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February 18 - June 10, 2024
what was happening in his actual hometown. Just as the war was ending in El Salvador, another one was starting in Los Angeles. On March 3, shortly after the Anzoras left for El Salvador, a Black man named Rodney King was hurtling down Interstate 210, drunk and speeding. When the police caught up with him near an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley, there were more than two dozen officers on hand. King emerged from the car, laid down on the ground, then stood back up. He wobbled a bit, and staggered toward one of them before the beating began.
The King beating was the latest in a series of city tragedies. A handful of police brutality cases had left several Black Angelinos injured, dead, or dispossessed. A predictable set of acquittals had followed.
Bradley and Gates hadn’t spoken for a full year when, on April 29, 1992, a jury reached a verdict on whether the three officers shown on the video beating Rodney King, along with their supervisor, were guilty of violating his civil rights. The acquittal was announced that afternoon, from a courtroom in Simi Valley. It struck like an earthquake. Within hours, rioting had broken out across the city. At six forty-five p.m., a group of Black men pulled a white truck driver out of his vehicle on the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues and beat him, bashing his head with a brick. An hour later,
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By the second day of rioting, there were more than five hundred reported injuries, hundreds of fires, and close to $250 million in estimated damage. The conflagration, which began to lap at other parts of the city, soon persuaded state and federal authorities to send in troops—six thousand National Guardsmen and a thousand federal agents. Two hundred of those agents belonged to a special operations force of the US Marshals that President Bush had recently dispatched to Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega.
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. In
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.
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 with citrus groves and vegetable farms called Indiantown.
Almost all the Indigenous Guatemalans in Florida at the time had come from somewhere in the Cuchamatán mountains, in
Several years passed before an immigration lawyer whom the family could finally afford found their names in the settlement agreement. 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.
Under Clinton, Meissner quickly learned, the emphasis would always be on demonstrating toughness. The president and his political advisers were obsessed with charting a centrist course. The White House wanted to preempt criticism from the right.
El Paso was the second-largest city on the US-Mexico border, smaller only than San Diego. But that designation overstated the size and remoteness of the place. Fewer than seven hundred thousand residents lived there, and the nearest American cities were hundreds of miles away. The Border Patrol sector was much vaster than the city itself. It covered 268 miles of the border, including the two westernmost counties in Texas as well as the entirety of New Mexico.
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. There was a lawsuit; the controversial local head of the Border Patrol retired; and his replacement, Silvestre Reyes, brought an idea that would revolutionize border policy
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The riots in April 1992 changed everything in and around Los Angeles. 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.
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.” Elana Zilberg, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, later wrote, “Whites pointed at Blacks, who pointed at Latinos, who in turn pointed at Central American immigrants.”
Rigoberta Menchú,
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. (“It was the first time I smoked a cigarette,” Lucrecia, who joined a group of San Carlos students in taking to the
Hurricane Mitch was the deadliest natural disaster 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 almost as many 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.
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.
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.”
Around dawn on June 28, 2009, two hundred soldiers entered the Casa Presidencial in Tegucigalpa and pulled Manuel Zelaya, the president, out of bed at gunpoint.
To the annoyance of the Americans, he brought Honduras closer to Venezuela and Cuba.
was put on a plane for Costa Rica. It made one stop—at
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.
Obama had entered the White House vowing to protect the undocumented and restrain ICE, but deportations increased steadily during his first two years in office.
Still, she was an outlier just the same. The president’s inner circle of advisers was not ready to spend political capital on immigration. The country was in the midst of a severe recession, with the economy shedding upward of six hundred thousand jobs a month; the effects of the $780 billion federal stimulus package, which passed in February 2009 despite overwhelming Republican opposition, were materializing gradually.
US generals were unfailing supporters of the program, not least because they saw it as a way of building trust among allies in and around international war zones.
Records from that meeting were never circulated. Other stakeholder agencies—such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Department, the US Mission to the United Nations, and the Office of Management and Budget—were excluded from subsequent conversations. At another session, in August, someone from the NSC asked why the administration was excluding representatives from the military, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the FBI, all of whom were usually active participants. One of Miller’s surrogates replied, “What the hell does DOD have to say about this?”
One such report maintained that refugees were thirty times more likely than other members of the public to commit acts of terrorism, but this was a pure fabrication.
“The president believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the president,” Miller told them. By the fall, when the administration presented its final number to Congress, the refugee cap was forty-five thousand, the lowest in the history of the program and below the explicit recommendations made by the State Department, the military, and the vice president’s office.
