The disintegration of a democracy is a deceptively quiet affair. For a while, everything looks the same. Each authoritarian milestone—the first political prisoner, the first closure of an opposition media outlet—is anticipated with fear. Then the milestone goes by, and after a brief period of outrage, life continues as before. You begin to wonder if things will be so bad after all.
One night in mid-May, some of the Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador tried to break the locks on their cells with metal rails from their beds. It was a futile gesture of rebellion; no one thought they could escape. Still, punishment was swift. For six consecutive days, the inmates were subjected to lengthy beatings, three inmates told me.
Photographs by Tarina Rodriguez
The Decapolis Hotel advertises “spacious suites & ocean views” in a business area in Panama City. The glass tower is also one of the few hotels in the city that can accommodate 299 people on short notice. When three planes carrying non-Panamanian deportees arrived in mid-February from the United States, the Decapolis redirected its guests to partner hotels and turned over its trendy lobby to armed security personnel, who ensured that no one could get in or out.
According to Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” the administration’s deportation policies apply only to people who are “in the country illegally,” not to the “millions of people standing in line, taking the test, doing their background investigation, paying the fees, that want to come in the right way.”
This week, more than half a million Venezuelans who’d done things “the right way” discovered that the distinction might not matter.
For many years, Venezuelans understood instinctively what was meant when someone invoked la situación in conversation. The rich started leaving the country because of la situación. One would be crazy to drive at night, given la situación del país.
Empires and nation-states are remembered for their monuments, but they also leave behind plenty of miniatures. Inside the Egyptian pyramids, within the chamber where the pharaoh’s mummy rests, stand collections of little statues—wooden figurines of mummified servants, clay hippos painted turquoise—to remind the ruler how the world once looked. Academics have complained that miniatures suffer from scholarly neglect.
The first generation of immigrants wants to survive, the second wants to assimilate, and the third wants to remember, the sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen wrote in 1938. The fourth, fifth, and sixth? Apparently they now want to go on a luxury vacation to visit the Welsh coal mines their ancestors crossed an ocean to escape.
So-called heritage tourism has grown into its own travel category, like skiing and whale watching.
Migration, I like to tell myself, is the opposite of inertia. I left Venezuela on August 28, 2014. President Hugo Chávez had died the year before, bequeathing power over his dictatorship to his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro. Around this time, supermarket shelves were emptying and resourceful Venezuelans were creating WhatsApp groups to tell one another where to find medicine, toilet paper, flour.
Two Republican governors last month sent asylum seekers to the two most Democratic places they could think of—Martha’s Vineyard and the doorstep of Kamala Harris’s house in Washington, D.C. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have made no secret of the message they were trying to send: Immigrants are a burden, and one that Democratic states should share.