The Brutal Cycle of US Immigration Policy

 

 

 

""Blitzer’s book is a study of migration moving in two directions. While thousands of Salvadorans living in the United States are, like Eddie, forced onto deportation flights, thousands of others in El Salvador find themselves pushed out of their homes and forced to leave the country as a result of increasing gang violence and the fallout of decades of US-backed Cold War counterinsurgency programs. Between 2007 and 2015, the number of people who emigrated to the United States from Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) rose by 25 percent. Blitzer painstakingly recounts the brutal circumstances behind this mass exodus, emphasizing the humanity of the people who uprooted their lives in search of safety in the US, only to find themselves criminalized in the very country they hoped would be their refuge.

Each person’s calculus for leaving is different. Some, Blitzer notes, are escaping torture, others poverty; in almost all cases, they have no legal channel through which to migrate. Keldy, a Honduran mother of three, goes to Denver with her husband in 2007 in search of work. “Although they never planned to stay in the U.S. for long,” Blitzer writes, “they risked everything to get there.” The trip is not easy. In Mexico, aboard the perilous freight train that migrants call “the Beast,” Keldy’s husband ties her to one of the cars so she doesn’t fall off. Later they’re kidnapped by Los Zetas, one of Mexico’s most notorious criminal syndicates. In Denver, their perilous journey gives way to the monotony of wage work: Keldy prepares and sells food, her husband paints houses, and they save up enough money to build a home in Honduras, where they return in 2010. “Neither of them expected to visit the U.S. ever again,” Blitzer writes.

But Keldy and her husband’s homecoming is marred by tragedy. Keldy’s family is threatened by armed men in Honduras who know she went north for work and assume that she came back wealthy. Several of her brothers are killed as a result. After two years of endless harassment and violence, Keldy and her husband flee with their sons, first to a small town in the forest and then—after Keldy testifies in court against one of the killers—to northern Mexico, where, armed with “a sheaf of documents held together with rubber bands,” Keldy and her two youngest boys cross the border into the US to ask for asylum.

 What happens next will sound familiar to anyone who was paying attention to immigration policy at the height of the Trump era: Keldy is taken into custody and prosecuted for crossing the border illegally, and her sons are sent to a shelter for unaccompanied migrant kids. The boys, ages 13 and 15, are among the more than 5,600 children separated from their parents at the border under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. In an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, Keldy meets other despondent women who faced a similar fate, and she compiles their names on a list that she hands to an immigrant-rights activist in the hope that she might help them. Meanwhile, an indifferent judge denies Keldy’s asylum claim, and while awaiting an appeal, she is tricked into signing a deportation order. Her sons are not sent back with her; they remain in the United States, living with an aunt in Philadelphia."

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