The president seized 1% of El Salvador’s population. Their children pay the consequences

Tears welled in Alex's eyes and he pressed his head into his hands as he thought about more than a year of birthdays and holidays without his mother, who was swept up by El Salvador's police as she walked to work in a clothing factory. “I’m scared, feeling like they could come and they could take away someone else in my family.” Forty thousand children have seen one parent or both detained in President Nayib Bukele’s nearly two-year war on El Salvador’s gangs, according to the national social services agency.