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On June 9, 2009, just after 2 A.M., Laura S. left the restaurant where she waitressed, in Pharr, Texas, and drove off in her white Chevy. She was in an unusually hopeful mood. Her twenty-third birthday was nine days away, and she and her nineteen-year-old cousin, Elizabeth, had been discussing party plans at the restaurant. They'd decided to have coolers of beer, a professional d.j., and dancing after Laura put her three sons to bed. Now they were heading home, and giving two of Laura's friends a ride, with a quick detour for hamburgers. Elizabeth said that, as they neared the highway, a cop flashed his lights at them. The officer, Nazario Solis III, claimed that Laura had been driving between lanes and asked to see her license and proof of insurance.

Laura had neither. She'd lived in the United States undocumented her whole adult life.

"Do you have your residence card?" Solis asked.

"No," Laura said, glancing anxiously at her cousin and her friends. Solis questioned them, too. Only Elizabeth had a visa, which she fished out of her purse. Solis directed the others to get out of the car. "I'm calling Border Patrol," he said-an unusual move, at the time, for a small-town cop in South Texas.

Laura panicked. At five feet two inches and barely a hundred pounds, she looked younger than her age. She often wore tube tops and short shorts, and styled her hair in a girlish bob. Her affect was "attached to childhood," her older brother told me; she collected porcelain dolls, and loved Japanese anime and Saturday-morning cartoons. Laura's friends saw her trembling. Like her, they had kids who were U.S. citizens and steady jobs they didn't want to lose, but they knew that Laura's fear was distinct. She had an ex-husband across the border, in Reynosa, Mexico, who had promised to kill her if she returned.

"I can't be sent back to Mexico," Laura told Solis, beginning to cry. "I have a protection order against my ex-please, just let me call my mom and she'll bring you the paperwork."

Laura's two-year-old had an operation scheduled for later that week, to remove an abscess in his neck, and Laura also told Solis about that. "I need to be here," she begged, in Spanish. In English, Elizabeth detailed the threats from Laura's ex, Sergio. "You can't do this," Elizabeth said. "He'll kill her."

"Sorry," Solis replied, shrugging. "I already called." (Solis could not be reached for comment. He was later sent to prison for unrelated convictions, including bribery, extortion, and drug conspiracy.)

Laura had started dating Sergio when she was eighteen, and he soon became physically abusive. After a particularly horrific night the previous spring, when Sergio assaulted her, Laura had finally called the police, and coöperated with them to secure his arrest. He was later deported. In the year since then, Laura had tried to create a normal childhood for her sons. She shared a small trailer with Elizabeth and the boys near the Sharyland Plantation, a gated community of houses with lima-bean-shaped swimming pools and Roman-pillared porches which advertised its "delicate scent of hibiscus and bougainvillea flowers." Sometimes she'd dress the boys in cowboy outfits, and use the neighbors' sheep and horses as their personal petting zoo. At night, she'd sneak into the citrus groves and pick oranges for breakfast, humming her favorite song, "Single Mom": "A single mother who does not worry, who will always fight to be a mom. Tell him she can be a mother without him." Still, Sergio haunted her. In Mexico, he'd reportedly joined a local drug cartel. He often texted Laura death threats.

Laura and her friends waited by the roadside until a U.S. Border Patrol agent named Ramiro Garza arrived and ordered the three of them into his vehicle. Laura pleaded with Garza as he drove them to a nearby processing center, where Laura's friends saw her, under pressure, sign paperwork for a "voluntary return." Three hours later-after holding off until dawn "for safety reasons," Garza later explained, "since there were females involved"-he drove them to the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge, which crosses the Rio Grande and leads to Reynosa, a city so violent that the U.S. State Department forbids its employees there from venturing out after midnight.

As the sun rose, Laura stepped onto the bridge and into a much larger story, one that has launched a major legal battle over the U.S. government's duty to protect prospective deportees who plead for their lives. The lawsuit, and others like it, has implications for the treatment of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have found refuge in the United States, and for whom deportation can be tantamount to death. Some, like Laura, are survivors of domestic violence seeking safety in the U.S. Others, like Elizabeth, are Dreamers, undocumented youths who were granted relief from deportation under President Obama, only to have their status imperilled by his successor. Still others are asylum seekers from Central America, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere, who have fled gangs, climate crises, and armed conflicts, and then been misinformed or turned away by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, some of whom have been emboldened under President Trump.

In the final moments before Laura crossed the bridge, she turned to Agent Garza. "When I am found dead," she told him, "it will be on your conscience."

When Donald Trump announced his bid for the Presidency, he made anxieties about whiteness under siege a signature part of his platform. On the campaign trail, he promised to "deport all criminal aliens and save American lives." After his Inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security created an office for the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, called VOICE -Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. The office is compiling an online database to track "illegal alien perpetrators of crime." (Data show that immigrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.) There is, however, no White House initiative to track a more sprawling set of legal violations involving immigrants-violations for which the U.S. government is largely responsible.

In the past decade, a growing number of immigrants fearing for their safety have come to the U.S., only to be sent back to their home countries-with the help of border agents, immigration judges, politicians, and U.S. voters-to violent deaths. Even as border apprehensions have dropped, the number of migrants coming to the U.S. because their lives are in danger has soared. According to the United Nations, since 2008 there has been a fivefold increase in asylum seekers just from Central America's Northern Triangle-Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador-where organized gangs are dominant. In 2014, according to the U.N., Honduras had the world's highest murder rate; El Salvador and Guatemala were close behind.

Politicians often invoke the prospect of death by deportation in debates about the fate of these immigrants and others with precarious status, like the Dreamers. In February, 2016, in a speech criticizing the lack of legal representation for Central American children seeking refuge, Harry Reid, at that time the Senate Minority Leader, warned Congress, "Deportation means death for some of these people." That summer, Senator Edward J. Markey, of Massachusetts, told the press, "We should not be sending families back to situations where they can be killed." He added, "That's just un-American."

These conversations have been largely theoretical, devoid of names and faces. No U.S. government body monitors the fate of deportees, and immigrant-aid groups typically lack the resources to document what happens to those who have been sent back. Fear of retribution keeps most grieving families from speaking publicly. In early 2016, as the director of the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, I set out, with a dozen graduate students, to create a record of people who had been deported to their deaths or to other harms-a sort of shadow database of the one that the Trump Administration later compiled to track the crimes of "alien offenders." We contacted more than two hundred local legal-aid organizations, domestic-violence shelters, and immigrants'-rights groups nationwide, as well as migrant shelters, humanitarian operations, law offices, and mortuaries across Central America. We spoke to families of the deceased. And we gathered the stories of immigrants who had endured other harms-including kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault-as a result of deportations under Obama and Trump.

As the database grew to include more than sixty cases, patterns emerged. Often, immigrants or their families had warned U.S. officials that they were in danger if sent back. Ana Lopez, the mother of a twenty-year-old gay asylum seeker named Nelson Avila-Lopez, wrote a letter to the U.S. government during Christmas week in 2011, two months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accidentally deported him to Honduras. Nelson had fled the country at seventeen, after receiving gang threats. He'd entered the U.S. unauthorized and been ordered removed, but an immigration judge then granted him an emergency stay of his deportation so that he could reopen his case for asylum. An ICE agent told his family's legal team that Nelson was deported because "someone screwed up," and ICE alleges that the proper office had not been notified of the judge's stay.

"His life is in danger," Ana Lopez wrote, begging U.S. authorities to reverse her son's deportation. Her efforts proved fruitless. Two months later, Nelson died in a prison fire, along with more than three hundred and fifty other inmates. His lawyer told me that Nelson had been detained by the Honduran government without charges, in an anti-gang initiative. Survivors of the fire alleged that it was set intentionally, perhaps as an act of gang retaliation, and that the guards had done little to help the men as they screamed and burned to death in their cells.

We discovered, too, how minor missteps-a traffic violation or a workplace dispute-can turn lethal for unauthorized immigrants. At eighteen, Juan Carlos Coronilla-Guerrero was deported from Texas to Mexico. He later returned and settled in Buda, Texas, with his wife. He worked as a carpenter and raised three kids. In January, 2017, someone in his neighborhood reported him for a domestic dispute; police found him in possession of a quarter of a gram of marijuana.

In March, Coronilla went to the Travis County courthouse for what, before Trump's election, would likely have been a quick misdemeanor hearing. Travis was a "sanctuary jurisdiction," meaning that the sheriff there declined to honor most federal detention requests for undocumented individuals without a warrant or an allegation of a serious crime. But Trump, within days of his Inauguration, had ordered a crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions, and ICE agents in Travis County had suddenly appeared in the courthouse. After Coronilla left his proceeding, his lawyer noticed two men who, he recalled, were "dressed like hunters." The men followed Coronilla into an elevator, then identified themselves as ICE agents and arrested him for reëntry after deportation, a felony.

Coronilla's wife begged a federal judge to spare her husband. Gangs had overrun his home town in Mexico, and deportees were prime targets for crime, since they were presumed to have money. Coronilla was deported in June. Three months later, gunmen woke him from the bed where he slept with his young son. According to the Austin American-Statesman, he tried to soothe the boy, saying, "Don't worry, my love." His body was found about forty miles away, filled with bullets. When I spoke to Coronilla's wife shortly after his death, she told me that she'd returned to Mexico to claim his body. She now fears for her own life. "He was a good man," she said. "Now I have to prepare for his funeral."

In the years following the Second World War, the United Nations established a principle of international law known as non-refoulement, or non-return, which forbids the removal of asylum seekers to countries where they are likely to be tortured or killed. The principle was enshrined in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, formalizing the concept of the "refugee" and insuring safe harbor for people who could show "a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion." No one with a credible fear of persecution could be expelled "in any manner whatsoever to a territory where he or she fears threats to life or freedom."

For the U.S., the effort to protect refugees was also an act of atonement. In 1939, the government had rejected a boat carrying more than nine hundred Jewish escapees from Nazi Germany. At least two hundred of them were later killed in the Holocaust. As the refugee crisis worsened, countless more were refused entry. President Franklin Roosevelt had warned the public that Jews posed a national-security threat, and argued for tighter restrictions on their numbers. "In some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies," he said at a press conference. Among those denied entry was Anne Frank, whose father applied for refugee status for his family in 1941, unsuccessfully. "What is done cannot be undone," Anne wrote in her diary, "but one can prevent it happening again." She later died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

In 1980, Congress incorporated the idea of non-refoulement into the Refugee Act. The act established protocols for vetting and resettling refugees and assured asylum seekers that they would not be treated as criminals, even if they arrived unauthorized in the U.S. The act, which had bipartisan support, was also meant to bolster relationships with allies and to provide a humanitarian model of resettlement for the rest of the world.

Today, the first screening of asylum seekers at the border often falls to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, who attempt to separate out candidates for asylum and other forms of protection. Many agents treat the task with great care. In the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas, several told me that they view the work of identifying individuals who may have fled serious harm as one of the most rewarding parts of their job.

A field manual for C.B.P. agents lists a series of questions that agents must ask an unauthorized immigrant before subjecting him or her to immediate deportation. "Do you have any fear or concern about being returned to your home country or being removed from the United States?" one reads. "Would you be harmed if you were returned?" another asks. C.B.P. agents are not authorized to evaluate the validity of the fear expressed. Instead, anyone answering yes to these questions must be referred to an asylum officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and given a chance to explain his or her fear. "The inspector should err on the side of caution," the field manual reads, and "apply the criteria generously."

