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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.”