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[0:00] Jeffrey Solomon: Hey, everybody. This is Jeffrey Solomon. I'm the co-founder of Houses on the Moon Theatre Company, a New York City-based theatre group dedicated to amplifying unheard voices to inspire bold dialogue and ignite action. For this special episode of our podcast, I want to introduce you to Amy Gottlieb, U.S. Migration Director for the American Friends Service Committee, who was our very first board member over 20 years ago and has consistently supported our organization ever since. Hi, Amy.

[0:22] Amy Gottlieb: Hey, Jeff. It's an honor to be here. In this episode, Amy interviews award-winning author Jonathan Blitzer about his book on U.S.-Central American relations and the themes that inspired our original documentary play and podcast series, De Novo. Take it away, Amy.

[0:37] Amy Gottlieb: So as Jeff mentioned, I have the honor of talking with Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who has won multiple awards for his work. I was bowled over by his 2024 book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. It does such an excellent job at explaining the historical context for the story of migrant teenager Edgar Chokhoi, which is the subject of De Novo, Houses on the Moon's original documentary play and podcast series. The book follows the decade-long story of migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America within the larger border debate. That's why we really wanted to talk to him. And we're going to talk a bit about the book and the context in 2024. But of course, we are now in 2025. And there's a lot more to add. So, John, thanks so much for joining us today.

[1:49] Jonathan Blitzer: Sure. And thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here and delighted to hear that you feel that way about the book.

[1:55] Amy Gottlieb: And just to get us started, I'll share that I started my career as an immigration lawyer in 1996. I worked as an intern in 1994, working with Salvadorans. And in 1996, I was representing Central Americans in asylum claims. And so much of what I read in your book just brought back the stories that I heard from people who had been forced to flee their home because of very similar stories. So, you know, just again, thank you for capturing that because I think it's a truth that is not well known. And I think the more people are able to hear it, the better. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit, I mean, you've been writing about immigration for a long time. Where did you get the idea for this book?

[2:44] Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think that was if I had to kind of pinpoint a specific moment, it's actually a moment that involved a man in his who's now in his late 40s named Eddie and Zora, who's Salvadoran by birth came to the United States when he was three years old, grew up in South Central Los Angeles, and then moved to the San Fernando Valley with his family. And it's just an American through and through. He talks like an American. His sense of the world is forged by his experience in LA in the 80s and 90s. And you know, you mentioned 1996, you know, you're doing this work then. Obviously, that's kind of a watershed moment in the history of American immigration enforcement. There was a bill passed in 1996, that among other utterly draconian things, allowed the US government to reclassify certain crimes as so-called aggravated felonies retroactively.

So in other words, if you committed a certain crime that, you know, wasn't characterized in this way at the time you committed it, you could essentially be brought back and face consequences as a result of the subsequent reclassification of your crime all of these years later. And Eddie had a green card. And basically, at a certain point, when he was in his, you know, late teens, early 20s, got caught with a small amount of drugs. And, you know, the details themselves are of that moment are unclear and someone else had the drugs and he was sort of pinned on him. But the short of it was that he ended up being stripped of his green card. And eventually, after, you know, going on the lam in the United States for, you know, almost a decade, he basically got deported to El Salvador in 2007.

And it was an incredible situation for him to be in, in particular, because he had seen the gangs that had made that had transformed El Salvador into the dangerous country that it was at the moment of his deportation. He had seen all of those gangs up close on the streets of Los Angeles in the early 1980s, because that's where gangs like MS-13 actually formed. And I was in El Salvador actually doing a different story. This was maybe February of 2016. And I was beginning to hear about this strange phenomenon in El Salvador involving the rise of a new industry that had a lot to do with the fact of all of these deportations from the United States during the 2010s. And that was the rise of the call center industry, where American companies were outsourcing their customer service work to Central American countries, because there were large numbers of people who were being deported who had spent, you know, five years or more living in the United States who spoke kind of, you know, Americanized idiomatic English, and who were desperate for work.

