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

by Jonathan Blitzer

MPP went into effect in January 2019, in Tijuana. The Department of Homeland Security extended it, city by city, to locations along the entire US-Mexico border. In mid-March, it came to Mexicali and Juárez. In July, MPP was instituted in the state of Tamaulipas, on the Gulf of Mexico, a stronghold for criminal cartels. Close to fifty thousand asylum seekers were returned to Mexico, where many of them faced extreme levels of violence.

On August 3, cartel members arrived at a shelter in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, demanding that the pastor in charge hand over a group of Cubans to be ransomed; when he refused, he was abducted, never to be seen again. Later in the summer, a few miles away, a dozen asylum seekers who’d just been returned to Mexico were kidnapped. “The people in migration”—Mexican immigration authorities—“turned us over to the cartels,” one of the victims later told Vice News. “They know what they are doing. They don’t care if you’re killed or not.”

It wasn’t just criminal cartels who brutalized the Central Americans stuck in Juárez; it was also the police.

Miller made what others began to describe as calls “deep in the building.” He would ring lower-level officials and give orders directly to them. Not only did he refuse to loop in their bosses; he also instructed the junior officials to shield their activities from the department’s leadership. When he found people he could trust, or bully, Miller would enlist them as informers.

Every Friday, he convened a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, to discuss the ways in which federal bureaucrats were falling short of implementing Trump’s agenda. Eventually, career officials stopped attending, and Miller’s audience became the political appointees who were already aligned with him.

For fifteen years, beginning around 2004, a laboratory on the border of Colombia and Venezuela churned out cocaine at a clip that eventually reached between three hundred and five hundred kilograms per month. The product was 99 percent pure, and it was costly—ten thousand dollars per kilogram. Packages went out regularly by planes, high-speed motorboats, and, on one occasion, a submarine. Some of the routes led to a ranch in Copán, Honduras, near the ruins of a ninth-century Maya acropolis with stone temples and the remnants of two pyramids. From there, traffickers fanned out into Guatemala and Mexico, where the Sinaloa cartel took control of the shipments, eventually smuggling them into the United States. The cocaine was packed in bulky rectangles that looked like bulging white bricks. On each block of tightly wrapped product were the two interlocking initials of its proprietor: “TH.” The letters corresponded to the first and last name of Tony Hernández, a Honduran national congressman and a brother of the president. In the

Juan Orlando Hernández denied any knowledge of his brother’s activities, but by the summer of 2019 evidence linking him to drug money was being made public. At the start of August, a forty-four-page court filing against Tony Hernández, in New York, referred to a certain “co-conspirator four.” The person was unnamed, but clearly identifiable: “CC-4 was elected President of Honduras in late 2013.”

In late February 2017, Morales and a group of political aides and influential businessmen had met at a condominium in Guatemala City to hatch plans for attacking the reputation of the CICIG, the anti-corruption body, in the US. Within a few months, this group had expanded to include members of the Guatemalan National Congress. According to an investigation by Nómada, a Guatemalan news site, they began paying tens of thousands of dollars each month to the American lobbying firm Barnes & Thornburg, which was managed by a major fundraiser for Vice President Mike Pence. Another interest group opposing the CICIG retained the firm Greenberg Traurig, which had offices in Florida, the home state of Republican senator Marco Rubio. By April 2018, congressional Republicans were holding hearings on potential investigatory abuses committed by the CICIG; in the Senate, Rubio and the Utah Republican Mike Lee led a push to suspend US aid to the group. After Morales expelled the CICIG, the US government remained silent, despite having once supported

By late July, everything was ready, and the Guatemalans were preparing to sign off when the Constitutional Court, the country’s highest judicial body, interceded. Morales could not sign such a substantial international compact without congressional approval, according to the judges. Their ruling came the night before he was supposed to travel to Washington. His plans were canceled. Instead of the triumphant meeting he and the Americans had planned, a harried delegation went in his place—a cleanup crew. They met at the White House with McAleenan and Stephen Miller. “I need the US to hit us with a big stick,” Degenhart told the Americans at the meeting. He was a tall, imposing man with short gray hair and a doughy face. Morales needed a pretext to ignore the court’s decision. “Let’s scare our people into agreeing with this,” Degenhart said.

A plan took shape: They would get Trump to issue a wrecking ball of a tweet, something that could, as Degenhart suggested, “get people to realize there’s no other option.” It would seem credible because everyone knew Trump would impose massive sanctions if he could. The only way to avert an economic catastrophe would be for the Guatemalan government to sign the asylum deal.

By March, sixty-four thousand asylum seekers had been enrolled in MPP, and 517 of them had been granted some form of legal relief.

thousand in the first eleven days of April. In multiple cases, US officials knew that they were spreading COVID but didn’t seem to care. A twenty-six-year-old Haitian man who’d become infected in a Louisiana detention center was put on a plane despite two positive tests; he claimed to know four others from the jail who were also sick but getting deported with him.

By the end of the month, roughly 20 percent of the nearly seven hundred confirmed cases of COVID in Guatemala were people who had been deported from the US. “We must not stigmatize,” Monroy said. “But I have to speak clearly. The arrival of deportees who have tested positive has really increased the number of cases.” The United States, he added, had become “the Wuhan of the Americas.”

virus. In early June, ICE transferred seventy-four detainees from Arizona and Florida to a facility in Farmville, Virginia. The alleged reason was that the Arizona and Florida facilities were overcrowded, but a DHS official admitted to The Washington Post that the detainees were moved so that ICE agents could contravene department rules on travel and secretly hitch a ride on the planes to help police Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, DC. A super-spreader event followed, in which some three hundred immigrants in the Virginia facility contracted the virus. After one of them died, an ICE official conceded, “The rights and interests of detainees were not a factor. You had the department making up a reason to move them.”

For more than a year after the government instituted its zero tolerance policy, the Trump administration lied about how many families had been affected. In the summer of 2018, the Department of Justice was forced to acknowledge having separated roughly twenty-seven hundred children, but the actual number was more than fifty-six hundred.

It took months of litigation to dislodge the accurate tally, because the earlier count had deliberately left out most of what had happened in 2017. The first separations began in two waves that year, and they’d never entirely stopped.

Trump sought to hide the asylum crisis south of the border. Biden started paying an immediate price for bringing it back into view.

Ever since the CICIG had been forced out of the country, in 2018, the attorney general, an arch conservative named María Consuelo Porras, had been charging and arresting lawyers who’d been involved in the fight against corruption. Twenty-two judges and anti-corruption prosecutors had been forced into exile. The claims against them were baseless; in many cases, private lawyers with ties to vested interests brought highly dubious charges that the ministry used as pretexts to launch formal investigations. The State Department issued sanctions against Consuelo Porras, but she wasn’t deterred.

In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that advocates were asking the government to consider giving $450,000 to each family member who had been separated. This number wasn’t final; the DOJ hadn’t agreed to it, and the government’s opening bid in the negotiations was substantially lower. But the GOP wasted no time using the figure to attack Biden. Already, Republican attorneys general in several states had filed lawsuits to block every immigration initiative that the president had issued since taking office. In virtually all cases, they were succeeding.