When Manuel ran away from El Salvador, in 2015, the country had one of the highest murder rates in the world: a hundred and four murders per hundred thousand inhabitants. So Manuel, who was still a teen-ager, made sure that he would make it to the U.S.’s southern border with a file of legal documents that, he thought, could save his life. “Evidence,” he said—“papers that affirmed that I was in danger.” He was fleeing a local gang that had threatened him, and he saw no choice but to find a way out of the country—he planned to request asylum once he reached the U.S., and hoped that he would be able to bring his family along later. At first, all seemed to be going according to plan. He made it to El Paso, Texas, where an immigration officer told him that he had a strong case. Soon after, he moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, and started working to send remittances back to his family, including his one-year-old daughter. “I worked from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. in landscaping, then until 1 A.M. in a gas station,” he said. He was relieved to walk around his new neighborhood without having to look over his shoulder.
But, at the end of 2017, an immigration judge denied him asylum. He was in shock. He insisted that he had done things by the book: presenting himself at a port of entry, providing documentation of his plight, never missing a hearing. Last April, he was deported back to El Salvador. In the video above, Manuel tells the story of his journey.
The Trump Administration has not made the immigration process easy for the hundreds of people seeking asylum. In 2017, immigration judges rejected sixty-one per cent of all asylum cases, the highest denial rate in a decade. During the first half of this year, the number of immigration courts finding “credible fear” in asylum seekers’ screenings plummeted from thirty per cent to fourteen per cent. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has talked about elevating “the threshold standard of proof in credible fear interviews” and has argued against granting asylum to victims of domestic abuse or gang violence.
Back in El Salvador, Manuel hasn’t returned to his old neighborhood. Terrified of the men who threatened him, he moved into his sister’s apartment and didn’t leave his room for weeks. He was in a state of “constant paranoia” every time he had to take a public bus. Eventually, like many deportees, he started taking English classes in order to find a job at a call center. But he is still living in a state of uncertainty. “Are you worried about your future?” the video reporter Danny Gold asked Manuel recently. “Yes,” Manuel said. “To be honest, my future is what’s on my mind in these moments. I can’t get it out of my head. What am I going to do? Who am I going to be in the future?”
