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

by Jonathan Blitzer

It was impossible to detain all the families arriving at the border, but government officials believed that detaining a small fraction of them would send a message to Central Americans contemplating a similar trip. The facilities themselves would be set up less like prisons than like barracks. The families could move around the premises, and they’d sleep, a dozen to a room, in spaces with bunk beds, refrigerators, televisions, and telephones. There’d be access to regular medical attention, health screenings, and clothing. But confinement could last months: the government would deny them bond until a judge issued a final ruling on their asylum cases. “I tried to keep it together,” Cecilia Muñoz said later. “That summer was the hardest of my life.” The humanitarian crisis at the border had blindsided her. When she traveled to South Texas with Jeh Johnson, the first child she met was seven. After being briefed, she learned that the average age of the minors in custody was twelve. There were babies and toddlers traveling with siblings or neighbors, but not their parents. A mother herself, Muñoz was making policy decisions on behalf of mothers who couldn’t be with their own children to protect them. The burden of responsibility was overpowering.

restive.

What she said next sounded barbed, but she meant it as a concession to the enormity of the president’s responsibility, rather than as a reprimand. “I don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she said. Obama replied, “You know what? I don’t really sleep at night, but let me tell you why. It’s not just that I worry about these kids from El Salvador. I also worry about kids in Sudan, and in Yemen, and in other parts of the world. And here’s my problem: we live in a world with nation states. I have borders. You may believe that it’s inherently unfair that a child born in El Salvador has a completely different set of opportunities available and a completely different set of dangers than a child born in the US. And that’s because it is unfair. I can’t fix that for you.”

The same year Juliana and her sisters fled El Salvador, some 40,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the border, along with 40,000 families. In 2016, there were 60,000 children and 78,000 families. Deportations generated a separate wave of people, flowing in the opposite direction. In 2015 and 2016, the US deported roughly 42,000 Salvadorans, 42,000 Hondurans, and 67,000 Guatemalans. With this many people in a state of perpetual flux—pushed toward the border, then pushed back again—the dividing line between the US and Central America only grew blurrier.

Killings were up across the city. By the end of 2015, there had been at least sixty-six hundred homicides in a population of around six million people, bringing the murder rate higher than it had been during much of the civil war. A few months later, the Supreme Court issued a decision categorizing the gangs as terrorist groups, which gave the police and the military license to be even more aggressive. In Washington, ICE had recently decided to mount a series of so-called Christmas raids to send a message, because the number of asylum seekers at the border was rising once again. The Salvadoran government responded by tweeting out legal advice to Salvadorans living in the US, reminding them of their Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure. The move was billed as a show of solidarity with the Salvadoran diaspora, but it masked a sense of desperation. Those who were arrested would, in effect, be sent back to a war zone.

For all the passion inspired by immigration, it had never before been the defining issue of a winning presidential campaign. In the 1992 Republican primary, the pundit Pat Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush from the right by using immigration as the central plank of his campaign. He proposed a border wall and a five-year moratorium on legal immigration. Bush “is a globalist, and we are nationalists,” he announced on December 10, 1991, in New Hampshire. “When we take America back, we are going to make America great again, because there is nothing wrong with putting America first.” Buchanan didn’t win a single state primary, but he demonstrated that a nativist platform could appeal to about a third of Republican voters.

Because Cecilia Muñoz had headed the Domestic Policy Council during the Obama years, she was required to brief her successors after the election. Holding out hope that the incoming administration might become more temperate now that the campaign was over, she asked Miller how she could help orient him in the new position. “How do you maneuver so that you’re making the decisions and not the NSC?” he replied, adding, “How do you elbow them out of the way so that you are controlling the decision making?”

