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

by Jonathan Blitzer

“Insurgency,” the US Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote in 1962, was defined as any “illegal opposition to an existing government.” In El Salvador, that included worker strikes, unionization efforts, and public demonstrations.

In March 1980, Congress and the Carter administration put an end to the policy chaos and passed the Refugee Act. By then, the US was admitting, on average, roughly ninety thousand refugees each year. Now the government would have an actual blueprint, bringing US law into step with long-standing international compacts. It began with some definitions. According to the act, a refugee was someone outside his homeland, unable or unwilling to return because of either outright persecution or a “well-founded fear of persecution.” Such persecution was defined as being based on “race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” Immigration lawyers, judges, lawmakers, and government officials would spend decades fighting over the underlying ambiguities. But for the time being, the act represented an unqualified advance in American legal practice. As one congressman pointed out, on the House floor, these definitions identified refugees by “a more universal standard based on uprootedness rather than ideology.”

The US couldn’t control the size or composition of this population. Members of the administration decided to enshrine the principle of asylum in the statute, making it the first congressional act to mention the concept. The question was, how many people who’d been granted asylum could adjust their legal status each year to become permanent residents? Over the previous decade, roughly two thousand asylum seekers showed up on American soil each year; managing their numbers seemed doable. “Let’s be really expansive,” Meissner told her counterparts at the State Department. “We’ll double it, and then some.” The number they arrived at was five thousand. In March 1980, it seemed inconceivable that all those slots could be filled in a single year.

When those facilities were filled a few weeks later, agents used the Orange Bowl stadium in Miami and a blimp hangar in Opa-locka. In a government sedan, Meissner and her colleagues drove right up to the harbor and watched in astonishment as more Cubans than they could count emerged from rafts, fishing vessels, and powerboats. Witnessing the swell of new arrivals, Meissner stared straight at a policy paradox. How did you deal with this, she wondered, without immediately undercutting the principle that migrants had the right to seek protection, a right she had just fought to enshrine in law?

By early May, there were more than fifteen thousand Marielitos, and American authorities were realizing something even more alarming: Castro hadn’t simply allowed the ten thousand dissidents who’d amassed at the Peruvian embassy to leave. He was emptying prisons and psychiatric institutions, mixing criminals and mental health patients in with the groups headed for the US. One hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans arrived in the ensuing six months, and according to the State Department, some forty thousand of them had criminal records. Fewer than half of all the Cubans who arrived had families to receive them; the rest were on their own, meaning US authorities had to figure out where to send them as the crisis continued. The Department of Defense had space for twenty thousand Marielitos at army bases in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arkansas.

They introduced a bill in 1982 that passed the Senate but languished in the House, then reintroduced a version of it three more times in the next four years. A viable immigration bill was a kind of legislative Rubik’s Cube. Organized labor approved of employer sanctions but bristled at expanded legal immigration. Mexican American advocacy groups, which supported legalization of the undocumented, opposed employer sanctions for fear of discrimination against Hispanic workers. For every law-and-order type championing increased enforcement, there was another congressman whose most powerful constituents depended on cheap, undocumented labor.

The fallout from Mariel, for instance, was ongoing. There were thousands of Cubans stuck in jails and military bases because they had criminal records, but there was no place for the Reagan administration to move them without causing further outcry. In Arkansas, where gubernatorial elections were held every two years, the Republican incumbent Frank White, who had won election in 1980 by lambasting Clinton over the refugees at Fort Chaffee, was now on the receiving end of the same attacks. It was Clinton’s turn, this time as White’s challenger, to blame the governor for doing nothing about immigrant criminals in the state. “I don’t need to tell you how important it is to the Republican Party and to my own political future that these people be moved,” White told one of Reagan’s advisers in the summer of 1981.

