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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Anonymous notes arrived at La Clínica instructing Juan to remember his family back home. Sometimes people called to say that they knew where he lived and that if he wanted to be tortured again he should go back to El Salvador. At one point, Juan’s mother became too scared to go to church in Usulután. In Mount Pleasant, at his house on Longfellow Street, Juan was sleeping badly and suffering from anxiety attacks. Shortly before the trial began, he thought about pulling out of the case altogether. He wavered for a few days but decided to continue.

American deportation policy had turned local street gangs from LA into an international criminal network. MS-13 and 18th Street fanned across the country and the region; their rivalries spread with them, mutating into something even more violent and ungovernable. The Clinton administration was so eager to demonstrate its toughness on crime that it had deported hardened criminals without warning the Salvadoran authorities.

Between 1993 and 1996, four thousand teenagers and young men with thick criminal records were sent to El Salvador. Many of them had been arrested for robberies, kidnappings, and homicides. After twelve years of civil war, the country was in no state to receive them. Military weaponry was easily accessible. The economy had cratered, and many former soldiers and guerrillas, with experience in kidnapping and extortion, were turning to street crime. One of the terms of the peace accords was that the government would reconstitute the national police. As a theoretical check against its past abuses, patrolling officers were lightly armed with old pistols and nightsticks, while criminals carried M16 rifles. There were budget shortfalls, recruitment problems, and a shortage of jail space.

Members of the new Salvadoran government pleaded with the US ambassador and officials at the State Department to slow the deportations, or at least to help devise a system for screening the most dangerous elements. But the Americans weren’t interested. In August 1997, the president of El Salvador told The New York Times, “This is a very serious problem. The United States lets these dangerous types out and tells them ‘go back to where you came from.’ But we have no way to try them or jail them…and so we must not only let them in but let them go free.”

In September 2007, when Eddie arrived, it had been roughly four years since the right-wing ARENA government of Francisco Flores had unleashed a new anti-gang policy called Mano Dura, or “Strong Hand.” It had consisted of massive patrols and gang sweeps launched by combined units of the military and police; with broad new security powers, the government arrested thousands of people, some of whom didn’t belong to the gangs but were thought to be associated with them, either because of where they lived, whom they knew, or how they dressed.

After the Supreme Court invalidated key parts of the original anti-gang policy, Saca introduced another version, dubbed Super Mano Dura. The prison population exploded, which further consolidated the power of the gangs. To avoid constant riots, members of MS-13 and 18th Street were kept in separate facilities, but because their leaders were now well protected, they arranged hits and orchestrated extortions with cell phones, commanding an expanding army of foot soldiers who operated outside the prison walls.

Deportees were a natural fit for the workforce: they spoke idiomatic American English, were desperate for money, and couldn’t find work anywhere else. Deportees were “very loyal,” a call-center recruiter once admitted to the news service McClatchy. “They know they won’t get another shot.”

In the summer of 2001, the Bush administration had been in advanced talks with Mexico to announce a comprehensive plan when 9/11 inverted the agenda. For the next several years Congress funded a harsh enforcement regime in preparation for legalization measures that never materialized.

In 2006, a bill sponsored by Ted Kennedy and John McCain passed the Senate but wasn’t taken up in the House. The Bush White House supported this latest version, and the Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress. Yet there were other complications. For one, McCain was no longer a sponsor. He was preparing to run in the Republican primary for president and had decided to keep his distance from controversial legislation. The fact that advocates and a bipartisan group of senators were on the verge of giving millions of people a path to citizenship had galvanized the opposition. The congressional phone lines crashed from an onslaught of calls placed by enraged conservative voters, stirred up by representatives on the far right, talk-radio hosts, and Lou Dobbs, a CNN anchor who filled the prime-time slot with nightly rants about “amnesty for illegals.”

