Creating Preemptive Suspects: National Security,Border Defense,and Immigration Policy,1980–Present

The Convergence of U.S. Foreign Security Policy and Asylum Policy in Central America

In the 1980s the United States supported the Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments and militaries that were fighting leftist popular armed movements and the Contra rebels based in Honduras who were fighting the socialist Sandinista government. In an address to the nation on U.S. policy in Central America delivered on May 9, 1984, President Reagan spelled out the dangers to U.S. national security, border defense, and ultimately U.S. society itself that justified U.S. support of undemocratic regimes, undermined the cases of hundreds of thousands of war refugees seeking protection in the United States, and caused the United States to turn a blind eye to and continue to fund militaries that committed massive human rights abuses (Reagan, 1984):

Central America is a region of great importance to the United States. And it is so close: San Salvador is closer to Houston, Texas, than Houston is to Washington, DC. Central America is America. It’s at our doorstep, and it’s become the stage for a bold attempt by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua to install communism by force throughout the hemisphere. . . .

What we see in El Salvador is an attempt to destabilize the entire region and eventually move chaos and anarchy toward the American border. . . .

As the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, chaired by Henry Kissinger, agreed, if we do nothing, if we continue to provide too little help, our choice will be a Communist Central America with additional Communist military bases on the mainland of this hemisphere and Communist subversion spreading southward and northward. This Communist subversion poses the threat that a hundred million people from Panama to the open border of our South could come under the control of pro-Soviet regimes. . . .

The simple questions are: Will we support freedom in this hemisphere or not? Will we defend our vital interests in this hemisphere or not? Will we stop the spread of communism in this hemisphere or not? Will we act while there is still time?

Reagan emphasized that the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala had recently held elections and were making progress toward democracy. He linked the Sandinistas to Cuba and the Soviet Union, saying that with Soviet and Cuban support Nicaragua had begun “supporting aggression and terrorism against El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. They opened training camps for guerrillas from El Salvador so they could return to their country and attack its government” (Reagan, 1984). Following the lead of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Reagan invoked “communist subversion” as the primary threat to the United States. This rhetorical move established the particular categories of “communist,” “subversive,” and “guerrilla” that were later applied in U.S. asylum policy.

Throughout the Salvadoran civil war, from 1979 until 1992, the United States spent US$6 billion to shore up various branches of the Salvadoran armed forces in an effort to prevent a victory by the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Lauria-Santiago and Binford, 2004: 3–4). In this civil war, more than 80,000 people died, at least 8,000 were disappeared, and massive human rights violations occurred. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have linked the Salvadoran military, different police forces, and death squads to thousands of cases of assassination, torture, rape, and imprisonment of peasants, union leaders, students, and others who were politically unaffiliated. The final report of the United Nations Truth Commission (Naciones Unidas, 1993) found that the military and far-right death squads with ties to the army were responsible for 85 percent of the 25,000 civilian deaths it investigated.

In Guatemala the ramping up of a civil war that began in the 1950s targeted indigenous communities with a campaign of genocide, scorched-earth missions to burn entire villages, forced displacement, and the pursuit of survivors. The official statistics of what is known as La Violencia include 400 massacres in villages burned off the map, 1.5 million people displaced, 150,000 refugees, and more than 200,000 dead or disappeared (Commission for Historical Clarification, 1999a; 1999b; Sanford, 2003: 14). The report of the Commission for Historical Clarification blames the Guatemalan army for 93 percent of the human rights violations.

U.S. support for the Salvadoran and Guatemalan militaries was justified in terms of national security. President Reagan had declared his intention to “roll back communism” in Central America. U.S. national security doctrine centered on the discourses of the cold war and fighting communism. In El Salvador, Guatemala, and other Central American states dependent on U.S. aid and political influence, the doctrine assigned to the armed forces and their allies the role of “safeguarding internal security and waging war against ‘subversive elements’ within their borders” (Fisher, 1993: 10). In the patterns of people targeted for assassination, torture, rape, and other forms of violence, “subversive” was translated to mean anything that threatened the status quo politically, economically, or even culturally. It resulted in the creation of groups of preemptive suspects who were hunted and killed and whose deaths were justified as necessary in the name of security. When these people made it into the United States as refugees seeking asylum, these categories still permeated their bodies and biographies in U.S. asylum proceedings.

