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

by Jonathan Blitzer

By March, sixty-four thousand asylum seekers had been enrolled in MPP, and 517 of them had been granted some form of legal relief. Thousands of asylum seekers abandoned their cases. Among those waiting in MPP, there were more than fifteen hundred documented cases of murder, rape, assault, and kidnapping, according to Human Rights First. In El Paso, the wait time for an initial court hearing was about five months, while the Mexican government was providing temporary work visas that lasted six months. DHS could say that it was giving migrants a chance to seek asylum, and that immigration judges were ruling against most applicants. But the actual situation was much more troubling. Of the thirty-two thousand removal orders issued by judges, 88 percent were delivered in absentia: the migrants whose asylum cases were being rejected weren’t even there.