This week on The Show, we’re presenting a miniseries about the backstory of the volatile debate around immigration policy.
During the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris was heavily scrutinized for her role in addressing the so-called “root causes” of the surge of migrants at the southern border. But while there was plenty of arguing about what the vice president actually did, there was far less conversation about what those root causes are.
In his new book, “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis,” New York staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells that story in expansive detail. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, Blitzer writes, migrants entering the U.S. via Mexico tended to be single Mexican men, many of them looking for work.
But around 2014, a different population started to arrive on a scale Americans had never before seen. These were children and families from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America. They weren’t looking for work — they were risking their lives to escape brutal regimes in their home countries, coming to the US to seek political asylum.
At this point, what Blitzer calls “two inescapable realities” collided: living conditions in Central America had gotten so bad that many people couldn’t remain even if they wanted. And the U.S. immigration system was capable only of “flailing triage.”
In attempting to explain a vast, multi-pronged crisis, Blitzer’s book unfolds as a series of character studies. Blitzer joined The Show to discuss, starting with a harrowing scene involving one of the principal figures in the story, a Salvadoran doctor named Juan Romagoza. It’s the 1980s, at the height of the Salvadoran Civil War, and Romagoza is training to be a surgeon at a hospital in El Salvador. A badly wounded student protester is brought in after being shot by the police, and Romagoza and his colleagues perform emergency surgery.
Blitzer picks up the story from there.
Full conversation
JONATHAN BLITZER: You know, it's late at night, maybe 10 or 11 o'clock at night, and Juan is sort of drifting off next to his patient's bed. His job is to sort of monitor the patient's progress, and all of a sudden he hears the marching of soldiers' boots down this long hallway in the hospital. And before he realizes it, the door swings open and a handful of armed men order everyone to hit the ground.
And walk right up to the bed where this patient is recovering and fire a number of bullets into him and kill him. And Juan is stuck under the bed watching as these bullet casings are pinging off the floor, and that was very much a common occurrence in 1980s-era El Salvador, and one of the reasons why so many people eventually were forced to flee because of the continued persecution and repression.
SAM DINGMAN: So that scene, it doesn't just help to illustrate the kind of authoritarianism that, that might prompt someone to want to leave a country to seek asylum in the United States. It also lays the groundwork for another very harrowing layer to this story, which is that many of those authoritarian regimes have been propped up by the United States.
BLITZER: You know, it's hard in retrospect to overstate the force of the sort of geopolitical orthodoxy at the time, which was that the United States was engaged in a Cold War against the spread of leftism and communism in the region. And as a result, the United States not only had allies with right-wing regimes across the region that vowed to crack down on communists or leftist insurgents, but actually the U.S. fully armed a lot of these regimes, gave them military training, gave them diplomatic cover. And the overall effect of all of this in the 1980s was that you had huge numbers of people who had no choice but to flee the country because they were being persecuted.
And when they reached the United States, the U.S. had finally actually created the legal infrastructure of what became the asylum system, but there was very little thought given to this kind of circumstance, the circumstance of large numbers of people showing up at the southern border and saying, “look, we're here to present a legal claim to asylum.”
The U.S. government didn't have the space to hold people. While they took their initial interviews, they just didn't have the infrastructure in any sense, and that of course detonated a big political crisis that really made it even harder for policymakers to do the right sorts of things to start to ease the administrative burden of all of this.
DINGMAN: Well, this makes me think about something that I heard you say in an interview that I, I would love to ask you to expand on a little bit. You said, quote, “the policy levers don't match the lived experience of people who make the journey.”
BLITZER: Now, let me give you the most concrete example I can think of, which is the story of a Honduran mother who in 2017, before the Trump era family separation policy was fully known or even fully fleshed out, there was a pilot program. And so this Honduran mother, Keldi, she came with her two children. They were separated at the southern border. Kelly was detained for over one year and eventually deported.
And so there was a moment a couple of years later where I found myself with Keldi and a number of other Honduran migrants, at this particular moment in time in southern Mexico, making the journey again. And on the one hand you'd think, OK, well, the logic of this enforcement policy was precisely that. It was meant to discourage people from trying to attempt this trip again.
And yet, you find yourself with a mother whose kids are now living in the United States, and she's been separated from them. And so it's obviously a kind of lunatic notion to expect a mother just to abandon that trip and abandon her family because law-enforcement policy was what it was at a moment in time.
And so the U.S. government is only zeroing in on the U.S.-Mexico border as a place where they can treat people harshly enough to try to discourage them from making the trip. But that fails to understand the fact that large numbers of people, when they reach the U.S.-Mexico border, that is the final chapter in a much longer story.
DINGMAN: And I think it is also related to this, this larger meta question that I wanted to ask you, which is, as we've been discussing, this is a longstanding, deeply entrenched political problem, human rights problem, and it is also incredibly complex and difficult to explain, which is why your book is is so important.
And you actually addressed this in that same interview that I was watching earlier this year. You said that it is intimidating to quote, “step into this history and find a narrative way into the broader story.”
But in your answer, there's actually a clue, which is that you made the decision to find a narrative way of stepping into the story, which is not the approach that everybody would take. And you, you know, you've been illustrating that with the, the hospital scene that you played out for us and the story of Keldi. Why did you make that choice to take a, a character-driven, narrative-driven approach to telling this story?
BLITZER: You know, you can study this stuff, you can talk to experts, you can pour over, you know, legal documents and historical records, and all of them are revealing. But the most striking thing viscerally is that people have lived this broader history. People have lived out the consequences of some of these policy decisions. And, and, and people have lived them in ways that to them are very natural and matter of fact in the context of their own lives.
And so that's always been for me the starting point in all of my writing and reporting on this subject because in fact that's how I myself got educated on it. I mean, I met people who embodied different aspects of this history.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, with that in mind and in particular in light of what you said about certain people that you've met literally embodying the story. Can you tell us where the title of the book comes from?
BLITZER: Yes, that's a phrase that Juan Romagoza used with me in one of our conversations about a very specific moment in time. So in the early 2000s there was a human rights case brought in a civil court in Florida against two ex-generals, Salvadoran ex-generals who'd been allies of the United States, who had been relocated to Florida. And it turns out that in the early 2000s, a human rights group called the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco got wind of the fact that these guys were living in Florida and brought a human rights case against them for crimes against humanity, which included, among other things, the systematic torture and incapacitation of Juan.
And Juan displayed to me an almost superhuman strength in appearing in this courtroom.
At a certain moment, a member of the jury passed a note to the judge, and the note said, from this jury member, you know, “I know we've seen all the evidence. I know we've heard all of the testimony, but it would help before we go into deliberations to see the physical scars borne by the plaintiffs.”
And Juan steps in front of the jury box and rolls up his sleeve and starts to show his scars from this horrific torture he endured in 1980, and I asked him, you know, what it felt like at that moment.
And he said to me, you know,” I, I thought how lucky I was. I at least had scars I was able to show. I knew so many people who couldn't even be in the position that I'm in now.” And it was in that context that he said this phrase to me, “everyone who was gone is here.”
Everyone who had died, who hadn't survived, who couldn't make it to this point, they're here with me right now in this moment in the trial as I'm presenting my wounds. I'm baring my wounds, but I'm really baring all of our wounds, and that. That line, I mean, it gives me chills even to remember it now.
It just, I realized that every aspect of this reporting over many years all led back to that fundamental principle and premise that those who are gone are still present and that their story is our story in every sense.
