Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violent death and rape.

In April of 2015, Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova was deported to El Salvador. Juan was there at the airport, holding a sign that read “asesino” [assassin/murderer] on one side and asking, “Donde están los desaparecidos?” [“where are the missing?”] on the other (427).

Blitzer was following Vides Casanova’s deportation and learned that Juan had testified against him in the Florida civil case. He read the transcripts of Juan’s testimony, and in May 2020, they finally had a chance to speak. Both were quarantined, Juan in Usulután and Blitzer in New York. They spoke over the phone for an hour in “a flow of unselfconscious reflection” that took them to “unexpected places” (428). They spoke every weekday for a year, and as COVID-19 restrictions eased, their conversations ebbed to two or three times per week.

Using “brash executive action, relentless politics, and bureaucratic sleight of hand” (430), Trump achieved his campaign promise of curbing immigration. At the start of 2020, MPP was still in effect. Nearly 64,000 asylum seekers were enrolled and just 517 had received some kind of legal relief. Many abandoned their cases, and many were murdered, raped, and kidnapped while waiting in Mexico.