The group had been preparing for legal challenges when Miller intervened. To him, strategic due diligence was a concession of weakness. “Miller has two impulses that he’s warring with,” a senior Republican aide said. “One is to be the bomb-thrower he always was. The other is to try to secure victories for the President.” In the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration, Miller and a close associate named Gene Hamilton, a former Sessions staffer in his midthirties, drafted an executive order called “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”—the travel ban. When Trump signed the ban soon afterward, none of the top officials at the Department of Homeland Security had been notified in advance, even though they were responsible for enforcing it. Travelers with valid visas were suddenly trapped at American airports, unable to enter the country; refugees who, after years of waiting, had been extensively vetted and approved for entry were turned back. Thousands of protesters and civil rights attorneys began congregating at airports across the country, and Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, arguably the party’s most respected voices on immigration, issued a statement saying, “We should not turn our backs on those refugees who…pose no demonstrable threat to our nation, and who have suffered unspeakable horrors.”

While Homan was unpacking the boxes in his new office at agency headquarters the following Monday, tens of thousands of immigrants across the country were packing their bags, making contingency plans, and even preparing actual escapes. In Queens, a twenty-two-year-old DACA recipient and college senior named Antonio Alarcón returned from school one night to the home he shared with his aunt and uncle to find that they had placed a pile of boxes and suitcases full of their belongings by the door. “We want to be prepared,” they told him. Later that winter, reports of an ICE raid in Las Cruces, New Mexico, kept families from going outside. Attendance at the county’s public schools dropped by 60 percent. Principals sent social workers to make home visits.

In December 2017, Sandoval went to an immigration court in New York City to attend a hearing about Jorge’s case. Ever since his arrest, she’d been inconsolable. School may have been safer than before, but Sandoval found it hollowed out and eerie. There was no one to talk to, and she no longer had the energy to try to make new friends. Her relationship with her parents had been strained, and she sensed that they still blamed her for getting involved with Carlos. But her mother had her own reasons for feeling stressed. The Trump administration had announced plans to cancel temporary protected status for Salvadorans living in the US, including those who had bought homes, paid taxes, started families, and joined the legal workforce. The president was also canceling TPS for 60,000 Haitians who’d lived in the US since a 2010 earthquake, and for 2,500 Nicaraguans who’d arrived in 1999 following Hurricane Mitch. The Salvadoran population was the largest by far, some 200,000 people, most of whom had been living in the US for twenty years. Among them were parents of roughly 190,000 children who, like Sandoval, were American citizens.

A few weeks later, in early March, the secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly, went on CNN to describe the new administration’s approach to immigration enforcement at the border. “I would do almost anything to deter” migrants from coming, he said. When asked if that would mean separating children from their parents, he replied, “I am considering exactly that. They will be well cared for as we deal with their parents.” There was an immediate national outcry, and Kelly publicly backtracked. But that same month, in the El Paso sector, Border Patrol had already started referring parents for prosecution. Plans to extend the policy were underway in certain quarters of the new administration.

Hastening them along was the attorney general, Jeff Sessions. On April 11, 2017, he called for increased criminal prosecutions at the southern border, ordering US attorneys to develop “district-specific guidelines” for bringing charges against first-time border crossers. Federal rules prohibiting the prolonged detention of immigrant children, he said, were nothing more than “loopholes” used by families to game the system at the border. “After their release, many of these people simply disappeared,” he later said. “President Trump is going to fix that.”

children. Agents at the El Paso Border Patrol insisted that they had no choice. “It is always a difficult decision to separate these families,” one of them wrote to government lawyers in West Texas. “It is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents bringing their children.” The justification was deterrence, but the policy itself remained secret. Jeff Sessions came to Texas twice in 2017, and not once did he mention the pilot program to his subordinates in the US Attorney’s Office. It would take Durbin another full year before he learned that he had been part of an official experiment. How could migrants discern the contours of a new deterrence policy if the government’s own employees weren’t sure what was happening?

The images first appeared on a Fox News broadcast one Sunday morning. Families with small children were gathering south of the Mexican border, on their way to the United States to seek asylum. They were more than a thousand miles from the US, and moving on foot, with their belongings packed in sacks and bags strapped to their backs. Watching the segment from the White House, Trump started tweeting. “Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release,” he began. “Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW.” Inside his administration, staffers scrambled to prepare for the president’s latest pronouncements. He wanted more money for his “big, fat, beautiful” border wall. The Republican Congress was already funding it, just not to the degree Trump had demanded. He called for federal troops to stand watch in South Texas. It didn’t matter that border crossings were at their lowest point since 1971, or that officials at DHS were in the middle of delicate negotiations over security and trade with Mexico. Members of the administration now had to explain to their foreign counterparts that the president’s Twitter fusillade had no bearing on their painstaking, months-long talks.

