The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum and the US-Mexican Border and Beyond

by John Washington

Overview

The first comprehensive, in-depth book on the Trump administration’s assault on asylum protections

Arnovis couldn’t stay in El Salvador. If he didn’t leave, a local gangster promised that his family would dress in mourning—that he would wake up with flies in his mouth. “It was like a bomb exploded in my life,” Arnovis said.

The Dispossessed tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran man, Arnovis, whose family’s search for safety shows how the United States—in concert with other Western nations—has gutted asylum protections for the world’s most vulnerable. Crisscrossing the border and Central America, John Washington traces one man’s quest for asylum. Arnovis is separated from his daughter by US Border Patrol agents and struggles to find security after being repeatedly deported to a gang-ruled community in El Salvador, traumatic experiences relayed by Washington with vivid intensity.

Adding historical, literary, and current political context to the discussion of migration today, Washington tells the history of asylum law and practice through ages to the present day. Packed with information and reflection, The Dispossessed is more than a human portrait of those who cross borders—it is an urgent and persuasive case for sharing the country we call home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788734721
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	04/03/2020
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

John Washington is a writer, translator, and activist. A regular contributor to The Nation magazine and The Intercept, he writes about immigration and border politics, as well as criminal justice, photography, and literature. Washington is an award winning translator, having translated Óscar Martinez, Anabel Hernández, and Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, among others. A long term volunteer with No More Deaths, he has been working with activist organizations in Mexico, California, Arizona, and New York for more than a decade. He is currently based in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Piedras Negras

Arnovis in the safe house

Paying the wrong coyote

Harvesting coconuts in Corral de Mulas

Gimme Shelter

Asylum defined

How to quantify fear?

The discriminatory politics of asylum

Fear and civilization

Frederick Douglass 1

First Attempt

1 Bombing the Bridge of Gold

Gang presence in Joyous Saint John

A soccer match and an asylum claim

Gangs as state actors

Pressure to join one gang, threats from the other

Peluca keeps pushing

Pistol to the head

Escape 19

2 Fear and the state

Biases in asylum adjudication

Greek heroes

Non-refoulement

Principle and practice

More asylum seekers, more bordering

The meaning of the crisis

Blurring of economic migrants and refugees

The doubly dispossessed 39

3 Arnovis traveling north

Horrors and hardships

Caught in Mexico

Mexican immigration enforcement

Siglo XXI 51

4 Fear, the state, migration

The highway comes to Corral de Mulas

Rise of the gangs

Dangerous and do-nothing police

Police target Arnovis

Chris Rock and Max Weber

Isolation and danger in Corral de Mulas

Inability to relocate in El Salvador 59

Second Attempt

5 Deportation

A sad night in a sex motel

Poverty in Corral

Heading north again

Bribery in the jungle

The Beast

Pushbacks and the deterrence

Hiring a coyote

"Safe third country agreements"

Mexico's dysfunctional asylum system

Are refugees safe in the United States?

Arnovis arrives in Piedras Negras 77

6 Escape from the safe house

Dodging Mexican marines

Nights in the desert

Pushing away asylum seekers at the border

Fording the Rio Grande

Entry fiction doctrine

Taken into custody 103

7 The century of the refugee

Hebraic law and asylum

Islamic and Arabic traditions of hospitality

Sanctuary and asylum among the early Greeks

Sophocles and Aeschylus

Democracy and asylum

Sanctuary in Rome and the early Christian church

Calvin and Luther

European states and asylum

Fugitive slaves as refugees 119

8 Requirements of proof for asylum claims

The World Trade Center and asylum policy

Immaterial inconsistences

Las hieleras

Border Patrol's lies

Arnovis and credible fear

Playing trilingual telephone in courts

Scheherazade

Arnovis deported 139

9 Twenty people displaced a minute

Nansen passports

Failures in 1933

Évian Conference and Kristallnacht

The saga of the St. Louis

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The "right to have rights"

