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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Their calls followed a spate of legislation in the wake of the terrorist attacks. The previous October, the US Congress passed the Patriot Act, which vastly expanded the government’s ability to surveil anyone on US soil without probable cause. Immigrants were the main source of the government’s concern. In September 2002, the Justice Department launched a program called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, which required immigrants from twenty-five countries—selected, with the exception of North Korea, based on the size of their Muslim populations—to submit their names to a government database that vetted them for involvement with terrorism. By the following May, with 138,000 immigrants registered, the program hadn’t led to a single successful terrorism prosecution, but twelve thousand people had been placed in deportation proceedings.