Many undocumented immigrants were used to living paranoid, circumscribed lives, but little could have prepared them for the enhanced tactics adopted under the National Fugitive Operations Program. The agency now had an actual policy sanctioning ruses, whereby officers could effectively trick people into opening the doors of their houses. Claiming to be police was a common ploy. Another was for officers to tell a mother, for example, that her son had been a witness to a crime, and that they needed his help. Other times, officers dispensed with pretext altogether and forced themselves inside, availing themselves of unlocked (or partially cracked) doors.

Hurricane Mitch was among the deadliest natural disasters to strike Honduras in more than a century. The rains led to floods, the floods to mudslides. Maps became useless overnight because whole networks of roads were wiped out, sealing villages away in sudden isolation. Keldy wasn’t especially religious as a child, but the destruction felt otherworldly and ungraspable. Eleven thousand people were confirmed dead, and even more were missing. Twenty percent of Hondurans lost their homes. Seventy percent of the country’s crops were destroyed.

Honduras had always been the poorest country in the region—“the country of the seventies,” a former Honduran president once called it. “Seventy percent illiteracy, seventy percent illegitimacy, seventy percent rural populations, seventy percent avoidable deaths.” During the height of the Cold War, the US sent roughly $750,000 a day in aid—some $2 billion over the course of the 1980s—but the money went directly to the military and its business holdings. By the nineties, American largesse was over, and the Honduran government didn’t have the means to rebuild itself after the storm. Estimates put Mitch’s destruction at close to $6 billion.

Cops usually weren’t paid well in Honduras, but the country was entering a new political era that brought a high demand for elite law enforcement. In 2002, Ricardo Maduro, an American-educated economist from the conservative National Party, became president. The former head of Honduras’s central bank, he entered politics after his twenty-five-year-old son was murdered in a botched kidnapping in San Pedro Sula in 1997.

few days later, his guerra contra la delincuencia began, or as it was more widely known, La Mano Dura. The Salvadoran government would eventually adopt Maduro’s approach, which relied on the same legal instruments introduced in California more than a decade earlier. Anyone charged with “illicit association” could face up to twenty years in prison. Sixteen-year-olds would be tried as adults. If the police acted “in defense of society,” it had carte blanche.

The maras who’d been hardened on the streets of American inner cities were beginning to surface in Honduras. There were cliques from California, criminals who drifted over from El Salvador, and those who had already been involved in local petty crime but were graduating to more serious offenses.

But the fact that teenage boys were falling under general suspicion led to police abuses. One ex-policeman who worked in La Ceiba later said that in cases involving kidnappings, “the policy was to exterminate the kidnappers. If a search was legal, the people who were arrested were brought before the Public Ministry, along with the evidence, but there were ten legal searches out of every hundred. Other times, they detained four, eliminated three, and presented one to the Ministry.”

Keldy was anxious about Carlos’s killing, and Mino was growing concerned about their finances. They decided to leave their sons with Amanda and set out for the United States. They would live there for, at most, a few years, enough time to earn money to fund a more stable life in La Ceiba. Keldy’s brothers, who were still in Denver, would hire a smuggler to help them cross the border once they made it through Mexico.

Although they never planned to stay in the US for long, they risked everything to make it there. After a grueling bus ride through Guatemala, they boarded a freight train, known as the Beast, in Mexico, near a town in Tabasco called Tenosique. The train, twenty-eight cars long and brimming with threats, was the primary means for migrants to traverse Mexico. Bandits, rapists, and kidnappers lurked on board, scoping out potential victims. Crushed limbs and fatal falls were at least as common as assaults. The cars were packed, forcing many of the travelers to climb up the sides to reach the roof. The wind alone was enough to knock a person to his death.

They left the Beast in San Luis Potosí and took a bus to Tamaulipas, approaching the border. In Nuevo Laredo, they were kidnapped by the Zetas, perhaps the most frightening of the Mexican crime syndicates. Known for beheadings and mass killings, these were ex-army commandos and cartel hitmen who had cornered the lucrative market of kidnapping and extorting migrants on their way to the US.

