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

by Jonathan Blitzer

For as long as Stephen Miller had been in the White House, he harbored the ultimate ambition of closing the border entirely to asylum seekers. MPP was effective, but people still made it through. Miller wanted a policy free of exceptions and legal qualifications. The key was to portray immigration as a direct threat to American public health. It had long been a talking point on the far right—immigrants brought diseases—but Miller sought to convert the claim into an actual policy prerogative. In 2018, when a large group of migrants in federal detention became gravely ill, including two small children who died, Miller felt the president should take advantage of the opportunity to seal the border. Immigrants, he liked to say, were “vectors of disease.”