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

by Jonathan Blitzer

When Smith took over the immigration subcommittee, he hired an attorney named Cordia Strom, who had served as the legal director of a far-right anti-immigration organization called the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The brainchild of a white supremacist ophthalmologist from Michigan named John Tanton, FAIR had been operating at the fringes of US politics since its founding in the late 1970s. Tanton’s goal was to “infiltrate the judiciary committees,” he wrote in 1986. “Think how much different our prospects would be if someone espousing our ideas had the chairmanship!” Smith turned the bill writing over to Strom, who authored it in isolation and then made revisions during conference committee meetings, while the House and Senate versions of the bill were being reconciled. Democrats didn’t see the changes Strom made until four days before the final vote. One immigrants’ rights advocate told The Texas Observer, “We would start to lobby on it, and when we went to offices, some of them would say, ‘we didn’t even know this provision was in there.’ ”

The advocates succeeded in sinking the provisions of the bill that would have restricted legal immigration and undermined asylum law. But the rest of the bill remained intact. Without the politically unpopular elements threatening legal immigration, it was essentially unstoppable. The measures that went to the president for his signature in September were almost too harsh and far-reaching to survey. The journalist Dara Lind, writing two decades later, said, “it was a bundle of provisions with a single goal: to increase penalties on immigrants who had violated US law in some way (whether they were unauthorized immigrants who’d violated immigration law or legal immigrants who’d committed other crimes).” The law, called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), established mass deportation as the new centerpiece of American immigration policy.

At the same time, the law expanded the list of crimes that could lead immigrants, including those with green cards and permanent residency, to be deported, even if they’d already served jail time. These crimes were called “aggravated felonies,” and they ranged from drug offenses to acts of so-called moral turpitude. Writing a fake check, evading taxes, and stealing a purse out of a parked car could trigger deportation. The worst part was that the government could punish offenders retroactively, so if someone had committed an aggravated felony five or ten years before the law was passed he would still be deported.

In September 2002, the Justice Department launched a program called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, which required immigrants from twenty-five countries—selected, with the exception of North Korea, based on the size of their Muslim populations—to submit their names to a government database that vetted them for involvement with terrorism. By the following May, with 138,000 immigrants registered, the program hadn’t led to a single successful terrorism prosecution, but twelve thousand people had been placed in deportation proceedings.

One day he was sent to arrest an Egyptian immigrant, because the agency was prioritizing people from the Middle East. But when Mechkowski looked at the case file, he saw that the man was a Coptic Christian who’d overstayed an H-1B visa for skilled foreign workers. It didn’t take any great power of deduction to see that his target was not a national security threat.

Despite the air of sobriety and reevaluation in Washington, there was something about “the fugitives” that most policymakers took for granted. The population of undocumented immigrants in the US was growing in large part because of the 1996 immigration law, which trapped them in the country. According to its strictures, an undocumented person couldn’t get on a path to legal status through marriage or sponsorship by a family member. If she had been in the US without documentation for six months, she’d have to leave the country for three full years before reapplying for entry; if she had lived in the US without papers for a year, she’d be required to leave for another ten before returning. (These came to be known as the three- and ten-year “bars.”) A large share of immigrants used to travel back and forth across the border, to be with family or to work seasonal jobs, but now they were stuck. The sociologist Douglas Massey estimated that because of the bars the undocumented population more than doubled, from five million before the law went into effect to about twelve million.

In 2003, the first year of the new fugitive operations model, Mechkowski and the others were told to go after “dangerous” criminals. By the start of the following year, 30 percent of arrests involved immigrants with criminal records. The rest were guilty of administrative violations such as entering the country unlawfully or overstaying a visa.