Presidencial in Tegucigalpa and pulled Manuel Zelaya, the president, out of bed at gunpoint. Zelaya was a businessman from the Liberal Party, who wore cowboy hats and had a thick mustache. His manner was blustery and self-aggrandizing. When he had entered office, three years before, everyone had expected the conventional politician he’d always been: pro-business and inoffensive to the country’s elites. But as president, Zelaya discovered a passion for being a reformer unbothered by legal strictures and bureaucratic politesse. He opposed the privatization of the country’s telecommunications industry and raised the minimum wage. To the annoyance of the Americans, he brought Honduras closer to Venezuela and Cuba.

He was a man with enemies. But his costliest move was to insist on holding a national referendum on whether the country should rewrite its constitution. His critics alleged that this was a stealth plot to stay in power. That seemed unlikely. For one thing, the referendum would be nonbinding; for another, two candidates in his own party were already vying to replace him in the next election, in November 2009. Yet when the Supreme Court and Congress blocked the referendum, Zelaya disregarded them and ordered the army to distribute ballots. On the day of the vote, he was put on a plane for Costa Rica. It made one stop—at a US air base—for fuel. The plotters called it a golpe profiláctico, a coup to forestall something worse.

When she and Mino returned, it was already known around town that they had worked in the US and therefore had money. Their new house was a one-floor, unpainted structure near a paved road and a grocery store, the only one in the area with a perimeter wall fringed in security wire. But the plot was in a colonia called Búfalo, in an area that was a short walk from a gang neighborhood. Shootings began shortly after Keldy and Mino had moved their belongings there and settled in. One day, someone came by the house to tell Keldy that he liked their property and wanted it for himself.

The 2009 coup had turned the country into a tinderbox. In the months after Zelaya’s ouster, he had twice tried to reenter the country—first by plane, then by foot—but the military blocked him each time. He succeeded on his third attempt, and hid out in the Brazilian embassy, where thousands of supporters flocked in solidarity. Mass arrests and police shootings hardly discouraged them from turning out.

The current president was Roberto Micheletti, the leader of the coup. “No matter what the merits of the case against Zelaya, his forced removal was clearly illegal,” the US ambassador wrote in a confidential cable to the State Department and White House. “Micheletti’s ascendence as ‘interim president’ was totally illegitimate.” Eventually, in late October, the Americans brokered a deal: Zelaya would be restored to power until the country had its scheduled elections at the end of November. When Micheletti reneged, several days later, the US shocked everyone by accepting the outcome of the elections anyway. Massive protests were already raging across the country, but they intensified when the National Party went on to win the election. The new president, Porfirio Lobo, called in troops to police the streets, installing checkpoints ...

In La Ceiba, the coup and its aftermath unleashed another wave of lawlessness. One morning, in November 2011, two men on a white motorcycle parked in front of Keldy and Mino’s house and took photographs. They said they would be back later to evict them. Around this time, Keldy received a call from Luis Fernando. “I’m in the middle of something sensitive,” he told her. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I can’t talk.” In January 2012, he and his wife were murdered.

There was no time to mourn. The next month, a series of thefts began, and Keldy frantically filed police reports. Armed men claiming to be in charge of the colonia stole cinderblocks and solar panels. Her family members were also being threatened. “I’m asking the authorities to help me,” her brother Óscar said, according to a separate report filed in late June. “I don’t know what to do and my fear is that they’re going to kill me.”

As the midterms approached, Democrats in border states faced a Republican onslaught, and, as usual, immigration made them vulnerable. At one point, Gabby Giffords, the Democratic congresswoman from Arizona contacted the White House with a plea. “You have to call up the National Guard on the border,” she said. “I’m going to lose my reelection unless I can show that we are serious about border security.”

In 2009, DHS set a record for annual deportations, at 392,862, with the secretary emphasizing that half of them—195,772; another record—were convicted criminals.