Miller, however, had always been hostile to the policy. In an email to an editor at Breitbart, he said that expanding the “foreign-born share” of the US workforce was an instance of immigration being used “to replace existing demographics.”
In September 2017, under pressure from Miller and other White House advisers, Trump agreed to cancel DACA,
From 2016 to May 2017, authorities in Suffolk County attributed seventeen killings to MS-13.
These numbers were a minuscule portion of the local immigrant population, which was statistically far more law-abiding than American citizens.
Gruesome gang killings magnified a sense of alarm that did not match the actual threat.
Crime was down overall and ebbing since the 1990s. “This sort of thing is about a feeling,” Steve Bellone, the county executive, admitted at the time. “You don’t feel that crime is down.
In April 2017, the president was still holding rallies as though the campaign had never ended. At one of them, assembled in support of the National Rifle Association, he asked the crowd, “You know about MS-13? Get them the hell out of here, right? Get them out!” Never had an American president spent so much time talking about an obscure Latino street gang.
Sini was a pragmatist. Given the police’s wretched reputation in the Latino community, he spoke publicly about the need to rebuild trust, especially if he wanted to root out local gangsters. 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.
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The noise was itself part of the Trump agenda, and its loudest exponents were members of ICE and Border Patrol.
There were effectively two Obama presidencies when it came to ICE enforcement: the first from 2009 to 2014, and the second during his final two years in office. Arrests made in the interior of the country dropped substantially, from 300,000 in 2009 to 140,000 in 2016. Homan, who was the head of the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, resented Obama for interfering. By
Every time federal officials came to Suffolk County to give speeches about MS-13, the undocumented community on Long Island took to their phones. They sent text messages and posted to private Facebook groups, describing the latest sightings of policemen, state cops, and ICE officers, an index of the roads and intersections to avoid. All the law enforcement personnel turned out in full force during the high-profile political visits, and because of all the national attention on MS-13 murders, the state’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, had also sent more patrols to the county.
One afternoon, despite his precautions, Gómez was stopped for a traffic infraction and ticketed for driving without a license. In El Salvador, he would have been forfeiting a steady chunk of his paychecks to gangsters demanding renta. On Long Island, the money went to the Department of Motor Vehicles, by way of the local police. Over the course of 2017, Gómez spent about a thousand dollars on tickets. He would pay them on days when it was raining, so that he didn’t miss landscaping work.
While the race was underway, the Suffolk County police were working with 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.
At schools throughout the county, the police posted an employee known as a resource officer, whose job was to provide support to administrators. But they also helped to identify gang members. What constituted membership was nebulous. ICE identified someone as a gang member if he met at least two criteria from a list that included “having gang tattoos,” “frequenting an area notorious for gangs,” and “wearing gang apparel.”
According to a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU, at least thirty-two teens were placed in immigration jails for alleged gang ties. The charges included being “in the presence of MS-13 members” on a town soccer field, being seen at school and in a car with confirmed gangsters, cutting class, and writing the number 503, the international calling code for El Salvador, on a school notebook.
The strategy for combating MS-13 rested on one of the core premises of American immigration enforcement: undocumented immigrants had far fewer rights than citizens did. Dismantling a criminal organization was a complex and painstaking legal task. It was much easier to deport someone than it was to convict him of a crime.
Ties to the gang would never have to be proved because the teenagers were guilty of something that was never in dispute: to flee the gang they were now accused of joining, they had entered the country without papers.
But her mother had her own reasons for feeling stressed. The Trump administration had announced plans to cancel temporary protected status for Salvadorans living in the US, including those who had bought homes, paid taxes, started families, and joined the legal workforce. The president was also canceling TPS for 60,000 Haitians who’d lived in the US since a 2010 earthquake, and for 2,500 Nicaraguans who’d arrived in 1999 following Hurricane Mitch. The Salvadoran population was the largest by far, some 200,000 people, most of whom had been living in the US for twenty years. Among them were
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One of them was a “confirmed gang member” whose name was redacted; the other was Sandoval. After she escaped from her ex-boyfriend, the local police knew that she’d been kidnapped and abused. It didn’t matter that she had done nothing wrong. What she had suffered turned into an indelible mark that she didn’t realize she was carrying. She was a “gang associate,” and anyone close to her was an object of suspicion.
helped negotiate regional peace accords in the 1980s and ’90s, sought out Helen Mack. “I need you to help me because we’re having problems governing,” he told her. Specifically, the issue was a shadow government of private interests run by ex-military officers and corrupt lawmen.