Nevertheless, my team and I heard stories from more than a dozen women who say that they were never asked the required questions, or were ignored, mocked, or even sexually propositioned by U.S. agents after expressing their fears-and then deported to harm. In Queens, we met Rosaleda, who had worked as a police officer in Comayagua, Honduras, until her investigation of a cousin's murder revealed a high-ranking colleague's involvement in the crime, which Rosaleda reported to the department. Menacing phone calls began, followed by a drive-by shooting while she worked the overnight shift. "This is a warning," read a note bearing her name that was left at the scene. "Leave things alone or we will kill you and next time we won't miss." Rosaleda asked a supervisor to transfer her; he said he'd consider it only in exchange for sex. In a second attempt on her life, while she was on patrol, two of her colleagues were killed. Rosaleda decided to risk the journey north. Her situation is surprisingly common, in some ways. In a recent study conducted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, ten per cent of the women interviewed, who had fled El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, or Mexico, indicated that "the police or other authorities were the direct source of their harm."

When Rosaleda arrived in Texas, she was apprehended and deported without seeing a judge or a lawyer. She hadn't shared details of her escape from Honduras, fearing that it would further endanger her. She attempted to cross the border again, and was kidnapped by a cartel and held for ransom. Eventually, she made it to New York, where she found pro-bono legal help. But, because of her earlier-and, her attorney argues, unlawful-deportation, she is now ineligible for asylum. (She was granted a "withholding of removal," which has allowed her to remain in the U.S. but offers no path to permanent legal status.)

Allegations abound of Customs and Border Protection officers dismissing asylum seekers more brazenly. According to a 2014 American Civil Liberties Union report based on conversations with nearly a hundred people who were removed without seeing an immigration judge, "Fifty-five percent said they were not asked about fear of persecution or torture," while "forty percent who were asked and said they were afraid were ordered deported without seeing an asylum officer." For years, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has documented Customs and Border Protection's noncompliance with asylum-seeker protections, including, in more than fifty per cent of cases, officers at ports of entry neglecting "to read the required information." More recently, after Trump's election, civil-liberties groups began documenting an apparent increase in rejections in some places on the border. According to a recent lawsuit, C.B.P. officers have told prospective asylum seekers, "The United States is not giving asylum anymore," and "Trump says we don't have to let you in."

On the night Laura was sent back across the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge, her mother, Maria, put her grandkids to sleep and lay down on Laura's bed. Lately, she'd been helping Laura with childcare. After her daughter got back from her waitressing shift, she would often get into bed next to her mom and tell stories from her day before falling asleep. When Maria noticed, around sunrise, that her daughter hadn't returned, she began to worry.

Maria had raised Laura and her brother as a single mother while working at a Black & Decker plant in Reynosa, on the assembly line. She'd also done a stint at a laundromat, where Laura kept her company. Laura grew into a mischievous preteen. Once, she riled her brother by shaving off half his mustache while he was sleeping. At eighteen, Laura started seeing Sergio, who lived on her grandmother's block. Sergio had a buzz cut, a square jaw, and an awkward sense of humor. He and Laura talked on the phone for hours, until Maria complained, "My phone bill-it's a whole year's salary!" Sergio had Laura's name tattooed on his arm. After a year, Laura, who had a son from a previous relationship, gave birth to their first child. When Sergio later moved to Texas to work in construction with his father, Laura joined him. In 2007, the couple had another boy. Laura found work as a waitress and sold homemade candied apples door-to-door, while also taking care of the children. They were a handful, and, Maria recalled, "her partner was like a fourth child."

Maria told me that Sergio had been abused as a child and had struggled with addiction. "He came from a tough psychological background," Laura's brother said. One time, Maria told me, Sergio dragged Laura across the floor by her hair. Another day, in March, 2008, when Laura said she was going to leave Sergio, he grabbed a knife and threatened to commit suicide. As Laura protested, he shoved her to the floor and kicked her in the ribs. He beat her so badly that she called the police and prepared to file charges against him. A judge signed an emergency protection order forbidding Sergio from going within two hundred yards of Laura's home, but the order seemed only to enrage Sergio. After multiple threats against Laura, he was arrested, charged with assault, and deported to Mexico.

In the years since Laura and Sergio had left Reynosa, the town had become a cartel battleground. In 2008, at least five thousand Mexicans died in the drug war, more fatalities than the United States suffered during the Iraq War. That year, a drug kingpin was captured in a shoot-out near Laura's childhood home, and the military seized five hundred and forty rifles, a hundred and sixty-five grenades, and fourteen sticks of TNT. A turf war began, to determine his replacement. After Sergio returned to Reynosa, he reportedly started working as a cartel grunt. Maria told me that he continued to threaten Laura, saying that if she ever returned to Mexico he'd set her on fire, and texting, "I'm going to smoke you."

On that Tuesday morning in June when Laura didn't come home from her waitressing shift, Maria considered the dark possibilities right away. Then the phone rang. It was Laura, from Reynosa. "I did everything I could," she said, crying. "I even told the police, 'Arrest me, and I'll show you the documents,' " referring to the emergency protection order.

Laura called Elizabeth, too, and the cousins made a plan to meet in Reynosa. Elizabeth, trying to lighten the mood, asked whether the border agent who deported Laura was cute. Laura said that he was, and Elizabeth asked if she had tried to flirt. Laura replied, "I told him, 'You're sending me straight to the slaughterhouse.' "

For years, most undocumented immigrants facing deportation in the U.S. were given a chance to go before a judge-to show evidence, call witnesses, and make a case for why they should be allowed to stay. In 1996, Congress revoked that right for tens of thousands of immigrants, expanding forms of "summary removal," which can take place without a hearing or judicial input. By 2013, more than eighty per cent of deportations were nonjudicial, with the result that life-or-death decisions now routinely rest in the hands of immigration authorities at the border.

Even when asylum seekers get the opportunity to see a judge, it can be difficult to prove that their fears merit legal relief. Asylum seekers aren't entitled to lawyers, and children as young as three have been told to represent themselves in immigration court. According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, at Syracuse University, asylum seekers who find legal representation are five times more likely to win their cases. Geography is a strong determining factor in their fates. When the Government Accountability Office studied the outcomes of asylum cases in courts nationwide, it found significant geographical disparities in the responses to nearly identical situations. Between 2007 and 2014, some sixty per cent of asylum applicants won their cases in New York City, while in the courts of Omaha and Atlanta less than five per cent did.

Perhaps the most formidable challenge for asylum seekers is that the Second World War-era categories of protection aren't well suited to immigrants fleeing modern gang violence. Courts resist recognizing the asylum claims of people who have been targeted by MS-13, for instance, because the motive for violence rarely fits the criteria. For victims of domestic violence, the legal protections, including the Violence Against Women Act, are slightly more favorable. If Laura had gone before a judge, she could have had multiple options for potential relief, including a U visa, for crime victims. Still, the legal scholar Blaine Bookey writes, "Whether a woman fleeing domestic violence will receive protection in the United States seems to depend not on the consistent application of objective principles, but rather on the view of her individual judge, often untethered to any legal principles at all."

Not long ago, I met a young mother who asked to be identified by her middle name, Elena. In Honduras, where she grew up, her teen-age brother was murdered by MS-13 for being gay, another brother was killed for refusing to join the gang, and her sister was shot for ignoring a gang leader's sexual advances after he'd raped and impregnated her. A different gang member began pursuing Elena, and fired shots at her house after she turned him down. She reported the crime to police, and then learned that he was planning further retaliation against her.

In 2012, Elena crossed the U.S. border near Eagle Pass, Texas, and told a Border Patrol agent that she feared for her life. He logged her possessions: a black sweater, a hairband, gray shoelaces, and a key chain with photographs of her two children, whom she'd left behind in Honduras. He asked, "Would you be harmed if you are returned to your home country?" He wrote down a single word: "No."

In detention, Elena fought back against this supposed denial, and won a hearing with an asylum officer, who corrected the record. Here she encountered a new obstacle. After she related her experiences, the officer asked her whether she was persecuted on account of her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group-the refugee criteria created by the United Nations to reflect the political threats of 1951. Elena answered no on all counts, and the officer determined that she did not qualify to apply for asylum.

Elena appealed, requesting a hearing with a judge. Asking to go before an immigration judge often means a long stint in detention, and detention can mean poor food, minimal medical care, and scant access to legal counsel. In the past, federal policy has encouraged releasing asylum seekers while they await court hearings, sparing taxpayers the cost of detention. But in the last year of Obama's Presidency, and then under Trump, the percentage of asylum seekers who were granted parole plummeted. Government data obtained in a civil-rights lawsuit showed that, in one New York facility, fifty per cent of parole requests were granted in the months immediately before Trump's Inauguration. In the months after, twelve per cent were.

After three months in detention, Elena was granted a rare hearing before an immigration judge. The hearing took place virtually, with the judge appearing on a video monitor. He asked Elena one question.

"Did you move to any other city in Honduras before coming to the United States?" he inquired.

"No," she said.

"Well, the government of the United States doesn't afford you protection for this type of reason. I affirm the asylum officer's decision. Nothing further." Elena was deported two weeks later.

Back in her home town, Elena was assaulted at gunpoint by the man she'd fled. He tortured her, holding a lighter to her skin. Other gang members cracked her thirteen-year-old son's skull. She fled, with her kids, to a tobacco-farming town in western Honduras, where the man who'd been pursuing her found her again. Once more, she escaped to the U.S. This time, authorities agreed that Elena's fear-and the threat to her kids' lives-was credible. But, like Rosaleda, she is barred from receiving asylum because of her prior deportation.

Many immigrants, after being deported, never get a second chance to prove their claims. Constantino Morales was a cop in Guerrero, Mexico, until he tried to break up a drug cartel and became a target of violence. He escaped to the U.S. and worked at a Cheesecake Factory in Des Moines, Iowa, and then became a popular laborers'-rights advocate. As with Laura, a minor traffic stop led to his removal, which he initially fought. At a community meeting with Tom Latham, at that time a Republican congressman, Morales said, "If I am sent back, I will face more violence, and I could lose my life." Morales had applied for asylum a month earlier. He was denied. At the time, the U.S. State Department called Guerrero "the most violent state in Mexico." Seven months after Morales's deportation, he was shot and killed.

In October, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decried the "rampant abuse and fraud" in the asylum system and said that "the system is being gamed." The Trump Administration has called on Congress to crack down, which federal immigration judges may be doing already. For the past several years, asylum grant rates have declined. In 2017, judges rejected some sixty per cent of asylum seekers, the highest denial rate in more than a decade.

Protections have also evaporated for many refugees seeking resettlement in the U.S. Trump has portrayed refugees from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Somalia not as candidates for humanitarian assistance but as national-security threats. In his first days in office, he banned many of them from travelling to the U.S. The ban is being contested in ongoing litigation. Several asylum and refugee officers told me they worry that the ban, and the inflamed discourse about refugees more generally, misrepresents their highly comprehensive vetting process, and undermines core American values.