Eventually, in response to a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of four thousand Haitians, a federal judge intervened, finding that the conditions in Haiti were “stark, brutal, and bloody,” and that deportees from the US were in “substantial danger” of being tortured or killed. The INS, he ruled, had violated the Constitution in denying the Haitians the semblance of a fair hearing. “Those Haitians who came to the United States seeking freedom and justice did not find it,” he wrote. “Instead, they were confronted with an Immigration and Naturalization Service determined to deport them. The decision was made among high INS officials to expel Haitians, despite whatever claims to asylum individual Haitians might have.” By then, Meissner was herself one of the agency’s top officials, and had come to understand how the system worked. The INS was organized into thirty-three different districts, each with its own director. Meissner outranked them all, but did not have direct authority over them in the institutional chain of command. She was also a woman and a career official; the field belonged to tough-talking lawmen who were contemptuous of legal niceties. The district directors were potentates controlling every aspect of their offices’ operations. Because INS was the lone immigration body inside the Justice Department, the district offices were responsible for everything from making arrests to processing applications for legal status. Each office handled asylum requests in it...

Meissner was watching government attorneys and State Department officials strain to create legal openings to resettle Southeast Asians at the same time that they were deliberately ignoring straightforward asylum cases from Latin America. The State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights endorsed political asylum much more often to Nicaraguans fleeing the Sandinistas than to Salvadorans or Guatemalans hounded by American allies. Back in Washington, behind closed doors, she began to raise objections. The agency’s own statistics left nothing to the imagination. By 1984, at a time when 25 percent of asylum seekers were obtaining a positive result, Salvadorans and Guatemalans were being rejected at a rate of 98 and 99 percent. When she broached the discrepancy with agency lawyers, they grew defensive. A probing report she put together was aggressively dismissed as the “Big Red Book,” and the INS general counsel—a former real estate lawyer and ardent Reaganite named Maurice Inman—told her to “deep six it.” In 1986, she resigned.

“Go to MacArthur,” he was told. “You’ll find Salvadorans there who can help you.” Over the course of the civil war, the number of Salvadorans living in Los Angeles grew tenfold, to three hundred thousand people, by the end of the decade. In March 1983, Reagan was issuing public warnings that El Salvador was “on the front line of the battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually at us.” He was right that the fates of the US and Central America were entwined, but wrong about why. The Americans were helping to unleash a regional exodus. More than a million Salvadorans were displaced by 1984. Almost a quarter of the country’s population would eventually be living in the US. Tens of thousands of them lacked legal status because the American government refused to recognize their legitimate claims to asylum.

Life in the US was a daily collision of all the accumulated injuries that had brought them there. Medical appointments were pointless if the patients never showed, and it took concerted effort to convince Salvadorans who were frantic to find work that their debilitating migraines or insomnia were physical manifestations of deeper emotional pain. In El Salvador, they might have been hunted by death squads and federal troops, but in San Francisco they lived under the threat of arrest and deportation. Juan recruited a team of Spanish-speaking

Act (IRCA) into law—“the most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since 1952,” he said, reading from a prewritten speech in which he praised Congress for its “truly successful bipartisan effort.” Some three million undocumented immigrants would be legalized. The legislation had been years in coming, he added, joking that the final stretch was up to him. “Hope nothing happens to me between here and the table,” he said. There was hearty applause as he signed the bill, but something happened in between the podium and the door. A reporter shouted, “Mr. President?” Reagan turned to the press gallery. “Do we have a deal going with Iran of some sort?” It was a reference to a story that had surfaced earlier that week and would soon gain traction as the so-called Iran-Contra Affair, a window into the White House’s continued obsession with Central America. In contravention of Congress and an explicit arms embargo, the administration was covertly selling weapons to Iran in order to send the proceeds to the Contra forces fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The room grew instantly quiet, as the president paused. “No comment,” he said.

Los Angeles was at the national vanguard of anti-gang policing, which had more in common with the practices of the US Army than with the protocols of other police forces across the country. This “wasn’t policing,” according to one historian. It was “anti-insurgency run amok.” The idea was to uproot gang members from their strongholds; if that meant decimating whole neighborhoods that gangsters shared with working-class people of color, the collateral damage could be justified in the broader war against crime.

As a doctor, Juan took an analytic view of their profiles. Many lower-level soldiers had been conscripted and were often tortured if they were caught absconding or disobeying orders. Some of them were campesinos themselves, not so much sadists as cowed conformists who’d been indoctrinated during their military service. Juan wasn’t naive about the savagery of their past acts. He just felt that the war had victimized everyone in different ways.