The brutal reality of living in the midst of U.S.-funded wars in Guatemala and El Salvador resulted in the flight of almost 1 million Salvadorans and Guatemalans through Mexico to enter the United States without documentation (Coutin, 2003; 2007). “Thousands traveled undetected to major cities such as Washington, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Chicago” (Gzesh, 2006). While Congress had imposed a ban on foreign assistance to governments that had committed gross violations of human rights, the Reagan administration circumvented this requirement by continually declaring that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments were “making progress” in improving their human rights records. For example, in January 1982, the New York Times reported that the Reagan government had certified aid to El Salvador for the first time: “Although serious problems remain, we conclude that the Government of El Salvador is making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights” (Weintraub, 1982).

The U.S. government discouraged Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees from seeking asylum in the United States, often calling them economic migrants and implying that they were undeserving of protection. Immigration judges who heard asylum cases received individual “advisory opinion letters” from the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs with regard to the credibility of the applicant’s fear of prosecution (Andrioff, 1985: 110; Gzesh, 2006) that usually repeated the government’s declaration that human rights records were improving.

For seven months in 1987, I worked as a paralegal in Boston while I was writing my doctoral dissertation. Not only did I process hundreds of “amnesty cases” related to the last comprehensive immigration reform we had, known as the Immigration Control and Reform Act (IRCA). I was also involved in dozens of Central American asylum cases. Approval rates for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases were under 3 percent in 1984 (Gzesh, 2006). For El Salvador in that year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service processed 13, 373 applications for political asylum and granted 328. Of the applicants denied about 4,000 were “returned to El Salvador” through deportation procedures (Andrioff, 1985: 110 n. 18). Nicaraguans fleeing the Sandinista government at the same time were increasingly granted asylum. While in 1984 Nicaraguan asylum seekers had an acceptance rate of 12 percent, by 1987 it was 85 percent (Jensen, 2012: 7). We see a clear pattern here of the influence of U.S. foreign policy on asylum decisions and U.S. government identification of preemptive suspects.

The experience with asylum seeking of María Teresa Tula is illustrative here. I met María when she was living undocumented in Washington, DC, with her children, and over several years we published her testimony in English and Spanish (Stephen, 1995; Stephen and Tula, 1994). One of the 12 founders of the human rights organization known as CO-MADRES (Comité de Madres y Familiares de Presos, Desaparecidos y Asesinados de El Salvador “Monseñor Romero” [Monseñor Romero Committee of Mothers and Families of Prisoners, Disappeared, and Assassinated]), María had fled El Salvador through Guatemala into Mexico and crossed into the United States after her husband, who was a union activist, was assassinated. She was imprisoned and tortured from July to October 1986, and in January 1987 she left for Mexico. In March 1987 she crossed the Sonoran desert with a coyote and eventually arrived in Tucson. There she was temporarily sheltered by people from the Sanctuary movement, who provided safe haven for thousands of Central American refugees in cities throughout the United States. She went briefly to New York and then settled in Washington, DC. In April 1987 she petitioned for political asylum, and in May 1988 her petition was denied (Stephen and Tula, 1994: 172–173):

The State Department opinion attached to my asylum case stated that I was a terrorist, anarchist, communist, and a guerrilla fighter and that I would present a security problem for the United States. They said they didn’t believe that I was captured and tortured; they said that I had made it all up just to receive political asylum. The State Department also said that there was respect for human rights in El Salvador. This was their answer to my request for political asylum. After they denied my request for political asylum, I received a letter informing me that I had to be out of the country by June 1988. My lawyers told me not to leave.