"We have a great mission characterized by extreme caution and care," Michael Knowles, a U.S. asylum officer for the past twenty-five years, told me, speaking as the president of Council 119, a union representing refugee and asylum officers and other staff of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. "Ours is a dual mission-to identify people who aren't refugees and who, worst case, might wish us harm, but also to identify and protect refugees." At a meeting in March, 2017, with John Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, Knowles warned that asylum and refugee officers are "deeply concerned" about the future of the program. Knowles told me what he wished he could have said to Kelly: "You've already unshackled Border Patrol. Please, don't put the shackles on us."

In the hours after Laura's deportation, Elizabeth drove across the border to meet her. "Ay," Laura joked, after Elizabeth arrived at her grandmother's house, in Reynosa. "What's going to happen to my birthday party?" Maria and the kids came soon afterward, and they set up an inflatable pool in the back yard so that the boys could play while the adults discussed what to do.

Sergio soon learned of Laura's return. He began driving by the house, shouting obscenities. A few days after her arrival in Mexico, Laura went to the pharmacy with Elizabeth and her youngest child. As she pulled the car out of the driveway, another vehicle T-boned her, blocking her exit. Sergio leaped out of the car and dragged Laura from her seat through the window, shouting, "You bitch!" He bit off a chunk of her ear and tried to strangle her, as their child cried in the back seat. Elizabeth grabbed a fallen tree branch and hit Sergio on the head. He stumbled, muttering, "You better not get involved."

"I'm calling the cops," Elizabeth told him, flipping open her phone. The gesture was a ruse-her U.S. cell phone didn't work in Mexico, and, anyway, the local police were known to collaborate with the cartels. But it worked. Sergio staggered back to his car and drove off.

The incident gave the cousins new urgency. Elizabeth emptied a coffee can and wrote "Help bring Laura back!" on it. She took it to friends and family members, asking for money to pay a coyote to smuggle Laura into the U.S. Laura's trailer in Texas was only a twenty-minute drive from Reynosa, but it would take hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, and a risky crossing, to get her there.

The next day, Laura left the house in her mother's Ford Contour to buy food for the kids. By evening, she had not returned. "We called the Red Cross, we called the hospitals, we called the police," Elizabeth said. The following morning, Maria turned on the local news, and a grisly image flashed across the screen. It was an incinerated vehicle, with a charred human skeleton in the front seat. The car was a Ford Contour.

Sergio seems like the kind of immigrant few Americans would object to deporting. In speeches, Trump has often warned the country about "bad hombres," emphasizing the spectre of violent men to justify his deportation policies. Obama, whose Administration deported more immigrants than any other, also divided undocumented immigrants into neat categories: the longtimers versus the newcomers, those keen to "get right with the law" versus those trying to skate beneath it. "We're going to keep focussing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security," he promised, in 2014. "Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who's working hard to provide for her kids."

But even some immigrants who have committed felonies or other crimes have stories that are more complicated than they first appear. At a law office in San Francisco, I met the surviving family members of a woman named Yadira. She'd come to California from La Lima, Honduras, in the early two-thousands, to escape an abusive boyfriend. In 2010, she was deported on a drug-possession charge, despite articulating her fear of return. After she was back in La Lima, her brother, who was confined to a wheelchair, was murdered by the Mara 18 gang. (He had left a competing gang more than a decade earlier, after being shot and paralyzed.) Together with her grandparents, Yadira's fourteen-year-old daughter discovered his body. Yadira began speaking out publicly against the gang, and became a target. Afraid for her life, she went north, hoping to get back to San Francisco.

At the U.S. border, she told officials about her brother's murder but was detained nevertheless. "They're going to deport me," she told her father, in a call from detention, saying that she had begged for protection. (The C.B.P. stated that Yadira "did not claim fear of persecution.") She stepped off the tarmac in Honduras wearing her favorite "California" sweatpants, hoping to go unnoticed. Her father, a trucker for Chiquita bananas, drove her home. A few days later, her youngest daughter found her body in front of the house, riddled with bullets.

Under Trump, ICE arrests of undocumented immigrants-including those accused, but not convicted, of minor crimes-have gone up by nearly forty per cent. Trump describes these roundups to the electorate as a public-safety measure, but many law-enforcement leaders argue that they can have the opposite effect, lowering the rate at which crimes are reported. In February, a group of sixty law-enforcement officials warned, in a letter to Congress, that Trump's policies "could harm community trust and make it harder for state and local law enforcement agencies to do our jobs." In March, Los Angeles's police chief noted that reports of sexual assault among the city's Latino population had declined twenty-five per cent in the first three months of 2017, Trump's first months in office. Domestic-violence reports dropped ten per cent. (The decline was not found among other ethnic groups.) In April, Houston's police chief noted that the number of Hispanics reporting rape was down more than forty per cent.

My team and I filed public-record requests in the twenty U.S. cities with the highest populations of undocumented immigrants, in order to determine the extent of this change. We obtained sexual-assault and domestic-violence reports from heavily Hispanic neighborhoods, and contacted more than a hundred police departments, district attorneys, legal-services providers, and domestic-violence shelters.

The results were striking. In Arlington, Virginia, domestic-assault reports in one Hispanic neighborhood dropped more than eighty-five per cent in the first eight months after Trump's Inauguration, compared with the same period the previous year. Reports of rape and sexual assault fell seventy-five per cent. Meanwhile, in Chicago, domestic-incident and sexual-assault reports from Hispanic victims dropped seven per cent. In Denver, the city attorney, Kristin Bronson, told us of more than a dozen Latina women who had dropped their domestic-abuse cases since Trump took office, citing fear of deportation. She estimates that the number of women who have avoided pursuing legal action against an abuser is far higher.

Many local law-enforcement officers are also concerned about state-based legislation, including bills requiring local cops to act as subsidiaries of ICE. A Texas law called SB4, known as the "show me your papers" law, threatens to jail or fine sheriffs who don't coöperate with immigration holds. The law, which was supposed to go into effect in September but is in litigation, would make routine the process by which Laura was turned over to Border Patrol. Last July, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a group of police chiefs and sheriffs representing dozens of large cities, joined with two other groups condemning SB4, warning the court that the law "will dangerously impact local communities by eliminating law enforcement discretion of how to effectively serve public safety needs."

On June 17, 2009, a week after Laura's return to Reynosa, a coroner confirmed that her DNA had been found in the Ford Contour, and the police delivered her remains to Maria. The next day was Laura's twenty-third birthday, and Elizabeth kept her promise to throw a party. She and Maria got balloons, prepared a cake, and hired a mariachi band. The birthday also served as a burial. At the gravesite, Laura's family called her Texas friends on video chat. Laura's eldest son brought his mother a gift, a figurine of his favorite cartoon character, and placed it in the coffin.

That week, Sergio was arrested by the Mexican police and confessed to Laura's murder. He'd strangled her, according to the local press, then doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. Maria and Elizabeth testified at his trial. He was sentenced to forty years in prison.

Grief, for Maria, was soon subsumed by the challenge of caring for Laura's sons. A teacher called her to complain that one of the boys had told his class that his dad had killed his mom. "He cannot do that!" the teacher said. Maria told her, "He's a child, and he's in pain." One day, Laura's middle child Googled his mother and discovered disturbing details about her murder. He threw a fit, smashing furniture and crying, "I don't want to be here without my mom!" At home, the youngest boy asked his grandmother, "Can you make her again, so that I can see her?"

I went to Texas to meet Maria, and she welcomed me into her darkened apartment wearing black. She had the same deep-set eyes and velvety brows as her daughter, whose photograph hung above an overstuffed couch. "What I'm most proud of is what she left me-my grandsons," Maria said, as she made coffee, gesturing toward the boys' grade-school portraits in the living room. She added, "There's a reason they're alive."

She showed me a cigar box on a shelf by the front door, the boys' Mom Box. "If they find something girly outside, they bring it home and put it in the box," Maria said. We looked through the contents: pink ribbons, a Disney Birthday Princess pin, a Mr. Potato Head ring, a Peter Pan figurine, and assorted trinkets that reminded the boys of Laura. Underneath was a copy of Laura's emergency protection order, carefully folded.

When Maria realized that the boys would soon be home from school, she told me that there was one last thing she wanted to show me. "You know how usually, when you box up someone's clothes, and then you take them out, they smell bad?" she asked. "Well, my daughter's clothes, they don't smell that way. They're still fresh." She went into the bedroom and returned with an armful of clothing. At her urging, I pressed my face into one of Laura's red satin blouses. A gentle scent lingered-unobtrusive, vaguely floral, verging on nothingness. I found it strange, after so many hours spent searching for Laura, to find her here.

Maria told me that shortly after Laura's death she began encountering problems raising the boys. She wasn't their legal guardian, and doctors wouldn't allow her to make decisions about their medical care. Signing off on school activities and therapy dates was complicated. So, one day in 2013, she packed up the boys and took them to the law offices of Jennifer Harbury, a civil-rights attorney.

Harbury told me that, in the meeting, the boys "were a wreck." She explained, "The older one was rocking back and forth, and the middle child looked scared-crying and hyper and desperate-and the little one was very upset." The whole family, Harbury said, showed "every sign of post-traumatic stress you can think of."

Maria told Harbury that she needed help getting custody of her grandsons, and then recounted the circumstances of Laura's death. "When a woman is afraid," Maria asked, "why can't you give her the opportunity to show her documents, to show her evidence?"

Harbury was stunned. Her team could help Maria get custody of the kids, she said. But, as the pair discussed the case, another idea emerged: filing a lawsuit against agents of the Border Patrol.

Harbury, who is sixty-six, has made a career of challenging alleged abuses of immigrants, including refoulements. She grew up in Connecticut and California, in a family that had fled Nazi persecution in Holland during the Second World War. After graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1978, she moved to the Rio Grande Valley to defend farmworkers' rights. In the early eighties, she noticed an alarming trend: thousands of Salvadorans and indigenous Guatemalans were crossing the Rio Grande, fleeing civil wars. Most were denied asylum and forced to return-often, she said, "to face torture chambers and death squads," some of which were funded in part by the U.S. government.

In 1990, Harbury went to Guatemala to conduct research on indigenous women rebels fighting in the country's civil war. Atop a volcano, she met a young Mayan rebel commander, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, who went by the war name Everardo. They fell in love and travelled back to rural Texas, where they married and, in the tradition of leftist guerrilla fighters, exchanged silver spoons. A few months later, with Harbury's support, Bámaca returned home to fight the Guatemalan Army. Then he disappeared.

At first, the Army claimed that Bámaca had been killed in combat. But Harbury grew suspicious when she reviewed the autopsy report. "Everardo was a walking war museum," she said, explaining that he was covered in scars-and yet the report noted none of them. Later, a rebel fighter who had been captured by the Army escaped, and claimed to have seen Bámaca alive, being tortured on a Guatemalan military base.