On April 23, Nielsen received a document bearing the signatures of her department’s three most important agency heads overseeing immigration: Thomas Homan at ICE, Kevin McAleenan at CBP, and Francis Cissna at Citizenship and Immigration Services. Their memo outlined several possible strategies for dealing with Central Americans at the southern border. The government could try to prosecute all single adults for illegal entry, or it could coordinate with DOJ prosecutors to target a certain percentage of these adults. But what they advised was something else entirely. The “most effective” way to stem the recent crossings, they wrote, was to prosecute parents who were trying to enter the country with their children. Each official was signing his name to a policy of family separation at the border.

For two weeks, the document sat on Nielsen’s desk unsigned. Until she authorized it, DHS could not move forward. Trump called her five times a day to berate her. Miller and Hamilton timed their own hectoring phone calls for nights after eleven p.m. On May 4, Nielsen capitulated. But leadership at DHS still hadn’t addressed any of the problems reported during the El Paso pilot program. Despite their obvious lack of preparation, officials at CBP were sending estimates of the number of people the new policy was due to affect to the Office of Management and Budget. Between May and September 2018, the government planned to separate twenty-six thousand children from their parents.

Toward the end of April 2018, Keldy started to notice more women claiming to have been separated from their children. There were several each week; by the start of May, she counted around twenty mothers in and around her unit. All of them were inconsolable, too traumatized to speak in full sentences. They sat off by themselves, moaning. It would be several days, at least, before they had any inkling of where their children were. Keldy knew enough not to talk the mothers down. She sat and cried with them. Some of the women knew about her own children, but many didn’t. She volunteered the information only if asked. To everyone, though, she said the same thing: “Someone will come and help us. I’m going to make sure of it.”

As word of Keldy’s list got around, women from other units began to contact her. There were furtive handoffs of information in the hallways and in the cafeteria, as women from different units passed each other to sit down. Keldy would receive strips of paper with the information she needed. Other times, she would go to the library, where there was a desktop computer and a printer, and leave the list there for other women to add to when they could. “I finally realized that no one from the government was going to help us find our kids,” she said. “We have to do it on our own.”

As the sun rose around seven o’clock, about half of the migrants were walking along the shoulder of the highway. The rest were either sleeping on the side of the road or had caught rides on the backs of passing trucks. The air was humid and filled with flies, and the road baked in the mounting heat. Along the way, a Honduran man named José Tulia Rodríguez was carrying a giant white flag made from two large sticks and a piece of cloth. “Peace and God Are with Us,” it read. It was a message to Mexico, he said, “to apologize for what we may be causing here, and to show we’re grateful.” He had no money, water, or food; the night before, he had slept on the street of Mapastepec, where locals had packed him off with tortas to eat on his walk. His plan was to keep moving until he saw a chance to find work to support his family. “I have two daughters at home in Honduras, plus my wife,” he said. “I can’t make enough money working in Honduras to buy shoes for my girls to wear to school.” He learned about the caravan from a television news program. “People say this caravan is about politics?” he said. “Well, sure, if by politics you mean hunger.”

Most of the migrants would lose their cases for asylum once they reached the US, which was proof to McAleenan that the system was being misused. “Only ten to fifteen percent of the Central Americans seeking asylum in the U.S. actually get it,” he said in a meeting in Guatemala, during the summer of 2019. If the government didn’t try to “curb the flow,” authorities at the border would continue to be overwhelmed by more migrants than the system was designed to handle. McAleenan embodied a version of what had become a respectable American position. “The short-term goal” of the safe-third-country deals, he went on to say, “is deterrence,” but “the long-term goal is to set the stage for investment and development in the region. There has to be a way for people to live in the hemisphere. It can’t just be the U.S. and Canada.”

