SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador _ The smell of slow-cooked Texas barbecue wafted over the outskirts of San Salvador as Jose Reyes cracked open another beer. It was Super Bowl Sunday, and Reyes had gathered with several dozen friends in a parking lot outside a stadium where the game would be screened. Dressed in baggy NFL and college jerseys, they traded jokes in English between bites of pulled pork and hamburgers.
Reyes was deported from the United States in 2001 after serving a prison sentence for wounding two people in a shooting in Houston when he was 17. His mother had brought him to the U.S. as a baby, and when he stepped off an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in El Salvador, he had no recollection of the country of his birth.
Now he is 39 and thriving as a manager at an English-language call center that takes questions from AT&T customers in the United States. He and his friends, other U.S. deportees also working in call centers, earn well over El Salvador's minimum wage.
Among the Central Americans caught in a decadeslong cycle of migration and deportation, Reyes is one of the more fortunate ones.
The U.S. deported 2.5 million immigrants under then-President Barack Obama, more than any previous administration. Roughly 150,000 of those were returned to El Salvador at a time when surging violence there and elsewhere in Central America was driving more migrants into the United States illegally.
Breaking from the long-standing policy of targeting immigrants convicted of serious crimes and turning a blind eye to most of the rest, the Trump administration announced last week that all 11 million people living illegally in the U.S. are potentially subject to deportation. It also said more immigrants may be deported without a hearing or review.
That means a whole new generation of deportees could soon be returning to countries that have long struggled to absorb them. An estimated 700,000 people from El Salvador alone are living in the U.S. illegally.
Each person picked up in the U.S. and delivered back will have to forge a new life, sometimes in an unfamiliar homeland. Some will make new beginnings. Others will struggle to find work or become new soldiers _ or victims _ in a gangland underworld.