In the winter and spring of 1990, Moakley’s staff traveled back and forth between the US and El Salvador, chasing down leads. In the end, there was too much working against them for a clear breakthrough. But Moakley did succeed in demonstrating that neither the Salvadoran government nor the White House sought the full truth. The investigation the Salvadorans had promised was “at a standstill,” the task force wrote in a report that April, and the State Department and CIA were giving it cover. It would take decades to bring the full cast of killers to justice. By then declassified US cables—from the embassy, Department of Defense, and CIA—revealed that the Salvadoran military had orchestrated the killings, while US officials had “foreknowledge” of the plot.

The search for answers in the Jesuit case was only part of Moakley’s agenda for El Salvador. Since 1983, he’d been pushing his bill to create a temporary status for Salvadorans living in the US that would protect them against deportation during the war. “It’s our bombs, our guns, and our mines that made these people refugees,” he said. Yet each time he and his Senate colleague Dennis DeConcini introduced the measure, it died in committee.

The medical records at La Clínica were kept in locked file cabinets in case of INS raids, and each chart, with its list of symptoms tied to stress and fear, told a story of the failed promise of the 1986 immigration reform. At that time, when IRCA passed, somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million Salvadorans were estimated to be living in the US. About half of them had arrived before 1981, which was the cutoff for legalization under IRCA. In Washington, DC, however, 90 percent of Salvadorans had arrived after that date. The legislation thus triggered a panic. Ten percent of Salvadoran students enrolled in DC public schools withdrew after the bill was passed; there was a 20 to 30 percent drop in ESL courses, and local charities reported a spike in hunger that coincided with mass firings of immigrant workers. Sylvia Rosales-Fike, who’d hired Juan at La Clínica, told The Washington Post, “Everybody is selling cars. They are ready to leave, but they don’t know where to go.” For the first time ever, American employers who knowingly hired undocumented staff faced financial penalties. They had until June 1988—eighteen months—before the government began enforcing the new rules.

TACA Airlines wasn’t alone in finding passports flushed down toilets. It was happening at major American airports as well, from LAX to JFK. Immigration officials across the country started calling those who arrived without passports “flushers.” Travelers who couldn’t sneak away to the bathroom before reaching customs found other ways to destroy or conceal their identity documents. They hid them in their carry-on luggage or, in cases of desperation, tried eating through the pages. Whatever their means of disposal, everyone had wised up to the same strategy: without a passport to confirm a country of origin, there was no way for INS officials to initiate the deportation process. These travelers requested asylum, and because there was limited space for detention, the INS often released them with a work-authorization form and a future court date.

By the early 1990s, the asylum system was in a state of disarray. After passing the Refugee Act, in 1980, legislators mostly lost interest in the issue; the chaos of Mariel was followed by a period of steady asylum applications (between sixteen and twenty-six thousand each year) but no accompanying sense of political urgency. For most of the decade, the Reagan administration was denying asylum applications with such regularity it saw no need to bolster the government’s resources. Under George H. W. Bush, however, there were new geopolitical considerations, which US asylum policy started to reflect. With growing concern about government repression in Beijing, the US expanded protections for Chinese émigrés fleeing the country’s one-child policy. The resulting wave of applications, coupled with old inefficiencies, meant unresolved asylum claims mounted. Soon there was a backlog of more than a hundred thousand cases.

They figured their best move was to prove their willingness to work; the first words in English that many of them learned was the phrase “I need a good work.” This made it even easier for the government to write them off as “economic migrants.” Those who applied for asylum were almost all rejected. Between 1983 and 1986, close to a hundred thousand Guatemalans reached the US, but only fourteen asylum petitions were granted. The denials didn’t stop the flow of people heading north. They simply clouded any understanding of who was coming and why.

Several years passed before an immigration lawyer whom the family could finally afford found their names in the settlement agreement. The ABC v. Thornburgh case may have represented a belated victory for the principle of asylum, but it added hundreds of thousands more applications for the INS to review. By the end of 1994, the backlog had grown to more than four hundred thousand cases.

