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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Between 1983 and 1986, close to a hundred thousand Guatemalans reached the US, but only fourteen asylum petitions were granted.

The government began speaking about a concept it was calling “prevention through deterrence.”

“The president believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the president,” Miller told them.

the Trump administration needed to portray Honduras as a success story. Doing so freed up the anti-immigration stalwarts to end temporary protected status for the sixty thousand Hondurans living legally in the US for more than a decade,

Between May and September 2018, the government planned to separate twenty-six thousand children from their parents.

the Trump administration lied about how many families had been affected. In the summer of 2018, the Department of Justice was forced to acknowledge having separated roughly twenty-seven hundred children, but the actual number was more than fifty-six hundred.