He’s been on a plane twice in his life—both times, Arnovis was in chains.
I was in shock, he said.
He was leaving Meybelín behind, by herself, somewhere in “Florida or New York,” as the ICE officer had told him.
Along with about a hundred other migrants, after landing at the airport in San Salvador, Arnovis was unshackled, loaded onto a bus, and driven to La Chacra, the migrant reception center. He was scared to be home, he said. He didn’t want to move, didn’t want to be there, or be anywhere but with his daughter. Inside La Chacra for the second time in a year, a social worker helped him call a US government number and, to his amazement and relief, they eventually got someone on the line who offered to help track down his daughter. They spent hours trying. Finally, after getting nowhere and accepting that there was nothing more he could do, he walked across the dirt and gravel parking lot, exited the large green door, and saw his father, once again, waiting for him under the brilliantly spilling magenta bougainvillea.
It was so sad, he told me. So, so sad to see my father in front of me. I couldn’t bring myself to say that I didn’t have my daughter anymore. I just told him that I failed. I failed, I said. And then I saw my mother, and we all started crying.
And then Arnovis noticed the cameras. All these gringo reporters—what are they doing here? he wondered. It seemed like a joke. They’re making a disaster of my country, he thought. He wanted to scream at them.
Joana, his partner, and his brother-in-law, Miguel, were there, too, and they all hugged him. It’s okay, they said. It will be okay. Miguel told him that a journalist had been talking to his wife, who had also come along, and he thought maybe she could help. It was Sarah Kinosian, a journalist writing for the Guardian. Though he didn’t want to talk to anybody, Arnovis relented, and Miguel called Sarah over. She introduced herself to Arnovis, asked a couple questions, and got his number. Maybe she would visit him in the next couple days, she offered, so they could talk some more. Fine, Arnovis said.
The family piled into the borrowed car and started the long drive back to the islands. After crossing the Bridge of Gold over San Marcos Lempa, with another hour yet to drive, the family decided to stop to eat pupusas. Arnovis, still wanting to be nowhere except on his way to get his daughter, as he put it to me, didn’t even step out of the car. He was sitting alone in the heat of dusk when he saw his dad hurrying back toward him.
Arnovis, his dad said, it’s Mey, and he handed him a phone.
The first thing she told me, Arnovis said, was: Papi, why did you leave me here?
My god. I didn’t know what to say.
No, mi amor, I didn’t leave you.
Then why didn’t you bring me with you?
At a loss for words—like they were sucked out of his soul—he lied. The airplane broke, he told her, hardly knowing where the idea was coming from. The airplane that was going to bring you back with me broke, but as soon as they fix it, they’ll pick you up and you’ll be back with us.
When, papi?
Soon, mi amor. Soon.
They spoke for maybe three minutes, and then Arnovis’s dad took the phone to talk to her. After he hung up, both father and son were crying. Crying and crying, Arnovis said.
They didn’t know if they’d ever see her again. They’d been hearing stories. Horrible stories. The US government, they’d heard, had been kidnapping thousands of children.
When the United States deported Arnovis, ICE hadn’t returned his Salvadoran ID card, and though he didn’t want to leave his home, and was scared he would be seen, he knew he needed to travel to Usulután, the department’s capital, to procure a new ID, though he put it off for a few days. Kinosian had, by now, put him in touch with Jonathan Ryan, the executive director of RAICES, an immigrant rights legal services organization based in Texas, who told him that Meybelín was not in “Florida or New York,” as an ICE officer had told him, but in Phoenix, and that they would send someone to talk to her and try to get her either released to Arnovis’s brother in Kansas or have her sent back to El Salvador.
In those first few days, the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry called Arnovis and told him it was going to get his daughter out, giving him a tentative timeline of three months. He was in shock. Meybelín, six years old, by herself in America for three more months. He started planning to head north again. He was going to go find his daughter. His idea, he told me, was to cross again into the United States and turn himself in so he could talk to a judge. But something stopped him: a sudden wave of media attention.
Just a few days after his deportation, the first article on Arnovis, by Joshua Partlow, came out in the Washington Post. The following day, Kinosian published an article in The Guardian, and Arnovis became one of the primary faces of the family separation crisis. In the photos published by both outlets, Arnovis appears in a blue 2015 Old Navy American flag T-shirt. He appears crying or tearful, and either sitting on Meybelín’s small bed, wiping his face, or, in one photo, looking younger than he is—pale, thinned by shock, mouth slightly open, and eyes staring blankly up—leaning against the door frame of his one-room hut. Daylight filters in between the slats of the palm-rib wall behind him, and Arnovis looks nothing like the strong, hardworking man who had built that very home. Only his hand in the photo, holding up his black cell phone as if waiting any moment to receive a call from his daughter, betrays any sign that he was not defeated.