That would be the high-water mark for fugitive operations. In 2006, under pressure from Congress, ICE instituted the annual arrest quotas, and, unsurprisingly, agents started arresting far fewer people with criminal records and far more of what they called “ordinary status violators.” Previously, if Mechkowski had been pursuing one person and encountered other undocumented immigrants along the way, he would ignore them, sticking to his original target. But because the arrest numbers were the key to unlocking more money for the agency, he and the other agents began making “collateral arrests.” They rounded up anyone they could. By the end of 2006, only 17 percent of all arrests made by fugitive operations involved immigrants with criminal records. The percentage was roughly half that the following year.

“The development poles in the Ixil Triangle and Alta Verapaz began as reception camps for the displaced who returned in 1982 and 1983,” Myrna wrote in a report called “Assistance and Control.” “One army official estimates that the military regime attended 42,000 people in the Ixil Triangle alone. This figure represents the entirety of the population in the affected area; in other words, virtually 100 percent of the population there was relocated into the reconstructed villages.”

The police investigation moved slowly and erratically, despite the immediate international outcry. On September 29, a well-regarded homicide investigator named José Mérida Escobar submitted his first report on the murder to the director of the police. The findings were unambiguous: Myrna Mack had been murdered for her work on the internally displaced population in the countryside; at least three perpetrators had attacked her outside the AVANCSO offices earlier that month. The lead suspect was Noel de Jesús Beteta Álvarez, an agent working for a highly placed military unit called the Archivo. He was in his midtwenties and slender, with an angular face, dark mustache, and arching eyebrows. One of Mérida Escobar’s government sources warned him not to proceed with the investigation because it would implicate the military high command. Sharing this view, the director of the police shelved the report. On November 4, 1990, a different version was entered into the court file, identifying the crime as a robbery with no known suspects.

The US was aware of the problem because it kept close tabs on the military, but the fallout was also reaching the US-Mexico border. By the late 1990s, the Drug Enforcement Administration determined that 75 percent of all the cocaine that reached the US passed through Guatemala. According to the State Department, Guatemala was the “preferred transit point in Central America for onward shipments of cocaine.” In The Texas Observer, investigative journalist Frank Smyth wrote, “What distinguishes Guatemala from most other nations is that some of its military suspects are accused not only of protecting large criminal syndicates but of being the ringleaders behind them.”

Across the border from McAllen, Texas, ex-members of the Guatemalan special forces—the Kaibiles—were training hitmen from the Zetas cartel in paramilitary operations.

Having heard Juan tell his story in public, Roberts knew he would make an ideal plaintiff, but she felt ambivalent as his friend. “Litigation can be horrible,” she said. It could dredge up old traumas, provoke threats, and invite unflattering press. There were two cases in development. Vides Casanova and García were the defendants in both. Juan would serve as a plaintiff in the second. The first was being filed on behalf of the four American churchwomen raped and murdered on December 2, 1980. The brother of one of the victims, Bill Ford, was adamant that his sister would have wanted her case to include Salvadoran victims. In 1998, Ford had convinced attorneys at the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights to travel to El Salvador to interview four National Guardsmen who’d been arrested and imprisoned for the crime. From that trip, the lawyers had learned the whereabouts of Vides Casanova and García. At least a thousand war criminals from all over the world were living in the US at the time, including many Salvadoran military officers. One war refugee bumped into his torturer on a public bus in the Bay Area. The man who had killed Óscar Romero sold used cars in Modesto, California. A colonel implicated in the assassination of the Jesuit priests in 1989 had a job at a candy factory outside Boston.

Juan was one of three plaintiffs, along with Neris González and Carlos Mauricio, who had each applied for asylum more than a decade earlier and now lived in Chicago and San Francisco. González was leading a sustainable agriculture program and Mauricio taught high school biology. Both had been brutally tortured: González in December 1979 and Mauricio in June 1983. Like Juan, neither had been charged with a crime, but their associations had made them suspect. González had been active in a base community through her church, while Mauricio had been a trained agronomist with a university professorship. The National Guardsmen who had kidnapped González from a market in San Vicente had taken an especially perverse interest in her. She was then eight months pregnant. The soldiers repeatedly raped her and pushed her down flights of stairs. They withheld food and made her spend the nighttime hours submerged neck-deep in a tub of ice water. They cut her forearm with machetes and put out lit cigarettes on her skin. At one point, they forced her to lie supine under a metal bed frame, which they balanced over her pregnant belly; they took turns standing on opposite ends of it so that the frame rocked back and forth over her abdomen like a seesaw. She gave birth shortly after being left for dead by the side of a road. Her baby had fractures and indentations on his face. He died two months later.