As did thousands of other Salvadorans who had sought and been denied asylum and many thousands of others who had not sought it, María remained in the United States undocumented. In 1991 she received temporary residence under an interim law granting Salvadoran refugees 18 months of legal residence. This status was renewed in 1992 and in 1994, and in 1994, after her testimonial book had appeared, she finally received political asylum (Coutin, 2011). She moved to Minneapolis in 1995, where she continued her political work through Comunidades Compañeras en el Desarrollo Alternativo (Companion Communities in Alternative Development), which links U.S. municipalities to sister communities in El Salvador.

Wars, Nafta, “Security,” and the Restructuring of the U.S. Economy

One of the consequences of the civil war in El Salvador was large-scale migration both within El Salvador and to Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and the United States. By 1981 some 60,000 refugees were housed in camps in Honduras, fleeing some of the most conflict-ridden zones of the country. Some 20,000 Salvadoran refugees also sought sanctuary in Nicaragua, and an estimated 80,000–110,000 more relocated to Guatemala and thence to Mexico, many hoping ultimately to reach the United States. Indeed, between 1979 and 1988 as many as 500,000 Salvadorans were estimated to have reached the United States, the majority via Mexico.

The anthropologist Elana Zilberg (2004) has suggested that neoliberal policy and the intersection of criminal, antiterrorist, and immigration law in the 1990s (such as Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996) turned nonviolent crimes such as drunk driving into aggravated felonies that resulted in increasing numbers of deportations. Those convicted were labeled as criminals, terrorists, and subversives and joined the ranks of those unwelcome in the United States, where they were raised, or in their own countries of origin. This combination of laws and security discourse inherited from the 1980s produced what Zilberg (2011) calls “neoliberal securityscapes.” Her ethnography suggests that Salvadoran immigrants who had fled the war and been raised in Los Angeles and who identified themselves as members of or sympathetic to gangs were deported to El Salvador after being jailed in the United States. The convergence of U.S. and Salvadoran “zero-tolerance” policing strategies for gang eradication in both countries often contributed to the violence these policies seek to eliminate in both countries.

The number of refugees and displaced persons in El Salvador was estimated at 1 million, or 20 percent of the population, roughly half of whom had left the country. Approximately 20 percent of the Salvadoran population still resides outside of the country. The U.S. 2000 census found that there are 655,165 Salvadoran immigrants living in the United States (U.S. Census, 2001), and by 2010 there were 1,648,968 (Ennis, Rios-Vargas, and Albert, 2011; see Coutin, 2011). A majority had migrated during the 1980s, with numbers slowing down by the 1990s when the civil war was over. The presence of Salvadoran workers in the United States has been crucial to the Salvadoran economy. In 2002 Salvadorans in the United States sent home US$1.9 billion in remittances (Orozco, 2003). By 2005 the figure was US$2.8 billion. In 2006 remittances were almost 17 percent of the gross domestic product (Gammage, 2007). In 2013 they amounted to US$4.2 billion. In 2012, remittances per capita from the United States were US$2,939 (Pew Research Center, 2014).

In Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) solidified changes made during the 1980s to facilitate debt repayment. Major changes were made in agriculture. Subsidies and loans for small farmers disappeared, and approximately 3 million corn farmers and their families were estimated to have moved into other sectors. This had serious consequences for many people. For self-employed farmers, wage losses in the 1990s were dramatic. By 2003, subsistence farmers were earning only 11.6 percent of what they had in 1991. The proportion of rural households living in poverty increased from 56 percent in 1992 to 60.7 percent in 2000 (White, Salas, and Gammage, 2003: 27). NAFTA also facilitated the entrance of large corporate stores and outlets into Mexico such as Walmart and Sam’s Club, which bankrupted many smaller and medium-sized businesses and increased imports of clothing and other goods from China, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.

Immigration Policy as Labor Policy

Since the 1920s, U.S. immigration policy in relation to Mexico has served primarily as labor policy—inviting workers in when they are needed and then showing them the door when it becomes politically expedient. U.S. immigration policy is directly responsible for increased levels of undocumented immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time that some officials in Ronald Reagan’s government were certifying the human rights progress of the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments and denying asylum applications, others were busy crafting a comprehensive immigration reform program that benefited 3 million people and their families, primarily but not exclusively from Mexico.