Harbury began a series of hunger strikes, sleeping on the pavement in front of Guatemala's Presidential palace for thirty-two days, demanding answers. She attracted the attention of U.S. news shows and celebrities like Bianca Jagger and Charlie Rose. "If you kill him, I'm going to die on your doorstep with convulsions in front of every camera in the world," Harbury said, addressing the Guatemalan government. "You're going to be seen." CBS reported that the C.I.A. knew that Bámaca had been captured alive and tortured, and Harbury moved her hunger strike to the gates of the White House. On the twelfth day of her fast, the congressman Robert G. Torricelli revealed that a Guatemalan Army colonel being paid by the C.I.A. had been involved in Bámaca's torture, as well as in the earlier killing of a U.S. citizen, in 1990. President Clinton's Administration ordered internal investigations into the United States' role in the murders and their coverups.

Along the way, Harbury became something of a celebrity herself. The writer Chris Kraus centered part of her cult hit " I Love Dick" on her, describing Harbury's pre-fasting aesthetic as "Hillary Clinton on a budget"-"a well-proportioned face with good WASP bones, blonde tousled bubble-cut, a cheap tweed coat, clear gaze"-and noting that, mid-fast, people looked at Harbury as "a strange animal." Ted Turner bought the film rights to her life story, and a Times reporter suggested Madonna for the role, writing, "It would take a certain controlled irreverence and mad gusto to get Jennifer Harbury on the screen."

In 1995, Bill Clinton suspended covert C.I.A. funding to the Guatemalan Army after the agency admitted to making mistakes in Bámaca's case. To Harbury, this was far from sufficient. By then, she'd learned that her husband had been killed by men on the C.I.A.'s payroll. The next year, she sued officials from the State Department, the C.I.A., and other government bodies for denying her access to information that might have helped prevent her husband's killing.

The case was filed as a "Bivens" claim, so called because of the case of Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, which, in 1971, established that citizens could sue federal officials if their rights had been violated. Harbury's claim was simple: if the government hadn't lied about her husband's whereabouts, she could have petitioned for his rescue. Her case eventually went to the Supreme Court, where, in an unusual move, Harbury argued it herself. The Court acknowledged "appreciating Harbury's anguish" but ruled against her.

In Maria's story, Harbury saw a grief similar to her own, and a chance to hold the government accountable for another family's anguish. "The U.S. government should not be free to submit people to torture and murder," she said. "They did it in my husband's case, and they did it in Laura's case."

Maria worried about antagonizing the authorities, but she was desperate for ways to draw meaning from her daughter's death. Recently, she had given Laura's porcelain-doll collection to a center for abused girls. "In the case of my child," she said, "there are many lessons that could be useful for other women." Maria decided to press ahead with a lawsuit.

They had to work quickly, because the statute of limitations in Laura's case had nearly expired. Harbury partnered with the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit that often pursues civil-rights cases on behalf of immigrants, and she was soon joined by one of the group's attorneys, Efrén Olivares. On June 5, 2013, they filed Maria S. v. John Doe, on behalf of Laura's three sons. U.S. immigration agents, they alleged, had arrested Laura, then "violated her procedural due process rights" and "refused to consider her clear eligibility for relief from removal." Laura had the right to a full and fair hearing before a qualified immigration judge, and the right to counsel at her own expense, as afforded by the Fifth Amendment. Instead, the complaint claimed, agents had sent Laura back to "extreme danger, resulting in her battery and death." Their decisions, the complaint said, "shock the conscience."

Holding U.S. Customs and Border Protection legally accountable is difficult but not impossible. The day before Maria S. v. John Doe was filed, the A.C.L.U. brought a class-action case against officers from Border Patrol and ICE in Southern California, alleging the widespread use of coercion, threats, and deception to get immigrants to sign their own expulsion orders, including a form called the I-826. In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security and other defendants agreed to a settlement. A long list of reforms resulted, including a stipulation that prospective deportees could use a phone to call a family member, a legal-service provider, or a Mexican consulate before removal. The reforms, however, applied only to Southern California.

Other suits are pending. Last July, a nonprofit called Al Otro Lado sued officials at the Department of Homeland Security and at Customs and Border Protection, alleging that asylum seekers are being "systematically turned away at ports of entry." Last year, the city of Chicago sued Trump's Justice Department over a plan to withhold federal public-safety funds from sanctuary cities.

Harbury has become involved in still more cases. After Trump's election, she began interviewing recent deportees in Reynosa about their experiences with U.S. immigration authorities, and gathered accounts of asylum seekers who'd been kidnapped or otherwise harmed after being turned away. She compiled her findings in a sworn legal declaration, and shared it with a national network of civil-rights attorneys. In September, she filed a suit against officers from ICE and other government entities on behalf of a group of "young civilians who were forced to flee their homelands due to the ongoing violence." These asylum seekers had come from places as diverse as Ghana, Guatemala, and Sierra Leone, but faced the same "danger of severe persecution" if deported. Although they had committed no crimes, the suit alleged, they had been "wrongfully denied parole and subjected to prolonged and arbitrary detention in prison-like conditions."

The case of Maria S. v. John Doe, filed on behalf of Laura's kids, ended up on the docket of Judge Andrew Hanen, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, in Brownsville. His rulings on immigration are infamous. In 2015, he accused the Obama Administration's Department of Homeland Security of "criminal conspiracy" after the agency chose not to arrest and deport an undocumented mother who had paid a smuggler to bring her child to the States. Hanen said that the decision set a "dangerous and unconscionable" precedent.

Government lawyers argued for the dismissal of Maria's suit, saying that U.S. Border Patrol agents enjoy wide immunity from civil lawsuits. It seemed likely that Hanen would side with the government, but, in 2015, in one of his first decisions in the case, he took a surprising position. He refused to dismiss the suit, writing, "Even aliens who have entered the United States unlawfully are assured the protections of the Fifth Amendment due process clause." The case, he said, could move to discovery, which would have to focus on a single issue: whether, and how, Laura's deportation had been coerced.

At a pretrial hearing of Maria S. v. John Doe, Hanen clarified this critical question. Laura, he noted, had signed an I-826 form in the hours before her removal, checking the box giving up her right to seek asylum, which reads, "I admit that I am in the United States illegally, and I believe I do not face harm if I return to my country." Why? If Laura really feared for her life, had she signed under duress? Or did she check the box voluntarily?

Harbury tracked down one of the friends who had been in the car that night. She was frightened but agreed to testify. While seated at the processing station, the woman recalled, Laura wept and begged the border officer-Ramiro Garza-not to send her back. The officer, she said, had a gun and an "annoyed" expression. He put the paperwork in front of Laura, and ordered her to sign. "This is an injustice!" Laura objected, according to the friend. Garza, she said, "mocked" Laura, and pressed again. The pair went back and forth until Laura caved. (Garza denied this version of events, and said that he would never force anyone to sign the form.) Laura's friend said that her own decision to sign was influenced by the prospect of the long detention that often accompanies fighting deportation. "I didn't want to be locked in," she said, "because I have children."

In July, 2017, Hanen finally handed down his ruling. "This case presents one of the most lamentable set of circumstances that this Court has ever been called upon to address," Hanen wrote. It left the court with "a profound sense of sadness about the disastrous chain of events that ended in the defendant's murder." But he said that he couldn't overcome the problem that "the only person who can truly reveal Laura S.'s motivation" in checking the box-Laura herself-"was killed." As a result, coercion was hard to prove. Perhaps she was coerced, Hanen said, or perhaps she signed the I-826 so that she wouldn't be in detention during her son's surgery, or for some other unknown or unknowable reason.

"Despite their best efforts," Hanen ruled, "Plaintiffs have failed to clear the evidentiary hurdle created by the death of Laura S." The case was dismissed.

Harbury felt heartsick, but she'd always known that the case might have to wind its way through higher appeals courts. Last August, Harbury and the other lawyers filed with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the case should be heard by a jury. They noted that the lawsuit's outcome "directly affects ongoing life and death situations" for other immigrants. Harbury is hopeful that, if success eludes them in the initial appeals, the case will eventually reach the Supreme Court. And if no justice emerges there? Harbury and her team will turn to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. There, they can draw on treaties meant to protect immigrants like those the United States failed in the Second World War.

For Laura's family, the stakes of the case are profound. But they also have other, more immediate worries. Not long after Laura's murder, Elizabeth's purse was stolen from her car. Her visa-her only proof of legal status-was inside. Then, in 2015, she learned about Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which was intended for people who had come to the U.S. as children and, in many cases, grown up here, who wanted to work legally, get an education, and stay in the place they considered home. Elizabeth decided to apply. She had to prove that she'd come to the U.S. before the age of sixteen, posed no threat to national security, and met a list of other criteria. Not long after submitting her materials, she was notified that she had won legal relief, and officially become a Dreamer.

Politically, Obama's DACA policies have been hugely popular. Recent polls show that more than three out of four Americans support allowing Dreamers to remain in the U.S., and two-thirds of Republicans back a pathway to citizenship for them. But, last September, Elizabeth got frightening news: Trump had ordered an end to the program, and had given Congress six months to extend its protections. Elizabeth had to submit a renewal request before an October deadline, but she couldn't afford the legal fees. Her immigration attorney, she told me, refused to return her paperwork without a substantial payment.

In December, Elizabeth's DACA status expired. If a legislative solution isn't reached by early March, nearly seven hundred thousand people in the U.S. will be stripped of their legal status and their protection from deportation. Earlier this month, three former Homeland Security Secretaries, including Michael Chertoff, who served under George W. Bush, wrote a letter to Congress underscoring the importance of a DACA fix. "We write not only in strong support of this legislation, but to stress that it should be enacted speedily, in order to meet the significant administrative requirements of implementation, as well as the need to provide certainty for employers and these young people," the letter read.

Some Dreamers fear for their lives if sent back. Elizabeth testified against Sergio at his murder trial, and she told me that he has called her relatives in Reynosa from prison to make death threats against her. When she lost her legal status, she also lost her work permit, and therefore her job. Some days, anxiety overtakes her. "I'm still trying my best," she recently texted me, "which is what matters."

Still, when I asked Elizabeth what she would tell President Trump if they ever met, she immediately thought of Laura's boys. "Please be conscious of what happens when a woman gets deported," she said. "It's not only what could happen to her-it's the family she leaves behind, in America. Please think of those kids."

At home last summer, Laura's boys celebrated what would have been their mother's thirty-first birthday. Maria decorated a vanilla cake with fresh carnations and hung streamers from the ceiling in Laura's favorite colors: purple, pink, and light blue. She gathered the family in the living room-the three boys and Elizabeth, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins-and handed out pens. Each person wrote a message to Laura on a piece of notebook paper, which they tied to pink balloons and launched into the sky.

"Hi, mami," Laura's youngest wrote, in Spanish. "I miss you." He said that he hoped to have four careers-as "a basketball player, a Nascar driver, an engineer, and a YouTuber"-so that he could send his earnings to his mom in Heaven, after buying himself a "fancy refrigerator."

The oldest boy told me of his plans to persuade the rapper Drake to adopt him. He loved Drake's music, and his style, and his Instagram feed, and he knew Drake would love his, too. "Hey, Mom," he wrote. "I need you to take care of me."

Laura's middle child kept his note secret, but he showed me a poster board he'd made for his mother, with colorful pompoms and photographs glued above a poem he'd written: "Wave after wave / Crushes onto my legs / I remember Mom's every word / To help me stand on my own two feet."

At the kitchen table, the boys played with an iPhone. "Siri, what is ten to the thousandth?" the youngest asked. "Siri, who am I?"

