If a body is undocumented, should we be surprised if the war against that body is undocumented too?
The ugly truth of deportation is it is a war. An American war predicated on the same things as previous American wars: genocide, white supremacy, and body counts. Always the body counts.
As was the case in Vietnam—and Iraq and Afghanistan—the most important thing for America is this metric of progress: their dead versus ours. A metric of territory lost and gained, of shock and awe, of humiliation and pain.
And to those who might say, Well, if this is a war, there must be two sides. It can’t just be America versus some vague idea, I’d point to American wars on other vague ideas: drugs, terrorism, socialism (and its “containment”). It wouldn’t be the first time America has pointed guns and resources at something without a standing army. And for those who might further ask, If this is a war, who are the American casualties? I would respond: Who gets to say who is an American?
The deported body removed from America is also an American body. I think about America’s Civil War, the war of all American wars, fought over the dignity and place of Black American bodies in the American fabric. And America’s civil wars in countries like Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, and El Salvador. American interventions that helped spur the mass migrations we see today.
The deaths of deportees are, in effect, part of America’s body count. A self-inflicted wound.
America’s involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War, for example, lasted from 1979 to 1992, during which time the United States supported a fascist military regime that ruled over a peasant class with torture, death squads, massacres, and forced disappearances that affected millions, fractured that country, and sent many refugees migrating north, largely toward cities like Houston and Los Angeles.
It has been widely documented that American Green Berets trained Salvadoran military death squads throughout the 1980s at a facility today referred to as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The curriculum ran from executions to torture to extortion
One Salvadoran special forces member trained by US Green Berets was Ernesto Deras. He went on to use what he learned there to transform the Los Angeles-based gang MS-13. Deras is largely credited with giving structure, organization, and discipline to that gang—many members of which were deported back to El Salvador, where they founded their own cells of MS-13, which further destabilized a country that was just recovering from a civil war made possible by American interventionist policy.
As recent as 2023, more than 78,000 people across El Salvador were members of MS-13, a statistic that, in large part, explains the rise of Nayib Bukele, who ascended to the Salvadoran presidency in June 2019 on the promise of ending gang violence in El Salvador. The result has been the mass incarceration of criminals and non-criminals alike, to the tune of an estimated 108,000 prisoners, or about 1.7 percent of El Salvador’s entire population. Among them are deported US immigrants. In recent years, Bukele has pledged to the Trump administration his willingness to hold even US citizens.
Long after the Salvadoran Civil War ended with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City in 1992, El Salvador finds itself living the fallout of American intervention. Many echoes from the eighties ring out in the testimonies of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border today, who report fleeing threats of rape, murder, disappearance, and extortion: tools of repression, employed by gangs, that were formerly used by the Salvadoran military under American training.
It is no surprise, then, that when we deport Salvadorans back to El Salvador they are killed. For most, that deportation is a “death sentence,” to echo the words and research of Sarah Stillman, who has written extensively about this topic in The New Yorker. Her findings have been corroborated by Human Rights Watch, which published a report that detailed the outcomes for deported Salvadorans from 2013 to 2019. It found that of more than two hundred deportees researched in the report, 138 were murdered. Seventy more were abused or sexually assaulted by gang members, police, soldiers, death squads, or ex-partners. Approximately eleven thousand Salvadorans are missing in the past decade alone, more than the number of people disappeared during El Salvador’s entire civil war.
In Mexico, America’s war on drugs and operations like the Mérida Initiative have fueled violence and instability across the country. The numbers are staggering. According to Mexico’s Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda (the governmental body charged with tracking the missing), approximately 134,448 people remain missing as of this writing, the overwhelming majority of them having disappeared between 2006 and 2020, which were the most intense years of the drug wars under US pressure. This is likely an undercount. In that same fourteen-year time period, more than 150,000 were killed, including 124 journalists. This is not to include the scores of journalists that remain missing. Mexico ranks twentieth in the world in number of femicides documented. As a result, #NiUnaMenos, a feminist group that originated in Argentina and whose aim is to combat complacency in societies that experience femicides, has taken root in Mexico.
According to Mexican deportee support organizations such as Otros Dreams en Acción, it has been documented that those deported to Mexico, especially women, fear for their lives in the months and years right after deportation. Trump’s draconian immigration measures have made recent deportees and asylum seekers alike easy targets for extortion, kidnapping, and occasionally recruitment by certain cartels along the US-Mexico border.
How invested is the United States, really, in fighting a war against drugs or cartels if it is actively feeding vulnerable people, like Diego, into that industry? Has that war failed by design or by accident? If by accident, why keep feeding resources and people to these wars against black markets? To what extent does that make us, Americans and our representative government, complicit in the genocide of a certain class and ethnicity of people? The deaths of deportees are, in effect, part of America’s body count. A self-inflicted wound. The loss of talented individuals, the loss of gross domestic product. But also the loss of things more incalculable: fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles. Integral members of American society, whose absence contributes to financial and psychological damage to other Americans—typically children—in ways yet to be calculated. For all the conservative rhetoric about who is and is not American (or worse yet, who can and who cannot be American), there is the knowledge deep within the deportees (at least the deportees I know) that they are, indeed, Americans. Despite knowing what America will do to them if they are of a certain class or shade or origin.
