Tell Me How It Ends

“The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hand, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality. It reads as if it were written in high definition, and as you make your way down its forty questions it’s impossible not to feel that the world has become a much more fucked-up place than anyone could have ever imagined.”

The essay explores in detail the difference between people who come to America from a place of privilege, seeking green cards, and those who come out of necessity who are undocumented. Luiselli’s work as a volunteer interviewer reveals how bureaucratic systems dehumanize the people they are nominally designed to protect and serve.

“It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.”

One of the key arguments of the essay is that the undocumented children are refugees, not immigrants, and that their migration is an extreme response to an extreme situation. Luiselli will unpack the specifics of the violence these children face from gangs, the drug trade, and their own families.

“In varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts! They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen—these menacing, coffee-colored boys and girls, with their obsidian hair and slant eyes.”

As the crisis of undocumented migrant children unfolds, Luiselli is traveling through the American Southwest and cannot help but notice the cruel, inhumane portrait being painted. During this time, most media coverage avoided sympathetic portraits of the children, choosing to see the crisis through the lens of an overloaded administrative body. This was accompanied by more partisan messages that portrayed the children through directly inhumane messaging, which Luiselli documents in this passage.

“There is a saying about La Bestia: Go in alive, come out a mummy.”

La Bestia is the slang term for the train tops that many undocumented migrants travel on, and Luiselli sees clearly in her interviews the effect it has on children—it is a dangerous, emotionally-fraught journey that takes a heavy toll on them, both physically and mentally. Throughout the essay, Luiselli is careful to present the migrant experience from the point of view of the children who made the journey in an attempt to draw attention to the gravity of what they’ve faced.

“Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.”

This passage is in response to a police officer’s questioning Luiselli and her husband about why they’re traveling through the American Southwest—the officer thinks they must be looking for inspiration, and this is the response Luiselli knows she cannot give to a white figure of police authority. As a woman seeking citizenship in the United States who has made it her home for years, Luiselli has a complicated sense of her own complicity in the nation’s treatment of people like her.

“And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”

The impulse to tell the individual stories is born out of Luiselli’s volunteer work, and it’s also the animating force of the essay. For Luiselli, justice can only come with an empathetic honesty about what is happening in the children’s lives and how that is a transnational problem caused and heightened by American policy and indifference.

“The priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children. Ethically, that answer was more than questionable. In legal terms, it was a kind of backdoor escape route to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country’s front doors.”

The priority juvenile docket created by the Obama administration intends to address the influx of undocumented child migrants with speed, which, on paper, would seem to be an empathetic response that moves children out of the liminal state they’re in as undocumented children. The reality, however, is that the children now have over 90% less time to build a case, find a lawyer, and understand the nature of the charges against them. It is designed to ease the burden of the court system, not the children who have fled violence.

“It was just a piece of paper, damp with sweat, eroded by friction, folded and tucked inside a boy’s pocket. Originally, it had been a legal document, a complaint filed by a boy hoping to produce a change in his life. Now it was more of a historical document that disclosed the failure of the document’s original purpose and also explained the boy’s decision to leave that life. In a less obvious but equally material way, the document was also a road map of a migration, a testimony of the five thousand miles it traveled inside a boy’s pocket, aboard trains, on foot, in trucks, across various national borders, all the way to an immigration court in a distant city, where it was finally unfolded, spread out on a mahogany table, and read out loud by a stranger who had to ask the boy: Why did you come to the United States?”

Manu’s police report is a testament to the destructive power of a broken system that doesn’t help its citizens and physical evidence of the tragedy he is fleeing. Luiselli recognizes it as a symbolic object, the answer to the questions she must ask. It also becomes a key part of his legal argument—proof that he has suffered ‘enough’ for a lawyer to take his case and win him a pathway to staying in the United States.

“[MS-13 and Barrio 18] originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s, a time when the Bloods, Crips, Nazi Low Riders, and Aryan Brotherhood, among many others, were already well established in the United States. The original Barrio 18 members were second-generation Hispanics who grew up in L.A. gang culture. The MS-13 was originally a small coalition of immigrants from El Salvador who had sought exile in the U.S. during the long and ruthless Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992), in which the military-led government relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups.”

