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

by Jonathan Blitzer

New tragedies were coming to light each day. One involved a Honduran father named Marco Antonio Muñoz, a thirty-nine-year-old with short dark hair and a thin mustache; a small hoop earring in his left ear gave his face a dash of youthfulness. He was apprehended with his wife and three-year-old child in Granjeno, Texas, a tiny town of some three hundred residents. Border Patrol agents brought all three of them to a large processing center in McAllen, then followed the dictates of the newly sanctioned zero tolerance policy. “They had to use physical force to take the child out of his hands,” a Border Patrol agent later told The Washington Post. “The guy lost his shit.” The agents threw Muñoz into a small cell with chain-link walls, but he began slamming his body into the metal. He never threatened the agents themselves. But according to an incident report, they considered him to be “pre-assault,” which one of them later clarified to mean that “he had the look of a guy at a bar who wanted to fight someone.” He was shackled—kicking and screaming—and driven in a van to a local jail about forty miles away that had a padded isolation cell where Border Patrol could hold him. Every half hour guards checked on him. Late the next morning, one of them entered to find him lying in a heap on the floor, bloody and unresponsive. A piece of clothing was twisted around his neck. He had hanged himself.