And this actually became an appealing job prospect for a lot of people in El Salvador at the time. And Eddie, who is kind of a real hustler and entrepreneur and extremely smart and kind of always, you know, always kind of on the make a real hustler in the kind of best American sense of the word, actually started a language school to teach people English, the kind of English, the kind of customer service English that was spoken in the call centers. And he advertised himself as someone who had been deported as, you know, a native speaker of the language. And so he had this small school that was up and running. And a friend of a friend of a friend basically referred me to Eddie. And we met one night for a beer in San Salvador.

And Eddie, who's just a fantastic talker, I mean, I was completely spellbound. I just wanted to hear him tell stories. That feeling was, I think, more than anything else, that kind of inspiration for the idea of trying to get at how deeply interconnected these worlds are of the US and Central America and begin to understand kind of how that came to be, and what that's meant in practice, because obviously, that flies in the face of all the political rhetoric and policy that we're bombarded with on a daily basis from Washington. So it was that it was it was like wanting to capture that relationship between these places, and what that looked like on a human level. And the feeling that I had and continue to have of really, like being deeply humbled by how much I learn about the United States when I'm outside of it. And so that was really more than anything else, I think, the feeling of, okay, I need to sort of dig into this in a holistic way.

[7:26] Amy Gottlieb: There's so much there. And what you said, I, you know, I've been in the immigrant rights movement for many, many years. And there have been quite a few organizations that have really tried to have the conversation about root causes about why people migrate and about why our US policies cannot only be driven by what happens in the US. But there are few and far between the organizations and the people that know that history that are willing to talk about it. And when I read your book, I felt like, wow, this is really getting out there in a way that maybe it can truly make a difference at some point. So again, thank you. I do want to say like, one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you for this podcast is that Houses on the Moon has an extraordinarily beautiful play, which then became a podcast called De Novo.

As documentary play, it's told solely from transcripts and interviews from immigration court and lawyers and family members of a 14 year old boy named Edgar Chikoy, who was from Guatemala. And the story is about his legal struggle to be able to stay in the United States. He had been involved in a gang, he tried to leave the gang, he got re-involved with a gang, he was deported. And that the story of the play really tells the story of gangs and how they complicate the lives of children and young people. And, you know, certainly the complexities of our immigration law, that really does not have any forgiveness, as you say, for people who have had some kind of interaction with the criminal system. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts about what you learned in doing the book around the history of the gangs and how they impact people's lives.

[9:24] Jonathan Blitzer: Mm hmm. You know, I guess the overwhelming feeling I've had in the Central American context, kind of reporting on people whose lives have been impacted by the gangs, you have people who are essentially trapped. And that starts to mean a different thing as you get closer to the United States. But to begin with, you know, what does it mean getting trapped in a place like, you know, a gang controlled community and, you know, the outskirts of Guatemala City or in San Pedro Sula or in El Salvador up till recently, which is the situation has changed quite significantly in the last couple of years there, you know, it essentially means that you were, you know, answerable to a kind of shadow state. And, you know, your life is completely circumscribed by these very esoteric dictates of how individual gangs police and enforce their kind of propriety over territory.

And, you know, the degree to which people adapt their lives around that fact is just staggering to see. So oftentimes, you know, what it means on a daily level for people is that they have to pay, you know, quotas or essentially taxes to the gangs that operate on their block or in their neighborhood, you know, kicking the money they're earning parts a good chunk of the money they're earning up to these gangs in exchange for not getting, you know, murdered or brutalized in some fashion. So it drains people of their, you know, own livelihoods just to begin with, and it drains whole countries of their livelihoods. The kind of most overwhelming feeling you have, you know, speaking to people who are kind of trapped in this gang world is that the gang is as omnipresent and ubiquitous in their countries as any government would be, and in some ways is more deeply enmeshed in people's lives.

So there's that fact just to begin with, that the persecution is often the same. And then in terms of people's identification with gangs or what it means when they reach the United States and, you know, American authorities, you know, ICE, prosecutors, you name it, border authorities scrutinize someone's record. And I've spoken, I'm sure you've done this ad nauseum, but, you know, in my own experience, you know, I've spoken to so many people who in some form or another have been accused of quote unquote gang membership or gang association by virtue of the fact that they lived in a neighborhood where a gang was operating, or by virtue of the fact that they had a family member who had been recruited. Then you get to the question of what...

