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

by Jonathan Blitzer

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.