Blogging from El Salvador #1

I arrived in San Salvador last night as part of a contingent of University of San Francisco staff and faculty here to learn more about El Salvador’s civil war and human rights story of the 1980s and 1990s. This trip is particularly meaningful to me; I represented many Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers in the U.S. during that period, and working with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, we developed training materials and resources for immigrant rights advocates.

It’s striking that much news is currently being made of an historic truce among gang members here who have transnational roots to the United States. Some of the most violent gang warfare and activity is the direct result of U.S. deportation policies that removed many such gang members from the U.S. to central america, filling their local ranks. That was a mistake, representing a failure of the U.S. institutions and its criminal justice system.

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