[12:10] Jonathan Blitzer: Recruitment doesn't work the way I think people in the United States tend to assume it does. It's not like this is a job fair and you get to pick the group that you hang out with. I mean, this is recruitment by force. This is you join our gang or we kill you. And so people are really between a rock and a hard place. They don't have any choice at all to speak of. And so this idea of gang association is something that I think is an overlay of the U.S. immigration and criminal justice system that gets imposed on the reality on the ground in a lot of these countries where basically the U.S. tends to criminalize or view with great skepticism and distrust people who have really no choice but to live alongside the presence of a gang.

[13:09] Jonathan Blitzer: I spent a lot of time on Long Island, New York, where MS-13 had a real presence. And the people who were victimized by MS-13 were immigrants and almost entirely undocumented immigrants who lived in these communities, who were trapped, who were trapped on the one hand by the gang itself operating in their community, and on the other hand by local law enforcement in conjunction with federal immigration authorities who were looking to scoop up anyone who was undocumented, particularly when they had this kind of pretext of being able to claim they were cracking down on gang crime. And so, you know, you had this absolutely staggering fact of the very people who were victimized by the gangs being accused of being the victimizers themselves. And to me, there was no clearer instance of this just colossal misunderstanding in the United States about the realities of this on the human level than that fact.

[14:07] Amy Gottlieb: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks. You know, gangs are back in the news in a big way and in a challenging way. And, you know, there's people from Venezuela now who are being called gang members who are being summarily disappeared to, you know, the Secup prison in El Salvador, and stories of, you know, people being called gang members and just sort of given zero opportunity to talk to anybody about whether or not they are. And even if they were, should we be deporting them? The thing right now that is most overwhelming to me about how the current administration is using the excuse, the pretext of this Venezuelan gang, Tren de Agua, to round up and disappear and deport Venezuelans living here is that, you know, to begin with, the understanding of this gang Tren de Agua is just completely unhinged from reality.

[15:13] Jonathan Blitzer: And when you look at some of the documents that immigration authorities are using and that law enforcement has been using, just basic documents that are meant to give clarity on how authorities identify who belongs to these gangs and who doesn't. It essentially looks like they took documents from U.S. law enforcement's engagement with Central American gangs like MS-13, struck the name MS-13 from these documents, and replaced it with Tren de Agua. And I have to say, like, this is new to me. I've been studying up. I mean, I've been deferring to experts I know in the region, in Venezuela and beyond, who've spent many years reporting on and studying, you know, Venezuelan crime gangs. All of these notions that, oh, well, you know, certain kinds of tattoos are associated with Tren de Agua.

That's all just wrong. I mean, the people I speak to in Venezuela who really are close to this issue are just mystified and baffled by how U.S. law enforcement is handling this question of who belongs to Tren de Agua and who doesn't.

[16:22] Jonathan Blitzer: And in case there was any ambiguity about the bad faith of the current administration in this, I think it's pretty plain at this point that they are essentially accusing any Venezuelan male in particular who's arrived in the United States within the last three years of belonging to this gang. It has become a complete and utter catch-all and excuse to arrest as many people as the administration can possibly arrest and to, you know, in theory to deport them. But what we saw when the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was that it wanted to disappear them to a Salvadoran mega prison. For the time being, that plan is sort of on hold as it gets fought out in the courts. But as a kind of general enforcement dragnet, the logic remains more or less intact.

And as a reporter, you encounter person after person after person who, you know, based on all the reporting you do and all the cross-checking you do, is very plainly innocent of any sort of criminal association, who nevertheless is branded a gang member.

[17:21] Jonathan Blitzer: And the classic kind of American law enforcement response is, well, we have the evidence, and you don't. And you can't see the evidence, but we've got it. And all we need is to say that we're concerned about public safety, and that's justification for what we're doing. And then kind of layered onto that is I think the even, well, I don't know if it's a more alarming fact, but equally alarming fact, that most of the people, or at least a large number of people who are getting swept up in these enforcement operations, are people who are actually, who either have some form of provisional legal status or who are in the midst of seeking it, which is to say they've got an open asylum hearing before an immigration judge.

