In 2015, Valeria Luiselli starts volunteering at a Manhattan nonprofit organization called The Door. She interviews unaccompanied child migrants, asking 40 questions listed on an “intake questionnaire.” Translating what they say into English, she fills out the official forms, which will be used to match children with pro bono lawyers willing to defend them in court. The first question she has to ask is, “Why did you come to the United States?” The answers, she notes, are never “simple.” Instead, the children speak apprehensively, not knowing whether they can trust Luiselli. Moreover, their stories are shot through with “fear,” and the children deliver complicated tales that have “no beginning, no middle, and no end.” When they finish, Luiselli takes her notes to lawyers, who look for elements in the stories that could be built into “a viable defense against a child’s deportation.”
Luiselli jumps back in time one year, narrating a road trip she took from New York to southern Arizona with her husband, daughter, and stepson. She and her family are waiting to find out whether they’ll be granted green cards, meaning that they’re—in the “slightly offensive parlance of U.S. immigration law”—considered “nonresident aliens.” As they drive, they listen to the radio, hearing about the sudden influx of child migrants into the United States from Central America. It’s 2014, and people have just started talking about the “immigration crisis,” though Luiselli points out that many prefer the term “refugee crisis.”
As a volunteer at The Door, Luiselli hears many different answers to the question, “Why did you come to the United States?” Despite this variation, though, the children frequently cite the same reason: “reunification with a parent or another close relative who migrated to the U.S. years earlier.” They also talk about similar “push factors,” or motivations to leave their home countries, such as “extreme violence [and] persecution and coercion by gangs.” This, Luiselli says, makes it clear that the majority of these migrants aren’t searching for the “American Dream,” but simply trying to stay alive. Continuing her description of the intake questionnaire, Luiselli notes the various responses she receives to the second question, which is, “When did you enter the United States?” She then describes what it’s like during her family’s road trip when they listen to the radio and wonder if the strong negative reaction to the arrival of child migrants at the border would be quite as vitriolic if the children were white. Thinking this way, Luiselli and her husband search for ways to talk to their children about the manner in which Americans are reacting to the immigration crisis.
Continuing her examination of the 40 questions, Luiselli explains that the sixth question is, “How did you travel here?” This question often reveals how dangerous the journey is from Central America to the United States, as children ride on “La Bestia,” or “The Beast”—a freight train that runs through Mexico and upon which many migrants die, since they often roll off or are “sucked” onto the rails. Understanding the dangers, though, “people continue to take the risk.” Once young migrants reach the Mexico-U.S. border, they turn themselves into border control, knowing that it’s even more dangerous to wander through the desert after such a long journey. At this point, they’re put into a detention center known as the “icebox,” so-called because it’s run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and because the authorities keep the facilities incredibly cold, treating the children like “foreign meat” that might “go bad.” Even though the law says that no one can be detained there for more than three days, child migrants are often held for much longer, occasionally with “nowhere to lie down to sleep.”
The seventh question on the intake questionnaire is, “Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?” Luiselli hates hearing the answers to this question. As a Mexican woman herself, she’s mortified by the terrible violence these children encounter on their way through Mexico. To demonstrate what migrants are up against, she notes that “eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way.” Furthermore, many migrants are kidnapped or disappear, as drug cartels often abduct them and force them to work without wages. This consideration dovetails into the questionnaire’s eighth question, “Has anyone hurt, threatened, or frightened you since you came to the U.S.?” Luiselli tells stories about officers who shoot and kill unsuspecting migrants and then claim to have done so out of “self-defense,” despite any evidence to support this. To add to this, there are also “civilian vigilantes and owners of private ranches” who “hunt undocumented migrants.”
After her road trip, Luiselli starts volunteering at The Door in late 2014 with her nineteen-year-old niece. It is around this time that the media coverage of the “children’s crisis” becomes nearly “constant.” Luiselli notices that the majority of the child migrants come from Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras. What’s more, almost all of them have come to the United States to escape gang violence. In response to the crisis, Luiselli narrates, President Barrack Obama issued a “priority juvenile docket” in 2014, declaring that all child migrants must appear in immigration court within 21 days of arriving in the United States. “Being moved to the top of a list, in this context, was the least desirable thing,” Luiselli explains, “at least from the point of view of the children involved. Basically, the priority juvenile docket implied that deportation proceedings against them were accelerated by 94 percent, and that both they and the organizations that normally provided legal representation now had much less time to build a defense.”