“Why don’t you have the doctor fold up his sleeve, and when that is done, he can simply walk in front of the jury,” the judge said. With González standing beside him, Juan rolled up his shirt. Both were nervous baring themselves before the court. They kept close. From the gallery, it looked as though they were holding each other up. Juan stepped forward to approach the jurors. He didn’t feel self-conscious. His surroundings melted away. He had the sensation of leaving his body and floating above himself. He wasn’t alone. He was merging with the bodies of the people he knew, those who had died. The mother of his child. Romero. His friends. Family members. Christians. People better than himself. A pressure lifted from his shoulders. A sense of community pervaded his body. The dead were alive and with him. “So many scars in El Salvador, and we have the privilege to show ours,” he thought. “Everyone who is gone is here.”

American deportation policy had turned local street gangs from LA into an international criminal network. MS-13 and 18th Street fanned across the country and the region; their rivalries spread with them, mutating into something even more violent and ungovernable.

The Clinton administration was so eager to demonstrate its toughness on crime that it had deported hardened criminals without warning the Salvadoran authorities. Its disregard was even more egregious because the US embassy, more or less simultaneously, had also been dictating whom the government named to top posts in the national police force. Between 1993 and 1996, four thousand teenagers and young men with thick criminal records were sent to El Salvador. Many of them had been arrested for robberies, kidnappings, and homicides.

After twelve years of civil war, the country was in no state to receive them. Military weaponry was easily accessible. The economy had cratered, and many former soldiers and guerrillas, with experience in kidnapping and extortion, were turning to street crime. One of the terms of the peace accords was that the government would reconstitute the national police. As a theoretical check against its past abuses, p...

In short order, there were hundreds of others, and while many of them were mortal enemies, certain American rules still applied. Called “southern pacts,” in reference to the Mexican Mafia in California, the arrangements allowed for outright war between gangs, but forbade the extortion of businesses that fell in another’s neighborhood. The arcane logic of this new civil war made sense to the participating gangsters, but not to the people caught in the crossfire. Every Salvadoran carried a national identification card necessary for any number of quotidian reasons: to enter work, pick up medicine at the pharmacy, and sign for packages. But because these documents listed home addresses, they also invited scrutiny from upstart gangsters, who could know if an otherwise innocent person happened to live on a rival’s turf. To some of the fiercer cliques, which set up checkpoints on the outskirts of their own neighborhoods, someone with a “bad” address was a legitimate target.

“A common past of deportation and abandonment unified them,” Martínez d’Aubuisson wrote. “They thought El Salvador was a giant, violent California prison.”

After the Supreme Court invalidated key parts of the original anti-gang policy, Saca introduced another version, dubbed Super Mano Dura. The prison population exploded, which further consolidated the power of the gangs. To avoid constant riots, members of MS-13 and 18th Street were kept in separate facilities, but because their leaders were now well protected, they arranged hits and orchestrated extortions with cell phones, commanding an expanding army of foot soldiers who operated outside the prison walls.

Eddie didn’t belong to a gang, and he was determined to keep his distance. The same was true of most people deported during the presidency of George W. Bush. The legal tools for sweeping immigration arrests and expulsions had been in place ever since the passage of IIRIRA, in 1996, but it was only in the aftermath of 9/11 that the full bureaucratic machinery got engaged; the deportation numbers had been rising steadily each year since.

When Eddie had lived in El Salvador in the early 1990s, fluency in English minted his status and made him endlessly appealing to everyone he met. But now when people heard him speaking English, they lowered their eyes. “Oh, you’ve been deported,” some of them would say gravely before turning away.

