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

by Jonathan Blitzer

At schools throughout the county, the police posted an employee known as a resource officer, whose job was to provide support to administrators. But they also helped to identify gang members. What constituted membership was nebulous. ICE identified someone as a gang member if he met at least two criteria from a list that included “having gang tattoos,” “frequenting an area notorious for gangs,” and “wearing gang apparel.” Sandoval had observed how Carlos and his friends from MS-13 would change their style of dress in response to the heightened police activity. In the weeks after the murders of Mickens and Cuevas, the gang members at school replaced their Nike Cortez sneakers with Adidas. They mocked the police for being slow to catch on. Immigrant teens without ties to the gang didn’t necessarily know which clothes were off-limits because schools never specified. Throughout the summer, a handful of students were expelled on suspicions of gang membership and put into removal proceedings by ICE. According to a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU, at least thirty-two teens were placed in immigration jails for alleged gang ties. The charges included being “in the presence of MS-13 members” on a town soccer field, being seen at school and in a car with confirmed gangsters, cutting class, and writing the number 503, the international calling code for El Salvador, on a school notebook.