‘Our country is not a safe place’: why Salvadorans will still head for the US
Poverty and gang violence are driving an exodus, regardless of US asylum reforms
Outside the migrants’ attention centre in San Salvador, 19-year-old Berenice Cruz’s eyes dart around nervously before she whispers that she had fled El Salvador “because of the crime”. Nearly all her family in the east of the country belong to a gang, she says, but she refuses to get involved. The gang threatened to kill her, so she attempted the perilous journey to Reno, Nevada, in the US, where an aunt lives and where sanctuary lies. She failed.
“If I go back to where I live, they’ll kill me,” she says, shortly after arriving back in her home country from a detention centre in McAllen, Texas, where
