Tell Me How It Ends: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

“So, how does the story of those children end?” Luiselli’s daughter asks her. This is a question she poses frequently, but Luiselli can’t answer, because she doesn’t know what happens after the interviews. Her daughter is especially interested in a story about two little girls who came to the United States from Guatemala after their mother had been living in the country for several years, saving up money for them to join her. After a long journey with a “coyote” and a stay in the icebox, the girls were reunited with their mother in New York. “That’s it?” Luiselli’s daughter asks. “That’s how it ends?” Luiselli tells her that this is how the story ends, but she privately acknowledges that this isn’t the case, since the real story has only just begun: the little girls now face a legal battle that will determine whether or not they’ll be deported.

In immigration court, the only way for a lawyer to argue for “potential avenues of relief” is to first have his or her client plead guilty to coming to the United States “without lawful permission.” In turn, this opens the client up to deportation, but it also gives the lawyer a chance to build a case for why the child should be allowed to stay. Luiselli explains that asylum and special immigrant juvenile (SIJ) status are the most “common forms of immigration relief.” Both can even lead to permanent residency and, in some cases, citizenship. For the most part, children are often eligible to receive SIJ status if they’ve fled dangerous conditions. This means establishing that they “are impeded from reunification with at least one of their parents because of abuse, abandonment, or neglect.” It also means showing that returning to their home country would put them in danger.

One strange thing about the intake questionnaire is that children increase their chances of avoiding deportation if they answer the questions “correctly.” Luiselli explains that a “correct” answer is one that “strengthens the child’s case and provides a potential avenue of relief.” This means that, in the “warped world of immigration,” stories about traumatic experiences are considered “correct answers.” If children don’t have enough “battle wounds to show,” it’s unlikely that lawyers will agree to represent them, since their cases will be hard to win.

Luiselli knows that the manner in which she records the children’s answers might affect whether or not lawyers agree to represent them. However, she doesn’t have much control over the interview process, though she can sometimes help children understand the questions more clearly and thus (in some cases) provide more in-depth answers. For instance, she has learned that she needs to “reconfigure the questions” for extremely young children, helping them approach the matter in language that makes sense to them. “I find myself not knowing where translation ends and interpretation starts,” she writes.

Over time, Luiselli and her niece become somewhat dispirited, though they don’t stop working at The Door. On the way home one night, Luiselli’s niece announces that she wants to study law in college. That way, she can make an impact in the United States’ immigration system, since there aren’t currently enough lawyers to represent child migrants. Luiselli notes that, because immigration cases take place in the civil courts, migrants “are not entitled to the free legal counsel that American law guarantees to persons accused of crimes.” As a result, undocumented minors rely upon lawyers willing to represent them pro bono, and though this does happen, there is still a desperate need for available attorneys.

Luiselli returns to the story of her first interview. The migrant’s name is Manu López, and he is a sixteen-year-old boy from Honduras living in Hempstead, Long Island with his aunt Alina. She asks where his mother and father live, and when he shrugs, she writes “?” on the questionnaire. He’s terse and hesitant to speak, so she says, “I’m no policewoman, I’m no official anyone, I’m not even a lawyer. I’m also not a gringa, you know? In fact, I can’t help you at all. But I can’t hurt you, either.” Hearing this, he asks where she’s from, and when she tells him she’s from Mexico City, he points out that they’re “enemies.” “Yeah,” she replies, “but only in football, and I suck at football anyway so you’ve already scored five goals against me.” This makes Manu smile, and Luiselli sees that he’ll let her continue the interview.

Manu doesn’t like talking about his mother, but he tells Luiselli that she “came and went as she pleased” because she “liked the streets.” He explains that he lived in Honduras with his grandmother, but that she died six months ago. He tells Luiselli that Alina has always sent money back to Honduras, where her two daughters (his cousins) also lived with Manu and their grandmother. Apparently, they too are now coming to the United States. Luiselli doesn’t fully understand why this is the case until she reaches the questionnaire’s final questions, which have to do with the influence of gangs on migrants. She notes that these questions often make child migrants—and especially older ones—“break down.” This is because most of the teenagers she speaks to have “been touched in one way or another by the tentacles of the MS-13 and Barrio 18.”

“Did you ever have trouble with gangs or crime in your home country?” Luiselli asks Manu, reciting question 34. In response, he tells her a “fragmented” story, explaining that members of Barrio 18 waited for him and his friend outside their school one day. When they saw the gang members, they knew there were too many of them to fight, so they tried to leave, eventually breaking into a run. After hearing a gunshot, Manu turned around and saw that the gang had shot and killed his friend. Unable to do anything else, he kept running, narrowly escaping by slipping into a storefront. Hearing this story, Luiselli asks questions 35 and 36: “Any problems with the government in your home country? If so, what happened?” “My government?” Manu replies. “Write this down in your notebook: they don’t do shit for anybody like me, that’s the problem.”