Doris Meissner was working at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace when Bill Clinton offered her the job to head the INS. She accepted knowing the downsides. The agency had a modest budget and a sprawling mission. Its responsibilities put it squarely in the political fray. What the agency needed was ambition and leadership. What it had was the indifference of presidents who saw immigration policy as a political liability. Clinton was wary of the issue, and even so, his learning curve was steep. On the campaign trail, he attacked George Bush over a policy his administration had adopted in May 1991, in which the US turned away tens of thousands of Haitian asylum seekers who were trying to reach the US by boat. After a coup the following September, the human rights group Amnesty International estimated that the new government had killed at least fifteen hundred people whom it considered loyal to the old regime. The number of Haitians fleeing to the US increased. As it did, the American policy intensified, with the Coast Guard intercepting US-bound vessels at sea. Clinton called it “appalling” and vowed to give each Haitian an asylum hearing once he was president. But as the president-elect he now faced the reality of an impending humanitarian crisis. In late December, a seventy-foot wooden freighter that was crammed with 392 Haitians en route to South Florida sank; eight survived. “What if in the first few days of the Clinton administration, thousands more refugees ...

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the US government was trying to contain Mexican border crossers, agents in El Paso responded by racially profiling residents. Because they couldn’t catch everyone who entered the US, the patrolmen stopped anyone they could within the city limits, from grandmothers to high schoolers, demanding to see their papers. This posed a special problem in a county that was 75 percent Hispanic. There was a lawsuit; the controversial local head of the Border Patrol retired; and his replacement, Silvestre Reyes, brought an idea that would revolutionize border policy for the next three presidential administrations. He called it Operation Blockade.

Reyes’s superiors in Washington were skeptical until they saw the results. Over the following year, there was a 72 percent drop in apprehensions in the sector. These figures would later prove to be deceiving. Migrants were continuing to cross—they were just doing it farther from the major ports of entry. An increasing number of them were dying in the desert. But fewer arrests counted as a clear success by the low standards of immigration enforcement. The INS scaled up the operation in other locations along the border. In San Diego, there was Operation Gatekeeper; in Arizona, Operation Safeguard; and in South Texas, Operation Rio Grande. The government began speaking about a concept it was calling “prevention through deterrence.”

Another bill passed Congress in August 1996 and went to the president for his signature. This one, he complained to his advisers, was “a decent welfare bill wrapped in a sack of shit.” The law slashed the welfare rolls and unraveled the social safety net, but perhaps the most controversial aspect of it was how the bill funded job training programs to wean people from government support. Almost half of the total funding—some $23 billion—came from cutting aid to legal immigrants. For years, permanent residents and green-card holders had received federal relief. The bill would end that, making them ineligible for welfare, aid to families with dependent children, supplementary security income, food stamps, and Medicaid. Up until this moment, there was a clear fault line for immigrants in the realm of public policy: legal immigrants were considered upstanding and thus largely protected, while “illegal” immigrants were treated as reprehensible. The welfare reform bill drew a distinction between legal immigrants and citizens.

There were allies in the administration, but no one powerful enough to override the president’s survival instincts. At one point, an official at the Office of Management and Budget named Ken Apfel gave a presentation to Clinton, laying out the bill’s monumental impact on legal immigrants. It didn’t dissuade Clinton from endorsing the bill, but it made a mark that would prove consequential. On August 22, 1996, Clinton signed the bill into law, but at a press conference several days earlier he had promised to find some way to eventually undo the damage. “I am deeply disappointed that the congressional leadership insisted on attaching to this extraordinarily important bill a provision that will hurt legal immigrants in America,” he had said from a dais at the White House. “This provision has nothing to do with welfare reform; it is simply a budget-saving measure, and it is not right.” Muñoz was cutting out articles from local, state, and national newspapers and keeping them in a file that was growing thicker as the welfare policy was finalized. The government was beginning to send out notices informing legal immigrants that their relief checks would stop coming. One clip in Muñoz’s folder included an account of a seventy-five-year-old Mexican-born farmworker named Ignacio Muñoz. He’d lived in the US for forty years and had been receiving four hundred dollars in supplemental security income each month. When a government letter reached him at his home in Stockton, California, h...