Besides going out for essential tasks—to get the new ID, or sign papers to facilitate RAICES securing Meybelín’s release—Arnovis wouldn’t leave the family home. His fear, along with his hopes, was compounded by a flood of journalists drawing attention to him. In addition to the Post and the Guardian, Reuters, NPR, Newsweek, TeleSur, PBS, Telemundo, Univision, El Faro, and the Chicago Tribune would cover Arnovis and Meybelín’s saga and separation. Every day he was getting calls from reporters and producers. I, too, called him from a café in San Salvador and, after talking a while, asked if I could come and visit. I wanted to give him space to tell the story in his own words, and a few weeks later I published an oral testimony account of his saga in the Nation.
In the midst of that journalistic crush, even as he was hoping that the attention would help him get Meybelín back, he also worried that the blitz would alert his persecutors.
And then, soon after the first stories went up, he got a call from Ryan at RAICES, who told him that Meybelín was going to be on a flight home the next day. He was shocked, felt a sudden hollowness in his chest—the need to do something. Not knowing what, however, he simply walked across the yard to the kitchen. His dad was the first person to receive the news, and then he called the rest of the family together.
They moved into action, stringing balloons from palm to palm, figuring out how to get a car—so many family members came that they ended up borrowing two vans—and preparing Meybelín’s favorite food: rice and beans, which is also what they eat nearly every day. Arnovis ordered a piñata in the form of a little girl. At the airport the next day the family was met by a battery of international press, and Arnovis gave multiple statements on camera. He seemed nervous but spoke in a measured, confident manner. And then the Salvadoran government informed him that Meybelín was going to be handed over to her mother, and Arnovis wouldn’t be allowed to receive her. It was a moment of confusion that was quickly corrected.
Their reunion was inside the airport, out of view of the press. Arnovis said that he and Meybelín literally ran toward each other. Having her in his arms rattled that desperate need into his chest again. He was burning with emotion. Love, shame, fear, confusion, relief, and love again, which is how he described what he felt in that moment. The family was given a police escort back to Corral de Mulas.
The first time I met Arnovis and his family, a few weeks after he had been deported from the United States—and recently reunited with Meybelín—I had hired a driver to take me to Corral de Mulas. There are no buses that service Corral, and I didn’t yet know how to arrive by boat. My driver was Antonio Montes, a photographer and a professional driver for Reuters correspondents in El Salvador. He drove an early model Scion with a hand-grenade-shaped gear shifter, and told me a terrifying story of his adolescence in San Salvador during the war. Once, with his whole family huddled under a kitchen table fortified with bed mattresses, a bomb fell into his backyard. It did not explode, but, thirty feet closer, and it would have crashed through the roof of his home. After the raids ended that afternoon, the family abandoned the house. Unlike millions of other Salvadorans in those years, however, their first internal displacement didn’t lead to further flight to the United States.
Antonio’s father is a scientist at a nearby dairy farm, and through him Antonio knew one of the islands’ ranchers who owns a large ranch close to Corral de Mulas. Antonio described to me the wide gulf between the millionaire ranchers who keep vacation houses on the islands and live in either San Salvador or the United States, and the peasants who earn seven dollars a day, or less, to work the land and tend the cattle. In Weakness and Deceit, journalist Raymond Bonner describes the grossly stratified society in rural El Salvador during the 1980s as “like Appalachia or the American West—in the 1800s.” In two of the departments where support for the revolution was strongest, Morazán and Chalatenango, there were only five doctors in the 1980s, or one for every ninety thousand peasants. Today, Corral de Mulas and the neighboring villages on the islands don’t have much better access to health care. If you get sick on the weekend or at night, you have to find someone with a boat to take you to Puerto Triunfo—the small city with the nearest hospital—which is, at least, a thirty-minute lancha ride away. In the late ’70s, the population as a whole only ate 82 percent of the daily caloric requirements. In 2018, 14 percent of children under five years old suffered from chronic malnutrition.
As Antonio barreled down the empty roads—at one point he swerved violently to dodge a zumbadora, a neotropical whipsnake, slithering rapidly across the pavement—he described how most of the islanders admire what they see as the largesse of ranch owners, who swing into town a few times a year bearing gifts of basic food baskets or toys for the kids. One of the ranchers recently rebuilt one of the schoolhouses and bankrolls an impeccably groomed soccer field on the school grounds. Education levels, meanwhile, remain extremely low on the islands—most of the locals leave school after ninth grade, some even earlier—and there are few job opportunities outside of grunt labor or small-boat fishing. The same morning that Antonio was driving me to Corral de Mulas, one of the ranchers had thrown a small “party,” offering a bit of food and coffee to the locals, making a short speech, and sending each family home with a packet of generic rice crispy treats already melting in their plastic.
