34 The New York Review
to define the current era. Understand-
ing these dynamics is vital: since the
number of immigrants and refugees
adm itted to the US is capped by shr ink-
ing country-based quotas, the number
of asylum cases, which are governed in
part by international agreements and
not subject to numerical limits, have
exploded. Asylum seekers, once a small
subset of prospective immigrants, are
now situated at the very center of en-
forcement and policy, with anti-asylum
measures like the “Remain in Mexico”
regulations—officially known under
the Orwellian moniker “Migrant Pro-
tection Protocols”—requiring them to
wait for their asylum hearings on the
Mexican side of the border, leaving
them vulnerable to violence, exploita-
tion, and perpetual overcrowding.
The situation at our border is often
described as a crisis, but The Dispos-
sessed lays out its gradual design, sug-
gesting that Trump’s unraveling of
protections is not an initiative unique
to his presidency so much as a cul-
mination of a thirty-year worldwide
trend to “stymie, deter, and deny asy-
lum seekers.” Under Trump, of course,
there is something especially horrify-
ing about the loud and proud repudi-
ation of international protocols and
the wholehearted embrace of what
was previously a more quiet, if no less
concerted, effort to stave off the hud-
dled masses. But the impulse to reject
foreigners has always been buried just
under America’s supposedly welcom-
ing surface and was evident even at the
dawn of the post–World War II interna-
tional order.*
In 1951 the United Nations defined
refugee rights and outlined interna-
tional standards for protection by issu-
ing its landmark Refugee Convention.
The US, however, despite being a cen-
tral participant in negotiating its terms,
declined to sign on to the agreement
for seventeen years, bowing to nativist
political pressure. Our country finally
became party to the accord after it was
revised in 1967 to lift geographic and
temporal restrictions on refugees, so
that the US could, in part, save face
during the Vietnam War.
It was not until 1980, with the pas-
sage of the US Refugee Act, that the
legal definitions and protections laid
out in the Convention were finally cod-
ified explicitly in US law. Nevertheless,
in the following years the United States
aggressively resisted the arrival of flee-
ing Haitians, Central Americans, and
others, meeting their asylum claims
with disdain, denial, and worse. Wash-
ington reminds us:
Asylum seekers, then and now,
are not merely politely denied and
gamely deported—they are de-
tained, punished, humiliated, and
shackled in an elaborate show of
force meant to deter other poten-
tial asylum seekers from staking
their own claim.The historical analysis of The Dispos-
sessed is grounded by the intimately re-
ported story of an asylum- seeker named
Arnovis, a father from El Salvador who
ultimately makes three failed attempts
to enter the US, the final one resulting
in a month- long separation from his six-
year-old daughter, Meybelín, who was
held in the US after his deportation in
June 2018. Arnovis’s vulnerability, re-
solve, and ceaseless fear are all made
heartrendingly palpable: “My only
dream,” he tells Washington, “is to wake
up and be able to smile at my daughter.”
As Washington retraces Arnovis’s steps,
visiting sites in El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Mexico, he includes brief portraits
of bus passengers and train jumpers, of
low-level smugglers and their clients, re-
vealing the extent to which the horror
and displacement suffered by Arnovis
has become commonplace for genera-
tions of migrants.
The Dispossessed thus comes to oc-
cupy a unique middle ground between
a narrative story of immigration and
a historical survey of asylum. While
many immigration books center around
the authors’ efforts to remap journeys,
reconstruct stories, and piece together
voices to create vivid and wrenching
accounts, Washington instead tunes his
book to a multitude of voices, experi-
ences, and resonant moments in history
and literature. He is quick to cede his
voice to others who can describe with
greater immediacy what they have seen
and experienced.
He is also unafraid of long silences,
unanswered questions, and offhand
comments that linger in the air. “I can
do pretty good braids,” a woman hid-
ing out from immigration officials tells
Washington. As she braids the hair of
a social worker, she begins to recall
how she used to do this in exchange for
extra food while she was locked away
in a family detention center. “Does it
hurt?” she asks the social worker, in-
terrupting her own story. “Tell me if it
hurts. I’m scared to hurt you.”Increasingly, immigration narratives
are shaped by the voices of those who
have actually lived through border
crossings and dealt firsthand with the
long shadow of illegality. The past few
years have brought the publication
of groundbreaking works from poets
like Javier Zamora, journalists like
Jose Antonio Vargas, and memoirists
like Julissa Arce, Reyna Grande, and
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, whose
tender and profound Children of the
Land was published earlier this year.
For readers untouched by the violence
that grows at our borders, voices such
as these are vital for comprehending
the true cost of American immigration
enforcement. Another recent book
is Rosayra Pablo Cruz’s The Book of
Rosy, a first-person account of the hor-
rors of child separation.
After fleeing Guatemala with her
two sons in 2018, Pablo Cruz, who goes
by “Rosy,” arrives at the Arizona bor-
der and dutifully turns herself in to
immigration agents. She is soon torn
away from her boys, ages fifteen and
five, and made to endure close to eighty
days apart from them as she navigates a
maze of detention centers, courts, non-
profit aid groups, media outlets, and
foster care systems. Her book is writ-
ten in collaboration with Julie Schwiet-
ert Collazo—the founder of Immigrant
Families Together, one of the chief
advocacy groups that emerged in re-
sponse to child separation—and it thus
tells the story not only of Rosy’s perse-
verance but of the immense outcry and
ad hoc organizing that was required for
her to be released from detention and
reunited with her children.The plainspoken tone of The Book
of Rosy is striking, as is its vivid accu-
mulation of detail. Because migrants
are so rarely afforded a platform to
articulate their desires and imaginings
free from intermediaries, the book
also feels, at times, like a radical text.
