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Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer

Cover of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer
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Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer is a history / current affairs book published in 2024.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here traces the roots of today’s immigration crisis back through decades of U.S. policy and intervention in Central America. Published in 2024, the book offers a meticulously researched look at how violence, instability, and political decisions have forced generations of families to flee their homes.

Blitzer weaves together powerful personal stories with deep historical analysis, revealing how past actions have shaped the current immigration landscape and led to ongoing cycles of displacement and hardship.

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Table of Contents

1. U.S. Intervention in Central America

  • During the Cold War, the U.S. supported right-wing dictatorships in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Chile – even when they were violent and repressive – so long as they were anti-communist
  • These interventions helped fuel civil wars, instability, and human rights abuses, directly causing massive refugee flows
    • “It’s our bombs, our guns, and our mines that made these people refugees”
    • In Guatemala, US-backed forces waged genocide against Maya communities, including aerial bombings and mass executions
    • In El Salvador, the U.S. funneled over $4 billion to a government that used death squads to kill tens of thousands of civilians
    • The US-funded Contras in Nicaragua committed war crimes while trying to overthrow the Sandinista government
    • Military officers were trained in the U.S. School of the Americas, where torture and counterinsurgency tactics were part of the curriculum
    • These interventions crushed democratic movements, tore apart civil society, and left countries traumatized and unstable

2. Asylum Policy and Bias

  • The U.S. systematically denied asylum to Central Americans, especially Salvadorans and Guatemalans, despite clear dangers they faced
    • Less than 3% of Salvadorans and less than 1% of Guatemalans were granted asylum in the 1980s
    • Iranians and Poles received asylum at much higher rates
  • This reflected political motivations: granting asylum would mean admitting US-backed governments were producing refugees
    • “Too often in recent years we have tolerated a double standard, under which asylum has been unfairly denied to legitimate refugees for fear of embarrassing friendly but repressive governments”
  • Reagan administration said “It’s not enough to be fleeing a civil war”
  • Lawsuits like ABC v. Thornburgh (1991) exposed this discriminatory practice, resulting in temporary relief for some
  • TPS (Temporary Protected Status) was a band-aid solution, repeatedly extended but never leading to permanent legal status for hundreds of thousands
  • DHS and ICE were established post-9/11, significantly increasing deportations
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4. Increasing Deterrence and Cruelty

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

“People say this [migrant] caravan is about politics?” he said. “Well, sure, if by politics you mean hunger.”

5. Institutional Collapse and Indifference

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

6. Biden’s Partial Reversal

  • The Biden administration reversed some of Trump’s policies, like halting family separations and MPP (initially)
  • However, it retained Title 42, despite its dubious legal and public health basis
  • Settlement talks to compensate separated families were abandoned

Core Takeaway

In Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, Jonathan Blitzer 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 foreign policy interests and domestic politics than by humanitarian concern. From Cold War-era interventionism to 21st-century deterrence strategies, the system repeatedly marginalized those fleeing violence while failing to build lasting legal solutions.

While this summary offers a broad overview, Blitzer delves much deeper in the book, detailing the inner workings of agencies like INS and ICE and weaving in powerful personal stories from migrants, asylum seekers, and survivors of Central America’s civil wars.

Quotes

On Detention & Deportation

Within a week, Keldy was once again in DHS custody – this time at an ICE-run detention center on Montana Avenue 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, released on bond. 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 the ruling. 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 (OAS) 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 the “Zero-Tolerance” 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 and widely attended by reporters, parents described how agents of the US Border Patrol had kidnapped their children. None of them could say where they were.

“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.” – deputy criminal chief at the U.S. Attorney’s Office

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 the 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 immigration authorities – “turned us over to the cartels.”

On 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. The Trump administration also froze visa processing at foreign embassies, tightening earlier restrictions with renewed justification.. The backlog of unprocessed citizenship applications had now reached 675,000; another 110,000 people had had their applications approved but were stuck because the agency had ended in-person naturalization ceremonies. With a budget shortfall of more than $1 billion, 70 percent of agency staff faced the prospect of mass furloughs.

In February, barely two weeks after assuming office, Joe Biden had signed an executive order to create a federal task force charged with reunifying families that had been separated under Trump’s zero tolerance policy.

Biden’s advisers had criticized Trump for using Title 42 for political rather than public health reasons. Yet the administration did not want to relinquish what seemed like a useful tool in an unpredictable time: under Title 42, the government could continue to expel people en masse.

In the final weeks of December 2021, after ten months of negotiations, the Biden administration withdrew from settlement talks with the ACIU to provide financial compensation to the families separated at the border.

On Long-Term Strategy

Trump had railed against the governments of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala and cut international aid to the region. From his years at CBP, McAleenan knew that individual policies at the border were stopgap measures that failed to address emigration at its source. He wanted to restart US aid money to the region, while also rewiring the asylum system to account for what he viewed as an unstoppable exodus… ‘The long-term goal is to set the stage for investment and development in the region. There has to be a way for people to live in the hemisphere. It can’t just be the U.S. and Canada.”

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