwomen’s case, in the fall of 2000, Juan, González, and Mauricio had been in the public eye. They were reported on by name and associated with both cases because of the original joint filing. By the summer of 2002, when the second trial began, they had been receiving threats.