Even before COVID-19, El Salvador’s prisons were contagious disease hotspots. Here, MS-13 gang members with tuberculosis at Chalatenango prison, March 29, 2019.
Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images
El Salvador is arresting thousands of people for violating its COVID-19 quarantine, further packing a 'hellish' penal system once described as a 'petri dish' for infectious disease.
Street gangs that operate with impunity make El Salvador one of the world’s most violent countries. Few murders are ever solved.
MARVIN RECINOS/AFP via Getty Images
A new Human Rights Watch report finds many Salvadoran deportees are killed once home, often by the gangs they fled. Rampant impunity means El Salvador can't protect vulnerable people from violence.
A Congolese family approaches the unofficial border crossing with Canada while walking down Roxham Road in Champlain, N.Y., in August 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Charles Krupa.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Charles Krupa
Canadian leaders have desperately tried to preserve the country's image of liberal humanitarianism at our border, but the reality is Canada's immigration history is built upon exclusion.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer checks migrants’ documents.
AP Photo/Fernando Llano
Trump officials plan to send asylum seekers from the US to El Salvador while their claims are processed. That would expose these vulnerable people to grave dangers, says a political violence expert.
Migrants wait to apply for asylum in the United States outside the El Chaparral border in Tijuana, Mexico.
REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
As the House mounts an impeachment investigation of President Trump, examples from Central and South America show that ousting an executive leader from office doesn't always have the intended effect.
Asylum-seekers are carried from the Rio Grande.
REUTERS/Veronica G. Cardenas
Asylum-seekers will now be prevented from applying for asylum in the United States if they could have pursued asylum in another country first.
A farmer carries firewood during the dry season in Nicaragua, one of the Central American countries affected by a recent drought.
Neil Palmer for CIAT/flickr
Poverty and violence are often cited as the reasons people emigrate from Central America, but factors such as drought, exacerbated by climate change, are driving people to leave too.
Immigrants line up in the dining hall at the U.S. government’s newest holding center for migrant children in Carrizo Springs, Texas.
AP/Eric Gay
Immigrant children could remain indefinitely in federal detention if courts allow the Trump administration to ditch a landmark agreement that has protected migrant children for decades.
Alejandro Giammattei is a former prison official whose tenure was tainted by the 2006 mass killing of seven prisoners. He was accused but never indicted on conspiracy charges in those deaths.
AP Photo/ Santiago Billy
Conservative Alejandro Giammattei beat former first lady Sandra Torres with 60% of the vote. But turnout was the lowest in Guatemala's modern history, in apparent protest of both candidates.
Even working women who have partners often have to do the most work at home.
Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon
Does having children make the goal of fairly dividing work at home more elusive?
Honduran migrant Vicky Chavez with her daughter Issabella on May 31, 2018 in the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, where she sought protection from deportation in late 2017.
AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
Mario Garcia, University of California Santa Barbara
The number of migrants living in churches has spiked recently in anticipation of threatened immigration raids, but churches have long protected refugees in an act of faith-based civil disobedience.
A group of Mexican laborers boarding a train in Chicago to be deported in 1951.
AP Photo
Dennis Rodgers, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID)
Being part of a gang may increase the chance of dying young, but when gang members leave their old lives behind, they can find that their street smarts come in handy.
Some USAID programs seek to help raise living standards for families like this one in Western Honduras.
USAID-ACCESO/Fintrac Inc.
Done right, aid fosters greater stability and boosts the economy. That reduces incentives to move away.
Sandra Torres, presidential candidate for the National Unity of Hope, won the first round of presidential election in Guatemala with 25% of the vote, followed by former national prison director Alejandro Giammatei. The two will face-off in the second round of voting in August.
Reuters/Luis Echeverria
As part of a new 'metering' policy, US officials are turning asylum seekers away at ports of entry along the southern border. Thousands wait, straining the resources of Mexican border towns.
How did military conflict fit into the end of a mighty civilization?
AP Photo/Moises Castillo
Grisly war trophies made from the heads of vanquished enemies certainly grab attention. But archaeologists are more interested in what they may tell about a tumultuous time of shifting political power.
Stucco frieze from Placeres, Campeche, Mexico, Early Classic period, c. 250-600 AD.
Wolfgang Sauber/Wikimedia
Many people think climate change caused Classic Maya civilization to collapse abruptly around 900 A.D. An archaeologist says that view is too simplistic and misses the bigger point.