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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Immigration policy is governed by a politics of permanent crisis, with the border as its staging ground. 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.

But these were all different chapters of the same story, which went back to 1980. That was the year the US first codified refugee and asylum law, while also deepening its involvement in two major civil wars in Central America. The first asylum seekers were escaping regimes the US was arming and supporting in the name of fighting communism.

In January 1984, Rayburn’s new boss in Phoenix brought orders from the powerful director of the INS’s western district, Harold Ezell, a Reagan donor who had previously been the vice president of a California hot-dog chain called Wienerschnitzel International. On the Hill, testifying before Congress, Ezell described his enforcement agenda as “catch ’em . . . clean ’em, and fry ’em.”

Eddie hadn’t known it when he first arrived at the San Salvador airport, but there amid the crowds—in crisp khakis and golf shirts, beaming solicitous smiles—were call center recruiters, rushing to hire deportees almost as soon as they stepped off the planes. In Latin America, the burgeoning industry depended on US immigration policy, which was uprooting tens of thousands of Americanized immigrants each year.

In early June, ICE transferred seventy-four detainees from Arizona and Florida to a facility in Farmville, Virginia. The alleged reason was that the Arizona and Florida facilities were overcrowded, but a DHS official admitted to The Washington Post that the detainees were moved so that ICE agents could contravene department rules on travel and secretly hitch a ride on the planes to help police Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, DC. A super-spreader event followed, in which some three hundred immigrants in the Virginia facility contracted the virus. After one of them died, an ICE official conceded, “The rights and interests of detainees were not a factor. You had the department making up a reason to move them.”