"Who is my mommy?"

"Who is Donald Trump?"

"How old is Donald Trump?"

The oldest chimed in, "Siri, can I call my mom?"

Maria sometimes envies the boys' approach to death. She told me that twice Laura's eldest son had stood at the bus stop after school, craning his neck, waiting. "What is it?" she asked.

"When is Mom coming?" he replied.

"Mom's not coming," she told her grandson. "Remember where we left her?" she asked gently, pulling him close. "We left her on the other side of the border." ♦
This story was produced in collaboration with the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Fellows include: Annie Hylton, Anjali Tsui, Sarah Salvadore, Divya Kumar, Astha Rajvanshi, Chris Gelardi, Yemile Bucay, Micah Hauser, and Noor Ibrahim.

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On June 9, 2009, just after 2 A.M., Laura S. left the restaurant where she waitressed, in Pharr, Texas, and drove off in her white Chevy. She was in an unusually hopeful mood. Her twenty-third birthday was nine days away, and she and her nineteen-year-old cousin, Elizabeth, had been discussing party plans at the restaurant.

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They say they are fleeing persecution, poverty and violence in their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Many of them say their goal is to settle in the US despite warnings by US officials that anyone found entering the country illegally will face arrest, prosecution and deportation.

Where are they now?

More than 7,000 Central American migrants have arrived at the US-Mexico border after crossing Mexico and parts of Central America, according to official figures released by the Mexican Interior Ministry. They are staying in temporary shelters in the border cities of Tijuana and Mexicali.

Those now in Tijuana are part of a migrant caravan which left the crime-ridden Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on 13 October. The group, made up mainly of Hondurans, was joined along the way by other migrants from Guatemala and El Salvador.

There are also other smaller groups of migrants which have not yet reached the US border. More than 400 are in a shelter in Mexico City and more than 250 are in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa.

There are also four groups of Salvadoreans who have left their home country since the end of October. They are in different parts of Guatemala and Mexico, heading towards the US border.

In total the number of migrants expected to reach the border is predicted to reach 10,000.

What do they want?

The migrants say they are leaving their respective countries in the hope of building a better future for themselves and their families.

Some say they have been threatened or extorted by criminal gangs operating in their hometowns. Many are travelling with their children whom they do not want to fall prey to the gangs.

Others hope to get jobs abroad which pay enough for them to send money to their relatives who stayed behind.

Many say their dream is to reach the US. Some of them have relatives there already whom they hope to join, others have chosen it as their destination because they think they will earn higher salaries there than in Latin America.

Long before the first members of the caravan reached the US border, President Donald Trump labelled the migrant caravan as "an invasion".

Ahead of the mid-term elections in the US, he tweeted dozens of time about the migrants alleging that "many gang members and some very bad people are mixed into the caravan heading to our southern border" and warning that "our military is waiting for you".

On 2 November, just days before the mid-terms, he told voters at a rally that "if you don't want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you'd better vote Republican".

He also deployed about 5,800 troops to the southern border to "harden" it, including adding concertina wire to some stretches of the border fence, a photo of which he tweeted on 19 November.

Mr Trump also issued an order denying the possibility of asylum to migrants crossing the southern border illegally - but that order has since been halted by a US federal judge.

The US authorities also briefly closed the San Ysidro port of entry to "restrict access to a large group attempting to run through the border crossing".

On 20 November. US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen warned that "this administration will not tolerate frivolous asylum claims or illegal entry".

What are the migrants' options?

The migrants who have reached Tijuana are considering their options. Most of them set off with the plan of reaching the US and many say they will claim asylum there.

There is a legal obligation to hear asylum claims from migrants who have arrived in the US if they say they fear violence in their home countries.

Those seeking asylum must be fleeing due to a serious fear of persecution. Under international law, these are considered refugees.

If an asylum seeker enters the US illegally, they are still entitled to a hearing of their claim.

But those seeking a better quality of life - even if they are fleeing devastating poverty - are not considered refugees and do not have the same protections.

The alternative is to stay in Mexico. Outgoing Mexican President President Enrique Peña Nieto has said that those wanting to stay would be welcome and offered jobs, providing they agreed to register and comply with Mexican laws.

Some migrants have also returned to their places of origin. According to the latest figures provided by Honduran officials, 7,000 Hondurans have turned back during their trek north and returned to Honduras.

Some Hondurans have cast doubt on this figure but Director of Honduras's National Institute of Immigration Carolina Menjivar has insisted that it is accurate.

When the migrants first crossed from Guatemala into Mexico, they were stopped by riot police at the bridge separating the two countries. After an at times tense stand-off, the police let them through.

Many of the Mexican towns where the migrants stopped along the way offered them shelter, food and water. Volunteers dropped off shoes and clothes and cooked meals. A number of musicians, some famous, others less so, also turned up at the camps to entertain the migrants and lorry drivers offered lifts.

But in Tijuana, hundreds of people protested against their arrival holding up signs reading "no to the invasion".

Honduras, which has a population of about nine million, has endemic problems with gang violence, drug wars and corruption. The wider region has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

While Central Americans have long fled their homelands for the US and have sometimes joined forces along the way, the organised nature of this caravan is relatively new.

Migrants are often kidnapped by people traffickers and drugs gangs which force them to work for them. A large group such as this one is harder to target and therefore offers more protection.

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Migrant caravan: What is it and why does it matter?

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They say they are fleeing persecution, poverty and violence in their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Many of them say their goal is to settle in the US despite warnings by US officials that anyone found entering the country illegally will face arrest, prosecution and deportation.

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Well-off kids who don't get a private education still have significant advantages over their peers.

Jim Young / Reuters

Imagine you're at a typical American high school. In one class, students line up at the exit early because they can't wait to get out. Next door, honors students are engaged in a stimulating discussion until the bell rings. After lunch, a few of those students drive to their class at a local junior college, for which they'll earn high-school and higher-education credits simultaneously. Some of these high-achievers might return home in the evening only to take another college course-this one a paid-online class-that their parents believe will help them get further ahead. Meanwhile, back at the school, the struggling kids are staring at computer screens, taking a remedial class. Maybe some of them lack Internet at home and can't watch the video lesson their math teacher posted for homework. Over the weekend, an advanced student might meet with her SAT tutor, while her not-so-fortunate classmate could be washing dishes at the local restaurant.

Although these students might share a campus and a mascot, they form a distinct population within the public school, as is common throughout the country. This disparity between the relatively advantaged students and their disadvantaged peers often parallels that between private schools and public ones. In fact, the difference in opportunity can be surprisingly extreme within a single public school-sometimes even more so than that between the public and private ones.

Just look at SAT scores, which are one of the only measurements available for comparing public- and private-school students. In the middle-class California town where I live, the main private school (which charges about $12,700 annually for tuition) and public school have almost identical average SAT scores: 1830 and 1820 (out of 2400), respectively. But within the nearby public school where I teach, the gulf between the honor students and the rest of the school population is almost too vast to measure: The seniors taking AP English, for example, reported an average SAT score of 1890, while those in the mainstream English classes reported a mean score of 1590.

I wrote an essay back in March explaining that I opted to send my daughter to a small private school on the grounds that attending it reflected a "buy-in" rather than an obligation. I received a lot of critical feedback, including emails from a local parent who told me that my opinion was a "shame," a teacher who called me "self-serving," and a scholar who accused me of "white flight." I anticipated their finger-pointing because I had already read a wealth of commentary related to the subject, including a highly circulated "manifesto" from Slate describing private-school parents as "bad people" and an essay on ABC.com arguing that enrolling kids in private school "sucks on many levels." In one article about homeschooling, the journalist and author Dana Goldstein reflected a prevalent-though, according to researchers, debatable-sentiment when she concluded that pulling kids out of public schools "makes it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive." Furthermore, I understood their complaints because I, too, believe a common and equitable educational system is integral to equality, democracy, and a sense of true community. As the U.S. Department of Education declares, "equity in education is vital because equality of opportunity is a core American value" and integral to the country's economic strength.

But another popular approach among parents-enrolling a child in a public school while simultaneously investing time and money in extra programs to boost the child's success and achievement-seems similar in its contribution to educational inequality.

When a child is participating in the public-school system, in theory he or she is thus supporting and benefitting from the broader goals of public education by promoting racial and socioeconomic integration on a single campus. But like students who engage in homeschooling or independent instruction, many public-school students at least occasionally leave the common group for additional outside opportunities: off-campus extracurricular programs, for example, or private tutoring. In themselves, these are worthy practices. It's commendable when students and their families want to invest personal time and money in improving individual outcomes, and when schools encourage kids to take advantage of additional opportunities. But this can enable significant discrepancies because not everyone can afford, spend time on, or otherwise access those activities.

As a parent and high-school teacher, and a veteran coach of several sports at public schools, I am sometimes perplexed by the value in personal opportunities that are afforded more easily to some students than others. Is it better for my community if I remove my daughter from the private school and instead encourage her to take honors classes at the public school? Does that actually make a difference, and, if so, how? As a teacher, should I be excited for a student who dedicates hundreds of extra hours to private tutoring and club sports? Or should I be advocating instead for the underserved students who cannot afford the help and therefore find themselves at inherent disadvantage?

Participation in AP classes-which includes a third of Class of 2013 graduates-is one example. I taught AP English at a public school for eight years, and it was an entirely different world than the mainstream English classes I teach now in the same district. Similar to Goldstein, bloggers and parents who criticize the nature of private schooling often argue that it takes the best students away from the public-school system, at the expense of overall achievement at the latter. But within a public school, AP classes can do something similar, taking the more-advanced students out of the mainstream classes. The difference in the overall GPA between students in the 11th-grade AP class (taught by another teacher) and those in the 11th-grade "college prep" class (which I now teach) is significant: 3.68 and 2.90, respectively.

A 2004 National Center for Education Statistics report, which found that students who took AP science and math had an overall GPA of 3.61, compared to 2.85 among students who hadn't taken either course-even though AP courses are much more demanding. Likewise, graduates who completed an AP or International Baccalaureate class score significantly higher on the federal government's standardized test. Plus, students who take an AP course are more likely to be surrounded by academically engaged peers, have the chance to earn college credit, and are often eligible for an extra point on the grade they received for the class (a 5.0 for an A, for example).

National statistics reveal that the student makeup of AP classes is not reflective of the school community at large, a reality that I've certainly witnessed in my time as a teacher. In 2013, students in the country who qualified for free or reduced-price meals, an indicator of poverty, represented nearly half of all high-schoolers but only 27 percent of AP test-takers. The College Board, which oversees the AP program, collected $350 million last year from the nearly 4 million tests that were taken. These exams cost students $91 apiece, though schools sometimes subsidize the fee.

Then there's concurrent enrollment, when high-school students participate in postsecondary coursework on the side, often leaving campus to do so and getting a head start over their less-advanced peers. The merit of this extra learning is undeniable, but many students are barred from it because they lack the money or didn't get the support they needed to get ahead. More than 1 million students took a course for college credit in the 2010-11 school year, and about half of them paid for their own tuition, fees, and books. Studies show that the individuals who participate in dual enrollment are more likely to both graduate from high school and earn a college degree.

