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

Under Barack Obama, deportations steadily increased, and the Department of Homeland Security had an immigration enforcement budget greater than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. Cecilia Muñoz was the White House director of intergovernmental affairs and considered herself the president’s “moral compass” on immigration enforcement. However, the country was in a recession, and most of Obama’s advisors didn’t want to “spend political capital on immigration” (291).

Muñoz could be patient with comprehensive immigration reform, but she saw deportations as an “immediate emergency.” The DHS secretary, Janet Napolitano, ended ICE’s workplace raids and worked to ensure that most of the department’s allowance of 400,000 deportations per year were “convicted criminals.” However, “criminal” was loosely defined, and “large numbers of people were swept up in an expanding dragnet” (293).

Muñoz struggled in the White House. She genuinely believed in Obama’s commitment to humanitarian immigration policies, but other advocates called her a “sellout.” Muñoz’s belief in Obama was finally validated when he announced the executive order Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which would give approximately half a million “Dreamers” who arrived in the United States as children temporary legal status.

By the start of Obama’s second term, comprehensive immigration reform seemed to have a clear path forward. Eight Democratic senators introduced a bill that would create a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, develop two new guest-worker programs, and reform the system for assigning green cards. These reforms would be accompanied by $6.5 billion in spending on enforcement and border fencing. The bill passed the Senate and went to the House, where the Republican speaker began hesitating to pass the law.

By 2014, “decades of Central American history were crashing down at the US border” (300). For years, the majority of immigrants crossing the US Southern border were single Mexican men crossing for work. Now, however, the number of unaccompanied minors and families from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras was exploding.

Despite their “mammoth budget,” officials at the border were not equipped to deal with this demographic change and lacked sufficient resources to detain the volume of children and families as they processed their asylum applications. DHS held “war-room style meetings” trying to decide what to do. One ICE official suggested separating families in detention as “a deterrent,” but was quickly rejected for being “inhumane.”

The government started building new detention facilities. They knew it was impossible to detain all the families arriving, but they hoped that holding some of them until their asylum cases were processed might deter others from making the trip. Muñoz was overwhelmed by the “responsibility” of the humanitarian crisis she was facing, and described the summer of 2014 as “the hardest of [her] life” (304).

Meanwhile, Obama’s plan to regulate ICE activity led to waning Republican support for the immigration bill. When House majority leader Eric Cantor lost his primary to a Tea Party candidate, the bill was effectively killed. On June 30th, 2014, Muñoz was present as Obama, who had earned the nickname the “deporter in chief,” met with a number of immigration advocates representing various organizations.

Obama promised executive actions and enforcement policies that would protect millions of undocumented immigrants, but when the conversation turned to the border, he insisted that “the US had to enforce the law” (305). He admitted that it is “inherently unfair” that children have “a completely different set of opportunities available and a completely different set of dangers” depending on where they were born but insisted that was something he couldn’t “fix” (306).

Washington officials were trying to “dissuade” migrants from coming to the US. However, individuals like Juliana Ramírez, a 13-year-old Salvadorian girl who was kidnapped and raped by members of MS-13, were “focused on more immediate dangers” (308). Juliana and her sisters joined their mother in Long Island. One day at school, she was approached and “grilled” by two Salvadorian boys who were members of MS-13. She had no idea that the gang she and her family had fled from had started in the United States and continued to operate there.

In 2015 and 2016, well over 100,000 children and families arrived at the Southern border from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. However, the United States also deported a similar number of immigrants to these same countries, “blurring” the line between the US and Central America. Back in El Salvador, working at the call center, Eddie felt like he was living in “a third country” that was “a blend” of El Salvador and the US. He started a family and a language school called English Cool.

Thanks to secret negotiations between the government and MS-13 and 18th Street gangs, El Salvador became safer between 2012 and 2014. The US disapproved of these negotiations; the Treasury Department named MS-13 a “transnational criminal organization,” which put anyone associated with the gang in danger of facing jail time. The Salvadorian public was also skeptical about the truce, and when a new president was elected in 2014, he ended the agreement, announcing that his government would not be negotiating with criminals. Murder rates in the country reached a new all-time high.

Eddie was “obsessed” with understanding “the randomness of the carnage” (314) in El Salvador. MS-13 couldn’t compare to other organized crime groups in terms of earnings, and Eddie could only assume that young Salvadorian men “were so drained of hope and vitality that prison wasn’t appreciably worse than ordinary life on the streets” (315).

When Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, he made immigration “the defining issue of a winning presidential campaign” (320) for the first time. Immigration became Trump’s “unified theory” for explaining the cause of many white Americans’ woes. However, those watching took Trump’s stance on immigration seriously, mostly “because of those who surrounded him” (321), like Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions and the young speechwriter Stephen Miller. Sessions and Miller worked together to sink bipartisan immigration bills in the Senate, and Miller got a crash course in immigration policy, learning the ins and outs of regulations and loopholes.

In 2016, Miller went to work on the Trump campaign, where he wrote a speech containing a “detailed blueprint” of Trump’s immigration plan, including “zero tolerance for criminal aliens” and penalizing sanctuary cities (325). When Trump was elected, he named Sessions attorney general, and Miller became a senior White House advisor.

One of the administration’s first moves on immigration was the executive order drafted by Miller called “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which banned individuals from Muslim-majority countries from entering the country. It was Miller, not Trump, who “define[d] what victory looked like” (329) for the administration’s immigration policy, and he often pressured the president to go along with his plans.

Trump campaigned on the “specter of immigrant crime,” and in the fall of 2016, MS-13 became “public enemy number one” (330). Between 2016 and 2017, Suffolk County in New York attributed 17 killings to MS-13, including the violent murders of two American teenage girls. The local police identified 89 undocumented gang members, and Trump began to “constantly” mention MS-13 in all public appearances. However, most of the danger from gang violence was concentrated in immigrant communities.

Elena Sandoval was a 16-year-old born on Long Island to Salvadorian parents. In high school, she started dating Carlos, a member of MS-13. As the relationship progressed, he was often possessive and sometimes violent with her. He told her she couldn’t leave him because he was in a gang and sent his friends to watch her at school. When Sandoval and her parents filed a harassment report against Carlos, he threatened to kill her family. He kidnapped her and held her hostage for three months until she escaped.

Carlos was arrested, and Sandoval started dating a gentle Salvadorian boy called Jorge. One day, he was arrested on suspicion of being a member of MS-13 and slated for deportation. Many teenagers across Suffolk County were “arbitrarily accused of belonging to MS-13” (340), sometimes for things as innocuous as wearing a Chicago Bulls T-shirt because the horns mimicked MS-13’s gang sign. Instead of facing the complications of “dismantling a criminal organization” (341), law enforcement simply deported anyone they suspected of being a gang member. They never had to prove a connection because there was no denying that they were in the country illegally.

At Jorge’s trial, Sandoval learned that he had been arrested in part because he was seen with a “gang associate:” Her.

Lucrecia Hernández Mack grew up under her mother’s and aunt’s shadow “as the heir apparent to two leftist legends” (344). She studied medicine and conducted her residency in the remote villages of northern Guatemala, serving Indigenous populations in a life that looked very similar to her mother’s. However, Lucrecia struggled with the “reactive” nature of medicine. She wanted to enact structural change, so she decided to enroll in a graduate program for public policy.

Following the war, health care in Guatemala was run by “a patchwork” of organizations and contractors. In 2013, the government passed a law to limit the involvement of NGOs in the country’s health care, but there was “no alternative system […] to fill the void” (345-6). Clinics lacked medicine and supplies; rates of preventable diseases rose, and vaccination rates plummeted.

In 2007, the United Nations created an anti-corruption body called the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) to investigate the criminal groups that ran the country behind the scenes. In 2015, Guatemala’s vice president resigned in the face of corruption charges, and the public called for the president to do the same. He was arrested, and the country elected Jimmy Morales. Watching the news from her home in Mexico with her sons, Lucrecia felt compelled to return. Morales offered her a job as Guatemala’s health minister, and she accepted.

In her new role, Lucrecia was constantly harassed by conservative lawmakers and union leaders. Her “immediate priority” was restoring primary care access and reopening clinics that had closed because of budget shortfalls. However, she also wanted to expand the country’s healthcare to include treatment for Indigenous ailments like “evil eye” and “loss of the soul.” These “ancestral maladies” had symptoms that Western doctors might relate to post-traumatic stress disorder and “were contributing to high mortality rates in the countryside” (350).

Lucrecia assumed she would have four years to execute her agenda in the health ministry, but after just a year and a half, Morales announced that he was terminating the CICIG involvement in Guatemala. Lucrecia felt she had no choice but to resign.