The boy was crying as federal agents ordered him into the government vehicle. Tell your mother goodbye, they said.
It was late October, and Blanca Vasquez and her 12-year-old son, Luis, had only been in the United States for a few hours. They had crossed the Rio Grande near El Paso, giving themselves up to Border Patrol agents to ask for asylum. A gang in El Salvador had murdered her husband, a military sergeant, and she said they were now after Luis.
For decades, hundreds of thousands of immigrant families from Central America, escaping gang violence and political persecution, have followed a similar path, relying on international treaties protecting those seeking asylum from being summarily turned away.
Vasquez figured she and Luis would be detained, or even released, while she fought for asylum. A 20-year-old federal settlement that bars the extended detention of migrant children would ensure they stayed together.
But that was then. This summer, the practice changed.
Under orders from President Donald Trump’s administration, the federal government would begin broadly prosecuting parents who enter illegally, forcing the removal of their children. That enables the administration to detain parents until they are deported or win asylum, rather than freeing them with their children to wait for their cases in the backlogged civil immigration courts, a practice known as “catch and release” that Trump has vowed to end.
The possibility of being criminally prosecuted and separated from their children, the government argued, would deter Vasquez and other migrants from making the dangerous journey north.
But for Vasquez it was too late to turn back.
She was in federal prison. And her son Luis was, where?
No one would say.
In February 2012, Vasquez and her family were living quietly in a three-bedroom house in a middle-class municipality called Apopa on the outskirts of San Salvador. She and her husband, Juan Landaverde, had remodeled the house themselves to make room for Luis, who was born eight years after they married and their first son, William, was born.
Landaverde had joined the military as a teenager, choosing the armed forces over the guerrillas at the height of one of the hemisphere’s most brutal civil wars. He rose steadily up the ranks and at 48, just one year before retirement, oversaw a prison, according to U.S. government documents
He controlled what went in and out, and what gang members could obtain. It was a powerful post that had spurred threats against him. But he always shrugged them off.
“Don’t worry, my girl,” he’d tell his wife. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
On the morning of Feb. 20, William called from school, asking his father to bring his homework. Landaverde had just dropped off Luis, and was on the way when he was suddenly ambushed by at least two teenagers who fired dozens of shots, according to newspaper accounts. A medical examiner’s report noted about 19 bullet holes in Landaverde’s body.
Luis, then 8, ran out, seeing one of the shooters carrying a gun, blood seeping down his shirt. It was William’s classmate, he said, a boy who had often knocked on their door to sell snacks. William said he and the boy had drifted apart after the youth joined the Barrio 18 gang that controlled their neighborhood.
Landaverde’s killing roiled the military. It was the third and highest-ranking murder of an army official that month, according to newspaper accounts, coming as the government was under pressure to reduce the soaring homicide rate. Reports had circulated that it was even open to deals with gang leaders if they could curb the murders.
Some viewed the attacks as a warning to the government that it had no choice but to negotiate with the gangs, who, with some 50,000 members and weapons including assault rifles and grenades, are veritable armed forces themselves.
The army interviewed William, who was then 17 and part of a folk-dancing troupe for his municipality. He said he couldn’t report his classmate. He feared what would happen if he did.
Barrio 18 members began trailing the family.
“From the moment I left the door to the moment I came back,” Vasquez said.
The military was under pressure to crack down on Landaverde’s killers. They arrested one teenager and killed another, according to newspaper accounts. Soon some military sources circulated a theory in a local paper that it was William who had asked the gang to target his father. The teenager was angry, the sources claimed, because his father had punished him for hanging out with the gang and he wanted to prove his loyalty to them.
William denies this. He said soldiers tried to coerce him not only into testifying against his classmate, but into naming gang members from the neighborhood. When he said no, fearing retribution, some soldiers accused him of belonging to the group. They beat him, damaging two of his ribs, according to records.
“They got angry and said if I don’t answer with the truth that they would kill me, and I kept saying I wasn’t a gang member,” William later told a U.S. government official. “One of them said he would kill me because I no longer had a right to live.”
William was investigated in his father’s killing, but never charged and has no criminal history, according to Salvadoran police records.
