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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Grain and vegetable harvests that once produced enough to feed a family for close to a year now lasted less than five months. “Inattention to these issues,” the report’s authors wrote, can drive “more migration to the United States” and “put at grave risk the already deteriorating viability of the country.” In 2018, fifty thousand Guatemalan families were apprehended at the border, twice as many as the year before. The number of unaccompanied children also increased: American authorities recorded twenty-two thousand children from Guatemala, more than those from El Salvador and Honduras combined. Much of this migration was coming from the western highlands, which received not only some of the highest rates of remittances per capita but also the greatest number of deportees. Of the ninety-four thousand immigrants deported to Guatemala from the US and Mexico in 2018, about half came from the region. The Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy was calamitous to immigrants everywhere along the US border, but its effects were uniquely devastating in the Guatemalan highlands. Half of the parents who were deported without their children under the zero tolerance policy were Guatemalan; between 10 and 20 percent came from departments where the majority of the population was Indigenous: Huehuetenango, El Quiché, San Marcos. Only six hundred thousand Mam speakers existed in the world, but it was the ninth most common language spoken in US immigration courts, outranking French.