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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Eventually, in response to a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of four thousand Haitians, a federal judge intervened, finding that the conditions in Haiti were “stark, brutal, and bloody,” and that deportees from the US were in “substantial danger” of being tortured or killed. The INS, he ruled, had violated the Constitution in denying the Haitians the semblance of a fair hearing. “Those Haitians who came to the United States seeking freedom and justice did not find it,” he wrote. “Instead, they were confronted with an Immigration and Naturalization Service determined to deport them. The decision was made among high INS officials to expel Haitians, despite whatever claims to asylum individual Haitians might have.” By then, Meissner was herself one of the agency’s top officials, and had come to understand how the system worked. The INS was organized into thirty-three different districts, each with its own director. Meissner outranked them all, but did not have direct authority over them in the institutional chain of command. She was also a woman and a career official; the field belonged to tough-talking lawmen who were contemptuous of legal niceties. The district directors were potentates controlling every aspect of their offices’ operations. Because INS was the lone immigration body inside the Justice Department, the district offices were responsible for everything from making arrests to processing applications for legal status. Each office handled asylum requests in it...