Many have drawn parallels between Germany’s descent into Nazi fascism and this moment in America. The exploitation of racial divides, the mass rallies, the storming of the Capitol, the blurring of truth and reality, the unabashed abuse of government power to the ends of ethnic cleansing, which becomes systemic, institutionalized, and accepted. Many fear that the danger of this current path is that it might lead to full-blown fascism. It’s increasingly clear that moment is already here and was long before January 6, before Trump even. After all, he is simply a product of our American history. And perhaps because of this, the body count continues to swell under him well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. With the panels of the machinery off, we can see the death machine for what it is: a creation built entirely in our image. We want to count the dead. We need to count the dead. We need their dead.
Diego is descended from a long line of Totonac curanderos. Medicine people. This lineage includes his great-grandfather and his grandfather, but not really his parents. They moved to the city when they were young, but returned later in life out of both circumstance and the gravitational pull of family and tradition. Diego is proud that he can navigate both worlds—the traditional and the modern. To this end, he’s proud of how he can navigate both the labyrinth and the living artifact of history that is Mercado Sonora.
He’s not shy about calling out, in Mercado Sonora, the things he knows are scams. The use of oregano for diabetes, for instance. Or myrrh that looks too glossy to be the real thing. Or brujas who claim to know Yoruba magic (What the fuck even is that?). Or lotions that say ARRASA TODO. Obliterate everything. A kind of cleanse, he guesses.
With the panels of the machinery off, we can see the death machine for what it is: a creation built entirely in our image.
He remembers his grandfather used to do spiritual cleanses with a kind of leaf that grew in Hidalgo (not sage, something else), which he’d light on fire, and it’d smoke blue, blue, blue. You could hold on to the leaves, pretend you were smoking a cigarette. He’d move around the house like that. He’d smoke the corners his grandfather couldn’t reach. Dark corners, low corners. Get the bad ghosts out.
The Germans split apart, come back together. They take pictures of plastic bags filled with mushrooms imported from China. Or a sack of rabbit feet, freshly cut. Or an old lady dressed in a muumuu who says she’s famous and charges five pesos to take a picture. Five pesos more if you want to use her friend’s bathroom. They put on a show like Diego puts on a show. They’re not so much eager to please as they are eager to get paid. You wanna see some weird shit? I’ve got some weird shit.
Diego thinks of Aliana during moments like these in Mercado Sonora that border on the absurd. He admired that she could float financially without the spectacle surrounding whatever survival looks like in Mexico. She didn’t need to sell a mythology. She lived, mostly, in the truth. Though she was selling his wares, and if Mexican spectacle was what Diego was spinning, was she complicit too? Wasn’t the entire operation of F*CK LA MIGRA a spectacle? Something built for the white gaze. F*ck was an English word, of course. Though was it that hard to decipher F*ck anything? F*ck could be for the Mexican gaze too. F*ck could be international.
In Mercado Sonora, Diego doesn’t yet know his designs will sell far better than he expected—three times more than he had planned (with Aliana’s help). At this point, in the summer of 2018, she is still alive. Many possibilities still exist: Aliana could handle selling his work in the United States at prices that matched demand. It won’t be until the summer of 2019 that he sees a hat he designed for about five dollars being sold for thirty dollars on an Etsy page run by someone who calls herself the Texas Huntress. Someone he doesn’t know. Right now, in Mercado Sonora, the hat is just an idea in his head: a black trucker hat with golden laurels along the brim and the words FUCK TRUMP on top.
So what if Aliana profits from my ideas? Diego thought. He didn’t mind. She provided space for the deportee community and he was a volume-sales guy himself. It was about distribution for him anyway. It could be a win-win.
It was around this time he started having nightmares. He died in his dreams. You aren’t supposed to die in your dreams, he thought. He thinks he can trace the genesis of these dreams back to the plane ride from the United States to Mexico City in the summer of 2016. How he wanted that plane to crash. Somewhere over Texas would have been fine. Or maybe somewhere beautiful. The Sonoran Desert, say. Or somewhere in the lush green of the Valley of Mexico. He didn’t care. He just wanted to die. Better dead than shipped west. So, what was it? Peace or rage that made him want the plane to crash?
Rage for sure—he hated the way the officers treated him like a criminal. He wasn’t a criminal. He wanted to die, if only to watch them die with him. Rage.
For a long time, he dreamed about death. It was always him who died in the end. But then one night it was Aliana. This struck him as odd, but it was just a dream. Dreams came and went.
“Everyone follow Jesus,” says Diego earnestly. The Germans laugh and repeat the joke with exaggerated pride, as if they invented it. It’s embarrassing, but it is a good joke. We follow Jesus.
One of the Germans puts down his camera, takes a step back into the group so that he knocks two or three of his country men over, and just keeps going, “Fuck! What the fuck!” in English, of all languages.
We look. We see what he sees. A statue of a baby Jesus with both eyes gouged out, red pouring down his cheeks.
Jesus looks at Diego, who smiles back at him like, I think we did good. And we pause there for a beat. The Germans calm down, get an eyeful. They take pictures all at once, having found, finally, the Mexico they dreamed of.
______________________________
From How to Look Away: On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear by Daniel Peña. Copyright © 2026. Available from One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Leave a Reply