The fact that so many Mexicans (2.3 million) took advantage of the IRCA’s legalization provisions reflects economic circumstances in Mexico as well as opportunities in the United States (Durand, Massey, and Parrado, 1999). Throughout the 1990s Mexican immigration to the United States increased dramatically. By 2010 the undocumented population of the United States was about 11.2 million, and about 58 percent of these were from Mexico (Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2012). This number remained steady till 2015. By 2010 there were 1 million “unauthorized immigrants under age 18 in the United States, as well as 4.5 million U.S.-born children whose parents were unauthorized” (Passel and Cohn, 2011). With stronger U.S. border enforcement in the mid-1990s and the increasing cost and dangers of crossing over, both legal and undocumented migrants are staying longer in the United States (see Cornelius, 2006: 11; Massey, Durand, and Malone, 2002: 128–133; Reyes, 2004).

From Reagan’s Border Defense and Security Policy to Border Deterence, Deportation, and Death in the Desert

U.S. national security and asylum policies from the 1980s are the bedrock for subsequent border defense and immigration and deportation strategies. Beginning with the Clinton government, the United States turned the U.S.-Mexico border into a militarized zone in which the physical harshness and danger of the Sonoran desert are part and parcel of the securitization of the country. As the anthropologists Jason de León (2012; 2015) and Rocio Magaña (2008; 2010) suggest, U.S. border defense policy, which funnels migrants into desert corridors where the weather and geography are very dangerous, is a policy of death and suffering. In 1994 President Clinton initiated Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, the first of many walls constructed at border ports of entry and outside them in the course of the 1990s. Between 1998 and 2012, 5,595 people died on the border, according to statistics from the U.S. Border Patrol. In 2012, 477 deaths were registered despite greatly reduced numbers of apprehensions (Anderson, 2013). With the construction of border walls and an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents from 4,208 to 21,394 by the end of 2012 (Anderson, 2013), the market for skilled smugglers and the cost of passage increased very significantly. At roughly the same time, drug transport routes were being consolidated within Mexico, and competition between different organized crime groups for control of border crossing routes increased. Just as free-trade agreements encouraged the vertical integration of businesses such as agriculture and food processing, entrepreneurs in the drug transport business expanded their commodities to include humans (see Vogt, 2013). As human smuggling and drug smuggling came to occupy overlapping turf, the two businesses became integrated.

The War on Drugs in Mexico militarized many regions of the country and had horrific results. Launched by Mexico’s previous president, Felipe Calderón, and continued under current president Enrique Peña Nieto, the deployment of the Mexican army, federal police, and marines between 2006 and 2013 resulted in at least 120,000 murders, 27,000 disappeared, and 250,000 or more displaced, with about half moving to other locations inside Mexico and others to the United States (Aguirre, 2013; Bowden and Molloy, 2012). The resurgence of the disappeared in Mexico is mirrored by other disappearances on the border, whose numbers may exceed that of those found dead (Stephen, 2008). For Central Americans passing through Mexico over the southern border, the journey through Mexico is perilous. While no official statistics exist, unofficial estimates are that 70,000–150,000 Central Americans have died in recent years while trying to cross Mexico—numbers similar to those of deaths during the Salvadoran and Guatemalan civil wars (Telesur, 2014). They are subject to violence, extortion, kidnapping, and murder by organized crime groups and corrupt Mexican police and other security officials (Martínez, 2014; Telesur, 2014). Cartels and cartel-affiliated gangs and businesses control integrated routes that reach deep into Central America and run through Mexico on trains and other forms of transportation to the United States.

In 2005, when I was conducting fieldwork in the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango, two recent cases of disappearances were causing concern. Atenango is a transborder community with a long history of migration within Mexico and emigration to the United States (Stephen, 2007). People from Atenango have been coming to the United States since the beginning of the bracero program. By 2006 there were clusters of families from Atenango living in more than 12 locations in the United States and an equal number in other parts of Mexico. The first case began and ended in tragedy. In 2003 Mariano Gonzales, a man in his late twenties who was living and working undocumented in Santa Maria, California, returned to Atenango with his wife to bury his brother, who had died in a car accident in the United States. On their return to the United States through the Arizona desert with a locally known coyote, they disappeared, and their bodies were never found. Their children, who had been left behind with relatives, were brought back to Atenango to live with their grandparents. They didn’t adjust to life in a small rural community and missed their parents and life in the United States. Because they were U.S. citizens, they could easily return to the United States, and they did so.

