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

by Jonathan Blitzer

On April 23, Nielsen received a document bearing the signatures of her department’s three most important agency heads overseeing immigration: Thomas Homan at ICE, Kevin McAleenan at CBP, and Francis Cissna at Citizenship and Immigration Services. Their memo outlined several possible strategies for dealing with Central Americans at the southern border. The government could try to prosecute all single adults for illegal entry, or it could coordinate with DOJ prosecutors to target a certain percentage of these adults. But what they advised was something else entirely. The “most effective” way to stem the recent crossings, they wrote, was to prosecute parents who were trying to enter the country with their children. Each official was signing his name to a policy of family separation at the border.