Luiselli’s first interview with a migrant is with Manu López, who is sixteen and has come to the United States from Honduras. He is terse with her, but he explains that he left his home country because gang members were pursuing him. He even shows her a copy of a police report he filed, outlining the fact that these gang members used to wait for him outside school every day and follow him home, threatening to kill him all the while. The copy of the report claims that the police department will take action, but this never happened.
Luiselli points out that, despite the frequent coverage of the immigration crisis, “few narratives have made the effort to turn things around and understand the crisis from the point of view of the children involved.” Going on, she explains the origins of gangs like MS-13. During the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s and early ’90s, she says, the United States funded the militaristic Salvadoran government, thereby helping them massacre various opposition groups. As a result, large numbers of Salvadorans left the country, coming to the United States as “political refugees.” Because many of these refugees had become involved in guerilla warfare to resist the dangerous government, they were accustomed to violence, which they encountered once again when they found themselves facing gangs in cities like Los Angeles. To protect themselves, then, they formed MS-13, which quickly became the notoriously violent group it is now. When the United States government cracked down on immigration in the 1990s, it deported large numbers of people, including many members of MS-13. As such, the gang spread to Central America, which is why it’s now driving people back to the United States. “The whole story is an absurd, circular nightmare,” Luiselli writes.
Luiselli struggles with the linguistic and narrative difficulties of her job as an interpreter. She sometimes tells her daughter what she hears, and her daughter always asks how the stories end, though Luiselli is unable to answer this question. She also considers the fact that what a child says during the interview greatly affects whether or not they’ll be deported. If they answer the questions “correctly,” it’s more likely that a lawyer will agree to take their case. A “correct” answer, Luiselli explains, is one that is candid about the hardships a child has endured, making it clear why they can’t return to their home country.
Although Luiselli usually doesn’t know the end of her subjects’ stories, she’s able to follow what happens to Manu in the aftermath of his interview. In that initial meeting, he tells her that he and his friend were chased by gang members in Honduras one day after school. The gang members killed his friend, but Manu was able to escape. This was when he called his aunt Alina, who had already immigrated to Hempstead, Long Island. Hearing what had happened, Alina made arrangements for Manu to join her in America, paying $4,000 for a “coyote” (a guide) to bring him across the border. Because the police report Manu possesses is “material evidence” that it’s unsafe for him to return to Honduras, a group of high-powered lawyers have now taken on his case, and they ask Luiselli to continue acting as a translator and interpreter. In a fancy building, she convenes with Manu, Alina, and the lawyers. Manu tells them that things are going well but that he wants to drop out of Hempstead High School. When pressed, he explains that the school is full of MS-13 and Barrio 18 members. Recently, Barrio 18 beat him up, knocking out his front teeth. MS-13 intervened and protected him, meaning that he now owes them, though he has thus far managed to avoid joining the gang. Upon hearing that Manu wants to drop out, though, his lawyers inform him that his legal status in the United States requires him to be a student.
Having explained Manu’s predicament, Luiselli argues that the children who cross the border should have “the right to asylum.” She also upholds that all of the governments involved in the immigration crisis—the United States, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—should start thinking about it as a “transnational” and “hemispheric war,” thereby giving them a reason to come together to create “combined policies.”
Luiselli starts teaching a Spanish conversation class at Hofstra University in Hempstead. She decides to turn the class into a “migration think tank,” in which she and her students discuss the crisis and the best way to approach it. As the semester continues, the students become enthusiastic about taking action, eventually forming a nonprofit organization called Teenage Immigrant Integration Association (TIIA), which aims to help at-risk migrant teenagers quickly “integrate” into American society and, thus, avoid gang life. The group organizes language classes, civil rights workshops, and pickup soccer games, which Manu occasionally attends. Manu, for his part, busies himself by going to a church where he has found a community. He also has relationships with mentors at another anti-gang nonprofit, and he’s trying to improve his English by taking courses with TIIA.