Luiselli points out that the two criminal organizations that have become the boogeymen of anti-immigrant rhetoric were born in the United States, caused by poverty, local violence, and the personal history of refugees fleeing a violent regime that was enabled and supported by United States foreign policy. That they are presented as a product of South American society alone is a dangerous lie that fosters xenophobic sentiment, in Luiselli’s view.

“Later on, in the 1990s, anti-immigration policies and programs in the U.S. led to massive deportations of Central Americans. Among them were thousands of MS-13 members—those perhaps quite understandably unwanted in the country. But the policies backfired: gang deportations became more of a metastasis than an eradication. Now the gang has become a kind of transnational army, with more than seventy thousand members spread across the United States, Mexico, and the Northern Triangle.”

One of the key arguments of the essay is that the violence that the undocumented migrant children are fleeing is not a product of South America but a transnational problem created by a complicated web of political and social cause and effect. The refugees who turned to crime in the United States due to a lack of social support were further harmed by their deportation to another place that gave them little social support, exacerbating the criminality and creating international connections that didn’t exist before.

“The family tree of migrant families is always split into two trunks: those who leave and those who stay.”

Luiselli paints a general portrait of broken families, parents driven by violence and poverty to separate from their children to make a pathway for safety and security in America. Most often, this means that younger, able-bodied adults are sent to work in the United States while children and the elderly stay behind, creating situations in which children have little access to (and sometimes no memory of) their parents.

“The immigration status of [undocumented immigrant children] family members is almost always ‘undocumented.’ This, of course, means that presenting themselves in court in the company of a sponsor exposes other members of their family to a system that they have been dodging, sometimes for decades. The guilt weighs on some children noticeably. Many ask during their interviews if their guardians will now be at risk for deportation.” 

There is a double bind at the core of the immigrant court system: the migrant children who need state-provided relief are also living with people who are undocumented themselves. This means that the whole family is put at risk when the child arrives, and they must be exposed to the possible ramifications through the very same bureaucratic system they hope will protect the child.

“A Border Patrol officer can base a decision to deport a Mexican child on any evidence—no matter how substantial or insubstantial—and is not required to document a rationale behind it.”

The voluntary return policy is part of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a Bush-era policy that Luiselli portrays as an inhumane redirection of the problem. It also means that Mexican citizens, particularly those fleeing violence or trafficking, must provide an unreasonable amount of proof to stay in the United States; otherwise, they can be deported with no due process whatsoever.

“An answer is ‘correct’ if it strengthens the child’s case and provides a potential avenue of relief. So, in the warped world of immigration, a correct answer is when, for example, a girl reveals that her father is an alcoholic who physically or sexually abused her, or when a boy reports that he received death threats or that he was beaten repeatedly by several gang members after refusing to acquiesce to recruitment at school and has physical injuries to prove it.”

Luiselli shows the difficult reality of her volunteer work. Cases are unlikely to be taken by lawyers whose time and resources are limited unless there is enough proof of suffering to make a case. For the children to find relief in the immigration court, they must linger in the trauma they have experienced and articulate it with a level of thoroughness and clarity that most children do not have, particularly regarding their traumatic experiences.

“During the interviews, I sometimes note the children’s answers in the first person and sometimes in the third.”

This is a telling detail, and Luiselli uses it to demonstrate how her volunteer work starts to draw an empathetic connection between herself and the children she’s interviewing. She cannot help but identify with them, both as a Mexican immigrant seeking citizenship and as a person who is closely connected to them and the injustices they face.

“All too often I find myself not wanting to write anymore, wanting to just sit there, quietly listening, wishing that the story I’m hearing had a better ending. I listen, hoping that the bullet shot at this boy’s little brother had missed. But it didn’t. The little brother was killed, and the boy fled. And now he is being screened, by me. Later, his screening, like many others, is filed and sent away to a lawyer: a snapshot of a life that will wait in the dark until maybe someone finds it and decides to make it a case.”

This passage is one of several that demonstrates the toll the refugee experience has on the individuals and on those who care for them. Luiselli notes that the bureaucratic system she works in reduces these tragedies to evidence, case files that are to be summarily judged, granting either relief or return.