After talking to Arnovis for a few hours in thin plastic chairs in the shade, Arnovis’s fourteen-year-old niece, Cecilia, brought us each one of the rice treats. Arnovis didn’t eat his, but I was hungry, and pulled open the plastic to reveal a melted chocolate mess. Even the glue holding the thin plastic together seemed to have melted. This was the biannual kindness the rancher bestowed on the villagers.
When I first arrived, the house was quiet, the family seemingly waiting out the late morning heat. Arnovis’s father and sister were at work, and the carcasses of a few “welcome home” balloons still hung from a wire. Meybelín was facedown in the kitchen hammock, sound asleep. She seemed babyish, her arms straight down at her sides, feet crossed at the toes. Arnovis and I talked for about four hours. He told me about his trip, what Corral was like, Meybelín’s nerves, her fear of being apart from him, and his worry that the gang would find him again. When Meybelín woke—with indentations hatched into her forehead from the hammock strings—she came over to sit on Arnovis’s lap but wouldn’t meet my eye.
The family seemed happy that Meybelín was back, but two members were still locked up. José had been transferred to south Texas’s Port Isabel Detention Center, known as the Corralón, and Darlene was in a shelter somewhere in Florida, or so they thought. The Corralón has a long history: first as a US Navy station, then a Border Patrol academy and location of the Office of Public Safety, a wildly euphemistic name for an international police and military training academy that ran programming similar to the School of Americas—notorious for training Latin American military and police officers later accused, and sometimes convicted, of crimes against humanity and genocide. The Port Isabel school, also sometimes simply referred to as the “bomb school,” offered its international pupils lectures such as “Assassination Weapons: A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin.” Robert S. Kahn, writing about the detention center in 1984, explained how “virtually every man processed through Los Fresnos immigration prison [Port Isabel] was told that if he applied for political asylum, he would have to stay in jail for a year or more.” Kahn continued: “As the refugees stood naked with chemicals on their genitals, prison guards misinformed them about US law to discourage them from seeking political asylum.”
At one point during our talk, Arnovis shuttled up a tree to retrieve Meybelín a coconut. His mom served me fried fish in a bowl, with lime and homemade tortillas. In those hectic weeks of return, two friends of the family from Corral, both hounded by the gangs, decided to flee north to ask for asylum.
On my second visit to the family home, a few weeks later, shortly after arriving and being served a limeade and a bowl of beans with more fresh tortillas, Meybelín was excited to play with the new yellow soccer ball I had brought her, at her request. I was surprised when Arnovis suggested, or maybe just conceded to the suggestion, that all of us—Arnovis, Meybelín, Ale, Pedrito, Cecilia, Joana, Sonia, and me—go to the beach to kick it around. It was the first time I’d seen him off the family property, except for a brief ride in Antonio’s window-tinted Scion, and I wondered if he would be nervous. He brushed it off and told me he’d be okay.
About a ten-minute stroll from the house, passing under the shade of a stand of huge mango trees by the school, we arrived to the beach where, beyond Mothersalt Island, we took in the view of the Chaparrastique volcano hovering prominently across the bay. The day was windless, with hardly even a wrinkle in the warm, brackish water—the mangroves, volcanoes, and sky mirrored almost perfectly on the surface. We played a version of keep-away, with Meybelín and Pedrito repeatedly distracting themselves and covering themselves in wet sand or running to splash like excited dogs in the water. I’ve played soccer all my life and can recognize when someone has a good touch. Arnovis has an easy command of the ball and a fluid, hard shot. After the sweat and sand started stinging our eyes and we had worked back up an appetite, we all waded into the water to bob in the bay and let our bodies cool. For some reason, maybe simply in the face of the immensity of the quiet bay and the volcano, we were all whispering.
As we walked back home, evening was beginning to settle in the village. A cluster of women were slicing thin strips of banana to fry in oil and sell for fifty cents a bag on the side of the road. Skinny cattle were returning from their day of grazing, followed by skinny men on horses or bicycles. Meybelín was walking between Arnovis and me, holding each of our hands. At one point she tried to get Arnovis and me to hold hands as well, but, slightly embarrassed, we resisted her giggling attempts. And then, from behind us down the road, a flock of young men on bicycles approached. I turned to see what they were about as they slowly rode up and overtook us. They all seemed to be in their late teens, and all of them turned to look at us as they rode past. There is such little traffic in Corral de Mulas that a passing car, or even a person on foot, piques interest. Most of the boys, it seemed, looked at me curiously, probably wondering who I was. I noticed, too, that Arnovis didn’t once turn his head to look, even though a number of the boys, maybe all of them—they were high schoolers on their way to the soccer field—knew the family and most called out some form of salutation. It was odd, I thought, and I later asked Arnovis about it.