They have temporary protected status. They got paroled into the United States under the previous administration. In some instances, people waited months in Mexico for an appointment through a government app called CBP-1. I mean, these are people who actually did everything by the rules laid out by the previous administration, that the current administration is simply saying, oh, well, we don't recognize that as legitimate.

[18:28] Jonathan Blitzer: And the way they're supercharging their enforcement effort directed at this particular population, and this is the easiest population for the administration to target, because these are people who handed over their information willingly because they were trying to do everything by the book, is to accuse all of them of having some tangential relationship to this gang. And that's that. They just disappear right out from the U.S. immigration system. And it is absolutely terrifying to see.

[18:53] Amy Gottlieb: You said the government says that they have this evidence and they're hiding it, or they're not releasing it in court because it's a danger to national security or whatever reason they're giving. That's happening, of course, with people like Mahmoud Khalil and others who are being charged with potentially endangering national security because of their pro-Palestinian activism. And I'm curious if you see connections across how we're treating people who we're accusing of being gang members, how we're treating people we're accusing of putting the U.S. in danger because they are called anti-Semitic or they're misusing foreign policy in a way that targets individuals who have green cards. I'm curious if you see ties, links across those things.

[19:49] Jonathan Blitzer: I felt very naive in the first months of the current Trump term. And what I've seen is basically making clear to me that I couldn't even imagine the worst. Cracking down on students for their exercise of free speech and, in particular, targeting students and trying to strip them of their green cards on the grounds that their speech endangers U.S. foreign policy was not on my bingo card. Maybe this just speaks to how I was unprepared for the moment. I think a connection, though, to your point between that and some of what we're seeing in these Alien Enemies Act cases is that the view inside the administration is that the president's power is supreme. And immigration has always been, like foreign policy, has always been a zone where presidents enjoy a great deal of latitude in the exercise of their power.

[20:51] Jonathan Blitzer: And so for kind of presidential supremacists, people who really believe in this kind of expanded and uncheckable power of the U.S. presidency, you often see them sort of want to flex their muscles in the arena of foreign policy and in the arena of immigration. And I suppose it's only natural to those people, if they're completely unfettered and there are no kind of legal constraints on how they prosecute their agenda, for them to connect those two spheres because it becomes a very sort of powerful and to use language that they use in their court filings, literally unreviewable power of the administration.

[21:32] Jonathan Blitzer: You know, the most staggering thing to me, looking at some of these court filings in the Mahmoud Khalil case, for one, but also for other students who have been targeted, just even in some of the back and forth between federal judges who are just scratching their heads at the lunacy of this, the position of the U.S. administration is courts don't have the right to review this. This is a matter of national security. So that's, I think there really is a nexus here. And I think it's very scary. And I think, you know, you, given your expertise and experience, saw this coming. And I'm feeling it kind of in a visceral way right now. You know, the immigration space for an administration like this is really a laboratory where they get to test out all of these extreme fringe theories of kind of unrestrainable power.

[22:25] Jonathan Blitzer: And so, you know, there are specific reasons why right now they're less constrained than they've ever been. So they're like off to the races. And then the other scary thing, and the sort of the second, I think, reason why they're particularly unconstrained is that, you know, that concerns internally how the administration is organized. Externally, I think Democrats are in as much disarray on this issue as I've seen them in recent years, because I think the democratic kind of conclusion, which I actually think is a misreading of the last few years of American politics, is that, you know, we need to talk about immigration less, we need to attack to the middle or to the right, we need to prove to, you know, the American people that we support tough and tough-minded enforcement.

The 2024 election was a referendum on our immigration policies. So I think actually, you have a lot of Democrats who are less inclined to stage the sort of resistance that you saw during the first Trump term. So it's a very combustible situation.

[23:21] Jonathan Blitzer: Most particularly these days, it's been these arrests that ICE is making at courthouses, where people are actually showing up to court dates. I mean, these are people who are trying to follow every aspect of the legal system, who are nevertheless getting arrested by ICE, because ICE officers just have been tasked with arresting as many people as they possibly can right now. And it's easy to pick people off when they show up at court. Anytime you have people who are bearing witness and who are protesting, clergy members, members of Congress, activists, now these people, American citizens, are being accused of interfering with federal enforcement operations. In some cases, they've been accused of assaulting federal law enforcement agents. It doesn't matter that when we actually look at the video evidence of any of these incidents in question, that's actually not the case.