1951 Refugee Convention

Anti-communism and United States asylum policy

Refugees fleeing the United States

1967 Protocol and mass exodus from Southeast Asia

Denying Central American asylum claims

Anti-Haitian policies and the rise of Guantánamo

Welcome to the Cubans

War crimes and El Salvador at war

United States extends its border south

Australia learns from US pushbacks

Perdition, downfall, doom, extinction, and ruin 153

Third Attempt

10 Arnovis in chains

Domestic split in Corral de Mulas

Gang control on the peninsula

Another threat

Arnovis and José flee with their daughters

A smuggler's cramped truck 191

11 Santos witnesses his twin's murder in Juárez

The dungeons of US detention

Time as a weapon

Refugee literature

Bona fide or bogus claims

Climate refugees

Arnovis and Meybelín in a southern Mexican safe house

Border militarization

Racist immigration enforcement

Rise of the coyotes

Refugee Roulette

"Asylum to the virtuous"

Fifty-two hours in a truck

Death trucks

Darlene gets sick

"Zero tolerance" and family separations

The family crosses the river in a raft

Back in the hieleras

The girls are separated 201

12 Trump to eliminate courts and judges

A caravan

Particularistic refugees

US meddling in El Salvador

The Central American "laboratory"

Rise of gangs in LA

Failures of the Drug War

The CIA, the state, and local police collaborating with gangs and drug smugglers

US foreign policy in Honduras

NBA jerseys in Honduran slums 241

13 Where is Meybelín

"Twenty-three days of terror"

United States backs out of refugee resettlement accords

Narrowing grounds for asylum

Arnovis prosecuted 261

14 Martín threatened by Acapulco cops

Detention of asylum seekers

"We were locked up like dogs"

The feeling of fear

Torturing a grandmother

Psalms of asylum

Assassination of Archbishop Romero 271

15 Arnovis back in Corral without Meybelín

Contact with Meybelín

Media sensation

Welcome-home balloons

My first visit to Corral

Arnovis still on edge

Dancing in the dirt

Another trip north? 277

Can I Live?

16 Consequences of asylum denial

Sixty bullet casings

Chronicling death upon deportation

Emergency evacuations 291

17 Sanctuary outside Austin

Hilda's story

A childhood of abuse

Fleeing with her son

Detention

Hunger strike

Making home in a church

Growing up in a church 301

18 Lingering fear in Corral

New threats

The price of a bullet

Blistered identity

A nation's capacity to protect

Asylum as triage

A state's own fear

"Freedom is a place"

Heidegger, Arendt, Hölderlin

Changes in El Salvador

Meybelín loves her father

Arnovis's dream 319

Acknowledgments 331

Editorial Reviews

In an era of massive and unprecedented human migration, John Washington documents in his poignant book, The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond, how the poverty and violence powerful nations inflict on poor countries is a major reason so many flee their lives and families. Offering expansive historical analysis of how ancient religions, cultures, and societies understood the imperative of welcoming the outsider, particularly those seeking safety from harm or death, and contrasting it with our current world order, Washington has written one of the most important books of our time on one of the most dire systematic injustices on our planet. I read this book in one sitting because I simply couldn’t put it down.”
—Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars
 
“The Dispossessed is one of the most beautiful and wrenching books I’ve read in a long time. We are becoming a stateless world, as the combined effects of climate change, war, and struggles of resources push people from their land and their homes. John Washington’s book offers no easy answers, but in its empathy, it is a guide for how we confront the crisis with decency."
—Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth

“John Washington is a rarity in the world of Central American migration. He doesn’t parachute into tragedy. He travels with humility and seeks to understand, not to reaffirm his hypotheses. This is a book from someone who has been understanding for a long time. I’ve been covering migration in Central America, Mexico, and the United States for thirteen years, and I can say with complete conviction: Read this book.”
—Óscar Martinez, author of The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail

“John Washington delivers an absorbing, harrowing, and deeply moving reportage that renders the most thorough and critical assessment of the US asylum system that I have ever read.”
—Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders

“The Dispossessed is one book that you will not soon forget.”
—Skye Anderson, Patch

“Even if so much of what makes the book riveting is patently awful or evil, Washington’s narrative is a crucial read for anyone interested in immigration policy or border dynamics.”
—Russell Crandall, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

From the Publisher