The second case involved seven people who left Atenango on a bus on July 16, 2005, to go to the border town of Sonoyta, where they expected to cross over to the United States. Sonoyta is located across the border from Lukeville, Arizona, and crossings take migrants into the most desolate area of the western Arizona desert, which includes the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation and Organ Pipe National Monument. In July the temperature often goes well above 110 degrees. The group included five men between the ages of 26 and 49 and two boys of 15 and 16. By August 16 there had been no word from any of them. With local officials, their families created flyers with their photographs to circulate and called and faxed family members in California, Oregon, and Arizona and Mexican consulates in Arizona and elsewhere. The offices of the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations) were alerted in Juxtlahuaca, Tijuana, Los Angeles, and Fresno, and other nongovernmental organizations and government agencies such as the Instituto Oaxaqueño de Atención al Migrante (Oaxacan Institute for Attention to the Migrant) were notified. The mothers of the two boys were unable to eat or sleep and circulated endlessly around Atenango, Juxtlahuaca, and elsewhere seeking help in locating their children. The wife of one of the missing men assumed not only her own anguish but that of her son, who remained at home, commenting to me, “My son is asking for his father. ‘How is my Dad,’ he asks? ‘Did something bad happen to him? Is he OK? What happened?’” The family never got answers.

The seven who disappeared were to be led by a town-based guide, who may not have known about the 10 percent tax charged people passing through or about the extreme heat. They had to cross a border that is patrolled by the Mexican army, various kinds of police, the U.S. Border Patrol, and the smuggling cartels and their enforcers, who charge people for passage and may kidnap them for ransom. Undertaking the crossing is looking death in the face. Those who migrate risk their lives. They and their extended families are affected by the Prevention through Deterrence strategy and ongoing militarization on both sides of the border.

Material and Ideological Recycling: Contamination of U.S. Society by Central American and Mexican Migrants

Prevention through Deterrence recycles U.S. national security discourses of the 1980s. Focused on detecting, deterring, and apprehending people attempting to cross the border between official points of entry, it has resulted in the creation of a new group of preemptive suspects threatening U.S. national security. In addition to a workforce of over 20,000 agents, the U.S. Border Patrol deploys vehicles, aircraft, watercraft, and many different technologies to defend the border (Haldall, 2010). In 2003 it released a post-9/11 strategy that was later integrated into its 2006–2010 strategic plan. The strategy included preventing terrorism, detecting and preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons, including weapons of mass effect, from entering the United States, strengthening our control of our borders, strengthening national security between ports of entry to prevent the illegal entry of terrorists, terrorist weapons, contraband, and illegal aliens into the United States, protecting America and its citizens, and contributing to a safer America by prohibiting the introduction of contraband, including illegal drugs and other harmful materials and organisms, into the United States (Office of the Border Patrol, 2004: 3). This report puts the categories of “terrorists” and “illegal aliens” into the same sentence. It also introduces harmful materials and organisms as additional parts of what the deterrence strategy is to do. Thus “terrorists,” “illegal aliens,” “illegal drugs,” and “other harmful materials and organisms” are all categories of people/things to be prevented from entering the United States.

The Preemptive Suspects of Today: Women and Children from Central America and Mexico

The preemptive suspects of today are women and children from Central America and Mexico. In June 2014 President Obama labeled the presence of more than 50,000 unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children who had crossed the border since October 2013 a “humanitarian crisis.” The thousands of undocumented women who were a part of this migration as well as hundreds of thousands of other undocumented women from Mexico who are already here were invisible. Like the children, undocumented women are often fleeing conditions of violence, abuse, poverty, and hunger and seeking to be reunited with family members (Kennedy, 2014).

