Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer

Author:Jonathan Blitzer [Blitzer, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

34.

Border Emergency

On Mother’s Day weekend 2014, Obama’s new secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, was returning from California, where he and his wife were visiting their son, when a top official at Customs and Border Protection told him that the situation in South Texas was “out of control.” Thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America were showing up at Border Patrol stations, confounding agents and overwhelming the department’s resources. There was also a significant spike in the number of parents and children who were arriving together and seeking asylum.

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. The US government developed a $175 million program to house and process them, but few officials in the upper reaches of the administration paid much attention. Everyone was focused on comprehensive immigration reform, which remained stuck in the House.

Johnson and his wife rerouted from Washington, DC, and landed in McAllen, Texas, where the first detention facility they visited was overrun with children. One girl, who couldn’t have been older than ten, was sitting at a desk, in tears, waiting for an agent in a green uniform to take down her information. Almost all of the adults around were government personnel. Mylar blankets that looked like oversize sheets of tinfoil were scattered in pens enclosed by metal wiring. Johnson called Muñoz at the White House to deliver the news. “This thing is too big to downplay,” he said.

Nearly 69,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the border between October 2013 and September 2014, up from some 39,000 the previous year. Another 68,000 families were seeking asylum, a 200 percent increase. By the summer, in South Texas alone, there were 33,000 children in government custody.

The government rules for how to treat immigrant children at the border were laid out in an obscure court settlement known as the Flores agreement, the result of a lawsuit involving two Salvadoran children who had arrived in California in 1985. According to the agreement, which was later codified into law, immigration authorities could not detain children in borderland facilities for longer than seventy-two hours. Instead, the government was supposed to house them in the “least-restrictive setting” possible. Over the years, a network of shelters was created for this purpose, run out of a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services called the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But the existing system could only accommodate between six thousand and eight thousand children, and the volume of new arrivals was creating a bottleneck at the border. By the end of May, the Obama administration was using emergency shelters to move children out of immigration detention and into the care of HHS. A naval

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