Having told Luiselli that the Honduran government doesn’t help people protect themselves against gang violence, Manu takes out the police report he saved after filing a complaint about gang members harassing him. “He filed it months before his friend was killed, but the police never did anything,” Luiselli writes. The night his best friend was killed, he called Alina and told her what happened. Horrified, she made immediate arrangements for him to come to the United States, instructing him not to leave the house until the “coyote” was ready to take him away. “He didn’t attend his friend’s funeral,” Luiselli adds.

Manu tells Luiselli that Alina paid a “coyote” $4,000 to bring him to the United States. Now, Alina has paid an extra $6,000 so that her daughters can also make the journey. This is because the gang that killed his friend has started “harassing” his cousins in his absence. Because of this, Alina has decided to pay for them to come to the United States, figuring that “the dangers of the journey” are more tolerable than letting them remain in Honduras.

Luiselli explains that Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of Mexico from 2012 to 2018, oversaw a “new anti-immigration plan” that has tried to “halt the immigration of Central Americans through Mexico.” This has made it harder for migrants to travel north using the normal routes, so they’re forced to go by sea, which Luiselli fears is even more dangerous. She also notes that many of her fellow Mexicans criticize the United States’ policies, though Mexico itself has begun mass deportations of Central Americans, many of whom should be eligible for asylum. What’s more, the country has strengthened its control on its own southern border. This is something the United States has been “generously financing.” According to Luiselli, this accords with “the old tradition of Latin America-U.S. governmental relations,” in which Mexico gets paid to “do the dirty work..”

Manu and Luiselli meet again six months after their initial interview. This time, they’re in a fancy building with a view of Staten Island. Because Manu’s copy of the police report he filed counts as “material evidence,” a high-powered team of lawyers has agreed to take his case. With such strong evidence, Luiselli explains, “it would be impossible for them to lose.” In this next stage of Manu’s legal battle, his new lawyers have asked Luiselli to continue acting as an interpreter—an offer she gladly accepts. When she sees him, she doesn’t hide her excitement, telling him that she’s also working at a university in Hempstead, Long Island, where he lives.

As the meeting begins, Manu’s lawyers ask him if he’s still in school, and he tells them that he is. However, he says he wants to drop out. In response, they remind him that he must be enrolled in school in order to be eligible for “any type of formal relief.” Manu then reveals that Hempstead High School is “a hub for MS-13 and Barrio 18.” Upon hearing this, Luiselli goes “cold,” but Manu continues in a calm manner, explaining that he’s frightened of Barrio 18 but also doesn’t want to join MS-13. “Suddenly,” Luiselli writes, “we all suspect Manu and want to ask question thirty-seven: ‘Have you ever been a member of a gang? Any tattoos?’ No, he has no tattoos. And no, he’s never been part of a gang.”

Manu isn’t part of a gang, but this is precisely why he has “good reasons to be afraid.” Apparently, people from Barrio 18 recently beat him up—he has two missing front teeth to prove it. “After the incident with Barrio 18, his aunt Alina worried he would end up in trouble because MS-13 boys saved him from losing the rest of his teeth, and now he owes them something,” Luiselli writes. Despite this, Manu says, he isn’t going to give in. He also vows to protect his cousins, now that they’ve come to the United States. When Luiselli asks what he means by the fact that he has to “look out for them,” he says, “Just look out for them, ’cause Hempstead is a shithole full of pandilleros, just like Tegucigalpa.”

Luiselli once again considers the way people talk about immigration in the United States, suggesting that the prevailing discourse surrounding the topic fails to take into account the underlying causes of the crisis. Instead, people fixate on why migrant children aren’t simply “caught” as soon as they cross the border and then “sent back quickly.” “No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map,” Luiselli writes, adding that this is a “transnational problem that includes the United States.” To that end, she argues that the United States should involve itself not as a “distant observer or passive victim,” but as an “active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.”

The crisis surrounding immigration, Luiselli argues, isn’t confined to just one region. This, she asserts, is why it’s important for people to start talking about the problem as a “hemispheric war.” Doing this, she says, would help all of the governments involved recognize the extent to which this is a mutual problem, allowing them to “acknowledge the connection between such phenomena as the drug wars, gangs in Central America and the United States, the consumption of drugs, and the massive migration of children from the Northern Triangle to the United States through Mexico.” At the very least, calling this situation a “hemispheric war” would encourage people to “rethink the very language surrounding the problem and, in doing so, imagine potential directions for combined policies.”

Several months after meeting with Manu and his new lawyers, Luiselli speaks on the phone with Alina. Alina explains that she spent years working in the United States so that she could eventually bring Manu and her daughters to the country. When she heard what had happened between Manu and the gang members pursing him, though, she gave up trying to save money and decided to put herself into debt in order to bring him to the States. Interlaced with this conversation, Luiselli lists questions 38, 39, and 40 from the intake questionnaire: “What do you think will happen if you go back home?”; “Are you scared to return?”; “Who would take care of you if you were to return to your home country?”

Alina tells Luiselli that she had to pay $7,500 to get her eldest daughter out of an adult detention center after she crossed the southern border, since she’s 19. Hearing this, Luiselli guesses that this money came from Alina’s new husband (whom she married after moving to the United States). She notes that Alina’s husband has most likely depleted his “entire life savings” in order to ensure the safety of Manu and Alina’s daughters.