While the U.S. government does not think of its immigration and security policies as gendered, their structure and implementation have explicitly gendered results. In 2008, men were 55.8 percent of all Mexican immigrants (documented and undocumented) (Terrazas, 2010). Since 2008 the number of deportations from the interior of the United States has increased significantly; the Obama administration has set a deportation record, averaging about 400,000 per year. According to a 2014 New York Times investigation, two-thirds of the nearly 2 million deportation cases on Obama’s watch have involved people who had committed minor infractions, including traffic violations, or had no criminal record at all (Thompson and Cohen, 2014). Those detained have been confined in county jails but also in for-profit prisons, adding a strong economic link to the discourse of securitization. Melanie Diaz and Timothy Keen (2015) report that annual “private prison corporations earn about about 3 billion dollars, with over half of the profit coming from facilities holding undocumented immigrants.” There are currently 13 privately operated criminal alien requirement prisons, many of which are run by the two largest prison corporations, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group.

Most of those deported have been Mexican men between the ages of 20 and 30, many of whom have children (Foley, 2014; TRAC, 2014). The practice of deporting parents breaks up many families, which live divided between the United States and Mexico. Many of these men live marginal lives on the Mexican side of the border and may not speak Spanish (see Hansen, 2015). Some men who are deported remain in Mexico, but many keep trying to get back into the United States. The United States is deporting men and breaking up their families, and women and children are fleeing Central America and parts of Mexico and coming to the United States.

The adminstrative relief program set up by President Obama in November 2014, which many hoped would provide relief for several millions of people who had U.S.- citizen or resident children with temporary legal status, was stopped in its tracks by a Republican lawsuit. The appeal filed by the Obama administration asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate a hold placed on the deportation deferrals by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen. In May 2015 a divided three-judge appeals panel, ruling in the states’ favor, denied a Department of Justice bid to overturn a lower-court order, leaving nearly 5 million people who would have benefited from deferred deportation and work permits in legal limbo. In November 2015 the Obama administration petitioned the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s decision. In June of 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a 4-4 split decision that effectively blocked implementation of President Obama’s executive action on immigration that expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and created Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA).

Unfortunately, the women and children coming into the United States have been read by the immigration legal system and some people living in the United States as terrorists, criminals, and illegal aliens. While they should be considered refugees and afforded legal counsel and the opportunity to apply for asylum, many are not getting that chance. According to the New York Times reporter Liz Robbins (2015), 84,000 children were apprehended at the border during the 2014 fiscal year and the first six months of the 2015 fiscal year. A small percentage have been granted political asylum, but 69 percent of children’s cases are still pending despite having been moved to the head of the line (see Semple, 2014). The majority were from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, followed by Mexico. Of the 79,088 removal cases initiated by the government, 15,207 children had been ordered deported as of June 2015 (Robbins, 2015). Under an antitrafficking statute adopted with bipartisan support in 2008, minors from Central America cannot be deported immediately and must be given a court hearing. Mexican minors caught crossing the border may be sent back quickly (Shear, 2014).

In the summer of 2014, when thousands of children and women were coming to the United States primarily through Texas, they were shipped out to detention facilities in New Mexico, California, and Arizona. While in some communities they were welcomed and dozens of volunteers set out to help them, in other places they were met by signs and crowds telling them to go home or worse. In July 2014, 140 women and children on buses were met by crowds bearing signs such as “Return to Sender” and, according to one reporter, “Illegals Today, Jihadists with Nukes Tomorrow” (Al Jazeera America, 2014). News reports show people screaming things like “We don’t want them here. Turn around and go home” (ABC News, 2014). The direct equation of undocumented women and children with jihadists and nukes is a frightening reflection of the alignment of overlapping categories seen in the Border Patrol’s strategic plan unifying “illegal aliens” with “terrorists” and “weapons of mass effect.”