[24:20] Jonathan Blitzer: It's an instance of the administration using, claiming the broadest possible latitude to say, oh no, these are, you know, here we are conducting law enforcement operations and these people are interfering with them. And the idea that any sort of expression of opposition to the administration's policy amounts to quote-unquote interference, to me, raises very basic foundational free speech questions for Americans. So it really kind of quickly becomes, it snowballs and becomes all-consuming. But again, almost always the battering ram that this administration uses is through the immigration issue.

[24:57] Amy Gottlieb: Yeah, you've really nailed it. To pick up on the sort of unfettered power thing, I think what we're also seeing is abject cruelty. And I'm with you. I didn't, I've been in this work for 30 years. I didn't anticipate seeing what I'm seeing now. The cruelty of some of the videos that have been shared where an ICE officer actually breaks the window of a car to arrest somebody, to pull them out of the car. So there's this cruelty that I have not seen before. And I'm, there's a part of me, the idealistic part of me that has allowed me to stay in this movement for 30 years, believes that when people see this, there's going to be more resistance. The resistance is going to happen. And I really hear what you're saying about people being stymied, afraid to resist now because they're being charged with assault.

But I'm curious if you think the resistance that happened in LA or here in New York, do you think there's going to be a shift? And do you think that there might be some openings for us to really think differently and talk differently about immigrants in this country? Or are we really going down a path of no return?

[26:30] Jonathan Blitzer: I mean, I almost want to ask you this question, both for questions of expertise, but also almost for therapeutic reasons. I guess what strikes me in seeing what's gone on in LA and in seeing just increasingly in New York and in other cities, public opposition to the kind of ICE activity we've seen is that there is a bottleneck in the general resistance. And a lot of that bottleneck is in the political establishment. It's not so much in the country as such. When people see the kinds of things that they're seeing, they're aghast. It's monstrous. I don't know how it's possible not to be outraged by some of it. And yet, there was a kind of, I think, in certain quarters of the Democratic Party, a real sense of caution.

We don't want to misplay this moment. We have to bide our time. Let's just stick our messaging to the bare minimum. All, obviously, crazy things that the Democratic Party should also be pressing on. But I think there's a kind of risk aversion that I think is kind of counter to basic human observation and emotional experience. And that's always baffled me. I'm heartened by the level of public opposition, because I think that's actually typically been what moves the needle.

[27:53] Amy Gottlieb: But I have to say, in researching my book, you know this history better than I do. I mean, you've lived aspects of this history directly. A great revelation to me was the history of the sanctuary movement in the United States in the 1980s. I had no notion, really, before starting to do deeper research for my book and even to begin to interview some of the main players in that movement. I had no notion of how bold the activism was. I mean, you essentially had people who were transporting migrants into the United States, crossing them into the United States, because they didn't believe the U.S. government was fairly adjudicating their asylum claims. And they were horrified by U.S. complicity in essentially war crimes in Central America and decided to make the moral case and were willing to pay a certain price for it.

I mean, there were 11 sanctuary activists in the mid-1980s who were indicted. That was a total inspiration. And I actually think that that didn't come from party leadership among Democrats. That came from people. That came from grassroots activism. That came from a kind of commonsensical, everyday kind of place. And it channeled institutions of real moral authority, the religious community and beyond. And I really think that that moved the needle. I mean, one of the reasons why we had the creation of temporary protected status in the 1990 Immigration Act was as a result of sustained activism tied to the sanctuary movement.

[29:32] Jonathan Blitzer: And so, I do think that the public has the idea right when they see this stuff and are horrified and want to register their opposition. And I wish that sort of party leaders would be just a little more human to what they're seeing. But, you know, the pace for as long as the Trump administration overplays its hand, I think you're going to have more and more sort of public opposition. And that will eventually move the needle in some fashion. I don't know what it looks like yet. As to whether or not that meaningfully changes the kind of nature of our immigration conversation in the U.S., that I'm a little bit less sanguine about. Just because I feel like there's been this steady rightward tilt to how this country talks about immigration and immigrants and the realities of the world of immigrants.