Maintaining a good relationship with the United States wasn’t just a political imperative but an economic one. Twenty-two percent of the Salvadoran economy consisted of remittances sent by immigrants living in the US. Shortly after winning the presidential election in February 2019, Bukele traveled to Washington for a series of speeches and interviews. One of his first addresses was at the Heritage Foundation.

Asesino; on

Donde están los desaparecidos?

There were no linear or chronological paths to the conversation at first. Later, I’d try and fail to impose them. Juan spoke in concentric circles, telling and retelling an anecdote until it broke through to another, and another. I came to regard the knowing, unrushed voice on the other end of the line as the sound of history itself—following its own course, patient with my questions but not always responsive to them.

About three or four months into our conversations, I learned an important lesson: ask him about everything at least twice, if not three or four times, because new details would almost always emerge. When they did, I’d gasp and say, “Juan, you never told me that!” Unfailingly he’d reply, “Well, you never asked.” Eventually, Juan told his sister that this project was like a pregnancy that grew slowly over time. But in this case, he added, rather than nine months, the embarazo might last a few years.

By March, sixty-four thousand asylum seekers had been enrolled in MPP, and 517 of them had been granted some form of legal relief. Thousands of asylum seekers abandoned their cases. Among those waiting in MPP, there were more than fifteen hundred documented cases of murder, rape, assault, and kidnapping, according to Human Rights First. In El Paso, the wait time for an initial court hearing was about five months, while the Mexican government was providing temporary work visas that lasted six months. DHS could say that it was giving migrants a chance to seek asylum, and that immigration judges were ruling against most applicants. But the actual situation was much more troubling. Of the thirty-two thousand removal orders issued by judges, 88 percent were delivered in absentia: the migrants whose asylum cases were being rejected weren’t even there.

The irony was not lost on Central Americans. In the 1990s and early 2000s, during earlier waves of mass deportations, US and Latin American law enforcement personnel resorted to metaphor to describe what was happening: the gangs were replicating and expanding through the region like a virus. In 2020, the deportations were spreading an actual virus. By mid-April, there were more than six hundred thousand known cases in the United States, compared with a total of less than eight hundred in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala combined. Nevertheless, after the Guatemalan government suspended the arrival of some deportation flights, buying time to test other deportees, Trump signed an order threatening to impose a raft of sanctions on countries that “denied” or “delayed” the reception of deportees. “The US was being heavy-headed, and the Guatemalans didn’t want to pay too high a price,”

This message read: Felicidades, se va para fuera Trump, pero no quiere aceptar—“Congratulations, Trump is out, but he doesn’t want to accept it.” Juan was among the most political people I had ever met. Every aspect of his life radiated militancia, or activism. It could make our discussions of history tilt toward the abstract: he took credit for nothing, emphasized the collective struggle over individual action, and spoke indefatigably about organizing. In hundreds of our conversations, he somehow never failed to state, and restate, the central conviction of his adult life: that medical care was a human right and should be free.

Whereas Trump used the policy to exclude unaccompanied children, Biden allowed them in. The partial policy shift, however, meant that the number of children admitted at the border increased substantially. In late March, there were eighteen thousand unaccompanied migrant children in US custody, including more than five thousand who were held in overflow cells at the border. Officials had to resurrect temporary shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services. When members of the progressive left saw that Biden was using some of the same facilities from the Trump era—albeit for different purposes—they attacked him for “putting kids in cages.”

These were the right things for the US government to say and to do, and it mattered that the message came from the top of the administration. The trouble was that the influence of the US was waning. Top Guatemalan officials now feared the US less than they did the sprawling network of corrupt homegrown players. Harris traveled to Guatemala and said her piece to President Alejandro Giammattei, who countered that the corruption investigations were the partisan fixations of an overzealous left. In conspicuously perfunctory terms, he vowed to cooperate with Washington, then proffered a sharp criticism. Biden, he said, needed “to send more of a clear message to prevent more people from leaving.”

photograph of Juan in a gray suit showed him posing with Barack Obama; another included a note from Hillary Clinton. While I paged through, Juan spoke at his usual pitch, drifting toward his favorite subjects. “The one thing that’s been a constant in all my years practicing medicine,” he was saying, “is that people want to talk. Their symptoms are only half of it.”