The story of a girl for whom I provided expert testimony in December 2014 is an example of the experience of the preemptive suspects of the 2000s.Claudina García Contreras was born in 1998 in a small village in the western part of Guatemala, San Marcos, not far from the Mexican border. Her father came to the United States to work when she was two years old. Her mother left when she was five, leaving her in the care of her uncle and aunt. After Claudina’s aunt and uncle had children, she was essentially treated as a household servant. She was only allowed to leave to go to school and never given any physical affection or presents. She was also physically beaten and suffered sexual assault by a visiting relative at the age of seven. She maintained a strong belief in God and relied on this faith to make it through her very painful daily life.

Some relatives taking care of children provide a high level of care for them. Kristin Yarris (2014) has documented the extreme care and devotion that grandmothers in Nicaragua provide for grandchildren left in their care. Similarly, Leisy Abrego (2014) has documented the sacrifices parents make for their children and the connections they struggle to keep with them when separated. Research on transborder families in which children are left in the care of other relatives such as aunts, uncles, or godparents suggests that the experience is mixed. Some relatives use remittance money to care for children, but others do not (see Carpena-Mendez, 2006). In areas of Guatemala such as San Marcos and Huehuetenango that are centers of opium and marijuana production and located on drug trafficking and smuggling routes, young girls without their parents can be particularly vulnerable. Local gangs and organized crime groups control local commerce and are often integrated with the police and local government officials. Members of these groups are on the lookout for unaccompanied children, particularly girls, and will take advantage of them if they are not accompanied by male relatives and protected. Many children make heroic efforts to be reunited with their parents in the United States

In her declaration, Claudina shared that she knew that her community was not safe. She was aware of local gangs, known as maras, and had heard of girls who were raped, killed, or both. She never stayed out past 5 p.m. At the age of 15 she decided to leave Guatemala. She first took a bus to Chiapas, Mexico, and then traveled through Mexico up to the U.S.-Mexico border. There, in a border town, she was kidnapped by someone who had said he would help her cross and held in an unknown location for two weeks. Her kidnappers called her parents, who resided in Oregon, and they wired the ransom money. She was released and entered the United States. At the border she turned herself in to U.S. immigration officers and told them what had happened. Because her parents knew where she was, they immediately located her, and eventually she was released to them. In January 2015 her petition for asylum was granted, and she is now living with her parents.

A preemptive suspect who has suffered domestic servitude, sexual assault, and psychological and physical abuse, Claudina now feels safe and loved, but she has been greatly traumatized by all that happened. She is in school and feeling much more optimistic about her future. She feels lucky to feel safe and go to school and have friends. She is inspired to continue her education and perhaps go to college and have a career. Claudina is “talking back” to the policies and practices that sought to silence her by living a full life and aspiring to her full rights as a resident of the United States.

Conclusions

María Teresa Tula, the couple disappeared in the desert, the teenagers from Atenango, and Claudina are all preemptive suspects under U.S. national security, border defense, and immigration policy. Many of these people die or disappear before they even reach U.S. soil. Others face an uphill battle to receive permission to remain in the United States and live, work, and study with dignity and full rights. The events of Ferguson, New York, and Ayotzinapa and others bring us full circle in our recognition of the dehumanization and devaluation that occurs despite the fact that we are supposed to live in a democratic society under the rule of law. Michael Kearney gave us analytical tools for making injustice and inequality visible and helping to celebrate the resilience and the many contributions of immigrants and migrants. In the spirit of his work, I end this article by expressing my respect for those contributions.

It has been my great privilege to work with many immigrant and migrant individuals, families, communities, and organizations over the past 30 years. Most recently I have focused on political asylum, particularly for women. As anthropologists honoring the legacy of Michael Kearney, we need to construct analytical models to illuminate how U.S. economic and security policies have created categories of people who can be systematically excluded from the United States by being labeled as dangerous, criminal, undeserving, and less valuable than U.S. citizens. At the same time, we need to theorize and make visible the agency, resilience, and contributions of those who come to the United States to make a life, create new beginnings, and build a future. I hope that I have been able to demonstrate the consistency of U.S. national security, immigration, and border defense policy from the 1980s to the present despite somewhat different packaging and to gesture toward the ways in which those treated as suspects have individually and collectively begun to “talk back” to U.S. policies of exclusion.