Yet what made someone a “criminal” was much less clear. Under one federal program, the government took significant cues from local police. When officers arrested a person, whether for a serious felony or a traffic infraction, they would check his immigration status and file a “detainer” with DHS for federal agents to take that person into custody if he lacked legal status. There was barely any oversight of the arresting officers, who were often responding to local political pressures. In Las Vegas, for example, 70 percent of these detainers involved people who had committed violent crimes or drug offenses. By contrast, in Cobb County, Georgia, and Frederick County, Maryland, 80 percent of detainers corresponded to arrests for misdemeanors or traffic violations.

The administration also expanded a Bush-era program called Secure Communities, which automatically shared data with ICE anytime someone was booked in jail. If one problem was that law enforcement officers had inconsistent criteria for contacting ICE, Secure Communities swung in the opposite direction: the fingerprints of arrestees went straight to ICE databases, and detainers were immediately issued if there was a match. In principle, this was supposed to make immigration ...

Every presidential administration since Eisenhower had extended reprieves from deportation, known as deferred action, to certain categories of undocumented immigrants who were considered low priorities for arrest. Beginning in 1981, federal regulations explicitly authorized such immigrants to work. Combining these practices, the government could protect Dreamers from deportation while also making them eligible for work, bank loans, and financial aid to go to college. The proposals came with an additional slate of eligibility requirements. Recipients, for instance, would have to be either students, high school graduates, or members of the armed forces; they couldn’t have a criminal record, and there was a strict cutoff date for when they had to have arrived in the country. Roughly eight hundred thousand Dreamers qualified.

Nearly 69,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the border between October 2013 and September 2014, up from some 39,000 the previous year. Another 68,000 families were seeking asylum, a 200 percent increase. By the summer, in South Texas alone, there were 33,000 children in government custody.

The government rules for how to treat immigrant children at the border were laid out in an obscure court settlement known as the Flores agreement, the result of a lawsuit involving two Salvadoran children who had arrived in California in 1985. According to the agreement, which was later codified into law, immigration authorities could not detain children in borderland facilities for longer than seventy-two hours. Instead, the government was supposed to house them in the “least-restrictive setting” possible.

But the existing system could only accommodate between six thousand and eight thousand children, and the volume of new arrivals was creating a bottleneck at the border. By the end of May, the Obama administration was using emergency shelters to move children out of immigration detention and into the care of HHS. A naval base in Ventura County, California, was used to shelter six hundred children; an air force base in San Antonio provided twelve hundred more beds. Large white buses ferried children from the borderland holding cells to these other facilities.

But the Office of Refugee Resettlement was not a foster-care agency. Although it placed children with family members living in the US, there were no procedures for fully vetting them, such as making home visits, nor did the federal government track the children after their release. It was important that parents and relatives applying to sponsor the children know that the Department of Health and Human Services wasn’t sharing their information with ICE, because many of them were undocumented.

Thomas Homan, a top official at ICE, first broached the prospect of separating parents and children at the border by charging the adults with a misdemeanor for entering the country illegally. While they were being held on criminal charges, the government would temporarily take custody of their children. It would be painful, he said, but not fatal—a deterrent.

It already had a policy it called the Consequence Delivery System, an elaborate deterrence scheme designed to send strong messages back to the region: expedited removal of migrants at the border, the use of jails to detain recent arrivals, enforcement operations choreographed to generate press attention. Starting in the spring and summer of 2014, it added a regional counterprogramming campaign. If you turned on the radio in the Northern Triangle of Central America, you might hear songs with lyrics like these, from an ad that ran in El Salvador and Honduras: “Hanging on the railcars / Of this iron beast / Migrants go as cattle / To the slaughterhouse.” There were TV spots as well, with dramatizations of migrants dying before they could reach the US.

The same year Juliana and her sisters fled El Salvador, some 40,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the border, along with 40,000 families. In 2016, there were 60,000 children and 78,000 families. Deportations generated a separate wave of people, flowing in the opposite direction. In 2015 and 2016, the US deported roughly 42,000 Salvadorans, 42,000 Hondurans, and 67,000 Guatemalans.