[30:31] Amy Gottlieb: But there are people out there. I mean, the reason, like for me personally, as a reporter covering this, why I kind of can't look away and I keep coming back to the subject is because I am just utterly moved and inspired and drawn to people who are living this reality out and for whom we can learn so much. They continue to be an example of what's happening in the world. But I do think that there seems like a real groundswell and that doesn't seem to be going away. And I think that that does suggest that something is happening.

[31:12] Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah. And I hope you're right. I really do. I mean, the organization I work for, American Friends Service Committee, we're continuing to push. I agree with you. Our legislators are not in a place we need them to be. But if we become complacent and don't keep reminding them where we can be, what our vision can be, then we're going to lose completely. So our work is to just kind of keep at it, chipping away, continuing the conversation. And to share, to quote a very dear colleague of mine from our U.S.-Mexico border program, in an internal meeting this week, said, you know, we're in a moment of radical transformation. And holding onto that is what, frankly, gives me hope that we are going to be able to move from this place of brutal attacks, assault, lies, untruths about immigrants, towards immigrants, and eventually to a place where we really do know that we're stronger with immigrants, that our worlds are tied together, and that we have opportunities to build something that is based on common sense, like you said, you know, it's funny, because to say radical transformation sounds radical.

But in fact, what we really are talking about is common sense that people should have a right to have their basic needs met, to have a way to live in dignity, to be able to move if they need to move, to be able to stay if they need to stay, and to be free to express, you know, their human rights and their opinions.

[32:59] Amy Gottlieb: So, you know, I think your book really contributes a lot. And I will say your current reporting, you know, the book was published, you know, over a year ago now. But your current reporting also speaks to telling the stories, so that we can see where things are going wrong, and give us all the vision of where we might go on a better path. People need to be hearing, you know, the arguments of your colleagues at the American Friends Service Committee and activists and so on. And, you know, during the sanctuary movement, one of the most impressive things to me in the organization of that activism was the fact that, you know, a big part of it involved some of the Central American asylum seekers actually speaking out and telling their stories.

That was a core part of what the activism was, so that Americans would actually hear firsthand what was happening in Central America, they would hear firsthand what it meant, why it was so important for these people to be granted asylum. I think for as long as the conversation is happening, I do think that there is a receptive audience in this country. The problem to my mind is when the conversation halts, or when one of the sides, the side that's kind of closer to hearing reason right now, wants to avoid the conversation entirely. So I think for as long as this thing is front and center, I do think that there's a willing and humane and deeply feeling public that can process this and can try to understand the lives involved and so on.

[34:27] Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you for that. And I want to add to what you said, not only is that, you know, organizations and activists and movement people who are doing this work, but also the artists and the activism that's happening through art and through presenting stories and storytelling through so many various means really makes such a difference and Houses on the Moon is one of the key theater companies that I turn to that really tells these stories in a beautiful way. John, thank you so much for taking this time and for your book and for your reporting. Forgive me. You can probably hear my son in the background. I have to run to tend to another urgent political emergency. Toddlerdom.

[35:09] Amy Gottlieb: Childcare. Thank you.

[35:11] Jonathan Blitzer: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor.

[35:14] Amy Gottlieb: I've been talking to Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, the United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis. I highly recommend it. Go buy it now or check it out from the library today. And if you haven't yet listened to De Novo on the Houses on the Moon podcast, be sure to go back and check out all three episodes.

[35:37] Amy Gottlieb: This episode of Houses on the Moon podcast was hosted by Amy Gottlieb, U.S. Migration Director for the American Friends Service Committee and a member of Houses on the Moon's board of directors. We will be honoring Amy for her outstanding work in the field at our upcoming gala celebration, Amplify 2025. We hope you'll join us for this exciting evening, Monday, October 6th at New York City's Chelsea Table and Stage. Tickets, performer lineup and more details can be found at housesonthemoon.org. Special thanks to Corey Choi, Tom Fama and Silver Sound Studio for recording this interview and for Will Coley for producing and editing this episode. Thanks for listening, everyone, and keep your ear to the ground.