Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

On a bright, humid evening in early August 2019, ten Honduran migrants met to pray in the basement of a Mexican housing complex called Solidarity 2000. They were far from home and farther from their destination. Most had previously been deported from the United States, but none of them could stay in Honduras, so they were making the journey again. Their reasons varied. One was being hunted by criminals. Another had been going hungry. When I met them, they were biding their time in Tapachula, a city along the Guatemalan border, squatting in a semi-abandoned building.

In Tucson, a network of supporters was creating a movement—it lacked a name but already had a cast. One of the main characters was John Fife, a forty-year-old pastor with a salt-and-pepper beard and a penchant for cowboy boots and turquoise belt buckles.

There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other was an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, known inside the country as the Octopus because it had tentacles everywhere.

Of the two lives he began to imagine for himself—as an undocumented immigrant in the US or in Mexico—the American one seemed to involve a fight. He came to think of it as the only true path back home.

The higher Meissner rose in the halls of government, the more acute the contradictions of US asylum policy appeared. The Refugee Act didn’t protect people equally, and the Justice Department, which oversaw the INS, barely pretended that it did.

La Clínica was two and a half miles from the White House, and a forty-minute walk straight down Fifteenth Street NW. The halls of American power were practically contiguous with the streets of Adams Morgan and the immigrant neighborhood, called Mount Pleasant, where Juan lived in a small apartment provided by a church. When he wasn’t working at the clinic, he was engaging in his usual activities—protests and church events in the name of the sanctuary movement—only now the intended audience felt near at hand.

For the deportees and their growing retinue of Salvadoran acolytes, LA was the main reference point, eclipsing the heady new moment in El Salvador. One of the boys, looking at Eddie with unusually wide-eyed candor, said, “Hey, man, you sure you want to go back there to all that? It sounds dangerous.”

Eddie was caught in a dragnet that ICE had set up for someone else.

A year later, the global recession hit, and the American tourists who came to Mino’s company for rafting and hiking trips started to cancel.[…] They decided to leave their sons with Amanda and set out for the United States. They would live there for, at most, a few years, enough time to earn money to fund a more stable life in La Ceiba.[…]

Although they never planned to stay in the US for long, they risked everything to make it there.

Decades of Central American history were crashing down at the US border. Throughout the 1980s, ’90s, and early aughts most immigrants stopped by the Border Patrol were Mexican men, traveling alone and crossing for work. In 2011, signs of an incipient shift began to appear. Agents were encountering more children arriving alone from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, in search of parents or family members already in the US.

Immigration tapped into a rich vein of American outrage, and Trump had an instinct for a galvanizing message. He had found a unified theory that could account for declining factory jobs, the anger and insecurity stoked by far-right media, an opioid epidemic, and the indignity of the country’s first Black president. Immigrants could be blamed for everything.

Of all the places in the US where Keldy could have applied for asylum, El Paso was one of the worst. On average, 40 percent of asylum seekers were given relief in immigration courts across the country, but immigration judges in El Paso had granted asylum just 3 percent of the time between 2013 and 2017. One judge, speaking from the bench, called the city’s immigration court system the “bye-bye place.”

The caravan’s large size afforded some protection from both Mexican immigration agents and criminal syndicates along the route, which often abused, extorted, and kidnapped vulnerable travelers. These modest advantages, however, brought their own complications.

Their pastor, in a belted print dress and pink blouse, was Keldy.

“You have to say, ‘I’m not going to let anything bad overtake me,’” she began, sitting at the fulcrum of a half circle of plastic lawn chairs. There were murmurs of agreement.

The first of many problems with the plan was that none of the three countries of the Northern Triangle could be described as “safe.” El Salvador didn’t have an asylum system. Guatemala did, but it was minuscule. Then there was the bigger issue of how many people were already fleeing these three countries in the first place, a stark indication of the reality on the ground.

About three or four months into our conversations, I learned an important lesson: ask him about everything at least twice, if not three or four times, because new details would almost always emerge.

For a full second after Keldy emerged, there was silence. Then, a jolt, less a sound than a low rumble, as Keldy’s sons rushed to her. Her sisters and nieces collapsed in on them. Keldy disappeared, the circle of family members tightening around her.

He was gazing off into the garden. Still standing, unbowed by time, was the mango tree where Juan had hidden the night before he left the country, in 1981, when he was kept awake by thoughts of where he might be going.