Deportees were a natural fit for the workforce: they spoke idiomatic American English, were desperate for money, and couldn’t find work anywhere else. Deportees were “very loyal,” a call-center recruiter once admitted to the news service McClatchy. “They know they won’t get another shot.” Eddie hadn’t known it when he first arrived at the San Salvador airport, but there amid the crowds—in crisp khakis and golf shirts, beaming solicitous smiles—were call center recruiters, rushing to hire deportees almost as soon as they stepped off the planes. In Latin America, the burgeoning industry depended on US immigration policy, which was uprooting tens of thousands of Americanized immigrants each year.

Of the thirty people on his original deportation flight, fewer than five were still alive.

The fact that advocates and a bipartisan group of senators were on the verge of giving millions of people a path to citizenship had galvanized the opposition. The congressional phone lines crashed from an onslaught of calls placed by enraged conservative voters, stirred up by representatives on the far right, talk-radio hosts, and Lou Dobbs, a CNN anchor who filled the prime-time slot with nightly rants about “amnesty for illegals.”

Some of the day laborers joined Muñoz outside the chamber and recited their scripts to the passing senators. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, came over to them. He’d long been a supporter of immigrants’ rights, until he wasn’t. The polling changed. His tortured reversal was the subject of obsessive discussion among reporters and advocates. It was taken as an ominous bellwether of dwindling congressional allies. “Let me tell you what’s about to happen,” he told the day laborers. From his somber expression, Muñoz had an idea of what he was going to say, but she was surprised by his explicitness. “I’m going to go in there and I’m going to vote yes, and I’m going to watch and see how other people vote. If it looks like this is going to fail, which is what I think is going to happen, I’m going to change my vote so that I can be on the winning side.”

that Obama had been the senator wielding the gavel. They had first met in 2006, and he had begun calling her for policy advice during the congressional debates on immigration that winter and spring. There were certain patterns in his thinking—less ideological stances than an overall sensibility—that distinguished him from the usual Democratic crowd. The first was what Muñoz would later call his “civil rights instincts”: a group of people was excluded from basic services and subject to racial profiling. At the same time, he pushed Muñoz to bolster his intuitive arguments against predictable counterpoints. “Help me explain how more immigrants coming in doesn’t mean fewer jobs for people,” he said. Would American workers be displaced? What if the US government couldn’t manage its own border? How could he address these questions without fixating on them? He had a few trademark formulations when they sparred during briefings. One was to say: “I get the reflexive progressive position on this but tell me why it’s not a problem for this other reason.” Another was: “OK, I hear you. Now you tell me how I should explain that to people in Southern Illinois.”

Obama’s questions to Muñoz grew progressively sharper. Yet, along the way, he still took positions reflecting the mainstream consensus. It was like he was wrestling with himself while Muñoz watched and rooted for the idealist to win out. From the start, though, he’d made his outlook plain: the idealist had to be yoked to the pragmatist if anything were to come of their conversations. Less clear was where the lines of pragmatism blurred into conservatism.

To prepare, they discussed what Obama should say on the topic of granting undocumented immigrants driver’s licenses. As a New York senator, Hillary Clinton, the heavy favorite in the primary, had supported the policy, before reversing herself after a backlash. Obama’s advisers were uneasy about staking out a bold position, but he was not. Muñoz said that there was no substantive reason to oppose the licenses, and when Obama agreed, David Axelrod, his chief political adviser, cast a sharp, sidelong glance her way. “David, I know it’s not what people want to hear, but that might be exactly why we need to say it,” Obama said. The issue never came up at the debate, but Muñoz told herself, “That’s why this is my guy.”

John McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent, had spent the entirety of the Republican primary running away from his otherwise admirable record of bipartisan advocacy for immigration reform. Obama attacked him for getting cold feet once immigration reform became “politically unpopular.” His own rhetoric was that of a reformer with an ear to the grassroots. In one speech, he said, “When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that is happening, the system just isn’t working.”