Inside the White House, the president’s chief of staff, Leon Panetta, had previously served as a congressman from the San Joaquin Valley, in Central California. There were some lines he wasn’t comfortable crossing. “We all understand the problem of illegal immigrants,” he said at the time. “We’re all trying to ensure that we have additional enforcement to protect against illegal immigrants. But I, for the life of me, do not understand why we need to penalize legal immigrants in that process.”

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.

The discretion once exercised by INS agents and immigration judges no longer applied. According to the law, the government had to detain everyone it could possibly deport; once a person was in deportation proceedings no one could intervene to stop them in the event of extenuating circumstances. 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 a memo, from November 1996, Rahm Emanuel recommended that the president make use of the new law to burnish his image as being tough on crime. If Clinton took advantage of the opportunities afforded by IIRIRA, Emanuel wrote, he could “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.”

Eddie’s mother brought a bundle of his school diplomas to the first hearing in his deportation proceedings. Her eyes were bloodshot and twitching. His own shock, together with his mother’s anguish, seemed to weigh on the judge, who granted him bail. Eddie resumed his day job at the animal hospital and spent his evenings with his brother and Joel in their apartment on Langdon Avenue. His mother helped him find an immigration lawyer. They paid the attorney five hundred dollars every two months; in exchange Eddie was free to think about his legal situation less. Every six months, he was required to check in with INS agents at an immigration court in downtown Los Angeles. This went on for four years. One morning, in 2001, he arrived outside the courtroom a few minutes before his meeting. This time, his lawyer stopped him before he could reach for the door. “If you walk in there right now, they’ll cuff you and put you on a plane,” the lawyer said. He told Eddie to tear up his Social Security card, and not to mention their conversation to anyone. Eddie was now on the run.

Their calls followed a spate of legislation in the wake of the terrorist attacks. The previous October, the US Congress passed the Patriot Act, which vastly expanded the government’s ability to surveil anyone on US soil without probable cause. Immigrants were the main source of the government’s concern. 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.

raison d’être. Border Patrol merged with Customs in

lacunae. Some subjects you simply didn’t mention,

Seeking accountability for crimes of the past was its own high-wire act. The terms of the peace accords did not explicitly address the question of justice or recompense, but two major research projects had begun as part of the broader, postwar reconciliation. One was an international body created by the United Nations called the Commission for Historical Clarification. A staff of three hundred people spent two years conducting thousands of closed-door interviews, reviewing government documents, and reconstructing information on the atrocities of the war years. The commission would go on to publish a twelve-volume account that supplied some of the most definitive facts of the conflict: 200,000 civilians had been killed; there were 669 massacres; 83 percent of the victims were Maya; 93 percent of the crimes committed during the war years involved members of the military. For Helen Mack and others, however, the effort was tarnished by one principal shortcoming. The UN commission could not name individual people or military units or assign blame for any of the documented murders. None of the testimony could be used for future prosecutions in court. A

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.

group of fifteen other Salvadorans—La Clínica regulars—gathered in his office in the evening. They wanted to hear everything about the trial, especially the two generals. How did they respond to each aspect of the testimony? Did they wobble under cross-examination? Did they seem angry or upset? Someone would bring food, and Juan answered their questions and summarized the testimony while they sat around eating homemade pupusas and tamales. Usually, after a few hours, someone took out a guitar, and they tried to relax.

“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.”

Eddie had always grasped the cultural appeal of the gangs, but their utter dominance floored him. 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, patrolling officers were lightly armed with old pistols and nightsticks, while criminals carried M16 rifles. There were budget shortfalls, recruitment problems, and a shortage of jail space.

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. In October 2006, just a few months after supporting an immigration-reform bill that passed the Senate, Obama joined an eighty-vote majority to greenlight the construction of seven hundred miles of fencing along the border.

