Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer examines the historical roots of the U.S.-Central America immigration crisis. Blitzer traces decades of policy decisions, interventions, and instability that have driven generations to flee their homes. 

Combining personal narratives with historical analysis, the book reveals how past actions continue to shape present-day migration and the ongoing cycles of displacement and hardship.

U.S. Cold War Intervention

• U.S. supported dictatorships in Latin America as long as they were anti-communist
  • Fueled civil wars, instability, and human rights abuses
  • School of the Americas: the U.S. trained military in torture and counterinsurgency
  • Directly contributed to massive refugee flows 
  • “It’s our bombs, our guns, and our mines that made these people refugees”
• Guatemala → genocide against Maya communities (aerial bombings, village massacres, mass executions)
• El Salvador → death squads killed tens of thousands of civilians
• Nicaragua → Contras committed war crimes while trying to overthrow Sandinistas
• Impact
  • Democratic movements suppressed, civil society shattered
  • Lasting trauma, instability, and weakened institutions across the region

Asylum Policy & Bias

• U.S. rejected Central American asylum claims, even amid extreme violence
  • 1980s: <3% of Salvadorans, <1% of Guatemalans granted asylum
  • Iranians and Poles had far higher approval rates
• Granting asylum would mean admitting US-backed regimes were causing refugees
  • “Double standard”: avoid embarrassing allied but repressive governments
• Reagan administration: “It’s not enough to be fleeing a civil war”

Legal Challenges

• Lawsuits exposed this discriminatory practice, resulting in temporary relief for some
• TPS (Temporary Protected Status) was a band-aid solution for hundreds of thousands, repeatedly extended but never leading to permanent legal status
• DHS and ICE were established post-9/11, significantly increasing deportations

Increasing Deterrence and Cruelty

“People say this migrant caravan is about politics? Well, sure, if by politics you mean hunger”

• Policies became harsher under Trump:
  • Family separations, “Remain in Mexico” (MPP), and Title 42 expulsions
  • Poorly administered: chaotic recordkeeping, lost children, widespread abuse
• During COVID-19, the U.S. deported infected individuals, straining already fragile health systems in Central America and the Caribbean

Institutional Collapse

• Immigration agencies became underfunded and overwhelmed
• Massive backlogs of asylum and citizenship applications
• U.S. policy under Republican AND Democratic administrations failed to treat asylum seekers with dignity or urgency

Biden’s Partial Reversal

• The Biden administration reversed some policies, like family separations and MPP
• However, it retained Title 42, despite dubious legal and public health basis
• Settlement talks to compensate separated families were abandoned

Core Takeaway

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here reveals the core failure of U.S. migration policy: its persistent treatment of migration as a short-term border issue rather than a long-term consequence of American intervention and global inequality. For decades, the U.S. has destabilized Central America through military, economic, and political interference – then criminalized the very people forced to flee the resulting violence and poverty. 

U.S. asylum policy toward Central America has been shaped more by domestic politics than by humanitarian concern. From Cold War interventionism to 21st-century deterrence, the system repeatedly marginalized those fleeing violence while failing to build lasting legal solutions.

Quotes

On detention and deportation:

Within a week, Keldy was again in DHS custody – this time at an ICE-run detention center in El Paso. The facility resembled a cross between a prison and a military barracks: low-slung buildings, thick locked doors, and long hallways of cinder block and Plexiglas. The closer you got to the front parking lot, the more fortified it became.

Deeper inside, past a small library with a single computer and a row of phones, were dormitory blocks crammed with bunk beds. Each room opened onto a square of asphalt surrounded by high walls – what officials called the ‘yard’ – where detainees were allowed one hour of ‘recreation’ per day.

Ordinarily, asylum seekers who passed their initial screening could await their court dates outside of detention. But increasingly, the government kept them locked up for the entire duration of their legal proceedings. One Haitian schoolteacher, for example, was granted asylum in court – but ICE kept him in detention while the government appealed. It took two years before he was finally released.

In the White House, Stephen Miller told officials, ‘Don’t waste time trying to anticipate the risk of litigation. Everything will get challenged in the lower courts anyway. We’ll win at the Supreme Court.’

Only 1 percent of all completed cases ended in relief. In these instances, DHS filed appeals.

Of the thirty-two thousand removal orders issued by judges, 88 percent were delivered in absentia: the migrants whose asylum cases were being rejected weren’t even there.

On the Honduran 2017 Presidential Election:

On Tuesday evening, the computers crashed – no one could say why. When they came back online a few hours later, the electoral tribunal announced that Nasralla’s five-point lead had flipped into a 1.2 percent advantage for Hernández.

