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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Some thirty thousand people were being held in substandard conditions that heightened the risk of contagion. Testing was virtually nonexistent during the spring and summer months of 2020. Many detainees across the country launched hunger strikes and staged protests; some secretly uploaded videos to YouTube to plead for help and broadcast urgent messages, such as “We want to get out of here alive.” An asylum-seeking Cuban doctor who was being held in a privately run facility in Louisiana told the Mississippi Free Press, “There’s no way to ‘distance’ here. We sleep in bunk beds on top of each other, in columns with less than a [few feet] between us, head to toe. We use the same cafeteria as those in quarantine with no cleaning in between. . . . My medical opinion is that many people will die.”