Cold War Intervention
- U.S. supported anti-communist dictatorships during Cold War
- This contributed to civil wars, instability, and human rights abuses
- School of the Americas trained Latin American militaries, including in torture
- These policies contributed to large refugee flows
- Guatemala saw civil war, including massacres of Maya communities
- El Salvador saw death squads and large-scale civilian killings
- Nicaragua saw war crimes during conflict with Sandinistas
- U.S. contributed to repression under anti-communist strategy
- Long-term effects included weakened institutions, trauma, and regional instability
Asylum Bias
- U.S. rejected many Central American asylum claims despite extreme violence
- 1980s: approvals were under 3% for Salvadorans and 1% for Guatemalans
- Iranians and Poles had significantly higher asylum approval rates
- Granting asylum would imply U.S.-aligned regimes as sources of persecution
- Policy was a double standard to avoid political embarrassment of allied governments
- Reagan-era policy emphasized that fleeing civil war alone was not sufficient for asylum
Legal Challenges
- Lawsuits exposed discriminatory asylum practices
- Temporary Protected Status was a temporary fix but often came with no permanent residency pathways
- Post 9/11, creation of DHS and expanded role of ICE increased deportations
- In 2025, Donald Trump moved to end TPS protections for large groups of migrants
Institutional Cruelty
- Migrant caravans are driven largely by hunger and insecurity
- Trump-era policies tightened enforcement with family separations, MPP, and Title 42
- Implementation issues included poor tracking, child separation, and reported abuse
- Immigration agencies became underfunded with growing asylum backlogs
- Both parties faced criticism for failing to process asylum cases humanely
- Biden reversed some policies like family separations and MPP but retained Title 42
- Promised compensation for separated families was not fully realized
Quotes
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 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. 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.
In 2024, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted of accepting bribes and facilitating the import of over 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, receiving a 45-year prison sentence. On December 1, 2025, President Trump issued a pardon for Hernández while publicly endorsing the conservative candidate in Honduras’s 2025 election. In the midst of the voting three days later, the vote-counting screen went blank at 3:24 a.m. After several hours, the results reappeared, showing Trump-backed candidate Asfura now in the lead.
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. 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.
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. “La migra turned us over to the cartels.”
An obscure authority was buried in the US legal code. 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.