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

by Jonathan Blitzer

The government rules for how to treat immigrant children at the border were laid out in an obscure court settlement known as the Flores agreement, the result of a lawsuit involving two Salvadoran children who had arrived in California in 1985. According to the agreement, which was later codified into law, immigration authorities could not detain children in borderland facilities for longer than seventy-two hours. Instead, the government was supposed to house them in the “least-restrictive setting” possible. Over the years, a network of shelters was created for this purpose, run out of a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services called the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But the existing system could only accommodate between six thousand and eight thousand children, and the volume of new arrivals was creating a bottleneck at the border. By the end of May, the Obama administration was using emergency shelters to move children out of immigration detention and into the care of HHS. A naval base in Ventura County, California, was used to shelter six hundred children; an air force base in San Antonio provided twelve hundred more beds. Large white buses ferried children from the borderland holding cells to these other facilities.