Obama had entered the White House vowing to protect the undocumented and restrain ICE, but deportations increased steadily during his first two years in office. An average of a thousand immigrants were being removed every day, a large share of them the very people the president had promised to spare: parents of American-born sons and daughters; immigrants, known as Dreamers, who had arrived in the country as small children; and those with no criminal records. The president had inherited a deportation system that operated on a scale unknown to his predecessors. The vast legal machinery of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 had not been fully set in motion until the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which received gargantuan appropriations from Congress. A few years into Obama’s first term, for example, the immigration enforcement budget at DHS was $18 billion—more than the funding for all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. Personnel at Customs and Border Protection had nearly doubled since 2003, as had the number of ICE officers.

With a population of eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the US, DHS exercised enormous latitude in whom it went after. One of Napolitano’s first moves was to end the workplace raids that had become routine under her predecessor. She also created a task force to study how the department could exercise discretion so that ICE officers would eventually arrest immigrants with serious criminal records and new arrivals who had recently crossed the border. 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. Under one federal program, the government took significant cues from local police. 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.

Her main strategy for coping with the pressure was to organize her critics into two broad categories: those whose opinions mattered to her personally, and everyone else. It made sense that advocates would challenge her, but she had expected people who knew her to give her the benefit of the doubt. The way she saw it, there was a difference between “being righteous” and “being strategic.” Being strategic meant sitting down to an interview with Maria Hinojosa, a well-known Latina journalist anchoring a PBS Frontline episode called “Lost in Detention.” It was an exposé of ICE detention facilities told through the lives of families that had been separated by deportations carried out by the Obama administration. “You need people who know what I know making policy,” Muñoz said later. “And part of the job is defending those choices.” Hinojosa began by pointing out that the president was aggressively executing the very laws he had decried as a candidate. “Even broken laws have to be enforced,” Muñoz replied. When asked if the administration would continue to deport four hundred thousand people a year, she answered, “As long as Congress gives us the money to deport four hundred thousand people a year, that’s what the administration is going to do. That’s our obligation under the law.”

The show aired in October 2011, at a moment of intensifying speculation about the president’s political calculus. Was Obama trying to prove his toughness to earn Republican support for comprehensive reform? “There’s no quid pro quo,” Muñoz answered, ceding nothing. Hinojosa read a dramatic statement by Obama from the campaign trail, about communities being terrorized by ICE. “I was there when he said that,” Muñoz replied. “That’s exactly why we need to reform immigration law.” But the president, she added, couldn’t just ignore the law in the meantime. “That’s not how a democracy works.”

On Mother’s Day weekend 2014, Obama’s new secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, was returning from California, where he and his wife were visiting their son, when a top official at Customs and Border Protection told him that the situation in South Texas was “out of control.” Thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America were showing up at Border Patrol stations, confounding agents and overwhelming the department’s resources. There was also a significant spike in the number of parents and children who were arriving together and seeking asylum.

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.

The government rules for how to treat immigrant children at the border were laid out in an obscure court settlement known as the Flores agreement, the result of a lawsuit involving two Salvadoran children who had arrived in California in 1985. According to the agreement, which was later codified into law, immigration authorities could not detain children in borderland facilities for longer than seventy-two hours. Instead, the government was supposed to house them in the “least-restrictive setting” possible. Over the years, a network of shelters was created for this purpose, run out of a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services called the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But the existing system could only accommodate between six thousand and eight thousand children, and the volume of new arrivals was creating a bottleneck at the border. By the end of May, the Obama administration was using emergency shelters to move children out of immigration detention and into the care of HHS. A naval base in Ventura County, California, was used to shelter six hundred children; an air force base in San Antonio provided twelve hundred more beds. Large white buses ferried children from the borderland holding cells to these other facilities.

Thomas Homan, a top official at ICE, first broached the prospect of separating parents and children at the border by charging the adults with a misdemeanor for entering the country illegally. While they were being held on criminal charges, the government would temporarily take custody of their children. It would be painful, he said, but not fatal—a deterrent. This was immediately shot down as inhumane, as was another suggestion that involved ICE arresting parents when they came to claim their children from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. A few advisers, thinking toward longer-term approaches, proposed housing asylum seekers in Mexico with the aid of international relief organizations, rather than trying to detain them in the US. Others suggested mechanisms for handling refugee applications in Central America, to expedite processing and spare vulnerable children from making an overland journey rife with danger.