I know a student who took afternoon classes at the local community college last semester and ended up attending classes at his public high school for only 15 or so hours a week. This schedule is what educators might dub a " smart start. " And it is really smart. Along with his extracurricular golfing, he has already completed more than a year's worth of college courses. He's confident he can finish his undergraduate work at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he plans on enrolling, within two years after enrolling. He's friendly and outgoing, but how much is he integrating into the mainstream student population when he's interacting almost exclusively with other high-achieving students and golfers, and spends more time on the college campus or at his job? Is this schedule conducive to the DOE's goal of achieving "equity in education"?

A more-obvious discrepancy happens when parents pay for private tutors or test-prep courses. Private schools, according to the dad and blogger Serge Bielanko, " thrive because the other ones suffer." But when parents pay for specialists to help their children excel at a standardized test such as the SAT, disadvantaged students suffer. The Atlantic has explored how the math section of the new SAT is particularly unfair to "kids who lack access to in-person test preparation" and "those who live in low-income housing." And extensive research indicates that SAT scores correlate with family income. Nobody can track exactly how much money is spent on this extra help, but the revenue for test-prep companies and private tutoring is estimated to amount to the billions.

Even participation in club sports is an example of unequal opportunity. Athletic success in high school can help boost a student's chance at being admitted to college and securing a scholarship. Participation in sports also correlates with academic success, including better grades and standardized test scores, along with improved health, concentration, and classroom behavior. High-school athletes are more likely to attend and earn degrees from college, "Most Valuable Players" even more so.

However, there isn't enough room in athletics for everyone-in 2009-10, there were just 53 school-sponsored sports opportunities for every 100 high-school boys, and only 41 for girls, according to research from the University of Michigan. Given the limited access, it's no wonder that millions of parents pay for extra coaching outside of school; participation on private club teams often boosts success in school-sponsored athletics. National data on exactly how many kids participate in private athletic programming is difficult to track down, but I can say that virtually every public-school varsity basketball player in my area-boys and girls-has played for a private team.

According to the Aspen Institute, parents of club players in 2013 spent an average of $2,300 annually per child on memberships, tournament fees, equipment, and travel-and more than $20,000 a year at the "elite" level. In theory, using a conservative estimate of $2,000 for annual expenses and multiplying that by the roughly 21 million youth playing sports outside of school, parents in the United States could be spending $42 billion a year on club sports. Just the travel alone for youth sports produces an estimated $7 billion in annual revenue, according to a 2013 National Association of Sports Commissions study.

Other examples are more politically charged. The Washington Post recently reported that "white parents in North Carolina are using public charter schools to secede from the educational system." And The Atlantic has looked at the "cutthroat world of elite public schools in New York City," where the NAACP is complaining of modern-day segregation because of the disproportionate racial makeup of eight of the city's selective public schools. Apparently, the "sorting" of high- and low-achieving kids causes uneven distributions early on.

Likewise, opting kids out of government-mandated standardized tests-an increasingly popular practice among parents-can undermine equity in public-school systems. Last month, a group of civil-rights groups issued a statement in opposition of the opt-out movement: "When parents 'opt out' of tests-even when out of protest for legitimate concerns-they're not only making a choice for their own child, they're inadvertently making a choice to undermine efforts to improve schools for every child." The group declared that the data from these tests is "critical for understanding whether and where there is equal opportunity." As Andrew J. Rotherman noted in a U.S. News & World Report op-ed, many of the same parents who boycott these tests are "more than happy to opt their children in to the college gateway tests" such as the SAT.

When a public-school system based on equity and "equality of opportunity" is embedded within a capitalistic society, it can be a little disorienting for students, parents, and teachers. The DOE can proclaim its "twin goals of access and excellence" with a confidence in noble purpose, but when the system is constructed in a way so that individual motives incidentally hinder those who don't have the same advantages, the compass can be difficult to read. But the conundrum of public-school inequality shouldn't be ignored.

I sympathize with the New Jersey parent who, commenting on the practice of academic "tracking" in his daughter's high school, was cited in an article as saying he could easily "look in a classroom and know whether it's an upper level class or a lower level class based on the racial composition." Tracking is a common process in which students are segregated based on their performance. A University of Colorado report bluntly states that while tracking is "rarely couched in the express language of race or class differences ... the preservation of privilege is always the subtext" of arguments in favor of it.

"You see kids entering the building through the same door," the New Jersey parent said. Yet they enter a "second door," he added, that's systematically "stratified."

If I, or other parents, are to eschew private schools for public institutions, how should we guide our children through that second doorway?

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Michael Godsey is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and an English teacher based in San Luis Obispo, California.

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Well-off kids who don't get a private education still have significant advantages over their peers. Imagine you're at a typical American high school. In one class, students line up at the exit early because they can't wait to get out. Next door, honors students are engaged in a stimulating discussion until the bell rings.

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Do not move. Let me speak of a river in paradise
A turquoise gift from fiery stars that is paradise

How do you measure a river's weight, color, smell, touch?
How do you feel the veins of sand in a breathing paradise?

Eons of earth story, long before rocks, plants or bones
Bulging with flesh and blood in every corner of paradise

You call me Old Man, 12,000 years old, but really I'm a baby of
River Warren, swollen with glacier water flooding the paradise

My torso sloughed by old ice, two cities on sandstone bluffs
Headwaters of a 2350-mile road towards the gulf of paradise

A walk along the beach, a bag of rocks, fossils and agates
Each tells stories of the river, land & life-a kinship of paradise

Come to me at dawn or dusk, by foot, canoe or a single shell
To greet eagles, cranes, fox, trees...a ten-mile gorge of paradise

Gar, bass, goldeye, redhorse, bowfin, stoneroller, buffalo, drum, sunfish
Sickleback, darter, walleye, dace, mooneye...in the waves of paradise

The St. Anthony Fall that walked up 10 miles from Fort Snelling
Clams and shells in Kasota stones-layered history of paradise

Put your fingers into the bluff, and pull a handful of sand
From the Ordovician sea, each perfect to make a paradise

From time to time, I take you into the amniotic womb
A reminder of our origin from a black, red, white, blue paradise

Do not dam me. To move freely is to evolve is to live
Lock feeds fear feeds hate feeds violence to the base of paradise

The Mississippi, temple on earth, home of all living things
Would you tread with love, through the heart of paradise?

We are water-H2O-two hands under an open heart
Pulsing, dissolving, bonding the earth to a green paradise

Stop seeking before or after life, for a paradise
Already in us, in each cell of being that is paradise

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Do not move. Let me speak of a river in paradiseA turquoise gift from fiery stars that is paradise How do you measure a river's weight, color, smell, touch?How do you feel the veins of sand in a breathing paradise?

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CommonLit | The Border: A Double Sonnet | Free Fiction & Nonfiction Literacy Resources, Curriculum, & Assessment Materials for Middle & High School English Language Arts

Alberto Ríos is an author and poet. He was named Arizona's first state poet laureate in 2013 and held the position until 2015. In this poem, a speaker describes a border.

As you read, take notes on what the speaker compares the border to.

The border is a line that birds cannot see.

The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half.

The border is where flint[1] first met steel, starting a century of fires.

The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up but
making it hard to breathe.

The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend.

The border is the blood clot in the river's vein. Q1

The border says stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another
language, and keeps going.

The border is a brand,[2] the "Double-X" of barbed wire scarred into
the skin of so many.

The border has always been a welcome stopping place but is now
a stop sign, always red.

The border is a jump rope still there even after the game is
finished.

The border is a real crack in an imaginary dam.

The border used to be an actual place, but now, it is the act of a
thousand imaginations.

The border, the word border, sounds like order, but in this place
they do not rhyme.

The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest. Q2

The border smells like cars at noon and wood smoke in the
evening.

The border is the place between the two pages in a book where
the spine is bent too far.

The border is two men in love with the same woman.

The border is an equation in search of an equals sign.

The border is the location of the factory where lightning and
thunder are made.

The border is "NoNo" The Clown, who can't make anyone laugh.

The border is a locked door that has been promoted.[3] Q3

The border is a moat[4] but without a castle on either side.

The border has become Checkpoint Chale.[5]

The border is a place of plans constantly broken and repaired and
broken.

The border is mighty, but even the parting of the seas created a
path, not a barrier.

The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that
does not exist.

The border is the line in new bifocals:[6] below, small things get
bigger; above, nothing changes.

The border is a skunk with a white line down its back. Q4

Copyright © 2015 by Alberto Ríos. Used with permission of the author.

Promote (verb): to support or actively encourage

1. a type of rock that can be used to create a spark

2. an identifying mark burned into the skin

3. Promote (verb): to support or actively encourage

4. a deep ditch filled with water that surrounds a castle or fort

5. a slang term in Spanish used to express disagreement

6. a pair of glasses with lenses that are divided into two parts

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CommonLit | The Border: A Double Sonnet | Free Fiction & Nonfiction Literacy Resources, Curriculum, & Assessment Materials for Middle & High School English Language Arts Alberto Ríos is an author and poet. He was named Arizona's first state poet laureate in 2013 and held the position until 2015.

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A child has a bullet in her head that could be there for the rest of her life because she was struck by a stranger's celebratory gunfire.

Neighbors along the street where the girl was hit had a perfect view of San Francisco on New Year's Eve.

Roxanne Perez said she could hear children enjoying the evening's festivities at a family's party across the street from her home.

"Really family-oriented," Beatriz Ferrer-Castro, another neighbor, said. "There's always kids."

"You could hear the kids yelling, five, four, three, two," Perez said.

At midnight, Perez heard rounds of gunfire.

"Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know. And I told my husband, 'Baby, we better get our butts in the house before we get hit,'" Perez recalled.

The homeowner across the street didn't want to be interviewed on camera, but told ABC7 News the party was in the backyard. He said his friend's 6-year-old daughter fell to the ground right after midnight.

The homeowner said the girl was bleeding from her head and crying. It wasn't until her father got to the hospital that anyone realized she'd been shot.

"Where the wound is, is consistent with something that may come from something, let's say, an angle of something falling," Oakland police officer Johnna Watson said.

A stray bullet also hit a car parked outside the party.

Police are blaming all of the bullets on celebratory gunfire. Amazingly, the child is going to okay. The bullet is still in her head and may never be removed.

Oakland Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick stopped by UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital to see the family.

"I got to see her and touch her and give her our bear from our police department to her," Chief Kirkpatrick said.

The chief also said the girl's parents are shaken.

"Put the guns down," Chief Kirkpatrick said. "It is foolishness. It is unnecessary."

The Oakland Police Department said this case is tough. Shot spotter technology recorded lots of gunfire in the area. The bullet could have come from anywhere within about a mile away.

A $5,000 reward is being offered to anyone who has information that can lead police to an arrest.

The homeowner where the 6 y/o girl was shot says they were outside celebrating when the child hit the ground, started crying, and saw blood...they didn't realize she'd been shot until she got to the hospital @abc7newsbayarea pic.twitter.com/dpsr9P82WF
- Jobina Fortson (@JobinaFortson) January 1, 2019

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6-year-old girl struck in head by 'celebratory gunfire'

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A child has a bullet in her head that could be there for the rest of her life because she was struck by a stranger's celebratory gunfire. Neighbors along the street where the girl was hit had a perfect view of San Francisco on New Year's Eve.

