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

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis (2024) is a work of nonfiction by The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer. The book is a definitive look at the history of the current immigration crisis and the relationship between the United States and Central America. Blitzer traces decades of US involvement in Central America, political corruption in the region, natural disasters, and the development of the United States’ immigration law and asylum system, illustrating unexpected connections and consequences. Through history, reporting, and the personal stories of Central Americans caught between these battling forces, Blitzer explores The Connection Between the United States and Central America, The Human Impact of Political Decisions, and The Resilience and Agency of Migrants and Activists.

This guide uses the 2024 Penguin Press Kindle edition of the text.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, rape, racism, death by suicide, genocide, and violent death.

Plot Summary

Blitzer begins Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by discussing US involvement in Central America in the 1980s. Both El Salvador and Guatemala were engaged in bloody civil wars against “leftist guerrillas,” and received military aid and support from the United States in the name of fighting communism. However, these countries also had a long history of labeling any opposition as communist subversion, including uprisings from brutally repressed Indigenous peasant populations. With US aid, these military governments became more violent and repressive, killing tens of thousands of civilians and committing numerous human rights violations. Individuals like medical doctor Juan Romagoza were captured and tortured, then forced to flee the country.

Meanwhile, the United States enshrined the right to seek asylum in law in 1980. Some of the first asylum seekers to arrive at the southern border were Salvadorians and Guatemalans fleeing US-backed military governments. However, it soon became clear that Central American asylum seekers were being rejected at almost 100%, far higher than any other group, even when they demonstrated “‘textbook’ examples of political persecution” (114). The US could not approve their cases without acknowledging the truth of the violence happening in El Salvador and Guatemala. In response, activists developed a “sanctuary” movement, helping Central Americans cross the border and shelter in the United States under the pretense that their asylum cases were being wrongly rejected.

Many Central Americans settled in Los Angeles, where they were “at the bottom of an already vicious racial hierarchy” (159), brutalized by the city’s Black and Chicano gangs. Many of these new arrivals banded together to survive, calling themselves Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Over the course of the 1980s, MS-13 grew in stature, and when the LAPD started cracking down on crime in the early 1990s, many gang members were deported to El Salvador. The US often didn’t warn El Salvador that it was deporting dangerous criminals, and by the mid-2000s, these gangs had made El Salvador “one of the most dangerous places in the world” (261). MS-13 became classified as an international crime organization. Soon, gang violence in Central American countries was causing another wave of migration.

Meanwhile, immigration was becoming a more politically controversial topic over the course of the 1990s, making it difficult to pass comprehensive reforms. Instead of opening up more ways to enter the country legally, reforming the overloaded asylum system, or providing a pathway to citizenship for some of the millions of undocumented immigrants or those stuck with temporary status, bills increasingly focused on enforcement tactics, including detention and mass deportation. This movement toward increased enforcement was solidified in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. Republicans and Democrats agreed that immigration was “a matter of national security” and should receive “the resources and institutional heft typically reserved for military defense” (228). The newly-created Department of Homeland Security included a new agency called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with an entire branch focused on arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants.

By 2014, “decades of Central American history were crashing down at the US border” (300). An unprecedented number of families and unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were fleeing corruption, gang violence, and extreme poverty, traveling north to seek asylum. Normally, the majority of people crossing the southern border were single men from Mexico, and the immigration system was unprepared for this demographic shift. The Obama administration scrambled to build new detention centers and institute “deterrence” policies to discourage migrants from coming. However, these individuals were often fleeing immediate dangers, so deterrence had little effect.

When Donald Trump announced his run for president in 2015, he claimed immigration was the cause of all of white America’s woes. Once elected, his administration took deterrence policies to a new level. One was the “zero tolerance policy,” which separated families at the border. Another was Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which forced asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases were processed. When COVID struck, his administration used the “obscure” Title 42 in the 1944 Public Health Service Act to effectively close the border against the spread of communicable disease, even though the virus was already rampant throughout the United States. Furthermore, the US deported countless individuals infected with COVID, contributing to the virus’s spread in countries with already fragile healthcare systems, prompting more hardship and probable migration.

Trump’s handling of the border concealed the extent of the crisis, yet did little to actually solve it. Therefore, when Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he was forced to continue the government’s focus on deterrence and keep many Trump-era policies in place, or risk being accused of causing another “border emergency.” As long as true immigration reform remains impossible due to political polarization, the government has few other options.