Every time I see someone, he told me, I get nervous.
But you knew them all?
Yeah.
And are any of them involved in the gang?
You never know. I don’t want them to see me. And I don’t want to be seen.
He who fears he shall suffer, Montaigne wrote, already suffers what he fears.
How he was going to live in such a small village without being seen, Arnovis didn’t know. But for now, he was going to lie as low as possible. If they come for me, he told me, they come for me.
Another critical worry was the money the family still owed the coyote—six thousand dollars, which, at that point, his brother in Kansas was struggling every month to pay off in installments. Originally, Arnovis was going to be working in the United States, earning US wages, and paying it himself. Paying it off now seemed impossible.
The next four days in Corral we spent talking, eating, and making short forays to the beach, the turtle hatchery, or the family’s cashew and corn plot. Arnovis would occasionally squat against a palm tree and have confabs with his brother in Kansas about heading back to the United States—this time to try to sneak across.
A couple weeks later, before my third trip to Corral, Arnovis sent me a message asking to talk. He’d been stopped by a few young men who told him they knew that a bunch of gringos had been coming to his house and giving him money. They said he had received six thousand dollars, and he needed to start paying them higher taxes. We both thought it was suspicious that they cited the exact number the coyote had charged him. Arnovis told them he didn’t have any money, which seemed true. Later, when discussing his finances, he told me that he’d done some rough budgeting, and besides money for Meybelín’s school supplies, a little bit of gas money for the motorcycle, and food, there was nothing left. Not a dime.
The men who stopped him told them they would investigate. Arnovis said that they could go ahead, and that they wouldn’t find anything, that nobody had given him any money.
I was in Corral again on another night, about a month later, when El Faro published a short video documentary on Arnovis and his separation from Meybelín. It was the most thorough Spanish-language publication to date, providing details about Arnovis’s initial threat—the elbow on the soccer field—which hadn’t yet been described in a Spanish-language media outlet. Arnovis’s brother caught it on Facebook, where it was being passed around by other folks from the islands. Furious, he called Arnovis, insisting that the video was putting him and the family in danger. The call unsettled Arnovis, and he was convinced, again, that he needed to leave immediately. What if they come tonight? he wondered. What do I do?
Earlier that same evening, the whole family was discussing going to a village party being thrown at the nearby restaurant, El Delfín. It seemed like they all wanted to go but were nervous or embarrassed to say so. It was like before a high school dance: Are you going? Are you? I’ll go if you’ll go.
Arnovis, though, never considered it, even as a few of his friends had been texting him, asking him to come. It’s hard when people invite you to do things, he told me, or tell you about work, and you can’t go, and you don’t even want to say why. And they invite you again later, and you have to refuse again, and then, after a while, they stop inviting you.
In the end, nobody from the family went to the party, but we could hear the music blasting, and some of his cousins danced a bit in the yard. (The next night, the family set up a circle of chairs and danced and laughed with each other, pounding their bare feet into the dirt. Despite my reluctance, and to their enormous glee, I danced as well. Arnovis was the only young person who didn’t dance. Nor did Joana—out of respect, she told me).
The article, the phone call from his brother, the noise of the party, all of it had been stirring up his anxieties and fears. He looked pale and sleepless the next morning.
He said to me at one point, unprompted, Some mornings when there’s no coffee or bread, and you realize you don’t have the chance to go out and work in peace and you can’t even sleep at night … Misery. It’s misery. Think about it. You wake up in the morning and you want to drink a cup of coffee. But you can’t. And you can’t even go buy any because you don’t have a dollar in your pocket.
Indebted thousands of dollars to his brother and to a coyote who may or may not have ties to a local gang, unable to work, but needing food and to provide what he could for Meybelín, Arnovis had no good options. As he considered what to do, he filled his time building his sister’s house, just a few minutes’ walk away, helping out with corn or cashew harvests, and trying to hatch a plan.
It’s the same thing as before, he said. If I stay I might get killed and Meybelín will have nobody. If I leave, maybe I can at least pay for her school, or send for her to come after me.
One day he told me, definitively, that he was going to Mexico, that he was going to wait in Mexico for a few weeks, and then pass into the United States. At his request, I helped him look into trying to ask for asylum in Costa Rica, but, in the end, he didn’t think it would work.
I have no proof, he told me. We’d been discussing the requirements for asylum. Nobody will believe me.
The fear pressing in on both sides froze him. In the following weeks, if he was slow in responding to a WhatsApp message I sent him, I feared the worst. Once, his father called me, and for a moment I was sure he was going to tell me that they had come for Arnovis.