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This Poem From a Florida Shooting Survivor Is Going Viral

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Samantha Deitsch writes about hiding in a closet after the gunfire erupted at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

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Inequality Poems - Poems For Inequality - - Poem by | Poem Hunter

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Inequality poems written by famous poets. Browse through to read poems for inequality. This page has the widest range of inequality love and quotes.

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast

subscribe to Code Switch podcast

A new study conducted by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, finds that in 99 percent of neighborhoods in the United States, black boys earn less in adulthood than white boys who come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. This undermines the widely-held belief that class, not race, is the most fundamental predictor of economic outcomes for children in the U.S.

The study looked at racial disparities in income over generations by looking at de-identified data from 20 million U.S. children and their parents. It tracked outcomes for Hispanic, white, Asian, black and Native Americans.

Nathaniel Hendren, who co-authored the study, told NPR's Leah Donnella that black and Native American children have the lowest rates of upward economic mobility. Whites and Asians came out at the top, he said. "For Asians and white children, we find very similar processes of mobility," Hendren said. "For Hispanics, we see slightly lower incomes for children at the same level of parent income."

The researchers found that the racial wealth gap applies even to the country's wealthiest families: Black children whose parents were in the top 1 percent of earners, with incomes at an average of $1.1 million, grew up to have incomes 12.4 percent lower than white children who grew up in households with similar incomes.

Hendren says for the U.S. as a whole, the odds of a child raised in the bottom fifth of the income distribution rising to the top fifth are about 7 percent. But that chance at upward mobility varies widely across race. The study found that about 11 percent of white children raised in the bottom fifth end up rising to the top. For black children, that number is 2.5 percent.

The results are also gendered. The income gap between black and white Americans, the study finds, is almost entirely driven by differences in earnings between black and white men. When the researchers controlled for parental income, they found black women earn slightly more than white women. Meanwhile, white men are far out-earning black men, even when they start out in families with similar income levels.

For Native Americans, Hendren says, the gender difference is not as stark, but low rates of upward mobility and high rates of downward mobility persist.

Advocates of programs that address the specific needs of black boys could see the study as an affirmation of their efforts. Will Jawando, who worked on Barack Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative, told The New York Timesthat this study "crystallizes and puts data behind this thing that we always knew was there, because we either felt it ourselves or we've seen it over time."

Neighborhoods are still a determining factor when it comes to adult earnings and life outcomes. That holds across race and ethnicity. But Hendren says the study finds a larger black-white wealth gap in the most affluent neighborhoods: "It suggests that policies ... that aim to reduce just residential segregation can help, and I certainly don't want to say those policies are not fruitful. But we can't stop there if we want to try to eliminate racial disparities."

Hendren said the study did identify a few neighborhoods where black and white children often reach parity as adults. He highlighted some suburbs of Washington, D.C., including Silver Spring, Md., as having relatively low degrees of racial bias among white people - one significant predictor of whether or not black boys will match white boys in future earnings. Another factor present in the neighborhoods was high percentages of present black fathers, compared to the country as a whole. (The Times points out that this does not mean the presence of a black boy's father in his life has a direct effect on his eventual earnings; rather, the presence of black fathers in a community may help predict higher incomes for the black boys who grow up there.)

As for why the differences in wealth and mobility are most persistent among certain groups, Hendren suggests history might play a role. "Here, I'm speculating. But ... the two groups who happen to stand out - African-Americans and Native Americans - tend to be groups who have experienced a very different history in America," he says. "And so I think that does suggest thinking about the long-run historical processes that might have gotten us here."

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Forget Wealth And Neighborhood. The Racial Income Gap Persists

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast A new study conducted by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the Census Bureau, finds that in 99 percent of neighborhoods in the United States, black boys earn less in adulthood than white boys who come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

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ESRI

Three types of visualizations show the stark economic disparities in U.S. cities.

In Philly's Center City live its richest residents-those who can pay the premium for that walkable, amenity-rich, green neighborhood. But just across the river, blocks away from the lush, expanding campuses of the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University, the visual landscape of the city changes: Pawn shops, fast food eateries, boarded-up store fronts, and dilapidated houses. Only a few areas in West Philadelphia have become more prosperous ( and whiter). The rest continue to suffer concentrated poverty and decline.

This is not just a Philadelphia story. To visualize the landscape of economic inequality in U.S. cities, the mapping whizzes atESRI have created a captivating story map with multiple layers. It presents America's stark incomedisparities-and in the few places where it exists, income diversity.

Let's zoom in further on Philadelphia to understand ESRI's three metrics. The first type of map divides census tracts into four differently colored categories based on the income brackets of the "predominant"-or most most numerous-household type.

The clusters of orange dots show the tracts where the most common household type makes below $25,000; the pink ones show where households in the $25,000 to $50,000 range comprise the largest group; the purple: between $50,000 and $100,000; and the blue ones are where rich households that earn over $100,000 live. Note: The larger the dot, the more populous the tract it is marking; and the brighter it is, the higher the concentration of the "predominant" income group.

In Philly, you can see that blue spots burn bright in the Center City area, in particular.

The second measure gives a sense of how the share of groups at the lower and higher end of the income spectrum compare with the national average. So, the orange clusters on the map below show the tracts where theshare of households making below $25,000 is higher than the national share of 22.3 percent. The blue ones show where the share of households making over $100,000 a year is higher than the overall share of 24.6 percent. The brighter the dots, the higher the gap between the Census tract's share and the nation's. Put another way, this map shows the extremes of poverty or wealth. West and North Philadelphia, the map below shows, have deep pockets of red:

The third type of map, inspired by a USA Today diversity index, examines the likelihood that households belong to different income brackets in a given census tract. The green ones are more diverse; here, you're more likely to run into people from different economic backgrounds. The pink ones are less so; most households in these tracts fall into a single income bracket, whether it be high, low, or moderate. While Center City and some areas in West Philly may have high concentrations of rich and poor folks, respectively, they also tend to have a little bit more income diversity than areas in the North.

ESRI has a handful of other cities on the tab that all have their own distinct patterns. Below is the first type of mapshowing Los Angeles, which is majority residents of color, but still starkly divided by income. Lower-income households that make below $25,000 (in orange) are clumped together in areas including downtown and the San Fernando and San Bernardino Valleys.

In Chicago, the West and South sides contain households that have higher concentrations of poor households (in orange) compared to the national average.

And then there's Detroit, mapped below based on the concentration of income brackets. Even though it has been recovering from its economic woes, and is poised to become a crucial regional player, the city has yet to distribute its gains to the most vulnerable residents. A quarter of the city's residents still live in poverty -usually in the inner city area which, by and large, has very few households of other economic profiles.

At the end of the day, the way economic inequality manifests geographically can be measured in a number of ways-all of which have their pluses and minuses. But pinpointing concentrations of rich and the poor is a crucially important sociological exercise. Rich enclaves tend to "pool their resources for the exclusive benefit of themselves," writes political economist Robert Reich in the New York Times:

The renewed emphasis on "community" in American life has justified and legitimized these economic enclaves. If generosity and solidarity end at the border of similarly valued properties, then the most fortunate can be virtuous citizens at little cost. Since most people in one neighborhood or town are equally well off, there is no cause for a guilty conscience. If inhabitants of another area are poorer, let them look to one another. Why should we pay for their schools?

Put simply: As the rich cluster together, the poor get poorer, because the effects of living in poor neighborhoods are passed down from one generation to the next. That's why dismantling economic silos within a city can boost its total well-being and economic health.

About the Author

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Three Ways to Understand Income Inequality, Mapped

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In Philly's Center City live its richest residents-those who can pay the premium for that walkable, amenity-rich, green neighborhood. But just across the river, blocks away from the lush, expanding campuses of the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University, the visual landscape of the city changes: Pawn shops, fast food eateries, boarded-up store fronts, and dilapidated houses.

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subscribe to Planet Money podcast

There are essentially three reasons why women make, on average, 20 percent less than men in the U.S.

They are job choice, child care, and negotiation.

Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell, has done deep research into the gender pay gap, and joined us to dig into those reasons.

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subscribe to Planet Money podcast There are essentially three reasons why women make, on average, 20 percent less than men in the U.S. They are job choice, child care, and negotiation. Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell, has done deep research into the gender pay gap, and joined us to dig into those reasons.

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Last weekend's massacre in Las Vegas is only the latest reminder of the persistent gun violence in the United States. And a new set of statistics on the rates of gun violence unrelated to conflict underscores just how outsize U.S. rates of gun deaths are compared with those in much of the rest of the world.

Take countries with the top indicators of socioeconomic success - income per person and average education level, for instance. The United States ranks ninth in the world among them, bested only by the likes of Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Iceland, Andorra, Canada and Finland.

Those countries all also enjoy low rates of gun violence, but the U.S. has the 31st highest rate in the world: 3.85 deaths due to gun violence per 100,000 people in 2016. That was eight times higher than the rate in Canada, which had .48 deaths per 100,000 people - and 27 times higher than the one in Denmark, which had .14 deaths per 100,000.

The numbers comes from a massive database maintained by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which tracks lives lost in every country, in every year, by every possible cause of death. The figures for 2016 were released just last month. As in previous years, the data paint a fairly rosy picture for much of the world, with deaths due to gun violence rare even in many countries that are extremely poor - such as Bangladesh and Laos, which saw .16 deaths and .13 deaths respectively per 100,000 people.

Prosperous Asian countries such as Singapore and Japan boast the absolute lowest rates, though the United Kingdom and Germany are in almost as good shape.

"It is a little surprising that a country like ours should have this level of gun violence," says Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health and epidemiology at the IHME. "If you compare us to other well-off countries, we really stand out."

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To be sure, there are quite a few countries where gun violence is a substantially larger problem than in the United States - particularly in Central America and the Caribbean. Mokdad says a major driver is the large presence of gangs and drug trafficking. "The gangs and drug traffickers fight amongst themselves to get more territory, and they fight the police," says Mokdad. And citizens who are not involved are often caught in the crossfire.

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Mokdad said drug trafficking may also be a driving factor in two Asian countries that have unusually large rates of violent gun deaths for their region: the Philippines and Thailand.

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With the casualties due to armed conflicts factored out, even in conflict-ridden regions such as the Middle East, the U.S. rate is worse than in all but one country: Iraq.

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The U.S. gun violence death rate is also higher than nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including many that are among the world's poorest.

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One more way to consider this data: The IHME also estimates what it would expect a country's rate of gun violence deaths to be based solely on its socioeconomic status. By that measure, the U.S. should only be seeing .79 deaths per 100,000 people - almost five times less than its actual rate of 3.85 deaths per 100,000.

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Gun Violence: How The U.S. Compares With Other Countries

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Last weekend's massacre in Las Vegas is only the latest reminder of the persistent gun violence in the United States. And a new set of statistics on the rates of gun violence unrelated to conflict underscores just how outsize U.S. rates of gun deaths are compared with those in much of the rest of the world.

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Six years. 190,000 shootings. How has gun violence marked your corner of the country?

Daniel Nass is The Trace's associate editor for data and graphics. He analyzes data, creates graphics, and builds interactives for The Trace's investigations and daily coverage.

