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

On November 27th, 2017, Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras and the favorite to win the election, was losing. The loss looked inevitable to election monitors, but late that night, the electoral tribunal paused the count, claiming they had to wait for tens of thousands of ballots being trucked in from the countryside. Then, the computers crashed. When they came back online, Hernández was leading by 1.2%.

The United States largely ignored this “[o]utright fraud followed by mass protests” (364) because the Trump administration wanted to end temporary protected status and deport tens of thousands of Hondurans living in the US. However, Hondurans living in the country couldn’t ignore the election fraud. In April 2018, a caravan of 1,200 Hondurans assembled and began walking toward the United States.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions were working to expand the El Paso pilot program across the southern border. The caravan of migrants “inflam[ed]” Trump and pushed him to institute the “zero tolerance” policy that would end “catch and release.”

Keldy waited for her asylum hearing for six months. She prayed every morning and spoke to her sons once a week. She remained convinced that God would help her, and her religious conviction inspired the other detainees, who began calling her “la pastora” and asking for guidance and advice.

She finally had her asylum hearing on May 21st, 2018. It lasted less than an hour, and her claim was denied. She was “stunned” by this development. After two weeks, she wrote a letter to a deportation official begging for help. She had no one left in Honduras and she was desperate to see her children. How was one supposed to get asylum, she wondered, did she have to arrive “injured or dead?”

Back in Guatemala, changing weather patterns were affecting poor agricultural peasants in the highlands. A 2014 report warned that the area was particularly susceptible to climate change, the effects of which could cause more migration to the United States as agrarian lifestyles became less viable.

In 2018, the number of Guatemalan families apprehended at the US border doubled. The number of unaccompanied Guatemalan children had also skyrocketed, surpassing the number of children arriving from Honduras and El Salvador combined. The US was focused on deterring migrants from traveling north, but the populations of these small Guatemalan villages were literally starving. They had no choice but to leave.

As 2018 progressed, more “specific and damning” stories came out of the family separation policy, including one Honduran father who died by suicide after having his three-year-old forcibly taken from him. Members of Trump’s staff were starting to have second thoughts, but Miller continued to defend the policy.

On June 20th, 2018, Trump succumbed to pressure from both sides of the aisle and ended the explicit family separation policy. However, little changed for the thousands of families who had already been separated.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit arguing that separating families had a “permeant” and “devastating negative impact on the child’s wellbeing” (385), and a California judge ruled in their favor, ordering families to be reunited. This, however, turned out to be a gargantuan task due to “the extent of the government’s disorganization” (385): No one knew exactly how many families had been separated or where they were.

By October 2018, another caravan of over 5,000 Central American migrants was making its way through Mexico. These caravans were not unheard of; it was safer than making the journey alone, and groups of migrants sometimes organized to bring awareness to various causes. However, this caravan stood out for its size and because it coincided with the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States. Most of the migrants were aware that they had little chance of being admitted to the United States, but they had no choice but to leave their home countries.

Keldy’s sons were released into their aunt’s care in Philadelphia, but she struggled to provide for the boys, so Alex assumed guardianship of his younger brothers.

Meanwhile, their mother was back in Mexico, leading “informal religious services” for the migrants stuck there waiting to cross into the United States. She was “revered” in the migrant community and developed a “vast” network of individuals who came to her for advice, prayers, and blessings.

However, Keldy missed her family desperately. She had a new lawyer who advised her to establish legal status in Mexico, which might open up possibilities for her to temporarily visit her family in the United States.

Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigned on a promise to make Mexico a “country of refuge” for Central American migrants. As the migrant caravan made its way north in the fall of 2018, he offered work visas if the Central Americans wanted to stay in Mexico. This message countered the Trump administration’s efforts to deter migrants, and the US threatened to pull out of economic agreements that were being negotiated if López Obrador didn’t change his stance. This, coupled with pressure from the Mexican public, caused López Obrador to backtrack and agree to a new US policy called Migrant Protection Protocols, which stated that migrants would remain in Mexico while they waited for their US asylum cases to be processed.

By early 2019, nearly 50,000 asylum seekers had been returned to Mexico, where they often “faced extreme levels of violence” (407) from local cartels and the police. Keldy was in Ciudad Juárez, where prospective asylum seekers packed local shelters, churches, and makeshift encampments. There, she dedicated herself to helping the migrants, praying with them, delivering sermons, and helping them find safe places to sleep.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to deter migrants, more Central American asylum seekers were arriving than ever, angering the president and his advisors. By the fall of 2019, DHS had opened two makeshift tent courts along the border that could process 400 asylum seekers per day. They allowed the government to process cases while giving the applicants limited access to the United States. Only 1% of the cases were approved, and that 1% was usually appealed by DHS. Furthermore, DHS was so focused on maintaining MPP that the number of asylum seekers they were able to interview continued to drop. This meant that migrants were spending months in shelters on the Mexican side of the border.

In 2019, the acting head of DHS designed a system of “asylum cooperative agreement,” in which migrants attempting to reach the United States had to first claim asylum in the countries they passed through on their way. He insisted that Central American governments had to do something to “curb the flow” of migrants, suggesting that the asylum cooperative agreement would deter migration to the United States and encourage investment and development in Central America.

The problem “was that none of the three countries of the Northern Triangle could be described as ‘safe’” (416). El Salvador and Guatemala, which Hondurans had to pass through to reach the United States, were experiencing their own exoduses, and their asylum programs were “minuscule” or non-existent. Nevertheless, the US made a series of deals with Central American governments to move forward with the plan.