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.