Hurricane Mitch was among the deadliest natural disasters to strike Honduras in more than a century. The rains led to floods, the floods to mudslides. Maps became useless overnight because whole networks of roads were wiped out, sealing villages away in sudden isolation.

Honduras had always been the poorest country in the region—“the country of the seventies,” a former Honduran president once called it. “Seventy percent illiteracy, seventy percent illegitimacy, seventy percent rural populations, seventy percent avoidable deaths.” During the height of the Cold War, the US sent roughly $750,000 a day in aid—some $2 billion over the course of the 1980s—but the money went directly to the military and its business holdings.

One ex-policeman who worked in La Ceiba later said that in cases involving kidnappings, “the policy was to exterminate the kidnappers. If a search was legal, the people who were arrested were brought before the Public Ministry, along with the evidence, but there were ten legal searches out of every hundred. Other times, they detained four, eliminated three, and presented one to the Ministry.”

A year later, the global recession hit, and the American tourists who came to Mino’s company for rafting and hiking trips started to cancel. Those who could still afford to travel were wary for a different reason: the country’s violence was increasingly in the news. Keldy was anxious about Carlos’s killing, and Mino was growing concerned about their finances. They decided to leave their sons with Amanda and set out for the United States. They would live there for, at most, a few years, enough time to earn money to fund a more stable life in La Ceiba. Keldy’s

Around dawn on June 28, 2009, two hundred soldiers entered the Casa Presidencial in Tegucigalpa and pulled Manuel Zelaya, the president, out of bed at gunpoint. Zelaya was a businessman from the Liberal Party, who wore cowboy hats and had a thick mustache. His manner was blustery and self-aggrandizing. When he had entered office, three years before, everyone had expected the conventional politician he’d always been: pro-business and inoffensive to the country’s elites. But as president, Zelaya discovered a passion for being a reformer unbothered by legal strictures and bureaucratic politesse. He opposed the privatization of the country’s telecommunications industry and raised the minimum wage. To the annoyance of the Americans, he brought Honduras closer to Venezuela and Cuba.

The administration’s opening gambit was to accept Congress’s lavish appropriations for enforcement, but to use it strategically. ICE had the funds to deport four hundred thousand people a year. In 2009, DHS set a record for annual deportations, at 392,862, with the secretary emphasizing that half of them—195,772; another record—were convicted criminals. Yet what made someone a “criminal” was much less clear.

When officers arrested a person, whether for a serious felony or a traffic infraction, they would check his immigration status and file a “detainer” with DHS for federal agents to take that person into custody if he lacked legal status. There was barely any oversight of the arresting officers, who were often responding to local political pressures. In Las Vegas, for example, 70 percent of these detainers involved people who had committed violent crimes or drug offenses. By contrast, in Cobb County, Georgia, and Frederick County, Maryland, 80 percent of detainers corresponded to arrests for misdemeanors or traffic violations.

Decades of Central American history were crashing down at the US border. Throughout the 1980s, ’90s, and early aughts most immigrants stopped by the Border Patrol were Mexican men, traveling alone and crossing for work. In 2011, signs of an incipient shift began to appear. Agents were encountering more children arriving alone from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, in search of parents or family members already in the US. The US government developed a $175 million program to house and process them, but few officials in the upper reaches of the administration paid much attention. Everyone was focused on comprehensive immigration reform, which remained stuck in the House.

Nearly 69,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the border between October 2013 and September 2014, up from some 39,000 the previous year.

Another 68,000 families were seeking asylum, a 200 percent increase. By the summer, in South Texas alone, there were 33,000 children in government custody.

devoted to enforcement and detention, the government was not prepared for the kind of demographic shift that was taking place at the border. It wasn’t just the mass arrival of unaccompanied children; nationwide, ICE had only ninety-five available beds where it could detain families for an extended period. This meant that DHS had essentially two options, neither of which the administration liked. One was simply to release the families after booking them and assigning them a date in immigration court. The other was to build more detention space.