Munguía Payés had vowed to unleash soldiers on gang enclaves across the country. But as a military tactician, he also knew when a battle was unwinnable. Privately, he tapped an ex-guerrilla to start talks: in exchange for perks such as conjugal visits, the transfer of inmates out of Zacatraz, and a pause in military crackdowns in gang neighborhoods, the gangsters would stop killing one another and anyone else who got in their way.

The American embassy, for its part, was displeased by this turn of events. Officials at the State Department, which provided funding for Salvadoran prisons and law enforcement operations, considered the negotiations a capitulation and a security breach. Seven months later, the Treasury Department designated MS-13 a “transnational criminal organization” and began applying sanctions. It was the first time a street gang had received such a label. Anyone caught doing business with MS-13—including, in some cases, those working on community initiatives to coax gangsters away from violence—faced jail time.

When Trump signed the ban soon afterward, none of the top officials at the Department of Homeland Security had been notified in advance, even though they were responsible for enforcing it. Travelers with valid visas were suddenly trapped at American airports, unable to enter the country; refugees who, after years of waiting, had been extensively vetted and approved for entry were turned back.

In September 2017, under pressure from Miller and other White House advisers, Trump agreed to cancel DACA, setting a six-month deadline for Congress to find a legislative solution. He left the announcement to Sessions, who delivered it on the Tuesday morning after Labor Day. At the press conference, Sessions called Dreamers by a different name. They were, he said, “a group of illegal aliens” who were taking jobs away from citizens, contributing to “lawlessness,” and threatening the country’s “unsurpassed legal heritage.”

From 2016 to May 2017, authorities in Suffolk County attributed seventeen killings to MS-13. The county’s police department identified at least eighty-nine gang members who were undocumented immigrants; thirty-nine had been placed with family on Long Island by the federal government. These numbers were a minuscule portion of the local immigrant population, which was statistically far more law-abiding than American citizens.

There were half a million immigrants on Long Island, and about sixty thousand Salvadorans in Suffolk County. The most expansive estimates made by the Suffolk County Police Department put the gang’s membership at around four hundred people. Gruesome gang killings magnified a sense of alarm that did not match the actual threat.

Most of the victims of MS-13 on Long Island were immigrants themselves, and many had come to the US recently as unaccompanied children. The gangsters and their victims lived together in the same towns, went to the same schools, and vied for the same jobs. Their lives were thoroughly enmeshed. Without cooperation from witnesses (sharing tips, lodging complaints, asking for help), the police were adrift.

While Homan was unpacking the boxes in his new office at agency headquarters the following Monday, tens of thousands of immigrants across the country were packing their bags, making contingency plans, and even preparing actual escapes. In Queens, a twenty-two-year-old DACA recipient and college senior named Antonio Alarcón returned from school one night to the home he shared with his aunt and uncle to find that they had placed a pile of boxes and suitcases full of their belongings by the door. “We want to be prepared,” they told him.

Later that winter, reports of an ICE raid in Las Cruces, New Mexico, kept families from going outside. Attendance at the county’s public schools dropped by 60 percent. Principals sent social workers to make home visits.

“No population is off the table,” Homan told members of the House in June. “If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by being in this country, you should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder. You need to be worried.”

federal immigration authorities in the ways that undocumented residents had most feared. “We automatically notify the Department of Homeland Security when we arrest an individual for a misdemeanor or felony who was not born in this country, so that immigration authorities can take appropriate action,” Sini told a US Senate subcommittee, in May 2017.

Jorge wasn’t the only teenager to be arbitrarily accused of belonging to MS-13. At least four other students in Suffolk County were suspended from school because administrators thought that they were involved with the gang. Three of them, students at Bellport High School, twenty miles east of Brentwood, had come to Long Island as unaccompanied minors from Guatemala and El Salvador. One had worn a Chicago Bulls T-shirt to school; MS-13 members used to wear Bulls attire, because the horns of the team’s insignia resemble the gang sign. Another had posted a Salvadoran flag, which is mostly blue, on his Facebook page; MS-13’s trademark color is light blue. That seemed to be the extent of the evidence in each case, but neither the school nor the police would share any information.