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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.”