Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Jonathan Blitzer is an American writer and journalist known for his work covering politics and immigration. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Award for Education Reporting and an Immigration Journalism Prize from the French-American Foundation. Much of the subject matter in Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here appeared previously in Blitzer’s journalistic work, including, for example, Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga’s story and much of his commentary on the Trump administration’s immigration policy. His work has also appeared in publications such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Nation.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is Blitzer’s first book. It was named one of the best books of 2024 by numerous publications, including The New Yorker, the New York Times, and LitHub. While much of the later part of the text draws on his own reporting and experience, Blitzer conducted intensive research on the history of US relations with Central America and had extensive conversations with the text’s four key figures, whose stories informed the structure and content of the book. Most significantly, Blitzer had daily conversations with the Salvadorian doctor Juan Romagoza for an entire year, and they continued to speak multiple times per week for the next two years. Through these conversations with Juan and the other key figures, Blitzer conveys a sense of the personal consequences of immigration policy, bringing into focus some of the “blurred and anonymous” faces that generally fill news reports about immigration.