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

by Jonathan Blitzer

In El Salvador, the attorney general was appointed by Congress rather than by the president; in the spring of 2016, he began arresting government officials who’d been involved in the truce, from the top negotiators down to the undercover policemen tasked with collecting some of the discarded weapons.

The best explanation Eddie could come up with for the ferocity of the violence was that teenage gangsters were so drained of hope and vitality that prison wasn’t appreciably worse than ordinary life on the streets.

For all the passion inspired by immigration, it had never before been the defining issue of a winning presidential campaign. In the 1992 Republican primary, the pundit Pat Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush from the right by using immigration as the central plank of his campaign. He proposed a border wall and a five-year moratorium on legal immigration. Bush “is a globalist, and we are nationalists,” he announced on December 10, 1991, in New Hampshire. “When we take America back, we are going to make America great again, because there is nothing wrong with putting America first.” Buchanan didn’t win a single state primary, but he demonstrated that a nativist platform could appeal to about a third of Republican voters.

Immigration tapped into a rich vein of American outrage, and Trump had an instinct for a galvanizing message. He had found a unified theory that could account for declining factory jobs, the anger and insecurity stoked by far-right media, an opioid epidemic, and the indignity of the country’s first Black president. Immigrants could be blamed for everything.

Sessions was a short, mousy man in his early seventies with an impish smile and a thick Southern drawl. He had spent the entirety of his political career as a lightning rod and a punch line. In 1986, while he was serving as a US attorney in Alabama, Reagan nominated him to be a judge, but allegations of racism blocked his confirmation. At the time, Sessions was the first nominee for a federal district judgeship not to be confirmed in more than thirty years. This was an embarrassing setback, but it also made him an early martyr for white identity politics.

2007, he attacked George W. Bush for proposing comprehensive immigration reform, and in 2013 he assailed Obama for the same thing. Sessions may have lacked the clout to pass any bills, but he generated enough heat to scuttle them.

Miller “was just angry all the time,” a high school classmate later told his biographer, Jean Guerrero. “He put on this real victimization attitude.” He was a strident conservative by the time he was a teenager, and he defined himself in opposition to the student body at the liberal school he attended.

Among the other Republican staffers, Miller became known for his mass emails about immigration, full of links to articles from fringe websites such as Breitbart and VDARE, which often published white supremacists. Most of the recipients would delete the emails as soon as they saw Miller’s name.

Miller had chosen carefully, having spent the entirety of the transition trying to figure out which position in the president’s immediate orbit had the most influence over immigration. At the White House, Miller would have close access to Trump, while at the same time enjoying insulation from congressional scrutiny. He wanted to issue orders, not implement them, and his White House credential protected him from having to testify before Congress, a privilege that cabinet secretaries lacked.

Statistics were cherry-picked or replaced outright with figures from reports by the Center for Immigration Studies. One such report maintained that refugees were thirty times more likely than other members of the public to commit acts of terrorism, but this was a pure fabrication. The interagency process had been designed over decades to generate a series of dispassionate analyses outlining the operational costs, needs, and potential outcomes of refugee resettlement. This time, a routine cost-benefit calculation performed by officials at the Department of Health and Human Services was truncated at Miller’s behest. All that was stated were the “costs” of resettling refugees, but none of the considerable economic benefits.

“The president believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the president,” Miller told them.

By the fall, when the administration presented its final number to Congress, the refugee cap was forty-five thousand, the lowest in the history of the program and below the explicit recommendations made by the State Department, the military, and the vice president’s office. Yet the number itself mattered less than the warped new process that had generated it. By the end of Trump’s term in office, the cap would drop several more times, to fifteen thousand refugees—so low that refugee resettlement agencies had to lay off much of their staff. Miller was perfecting a strategy that would define his time in government. The key wasn’t just to rely on brash edicts and pronouncements from ...

Meanwhile, Miller invoked the president constantly, especially when he encountered resistance from other officials. “Stephen, what you’re trying to do is not possible,” he’d be told. “It is possible,” he replied. “I spoke to the president an hour ago, and he said it had to be done.”

From 2016 to May 2017, authorities in Suffolk County attributed seventeen killings to MS-13. The county’s police department identified at least eighty-nine gang members who were undocumented immigrants; thirty-nine had been placed with family on Long Island by the federal government. These numbers were a minuscule portion of the local immigrant population, which was statistically far more law-abiding than American citizens. There were half a million immigrants on Long Island, and about sixty thousand Salvadorans in Suffolk County. The most expansive estimates made by the Suffolk County Police Department put the gang’s membership at around four hundred people. Gruesome gang killings magnified a sense of alarm that did not match the actual threat.

