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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tell Me How It Ends, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Migration and Personal Sacrifice
Language and Storytelling
International Relations and Political Responsibility
Gang Life vs. Community Engagement
Summary
Analysis
In March of 2015, Luiselli begins work as an interpreter. She has encouraged her nineteen-year-old niece to join her, since she has just moved to New York and is living with Luiselli and her family until she hears back from colleges. On their first day, they go to lower Manhattan and meet a group of lawyers from a nonprofit organization called The Door, which “provides kids and teenagers with services ranging from legal assistance to counseling to English and hip-hop classes.” Luiselli and her niece undergo some cursory training, and although the plan is for them to “shadow” the lawyers until they understand the interview process, they’re immediately put to work because there are so many children to talk to and not enough people to conduct the interviews.
The Door’s urgent need for people to interview undocumented minors reveals the magnitude of the immigration crisis. With hardly any training, Luiselli and her niece are thrown into conversations with these children, a fact that underlines just how badly nonprofit organizations advocating for immigrants need help from volunteers to address the vast numbers of children requiring legal assistance.
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Most of the children Luiselli and other workers at The Door speak to are from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, which are the countries that comprise what’s known as the Northern Triangle. Between 2013 and 2014, the number of child migrants coming to the United States from these countries was 80,000, a “sudden increase [that] set off alarms in the United States and provoked the declaration of the crisis.” The interviews, Luiselli explains, take place in a large room, where the children sit at a table with Crayons and paper for them to play with if they want. As the interview commences, the children’s relatives sit on the other side of a large “balustrade” in the room, since they’re not allowed to be with the children during the questioning.
Although Central American immigrants come to the United States through Mexico, it’s a misconception to think that Mexicans are the only people leaving their country. In fact, the countries that make up the Northern Triangle produce many migrants, though this isn’t necessarily apparent to everyone because of the way people in the United States talk about the crisis, often framing it as a problem confined to Mexico.
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On her first day, Luiselli and her niece are mainly “providing backup” for The Door as it scrambles to address the “emergency” created by the governmental “decision to create a priority juvenile docket.” Luiselli notes that undocumented migrants used to have a year to find legal representation before attending their immigration hearing. Since the Obama administration created the priority juvenile docket, though, they’ve had only 21 days to appear in court. “Being moved to the top of a list, in this context, was the least desirable thing,” Luiselli writes, “at least from the point of view of the children involved.” She adds that the priority juvenile docket has meant that “proceedings against” child migrants have “accelerated” by 94%. This, in turn, means that any organization seeking to represent undocumented minors has significantly less time to prepare a defense.
Since the creation of the priority juvenile docket, a number of nonprofits have made enormous efforts to represent undocumented minors. Luiselli lists a handful of New York organizations, such as Make the Road New York, the Legal Aid Society, and Safe Passage, all of which have tried to “respond quickly and well to the docket.” This is important, since the result of the docket is that minors are deported “in much greater numbers and at a much faster rate.” Although the migrants “should be given an equal right to due process,” they are frequently deported because they can’t find lawyers to represent them in the short window of 21 days. “What child can find a lawyer in twenty-one days?” Luiselli writes. Given this situation, she believes the docket was a “cruel” measure, one that simply allowed the government to “avoid dealing” with the reality of the crisis.
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The first interview Luiselli ever conducts with an undocumented minor is quite memorable, she writes. Over the course of the conversation, the boy takes a worn piece of paper from his pocket. Luiselli reads it and sees that it is a copy of a police report. The boy had filed a complaint in his home country of Honduras, telling the police that gang members had made a habit of waiting for him outside school every day. They would often follow him home, and even started “threatening to kill him.” The report itself ends with a “vague promise to ‘investigate’ the situation.” Later that night, Luiselli thinks about this piece of paper, realizing that it began as a “legal document” but has now become “a historical document that disclose[s] the failure of the document’s original purpose” and, in turn, justifies the boy’s reason for leaving home.
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Luiselli once again considers the media coverage of the “immigration crisis,” illustrating that the predominant narrative fails to take the actual origins of the situation into account. Instead of interrogating why this problem has arisen, she says, Americans have fixated on the following question: “What do we do with all these children now?” Putting this in even simpler terms, Luiselli admits that the prevailing question is actually closer to the following: “How do we get rid of them or dissuade them from coming?”
Luiselli turns her attention to the ninth, tenth, and eleventh questions on the intake questionnaire. These are, “How do you like where you’re living now?”, “Are you happy here?”, and “Do you feel safe?” Luiselli points out that child migrants are frequently called “illegal” in the media, arguing that it’s obvious that the United States sees them as “a hindrance.” “How would anyone who is stigmatized as an ‘illegal immigrant’ feel ‘safe’ and ‘happy’?” she wonders.
As a way of examining the underlying causes of the refugee crisis, Luiselli considers the violent history of countries like El Salvador. The Salvadoran Civil War, she explains, took place between 1979 and 1992, when the country’s militaristic government “relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups.” During this time, the United States allied with the Salvadoran government, giving it money and “military resources.” As a result, roughly one-fifth of the population fled, mostly to the United States, where approximately 300,000 refugees sought safety in Los Angeles. However, Los Angeles was full of gangs like Barrio 18 during that period (along with the Bloods, Crips, Nazi Low Riders, and Aryan Brotherhood). Accordingly, Salvadoran migrants—many of whom fought the government as guerilla soldiers in El Salvador—formed MS-13 to protect themselves. Then, in the 1990s, the United States mass deported “thousands” of gang members, which is how MS-13 spread to Central America.
“The whole story is an absurd, circular nightmare,” Luiselli writes, referring to the fact that the United States government is now trying to keep Central Americans out of the country after having played a part in MS-13’s proliferation in the Northern Triangle. Luiselli upholds that nothing will be solved until “all the governments involved,” including the United States, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, “acknowledge their shared accountability in the roots and causes of the children’s exodus.”
The twelfth and thirteenth questions on the intake questionnaire ask child migrants to indicate whether or not they’ve been victims of a crime since entering the United States and whether or not that crime has been reported. Luiselli explains that victims of “certain crimes” are eligible for something known as the U visa, which provides “a path to lawful permanent residency for both the victims and their families.” There is, however, one catch: the victim must help the government “in the prosecution of the crime in question.”
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Once more, Luiselli outlines the steps of the journey most child migrants make. However, not all stories are the same, especially if a child is from Mexico. This is because Border Patrol officers in the United States can make an on-the-spot decision to deport Mexican migrants. “They don’t have to be given temporary shelter, are not allowed to attempt contact with parents or relatives in the U.S., and are certainly not granted a right to a formal hearing in court where they could defend themselves, legally, against a deportation order,” Luiselli writes. All a Border Patrol officer needs to do to deport an undocumented Mexican child is decide that the child hasn’t been the victim of trafficking, isn’t “at risk of trafficking upon return,” doesn’t have a “credible fear” driving them from their home country, and “is able to make an independent decision about returning.”
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If a Border Patrol officer decides to deport an undocumented Mexican minor, the procedure is called “voluntary return.” “And, as unbelievable as it may seem, voluntary return is the most common verdict,” Luiselli writes, adding that an overwhelming majority of undocumented Mexican children are sent back to their homes because of this rule. The rule itself has arisen because of an amendment to George W. Bush’s Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, signed in 2008. According to this amendment, “children from countries that share borders with the U.S. can be deported without formal immigration proceedings.”
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