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The Gun Violence Map: Six Years of American Shootings

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Six years. 190,000 shootings. How has gun violence marked your corner of the country? Daniel Nass is The Trace's associate editor for data and graphics. He analyzes data, creates graphics, and builds interactives for The Trace's investigations and daily coverage.

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Americans have short memories. But here we are in an election year. The same year in which a former student murdered 17 of his classmates in Parkland, Florida - and another student killed ten in Texas. In which at least 75 other shootings in schools barely made the news and then slipped right out of it (which often happens when victims are people of color).

It's stunning to think that these shootings - these attacks on children - aren't being talked about constantly.

One of the first recorded American school shootings took place in 1840.
But the first high-school shooting that truly lodged itself in our consciousness was Columbine, in 1999, when two students wearing trench coats fatally shot 13 of their classmates. It took 45 minutes for a SWAT team to go in. As the AP would note, those officers "had never trained for what they found: No hostages. No demands. Just killing." Now students have so many drills that some Parkland victims thought, This must be fake.

There have been more mass school-shooting deaths in the past 18 years than in all of the 20th century. The long list of casualties includes a classroom full of first-graders, an event that shocked the nation - but not enough. Deadlier weapons have become more available, bullets can be ordered online.

So why don't we talk about this all the time? Partly because it scares us. And partly because the problem can seem so intractable, even as polls show majority support for measures that could curb the violence.

In the midst of this amnesia, we wanted to conduct an exercise in remembrance, seeking out the survivors of school shootings from as far back as we could find them. What, we wondered, could their memories teach us about our inattention? The people whose bodies - in many cases - won't let them forget.

February 14, 2018 | Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School | Parkland, Florida | 17 Killed, 17 Injured

I did the thing that you're not supposed to do in a shooting: Go towards the back of the room. I panicked. I'm a huge supporter of the Second Amendment, but the moment you say that everyone can have a gun and that everyone should be able to roam the streets with one, you are completely negating the idea that people are cruel. "Guns don't kill people; people kill people" is very true. It's about regulating those people.

I was one of the first ones hit - behind my upper right leg. It exploded and came out my left leg. Once I can fully walk, they're going to do surgery to replace the fat. It's going to take about two years for it to fully, fully heal.
At the beach, I can't wear my leg wrap. People look at me. It's kind of like, "This happened to me. You can't do anything about it, but you can stare all you want."

We were doing this thing called Eyewitness on our computers. It's a program with testimony from Holocaust survivors. Steven Spielberg has something to do with it. It still kind of weirds me out that I didn't get more badly injured or even pass away, because I was directly exposed. It just doesn't make any sense. There was a girl who was praying in Spanish, and I thought maybe I should pray too. This is a time when you pray. So I did, and then I looked over and saw one of my classmates with her head down. Then I sort of realized that she wasn't alive anymore. It's weird to say that when you look at someone who's passed, you just kind of know.

William Olson: When I woke up at the hospital, I remember my mom and dad being there, and not knowing how to feel.

Lisa Olson, William's mother: When I first saw him, he wasn't even able to speak. He was just shaking, and in pain. I didn't realize what had happened to him - I knew it was a school shooting, but I didn't realize they were bullet injuries until we had seen the x-rays.

He was in such shock. He was covered in bloody clothes, and not all that blood was his, it was the blood of other children. He had to lay like that for a couple of hours, until the police came to collect it for evidence.

The next day, my husband and I shut the door. We sat on the bed, and we said, "William, a very tragic thing happened at your school." We told him, "Nick, the captain of your swim team, died, Alex died, and Alaina, and Carmen, who you take piano lessons with." He just stared out the window. I don't think he could comprehend what really happened. He didn't say a word. My husband and I were hysterical, sobbing.

William: I remember how upset they were.

Lisa: We have a very hard time talking about this [now]. We don't know how to talk about it. There are things that I want to know, but can't bring myself to ask him. He doesn't use the word shooting, or killing. I don't know if other families talk about it. We go to therapy. For a long time, we didn't say anything, because I thought it would do more damage to him. What do you say? You try to still live. I am so grateful that William got to come home. But [so many] of his classmates didn't. It's unfathomable.

William is back in school, and has a therapy dog with him. William is not able to tell his story. He just can't right now. But maybe one day he can use that dog to provide comfort to someone else who's had something terrible happen to them.

Teachers have told me that they go in the closet and cry, and then come back and finish teaching their classes.

A bullet skimmed my head. There was blood, but it didn't feel like it could be real. There had been a bunch of rumors that there was going to be a test, where they were going to use paintballs. Some days, I'll be really sad. Usually, I'm all right. The friends that weren't there don't really ask about it. I'm glad they don't. Sometimes it gets me in a really bad mood when they do. I haven't gotten involved in too much of the activism. I don't like to draw attention to myself. But it definitely changed how I feel about gun control. I think there should be more.

I was in the hospital for like two months. I wasn't bored - the pain wouldn't let me get distracted. It was all over my body, not just where I'd been shot. Imagine that someone stabbed you with a knife and wouldn't take it out, would just push it in.

The physical therapy is helping a lot. A lot of the exercises are like the things you do before a soccer game. Still, I can't feel my left foot. I've gotten skinnier, and when I stand up, I have trouble breathing. The goal is just to be able to move my entire body normally. I can't run, and I want to run. I'm doing homeschooling now. I'm not sure when I'll go back to school. I don't want to; I don't feel safe. I don't talk about it with anybody - I get really upset. I can't talk about it with my friends. I did what I had to do - that's why I don't like being called a hero. I want people to remember what happened as a miracle, from God.

May, 18, 2018 | Santa Fe High School | Santa Fe, Texas | 10 Killed, At Least 10 Injured

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At the Breaking Point: Rethinking the U.S. Immigration Court System

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Outside Casa Padre, a Walmart turned shelter for migrant children in Brownsville, Tex. The shelter is run by Southwest Key Programs, a nonprofit being investigated by the Justice Department. Credit Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

A difficult situation for migrant children in government custody could grow more challenging if the largest provider in the overburdened shelter system were to lose its grants.

The provider, Southwest Key Programs, faces mounting pressure after a video of staff members abusing children surfaced last month and the Justice Department opened an investigation into its finances. State and federal officials have cracked down on suspected malfeasance at shelters in the past year, closing multiple facilities, including two run by Southwest Key, and moving children elsewhere.

But taking any broader action on Southwest Key, a nonprofit that houses almost a third of detained migrant youth, would be a balancing act for officials as they tried to avoid tipping an overstressed system into chaos. Without adequate shelter space, minors remain stuck at border stations ill-equipped to care for them. After the recent deaths of two children in Border Patrol custody, the stakes have never been clearer.

About 12,400 migrant children are now housed across roughly 100 permanent sites and two temporary ones. That's down from the record level of almost 15,000 last month, largely because the Trump administration relaxed its rule requiring fingerprints for every member of a household sponsoring a child.

By any measure, Southwest Key is the industry juggernaut. The Austin-based charity operates 24 permanent facilities in Texas, Arizona and California. One of those is the nation's largest permanent shelter, a converted Walmart Supercenter in Brownsville, Tex., that can house more than 1,400 minors.

Southwest Key, which has pulled in $1.7 billion over the past decade, is being investigated by the Justice Department after a New York Times article documented possible financial improprieties and poor management. The charity stockpiled tens of millions in taxpayer dollars with little government oversight, possibly engaged in self-dealing with top executives and paid them significantly higher than the federal salary cap for migrant shelter grants.

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Juan Sanchez is the founder of Southwest Key, which houses almost a third of the migrant children in the shelter system. Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

But if the federal government revoked its grants, there would not be enough room in the crowded system to absorb the children under its care. Officials would need to find another provider to take over Southwest Key's shelters, or find new facilities altogether.

Maria Cancian, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Administration for Children and Families, said if a large provider had lost its contracts under her watch, she would try to maintain as many of the provider's staff and facilities as possible.

"The logical thing to do to maximize safety and minimize waste of public funds would not be to immediately shut down an enormous number of shelters," Ms. Cancian said. "The best course of action would be to figure out a plan for transitioning those facilities and transitioning those personnel."

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency that oversees migrant shelters as part of the Administration for Children and Families, declined to speculate on Southwest Key's grants. In response to a question asking if the agency had a plan if the charity were to lose its grants, a spokeswoman said the agency was always planning for unforeseen events.

A Southwest Key spokesman, Jeff Eller, said the charity had had no discussions about losing its grants with the Office of Refugee Resettlement or about its shelter licenses with officials from Texas, Arizona or California. He said the charity was focused on providing "the best care possible" for children.

Last year, the government cut off the contracts of another major shelter provider, International Educational Services, over suspected financial improprieties. Juan Sanchez, who founded Southwest Key and still runs it, also helped establish I.E.S., although he has not had a role there for decades.

The closing of I.E.S. facilities was carried out haphazardly, straining the system for months. As many as 620 children needed to be rehoused; most landed in Southwest Key facilities.

Comprehensive Health Services, a for-profit company based in Florida that ran one of the temporary shelters, leased three former I.E.S. shelters, all in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and then received a new government contract. Many original staff members were rehired.

Migrant children at a tent city in Tornillo, Tex. BCFS, a nonprofit, has faced daily protests for running the shelter, which is scheduled to close this month. Credit Andres Leighton/Associated Press

Two Southwest Key facilities closed last year - including the shelter where staff members were caught on video abusing children - as part of a settlement with Arizona after the charity failed to provide proof that its workers had received required background checks. Those shelters could house more than 500 children. Southwest Key's six remaining shelters in Arizona also can no longer accept new children until the state says otherwise.

If the government ends up seeking a provider to take over Southwest Key's remaining shelters, Comprehensive Health Services, a workplace medical contractor that has provided support during emergencies, is a likely alternative. But the company has also been accused of improperly handling government money.

In February 2017, Comprehensive Health Services paid a settlement of almost $4 million over improperly charging the government for medical screenings. The company said the overbilling was a mistake.

The country's second-largest provider, a San Antonio-based nonprofit called BCFS, seems unlikely to take over all Southwest Key's shelters. Its primary focus has long been disaster relief and international aid, and the nonprofit has faced daily protests for running a sprawling tent city in Tornillo, Tex.

The government may also try to delay deciding on Southwest Key contracts until it reduces the number of children in federal custody - or, at the least, reduces the number of children placed with Southwest Key.

A major reason for the shelters' overcrowding was the administration's decision in June to require fingerprints for every member of a household that wanted to care for migrant children. As fingerprinting slowed placement, the average length of time children spent in shelters stretched from about a month to nearly two.

In December, the Trump administration relaxed the fingerprinting requirements. The tent city, scheduled to close by Jan. 15, has already been reduced from 2,850 children to 1,500. In November, Southwest Key housed as many as 5,000, but as of Friday, there were only 3,900.

Still, the temporary shelter run by Comprehensive Health Services is expanding, from a capacity of 1,350 to 2,350 children.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Inquiry Into Shelter Provider Poses Dilemma: What About the Children?. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Inquiry Into Migrant Shelters Poses Dilemma: What Happens to the Children?

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A difficult situation for migrant children in government custody could grow more challenging if the largest provider in the overburdened shelter system were to lose its grants. The provider, Southwest Key Programs, faces mounting pressure after a video of staff members abusing children surfaced last month and the Justice Department opened an investigation into its finances.