Most of the victims of MS-13 on Long Island were immigrants themselves, and many had come to the US recently as unaccompanied children. The gangsters and their victims lived together in the same towns, went to the same schools, and vied for the same jobs. Their lives were thoroughly enmeshed. Without cooperation from witnesses (sharing tips, lodging complaints, asking for help), the police were adrift. Trump was complicating Sini’s plans to make inroads. “We have to compete now with concerns and anxieties created by other government agencies,” Sini thought. “We have to compete with that noise.”

Sandoval was thin and reserved, with a nervous laugh and a faint voice. The name of her ex-boyfriend, Carlos, was tattooed in cursive on her left wrist. He was in prison for the murders of Mickens and Cuevas, but the fact that he was locked away compounded her fears. Ever since the police picked him up, Sandoval had worried that his friends in the gang would come looking for her. MS-13 members were still angry that she’d broken up with him. But she was also scared of his old rivals: to members of the Bloods, who lived on her street, she was guilty of having once associated with MS-13.

One night in the fall of 2016, Carlos called Sandoval to ask if she had heard any rumors about girls who had gone missing. This was the first she’d heard about any disappearances. The next day, the police announced that they had found the bodies of Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens. Sandoval knew Mickens from school, but Carlos forbade her to go to the funeral. A few weeks later, she was walking to the bus stop when a red pickup truck pulled up next to her. Carlos emerged, holding a gun, and told her to get in. With two friends, he drove her to the woods, where MS-13 members had a meeting spot. Carlos kept Sandoval hostage for three months, moving her among houses in and around Brentwood and Central Islip. At night, they hid in the woods.

One morning in December, Carlos went to work early, and the friends he had deputized to watch her got into a fight and left the house. Sandoval ran to a friend’s place, where she called her mother, who got in touch with the police. They told her to call a taxi to pick Sandoval up. Sandoval had always distrusted the police, because she felt that they could not protect her from Carlos. After being forced to make her getaway in a taxi, she came to resent them. “Thank God you’re alive,” one of the officers told her. “Do you have any idea who you were with?”

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.

The strategy for combating MS-13 rested on one of the core premises of American immigration enforcement: undocumented immigrants had far fewer rights than citizens did.

Ties to the gang would never have to be proved because the teenagers were guilty of something that was never in dispute: to flee the gang they were now accused of joining, they had entered the country without papers.

In the file, the government listed three reasons why agents were certain that Jorge belonged to MS-13. The first was that he’d been wearing a Brooklyn Nets hat, which, according to a school resource officer cited in one of the documents, was “indicative of membership in a gang,” because “MS-13 members currently wear Chicago Bulls or Brooklyn Nets hats.” The second was that someone had seen him “performing a gang handshake,” although no further details were given. The final piece of evidence was taken as the most damning: at school, he had been observed in the company of two people on ICE’s radar. One of them was a “confirmed gang member” whose name was redacted; the other was Sandoval. After she escaped from her ex-boyfriend, the local police knew that she’d been kidnapped and abused. It didn’t matter that she had done nothing wrong. What she had suffered turned into an indelible mark that she didn’t realize she was carrying. She was a “gang associate,” and anyone close to her was an object of suspicion.

Could Guatemala run itself? Getting a Guatemalan court to convict one of the military officers involved in her sister’s murder had taken twelve years, roughly $3 million in legal expenses, and consistent pressure from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. And, in the end, he had still gotten away. Several years later, after a three-judge panel convicted General Ríos Montt of crimes against humanity for his role in the genocide perpetrated in the early 1980s, the country’s top court overturned the verdict within ten days.

2007, at the behest of Guatemalan human rights advocates, including Helen Mack, the United Nations established the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), an independent anti-corruption body, to investigate criminal groups that had come to dominate the country after three decades of civil war. It was a radical international experiment. The CICIG’s mandate was to work directly with national institutions, such as the police, the Public Ministry, and the existing court system. But this presented an immediate problem because many of these offices were controlled by organized crime. The commission’s inaugural chairman was a Spaniard named Carlos Castresana, who lived in a secured villa in Guatemala City that had once been the headquarters for the US Marines. A foiled assassination plot forced him to sleep in a room above his office. “When you come to a country with such extended levels of corruption, it doesn’t matter if you have built a good case,” he later told the journalist David Grann. “Guatemala’s institutions must be purged from the inside—they need an exorcism.” The commission went on to create new institutions that could withstand corrosive influences. One was a special prosecutor’s office that operated within the Public Ministry; another was a set of courts that handled complex investigations. Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress, who saw political corruption as a major driver of drug trafficking and migration, would give close to $45 m...