Rosy’s straightforward observations of
seldom-seen places along the migrant
trail push back against reductionist
misrepresentations of the voyage north.
She writes of watching nursing moth-
ers, whose milk often dries up during
the journey, “trying to coax the last
drops” out of a breast. “They would
be as disappointed and as desperate as
their babies when it yielded no more,”
she observes, “and then they tried the
other breast, urging it to provide just
one more feeding.”
After she is separated from her boys
and detained in Arizona, Rosy gives
readers an inside view of the very same
facilities that are at the center of Mi-
grating to Prison. In contrast to García
Hernández’s system-wide assessment,
Rosy’s is filled with quotidian details:
the lines to use microwaves and the
anxious quarrels that break out there,
the way prisoners use toothpaste to
clean and whiten their undergarments,
and how women starved of diversion
and intimacy perform peep shows for
male detainees through opposing win-
dows, risking reprisal from guards who
threaten them with solitary confine-
ment. As her own form of distraction,
Rosy imagines what kinds of clothes
her fellow prisoners might wear if not
forced into ill-fitting jumpsuits, and
which accessories would best match
their personalities, sizing them up just
as she would the customers who passed
through the market where she sold such
things in Guatemala.
Aside from these flights of fancy,
most days in detention are defined by
“mind- and soul-numbing dullness,”
and Rosy describes a litany of insuffer-
able conditions that match with grim
precision the testimony of more recent
detainees like Enrique:In my short time here I have seen
women go crazy with hysteria.
They curl up on their bunks and
refuse to leave their cells. They cry
without ceasing, as if their bodies
are bottomless wells of tears. I
have seen them shut down, becom-
ing shells of who they once were.
I have seen them lose their will to
fight, their will to go on.What sustains Rosy, like many detain-
ees, is an unbridled faith in God and
weekly calls with her children at a fos-
ter center in New York, where they live
in a home with six other boys who have
also been separated from their parents,
cared for by a woman who calls them
all mijo—“my son.” But where are
their real mothers, Rosy wonders? Are
they locked up alongside her, sleeping
in the cells next door?At many points in her book-length
testimony, Rosy suggests the lasting
nature of a trauma that, for her and her
boys, did not end after their reunion.
“The separation has left us all with
enormous amounts of emotional de-
bris,” she declares. “We are impatient,
anxious, and insecure. We are uncer-
tain of ourselves and one another, and
how to relate to each other after such
a painful time apart.” It is a sober-ing reminder that the abuses of the
Trump era will reverberate long after
his administration comes to an end.
More broadly, Washington and García
Hernández warn that the structural
framework, political culture, and pol-
icy justifications that undergird today’s
enforcement measures have persisted
through administrations of both par-
ties despite intense pressure and scru-
tiny. Simply returning to the policies of
the Obama years, which set their own
records for deportation and immigrant
incarceration, would be no worthy goal.
Late in his book, Washington re-
counts the story of Hilda, a Guatemalan
mother who, at the time of writing, had
been living in sanctuary with her son for
more than three years in a Presbyterian
church outside Austin, Texas. After
losing her asylum case on appeal, Hilda
beca me so ter r i fied of depor tation, sep -
aration from her son, and renewed de-
tention that she found herself unable
to sleep. “ICE comes for me even in my
dreams,” she confesses. Despite the best
efforts of the church, one of its congre-
gants concedes, the place has become
for her another kind of prison. This,
in effect, is what America has turned
itself into—a place where safety and
protection have become, for so many,
unattainable, and where escape from
physical incarceration often leads only
to an imprisonment of different design.
In the post-Trump era, whether it be-
gins next year or in 2025, advocates for
migrant and human rights will be well
advised to regard reformist rhetoric
with skepticism. A system that allows
for the internment of asylum- seekers
and families with children, after all,
does not need reform—it needs disman-
tling. García Hernández points out that
past efforts to reform institutions such
as prisons have often helped solidify
and entrench their role in society rather
than reduce their power to cause harm.
In the aftermath of family separation,
for example, the Trump administration
has sought to detain more families to-
gether, aggressively pushing courts to
reconsider old limits on the number
of days minors can be held in federal
custody, all while suggesting that more
money be funneled toward detention
facilities so that they might bring their
conditions to a higher standard.
The idea of abolishing immigration
detention and other cornerstones of
border enforcement may sound radi-
cal, but it is the only legitimate start-
ing place for negotiation. After all, our
current practices stand in clear viola-
tion of a half-century of internationally
agreed-upon norms. There is actually a
good precedent for dismantling these
systems—under Eisenhower, García
Hernández notes, the federal govern-
ment acted deliberately to bring an end
to the detention of migrants, a pause
that lasted for a quarter- century. While
politicians claimed the move was
rooted in a postwar commitment to the
“humane administration” of laws, the
real reasons were financial rather than
altruistic, allowing the government to
close costly prisons while satisfying
the market’s desire for more cheap
labor. Nevertheless, García Hernández
writes, “in fact, if not in law, the United
States came remarkably close to abol-
ishing immigration imprisonment.”
Today, immigrant incarceration is
at its zenith. But as more and more
Americans become aware of the need
to remake the criminal justice system
through decarceration, ending cash*See Julia Preston’s “Deportation Na-
tion” in these pages, October 8, 2020.