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

by Jonathan Blitzer

One of the core premises of US immigration policy—true under Democrats as well as Republicans—is deterrence: turn away enough people, and others will stop trying to come.

The first asylum seekers were escaping regimes the US was arming and supporting in the name of fighting communism.

Politics is a form of selective amnesia. The people who survive it are our only insurance against forgetting.

A single event, known as La Matanza, or the Massacre, defined modern Salvadoran history. On January 22, 1932, agricultural laborers in the western part of the country, armed with machetes and hoes, staged an insurrection against the nation’s coffee-growing elite, which had been subjugating the rural poor for decades.

All of them received training and weapons from the United States. Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, American military advisers helped restructure the Salvadoran police academy. They also wrote a manual for the Treasury Police, and trained members of the National Guard and National Police in riot control.

For decades, doctors and nurses trained in Western medicine had been dismissive of whole categories of diagnoses that predominated among the Indigenous population. Villagers would often visit healers and shamans who treated ailments such as mal de ojo (evil eye), pérdida del alma (loss of the soul), and el susto (the fright). Some of these afflictions dated to pre-Columbian times and went by a range of different names. El susto, the anthropologist Linda Green wrote, was “understood by its victims to be the loss of the essential life force as a result of fright.” In more conventional terms, its symptoms included depression, lethargy, insomnia, nightmares, diarrhea, and vomiting. To anyone mindful of La Violencia of the war years, the connection to post-traumatic stress was unavoidable. These conditions were, as Green put it, “social memory embodied.” In the summer of 2016, the Health Ministry announced that it would open clinics and hire personnel to treat seven different types of “ancestral maladies” that were contributing to high mortality rates in the countryside. “Independently of whether you believe it or don’t believe in this, we have seen that it’s necessary to be vigilant,” Lucrecia told one newspaper.

Keldy couldn’t speak to them because, in the government’s databases, her file was severed from those of her children. Patrick and Erick were listed as “unaccompanied alien minors” who had arrived at the border alone and been transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS would take up their case from scratch, vetting relatives in the US. Keldy was part of a different system run by DHS. According to ICE’s records, she had traveled to the US as a single adult. There was nothing in their files to link the boys to the nine-digit number that corresponded to their mother, and nothing in hers that led back to them.

By the late fall of 2017, the pilot program in El Paso was starting to attract more attention. A senior staffer at the Department of Health and Human Services noticed a pattern and emailed McAleenan, at CBP. Not only was the department running out of bed space for unaccompanied children in government shelters, he pointed out, but a significant share of the children entering HHS custody didn’t appear to be unaccompanied at all.