By 2015, the legal fight against corruption was reaching its high-water mark. That April, the country’s attorney general, Thelma Aldana, together with the CICIG, announced a criminal investigation into the president and vice president, accusing them of running a huge smuggling operation through the customs offices. The vice president resigned the following month; at one of her legal hearings, prosecutors played a wiretapped phone call that directly implicated the president in the bribery-and-kickback scheme. Thousands took to the streets to call for his ouster, and he was eventually arrested.

Later that year, Jimmy Morales, who had no prior public-service experience, won the presidential election by campaigning on the s...

For decades, doctors and nurses trained in Western medicine had been dismissive of whole categories of diagnoses that predominated among the Indigenous population. Villagers would often visit healers and shamans who treated ailments such as mal de ojo (evil eye), pérdida del alma (loss of the soul), and el susto (the fright). Some of these afflictions dated to pre-Columbian times and went by a range of different names. El susto, the anthropologist Linda Green wrote, was “understood by its victims to be the loss of the essential life force as a result of fright.” In more conventional terms, its symptoms included depression, lethargy, insomnia, nightmares, diarrhea, and vomiting. To anyone mindful of La Violencia of the war years, the connection to post-traumatic stress was unavoidable. These conditions were, as Green put it, “social memory embodied.”

Velásquez may have been technically right to flag misdeeds for investigation, yet the longevity of the CICIG could not rely solely on the logic of a prosecutor. This was the flip side of the problem of Guatemalan justice raised by Helen’s activism. Maybe the country couldn’t police itself, but principled outsiders didn’t necessarily share the same national long view or sense of realpolitik.

The justification was deterrence, but the policy itself remained secret. Jeff Sessions came to Texas twice in 2017, and not once did he mention the pilot program to his subordinates in the US Attorney’s Office. It would take Durbin another full year before he learned that he had been part of an official experiment. How could migrants discern the contours of a new deterrence policy if the government’s own employees weren’t sure what was happening?

Patrick and Erick were listed as “unaccompanied alien minors” who had arrived at the border alone and been transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS would take up their case from scratch, vetting relatives in the US. Keldy was part of a different system run by DHS. According to ICE’s records, she had traveled to the US as a single adult. There was nothing in their files to link the boys to the nine-digit number that corresponded to their mother, and nothing in hers that led back to them.

Ordinarily, asylum seekers who cleared this first test could be released on bond to wait for their subsequent court dates. But increasingly the government was detaining asylum seekers through the entirety of their legal proceedings. In one case, a Haitian schoolteacher had won asylum in an immigration court yet was kept in ICE detention while the government appealed the case.

They confirmed his quick count. With 57 percent of the vote in, Nasralla was leading by five points. Sometime the next morning, one of the tribunal’s magistrates let slip to a local reporter that the outcome appeared to be “irreversible.” Soon afterward, everything went dark. The electoral tribunal halted the count and claimed the army had to bring, by truck, tens of thousands of outstanding ballots from the countryside. Contreras and Dale oversaw the software used to process the ballots once they were electronically scanned into the system, but they couldn’t control the rest of the process. On Monday, the day after the election, the incoming electronic scans had slowed to a trickle. The data was not getting entered into the system. On Tuesday evening, the computers crashed; no one could say why. When they came back online a few hours later, the electoral tribunal announced that the five-point Nasralla lead had turned into a 1.2 percent advantage for Hernández.

A US ally in the Americas was stealing an election in plain sight. The foreign election monitors raised objections, and the Organization of American States issued an immediate report detailing “irregularities, mistakes, and systemic problems.” Its top official called on the Honduran electoral tribunal not to announce a winner until all “the serious doubts” were resolved. When the tribunal went ahead anyway and declared Hernández the victor, the Organization of American States called for new elections. The country with the greatest ability to stop the fraud had the strongest sense of loyalty to the fraudster. At first, the US refused to intervene.

president. The six-month period after the election revealed the American position for what it was. Outright fraud followed by mass protests had barely registered as a cause for concern in Washington. Members of the Trump administration needed to portray Honduras as a success story. Doing so freed up the anti-immigration stalwarts to end temporary protected status for the sixty thousand Hondurans living legally in the US for more than a decade, whom they now wanted to send home once and for all.

The scheme wasn’t isolated to Honduras. A broader effort was underway at DHS to whitewash the conditions in multiple countries over the objections of career officials at the State Department. The aim, according to the then acting head of DHS, was to “send a clear signal that TPS in general is coming to a close.” Staffers were tasked with finding “positive gems” about individual countries that could be used as an excuse to end TPS protection for more than three hundred thousand of their citizens who were currently living in the US.