A U.S. ally in the Americas was stealing an election in plain sight. Foreign election monitors raised objections, and the Organization of American States issued an immediate report detailing ‘irregularities, mistakes, and systemic problems.’ Its top official urged the Honduran electoral tribunal not to declare a winner until all ‘the serious doubts’ were resolved. But when the tribunal went ahead anyway and named Hernández the victor, the OAS called for new elections.

The country with the greatest ability to stop the fraud showed the greatest loyalty to the fraudster. At first, the U.S. refused to intervene.

The six months following the election made the American position unmistakably clear. Outright fraud followed by mass protests barely registered as a concern in Washington. Members of the Trump administration were determined to portray Honduras as a regional success story – doing so allowed immigration hardliners to justify ending Temporary Protected Status for the 60,000 Hondurans who had lived legally in the United States for over a decade. Now, they wanted to send them home once and for all.

On Trump’s family separation policy:

Since December 2017, Hamilton had been promoting the idea that the El Paso experiment was successful in reducing the number of migrants arriving at the border. There was little evidence to support this claim – so he created it. In fact, solid information about the rollout did exist, but Hamilton ignored it.

At CBP, agents had described chaos in an after-action report that was sent directly to top agency officials. Their software and data-entry systems had immediately faltered when the family separations began. Border Patrol agents were forced to enter family information manually into spreadsheets, where typos led to cascading problems.

Of the 280 families separated during the pilot, seven were misidentified because agents entered incorrect alien numbers into the government database. For another thirty-three families, there was no documentation in their immigration files indicating that their children were also in custody. ICE and HHS had no record of where Border Patrol had separated the families, making it virtually impossible to reunite them.

One morning in June 2018, Emily Kephart, a program coordinator at an immigrants’ rights group called Kids in Need of Defense, set out to find a six-year-old Guatemalan girl who’d been separated from her father a month before. He was in a detention center in Arizona, on the verge of being deported. He begged the officials in the jail not to put him on a plane until he contacted his daughter, so that they could at least be deported together.

But the ICE officials could only guess at where she might be. The government records were indecipherable. The administration was separating thousands of children but without a plan for how to reunite them.

The Trump administration spent the better part of the spring and summer of 2018 denying reports that it was separating children from their parents at the border. But the news accounts were growing more specific and damning. The New York Times published leaked DHS records showing hundreds of documented cases. At immigration courts in Arizona and Texas, where proceedings were open to the public, parents described how agents of the US Border Patrol had kidnapped their children. None of them could say where they were.

Deputy Criminal Chief at the U.S. Attorney’s Office: ‘We have now heard reports of us taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants. I didn’t believe this until I looked at the duty log and saw that we had accepted prosecution of mothers with one- and two-year-olds. The next issue is that these parents are asking for the whereabouts of their children – and they can’t get a response. The courts are turning to us for help.’

In the summer of 2018, the Department of Justice was forced to acknowledge having separated roughly twenty-seven hundred children, but the actual number was more than fifty-six hundred. It took months of litigation to dislodge the accurate tally, because the earlier count had deliberately left out most of what had happened in 2017.

On Trump’s MPP “Remain in Mexico” policy:

MPP went into effect in January 2019, in Tijuana. The Department of Homeland Security extended it, city by city, to locations along the entire US-Mexico border… Close to fifty thousand asylum seekers were returned to Mexico, where many of them faced extreme levels of violence. On August 3, cartel members arrived at a shelter in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, demanding that the pastor in charge hand over a group of Cubans to be ransomed; when he refused, he was abducted, never to be seen again. Later in the summer, a few miles away, a dozen asylum seekers who’d just been returned to Mexico were kidnapped. ‘The people in migration’ – Mexican authorities – ‘turned us over to the cartels.’

On Trump & Biden’s Title 42:

An obscure authority was buried in the US legal code as part of the 1944 Public Health Service Act. One provision, known as Title 42, stated that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could authorize the federal government to block travel at the border in the event of an emergency involving communicable diseases. There was no evidence that asylum seekers were transmitting COVID-19 at high rates, and the disease was already spreading rapidly inside the United States. The head of the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine refused to sign off on the policy because, as the Associated Press reported, he thought that ‘there was no valid public health reason’ for it. They forced him.

Other nations, too, paused their asylum processing during the pandemic. But within several months, many of them had restarted, at least in some measure. In the US, that was never the intention; under Title 42, the government was expelling all asylum seekers, including unaccompanied children, into Mexico.

Biden’s advisers had criticized Trump for using Title 42 for political rather than public health reasons. Yet the [Biden] administration did not want to relinquish what seemed like a useful tool in an unpredictable time.