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

by Jonathan Blitzer

From the 1980s to the early 2000s, the story of the southern border was about the United States and Mexico. At the time, migrants entering the US tended to be single Mexican men looking for work. But around 2014, a different population started to arrive on a scale Americans had never before seen. These were children and families from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America—traveling north to seek asylum. In just about every respect, the US was unprepared for this shift.

The randomness of the system was a cruelty all its own.

At one point, in 1975, the Supreme Court ruled that Border Patrol was justified to use a person’s appearance as legitimate grounds to make an arrest for illegal entry, since “the likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high.”

The US was propping up a war machine in El Salvador, she told them; it had long treated the region as a geopolitical laboratory. The CIA had overthrown the Guatemalan government in 1954 at the behest of an American corporation that, among other things, wanted bigger tax breaks abroad. Honduras had come to be known in the region as the USS Honduras, a de facto American military installation. For years, the US’s man in Nicaragua was a dictator. In Castillo’s circles, as the saying went, El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.

migrants from anywhere else—India, Brazil, or El Salvador; it didn’t matter—were all known as OTMs, “other than Mexican.” There was a practical reason for making such a broad distinction. The protocol for dealing with Mexicans caught crossing into the US wasn’t to formally deport them, which would involve first detaining them, then marking down the infraction on their record. Instead, in a process that took about five minutes from start to finish, agents simply dropped them back off across the border. There was virtually no paperwork at the office, just a few cursory notes written by hand in the field.

The Salvadorans were handed a form in English with a dense block of small English text and a line at the bottom for a signature. The paper was not an asylum application or some sign of impending relief, but an administrative sleight of hand called a “voluntary departure,” which immediately fast-tracked their expulsion to El Salvador without an immigration hearing. Not realizing they were waiving their rights, many signed the forms. Hours later, they were on a plane back to San Salvador. Between 1980 and 1981, this had happened to more than ten thousand of the thirteen thousand Salvadorans apprehended at the border.

The Reagan administration did not care about human rights, but it was preoccupied by the operational shortcomings of its Salvadoran partners; the issues were related. Whole divisions of the army were little more than fronts for the death squads, and military conscripts, many of whom were poor teenage peasants who’d been threatened and tortured into joining, were undisciplined soldiers.

In March 2002, an INS service contractor mistakenly sent out by US mail visa extensions for two of the dead hijackers.

“You received a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award for your work on immigration,” she said. “How do you see your MacArthur genius award given that now you work for an administration that has deported more people than any other president in history?”

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.”

For all the passion inspired by immigration, it had never before been the defining issue of a winning presidential campaign.

Sessions convened a conference call on May 11. “We need to take away children,” he told them. According to the attorneys’ contemporaneous notes from the call, Sessions added, “if care about kids, don’t bring them in [sic]; won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”