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

by Jonathan Blitzer

The irony was not lost on Central Americans. In the 1990s and early 2000s, during earlier waves of mass deportations, US and Latin American law enforcement personnel resorted to metaphor to describe what was happening: the gangs were replicating and expanding through the region like a virus. In 2020, the deportations were spreading an actual virus. By mid-April, there were more than six hundred thousand known cases in the United States, compared with a total of less than eight hundred in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala combined. Nevertheless, after the Guatemalan government suspended the arrival of some deportation flights, buying time to test other deportees, Trump signed an order threatening to impose a raft of sanctions on countries that “denied” or “delayed” the reception of deportees. “The US was being heavy-headed, and the Guatemalans didn’t want to pay too high a price,”