Earlier that day, Mario Díaz-Balart, a Florida Republican involved in House immigration talks, had told Boehner that 140 members—a decisive majority of Republicans—now supported a version of the bill. Díaz-Balart and his staff were celebrating at his apartment when they learned about Cantor. “We lost the whole thing,” Díaz-Balart told a Democratic counterpart, according to The New York Times. “It’s over.” Cantor’s defeat confirmed the vulnerability of any Republican who refused to toe the populist line.

What she said next sounded barbed, but she meant it as a concession to the enormity of the president’s responsibility, rather than as a reprimand. “I don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she said. Obama replied, “You know what? I don’t really sleep at night, but let me tell you why. It’s not just that I worry about these kids from El Salvador. I also worry about kids in Sudan, and in Yemen, and in other parts of the world. And here’s my problem: we live in a world with nation states. I have borders. You may believe that it’s inherently unfair that a child born in El Salvador has a completely different set of opportunities available and a completely different set of dangers than a child born in the US. And that’s because it is unfair. I can’t fix that for you.”

In 2011, after Juliana’s mother, Ramona, testified against the killer, a member of MS-13 tried to stab her at a soccer game, where she was selling refreshments. She escaped and fled the country, leaving Juliana and her two younger sisters at an aunt’s house, because she couldn’t afford to bring them with her. She went to Brentwood, on Long Island, where she had relatives, and took a job cleaning houses. A few years later, she was returning home from work, when she got a call. “What I need is money,” a male voice told her. “I know the people of the neighborhood. I know your family, your kids, your daughter.” Several days later, one of Juliana’s schoolmates, a sixteen-year-old boy who belonged to MS-13, kidnapped her from her aunt’s house; for weeks, she was raped and beaten. She managed to call her mother one afternoon, and together they plotted her escape.

In June 2015, Juliana, who was now thirteen, and her two sisters set off in the back of a truck, covered by a nylon tarp, packed in with other migrants heading north. In a jungle along the border between Guatemala and Mexico, Juliana had an asthma attack and the smugglers almost abandoned her. In Washington, officials at DHS and the White House were trying to find ways to dissuade migrants like Juliana from making the trip.

For a year and a half, between 2012 and the start of 2014, El Salvador suddenly became safer. Gang killings across the country fell by more than 50 percent, and while the FMLN government of Mauricio Funes was generally credited with this development, the reasons behind it were a secret. In February 2012, a small team inside the country’s Ministry of Public Security started clandestine negotiations with representatives of MS-13 and of 18th Street, which had splintered into two rival factions, the Sureños and the Revolucionarios.

Munguía Payés had vowed to unleash soldiers on gang enclaves across the country. But as a military tactician, he also knew when a battle was unwinnable. Privately, he tapped an ex-guerrilla to start talks: in exchange for perks such as conjugal visits, the transfer of inmates out of Zacatraz, and a pause in military crackdowns in gang neighborhoods, the gangsters would stop killing one another and anyone else who got in their way.

History was repeating itself with a different cast. The negotiators of the truce thought of it as a second coming of the Acuerdos de Paz, signed twenty years earlier between the guerrillas and the military. “We’re talking about an army of seventy thousand men,” one of them said, in reference to the gangs. “There’s no army in the region that can combat them.” Just like the old guerrillas, many of the gangsters agreed to hand over their weapons in public ceremonies; when they did, authorities found some of the M16s and a Claymore mine that the US government had given the Salvadoran military during the war.

In 2014, when his successor, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a fellow FMLN man and the first ex-guerrilla to serve as president, assumed office, he dissolved the agreement and redoubled the old crackdown. “At no time is our government prepared to negotiate with these criminals,” he declared. “We are going to hunt them down, capture them and put them on trial.” When, as predicted, the homicides spiked, reaching new highs in 2015, the government served up the negotiators as scapegoats.