The murder placed the family in the crosshairs of a power struggle between El Salvador’s gangs and its military. A few weeks after Landaverde’s killing, the government signed a truce with gang leaders, offering them perks in exchange for less violence.
It did not make a difference in the lives of Vasquez and her children, who were under threat from both sides. They abandoned their house. In all, William said they moved about 15 times in four years to five cities across the country, often not living anywhere for more than a few months.
If they moved to a neighborhood controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha, they were seen as informers for the Barrio 18. In areas overseen by Barrio 18, they were targeted for knowing about the gang’s ties to Landaverde’s slaying.
William said he was assaulted more than a dozen times and once the gang even killed a teenage neighbor he said they mistook for him.
“Our lives as we knew it had ended,” William said.
By January 2016, William had decided to join the military, in part to honor his father’s memory but also in the hopes that it would offer him protection. During his training, he said soldiers recognized his last name and took him to an isolated barracks where they stripped him naked, beat him at gunpoint and once again accused him of gang ties.
On his way home to Apopa, where his mother had returned with Luis, William said gang members recognized and assaulted him, sending him to the hospital, according to medical records. He had nowhere to turn.
“The army said I had one week to file a complaint against the gang or they would disappear me,” he said. “But if I did that, the gang would kill me anyway.”
Almost four years to the day after his father’s murder, William left El Salvador, traveling 1,400 miles to Reynosa on the Mexican side of McAllen. He paid a smuggler to take him across the cartel-controlled Rio Grande, where Border Patrol agents found him walking in the brush.
He said he was afraid to go home. They transferred him to an immigrant detention center in New York and in a two-hour-long interview with an asylum officer, the 21-year-old explained why he needed refugee protection.
“The mareros won’t be satisfied until they kill me and the soldiers won’t be satisfied until they find the persons responsible for my father’s murder,” William said, according to the government interview transcripts. “No matter where I go there are soldiers and maras … The police are connected to the maras and I can’t ask the government (for help) because these groups have popped up, the exterminators and the death squadron.”
By then, the government had ended the gang truce, granting police and the military broad authority to use deadly force against them. Killings skyrocketed.
The asylum officer found William had a credible fear of suffering torture in El Salvador, the first step to receiving asylum. The government released him on a $10,000 bond, requiring him to wear a GPS-equipped ankle bracelet.
In the summer of 2016 he arrived in New Orleans, where he has an uncle, and found a job in construction. He trained to be a plumber. And though he was lonely, he was relieved. And safe.
In El Salvador, his mother and brother were anything but.
Gang members in Apopa began following 12-year-old Luis, his mother said. She stopped allowing him to go anywhere but school. Then shortly before Christmas a man Vasquez did not know approached her on the street.
“You need to leave this place to protect your son’s life,” he told her. “They are watching.”
In late November Vasquez sat nervously next to four other Central American parents in El Paso’s downtown federal courthouse, wearing a blue jumpsuit and shackled at her waist, wrists and ankles. It had been five weeks since she was detained at the border. She still had not been able to speak to Luis.
When they took him away, the mother had tried not to let him see her tears. She had painted on a smile, urging him to remember Psalm 91: “He will save you from the fowler’s snare.”
That Scripture had carried her through the years since her husband’s murder. It sustained her while her life fell apart and she and her boys embarked on a nomadic existence, trying to keep one step ahead of the gangs. And it had given her strength as she made the harrowing trek north. Now, she wasn’t so sure. She saw Luis in her dreams. He wore a gray shirt and moved his mouth, but she couldn’t hear him. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
Her prayer changed in prison.
“Why don’t you take my sons and me so that everything can end,” she now implored. “Let us die together, so that we don’t suffer anymore.”
In court, more than a dozen Border Patrol agents and an expert witness had arrived from across the country at taxpayer expense to testify for the government.
Sergio Garcia, an assistant federal public defender for the Western District of Texas, argued that the government’s practice of separating families by prosecuting parents violates the U.S. Constitution. In removing their children and withholding information about them, the government forced parents to plead guilty so that they could quickly reunite.
The government contended that the parents could take their cases to trial or post bond as in any other criminal proceeding. Not pursuing charges against parents traveling with children would encourage more to come here and even incite trafficking, the lawyers argued, if having a minor proves a protection against prosecution.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Miguel Torres worried that prosecuting parents prevents them from participating in their children’s immigration cases, noting that even the most egregious criminals retain parental rights. He suggested that concern about their children could factor into parents pleading guilty.