“My government? Write this down in your notebook: they don’t do shit for anybody like me, that’s the problem.

It’s then that, from his pocket, he pulls out the piece of paper that haunted me for so long—a copy of the police report he filed against the gang. He filed it months before his friend was killed, but the police never did anything. And Manu knew, because everyone knows this is how it is, that the police wouldn’t do anything to prevent a second incident, or a third.”

Manu’s bitterness toward his government comes from how little help they offered after the death of his friend. After filing the police report, he realized that he was on his own against MS-13 and Barrio 18 and that no protection was coming for him except to flee.

“Under Programa Frontera Sur, the focus of border control for the Central American exodus is shifting from the Rio Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border to the Suchiate and Usumacinta Rivers on the Mexico-Guatemala. The United States, of course, not only endorses this shift but has been generously financing it: the State Department has paid the Mexican government tens of millions of dollars to filter the migration of Central Americans. In other words, following the old tradition of Latin America-U.S. governmental relations, the Mexican government is getting paid to do the dirty work.”

Throughout the essay, Luiselli notes a repeated pattern. The American government takes a “not in my backyard” approach to immigration problems for which they are partly culpable. In this case, the US government is pushing the problem to the Southern border of Mexico to end the crisis in their court system while failing to address the root of the problem in any substantial way.

“Between Hempstead and Tegucigalpa there is a long chain of causes and effects. Both cities can be drawn on the same map: the map of violence related to drug trafficking. This fact is ignored, however, by almost all of the official reports. The media wouldn’t put Hempstead, a city in New York, on the same plane as one in Honduras. What a scandal!”

For American media and public life to address the transnational nature of the drug trade and gang warfare comprehensively is unthinkable to Luiselli, as she is used to seeing a partisan simplification of the issue. But the reality of the situation is much more complicated, and to understand it requires an admission of culpability that the American body politic is not equipped to process.

“When causes are discussed, the general consensus and underlying assumption seem to be that the origins are circumscribed to ‘sending’ countries and their many local problems. No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a transnational problem that includes the United States—not as a distant observer or passive victim that must not deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.”

Here, Luiselli lays out more explicitly what she is arguing in the previous quote. The United States is culpable, both through its foreign policy and its immigration policy, for the migrant crisis it is now seeking to shunt back onto Mexico and Central America.

“Why did you come to the United States? We ask. They might ask a similar question: Why did we risk our lives to come to this country? Why did they come when, as if in some circular nightmare, they arrive at new schools, in their new neighborhoods, and find there the very things they were running from?”

Manu’s experience in a high school in Hempstead is dispiriting—he finds that MS-13 and Barrio 18-associated gangs are threatening him there, too, leading to Luiselli’s questions here. She sees this as a broad failure on the part of the international community and American society to protect suffering children.

. “The children who cross Mexico and arrive at the U.S. border are not ‘immigrants,’ not ‘illegals,’ not merely ‘undocumented minors.’ These children are refugees of a war, and, as such, they should all have the right to asylum. But not all of them have it.

‘Tell me how it ends, Mamma,’ my daughter asks me.

‘I don’t know.’”

As this essay is written in the throes of the migrant crisis, the title speaks to its position as an argument from the present tense of a situation. But it also speaks to whether or not there is reason to hope, both for the individual child and the situation as a whole. For most of the cases that Luiselli works with, deportation is likely, and she does not know how to address the magnitude of the grief that would accompany that outcome.

“The United States is a country full of holes, and Hempstead in particular is a giant shithole, as Manu says. But it’s also a place full of individuals who, out of a sense of duty toward other people, perhaps, are willing to fill those holes in one by one. There are lawyers and activists who work tirelessly to help communities that aren’t their own; there are students who, though not at all privileged, are willing to dedicate their time to those even less privileged than themselves.”

The hope that Luiselli looks for isn’t found in the bureaucratic systems that she and her interviewees struggle against. Rather, it is found in the individual activists and volunteers who have stepped in to fill a void that the system is disinterested in addressing. That the charitable spirit that Luiselli sees does not extend to the policies and systems that the society as a whole puts into place is the central problem that needs addressing, in Luiselli’s view, but until then, she has hope that the individual action will continue.