He wanted more money for his “big, fat, beautiful” border wall. The Republican Congress was already funding it, just not to the degree Trump had demanded. He called for federal troops to stand watch in South Texas. It didn’t matter that border crossings were at their lowest point since 1971,

Lost in the din coming out of Washington were the words of the migrants themselves. One of them was Maria Elena Colindres, a former member of the national legislature in Honduras. She had served in public office until January 2018, when her term expired. In the controversial elections held at the end of the previous year, a rival from the National Party had unseated her. Reuters reporters found her among the families making the journey north. “We’ve had to live through a fraudulent electoral process,” she said. “We’re suffering a progressive militarization and lack of institutions. They’re criminalizing those who protested.”

The first time Hernández won a presidential election, the National Party had secretly funded his campaign by stealing more than $3 million from the country’s health-care program. (Another $290 million was siphoned off through subsequent kickbacks, fraudulent contracts, and graft, all associated with the ruling order.) Thousands of people with treatable illnesses died because of drug shortages. Some hospitals had replaced prescription drugs with sugar and water.

But leadership at DHS still hadn’t addressed any of the problems reported during the El Paso pilot program. Despite their obvious lack of preparation, officials at CBP were sending estimates of the number of people the new policy was due to affect to the Office of Management and Budget. Between May and September 2018, the government planned to separate twenty-six thousand children from their parents.

Of all the places in the US where Keldy could have applied for asylum, El Paso was one of the worst. On average, roughly a third of asylum seekers were given relief in immigration courts across the country, but immigration judges in El Paso had granted asylum just 3 percent of the time between 2013 and 2017.

He begged the officials in the jail not to put him on a plane until he contacted his daughter, so that they could at least be deported together. But the ICE officials could only guess at where she might be. The government records were indecipherable. The administration was separating thousands of families without a plan for how to reunite them.

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.

Typically, maize was planted in April, prior to a period of extended rain; in 2018, however, both May and June were dry. “No one knows whether to plant their crops or not,” López said. “When do you do it? If the rains don’t come at a predictable time, how do you know? These crops are for survival. If there aren’t crops, people leave.” In places like these, the question was no longer if someone would emigrate but when. Extended periods of heat and dryness, known as canículas, had increased in four of the past seven years. Yet even measurements of annual rainfall, which was projected to decline over the next fifty years, obscured the effects of its growing irregularity on agriculture. At the border, American officials often spoke in seasonal generalities: more immigrants arrived in the spring when the weather was mild, fewer attempted the journey in the summer heat. But in the spring and summer months of 2018, the deterrent effects of zero tolerance were moot where people were starving.

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.

based on her sources along the border, the government had begun making a list only after Sabraw’s June order. The administration was taking the ORR records of children currently in their care and working backward to look for their parents, who were in the custody of DHS. But because DHS hadn’t made its own lists of separated parents, Brané knew that the government’s list would be incomplete.

In Sabraw’s court, lawyers from the Justice Department acted overwhelmed by the task of finding all the separated families under a tight deadline. Behind the scenes, however, officers at ICE were trying to pick off parents before the judge could force the government to reunite them with their children. Keldy had a choice, the deportation officer said, leading her down the page. Because she had lost her asylum case, she had an order of removal against her. She could either be deported with her children—or alone.

Many US commentators assumed that the migrants knew exactly where they were going, but in fact, many of them hadn’t thought that far in advance. For the first few weeks of the trip, there was a single, obvious route for the caravan through the small towns dotting the southern tip of Mexico. Beyond that, the travelers were basically improvising. When it came to the US, the preponderant view—that Donald Trump would not let them into the country—did not seem to slow anyone down. “We’ll do what we can for now, then wait and see,” said Daniel Jiménez, a thirty-year-old who had joined the caravan with six friends from his hometown in Honduras. That could mean trying to reach the US to seek asylum, or staying in Mexico to look for work, but the most important thing was to leave Honduras. “You just can’t live there anymore.”

He learned about the caravan from a television news program. “People say this caravan is about politics?” he said. “Well, sure, if by politics you mean hunger.”

In July 2018, a group of government officials began to gather each week at the headquarters of Customs and Border Protection, in Washington, DC, to discuss what to do in the aftermath of the president’s failed zero tolerance policy. None of the attendees expressed any contrition. The overall lesson, one said afterward, wasn’t that the administration had gone too far in separating families, but, rather, that “we need to be smarter if we want to implement something on this scale again.”

For years, Mexico had been a “transit country,” one through which migrants crossed to reach the US. But with their numbers increasing, and the US more determined than ever to turn them away, Mexico was becoming a terminus. Immigration was morphing into a toxic political issue in Mexico, a subject of resentment and contention. Leaders had to recalibrate.