“As a practical matter, there’s no meaningful way for these (migrant) parents to know anything about their kids,” Torres said. “Parents don’t know if they’re going to be deported before, after, or at the same time as their kids.”
But the jurist was hard-pressed to dismiss the complaint. The parents had crossed the border illegally, the crime for which they stood accused. A higher court would have to decide if their due process rights had been violated.
In a speedy trial, slowed only by the public defender’s efforts to enter arguments into the record for an appeal, the judge found Vasquez and her codefendants guilty of the misdemeanor crime of improper entry. He sentenced them to one year of non-reporting probation.
They would be transferred to immigration detention and likely quickly deported, sometimes without their children, which could even put them at risk of losing legal custody of them. If asylum officials find the parents have a credible fear of returning home, they could remain in prison for months without seeing their children until their asylum claims are adjudicated.
Such a practice of family separation is “so fundamentally unconscionable it defies countless international and domestic laws on child welfare, human rights and refugees,” according to a complaint advocacy groups, including the Women’s Refugee Commission, filed with the Department of Homeland Security in December.
The judge asked the parents if they had anything to say.
“I have lost everything,” Vasquez said. “I don’t know how (my son) is … I need to go where he is.”
William’s stomach was tight with anxiety. He hadn’t heard from his mother in days, not since she and Luis made it to Juarez, across the river from El Paso.
One morning, his phone rang as he installed pipes in a house on the outskirts of New Orleans. He did not recognize the number.
“‘William,'” he remembered Luis saying. “‘I’m in New York. In a shelter for children.'”
It was a little boring, Luis said, though they get to play in the afternoons. Did William know where mom was?
He did not. But the call filled him with relief. Luis was the baby, the one his parents told him to protect.
“I felt like part of my life had been given back to me,” he said.
A few days later a stranger messaged him on Facebook. Was his mother Blanca Vasquez? If so, she was in prison in El Paso along with the man’s girlfriend. She needed William to put money into her detainee account so that she could call him.
A social worker called him too. She sent him paperwork to complete and asked him to mail his fingerprints. If he passed a background check, she said Luis could come live with him while he waits for his appointment in immigration court.
William was thrilled. Maybe his family could finally be together again. He does not have many friends in New Orleans, shying away from the nightlife and not wanting to risk anything that could jeopardize his asylum case. He works six days a week.
Now and again he’ll engage in jabber with his construction crew. All of them are from Central America too. Most have been living here illegally for years, and came to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina for the construction work. Then they stayed, and had American children who sometimes join them on the job site, marveling at the pieces of American dreams they are rebuilding for others.
William wants his uncle, an American citizen, to adopt Luis. He hopes his asylum is approved so that he can apply for a green card and join the military, but in the United States. He sees no future for El Salvador.
“It’s a chain of violence that will never end,” he said. “I’ve tried to forget, because to remember is to suffer.”
The purple sky had faded to black when his mother called from prison. William told her that the social worker said Luis would be arriving soon.
“Don’t worry, mom,” he said. “This problem, we’re going to solve it somehow.”
Then he began boarding shut the vacant house. Vagrants sometimes try to sneak in at night to escape the cold.
It’s human nature, William shrugged, to try to survive.
Shortly before Christmas, an asylum officer determined that Vasquez did not have a credible fear of returning to El Salvador. It was a painful blow, William said, and also confusing. His mother’s argument for asylum is the same as his own.
An immigration judge will now review the decision. William is searching for an attorney to help his mother in the proceeding. The vast majority of such rulings are not overturned.
Vasquez will likely be deported soon without either of her children. If she tries to return to the United States, she could face a felony charge for re-entry.
Her previous deportation would allow federal agents to remove her immediately after serving that sentence.
William and Luis will remain in New Orleans while they await the outcome of their immigration cases, though their first hearings are not until 2020.
Perhaps Luis’s uncle will adopt him, or he could qualify for a type of protection for child migrants who have been abandoned. Maybe William will receive asylum. It is unlikely that they will see their mother again for years.
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