On August 21st, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights hosted its most recent book club with author and journalist Jonathan Blitzer to discuss his Robert F. Kennedy Book Award-winning debut. Everyone Who is Gone is Here tells the epic story of the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, delving into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.

Blitzer opened the conversation by sharing the inspiration behind the project. A central goal, he explained, was to recenter the immigration debate around Latin America—not through the “abstracted lens of U.S. politics,” but through deeply human stories. By foregrounding individual experiences, Blitzer hoped readers would better grasp the “human stakes” behind today’s immigration policies. 

Blitzer emphasized the importance of historical context, arguing that treating the asylum crisis as an issue isolated to the current U.S. southern border crises is like “picking up a book and starting to read the last chapter.” Periods of heightened migration during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations are part of a much longer story—one that stretches back to U.S. policies in the 1980s.

The Cold War shaped U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. In its efforts to contain communism, the U.S. allied with right-wing military regimes in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. These alliances involved military aid and diplomatic support, even as those governments carried out widespread human rights abuses. One consequence was the mass displacement of people fleeing political violence.

Blitzer noted the paradox that emerged after the U.S. passed the Refugee Act of 1980, which legally recognized the right to seek asylum. While the law offered protection on paper, in practice, asylum claims from those fleeing U.S.-backed regimes were often denied—accepting them would have required admitting the abuses of allied governments. “The thing that’s thrown out the window every time is the humanitarianism of the asylum system, ” he said. 

He also traced the evolution of immigration detention, beginning with the Mariel boatlift in 1980, when over 125,000 Cubans arrived in Florida. What started as a response to a perceived crisis eventually became an entrenched system of indefinite detention—a prison system in all but name.

Vice President of U.S. Advocacy and Litigation, Anthony Enriquez, joined the conversation to draw connections between immigration enforcement and mass incarceration. Enriquez highlighted that over 60,000 people are currently detained in immigration facilities across the U.S., and that 90% are held in private, for-profit institutions. He emphasized the structural overlap between immigration and criminal systems. He added, “the two systems, both immigration and criminal, share that common locus of mass incarceration as a simplistic solution to very complex issues.”

Watch the full discussion here.