Dangerous exile: more than 400,000 noncitizens have been deported since 1996 because of expanded criminal sentencing. A photojournalist follows the return of Central American and Caribbean deportees.

In the aftermath of the Rodney King beatings and the resulting riots in Los Angeles, the Immigration and Naturalization Service formed a special gang task force. The Violent Gang Task Force began targeting immigrant youth with gang affiliations for deportation. Before 1992, it was rare for gang members to be deported to Central America.

Following the Salvadoran peace accords--same year as the L.A. riots--hundreds of youths affiliated with L.A. gangs began getting deported back to Central America, especially El Salvador. The L.A. gangs began spreading throughout the region.

Following the changed immigration laws in 1996, the numbers of deportees from all across the U.S. began climbing and the numbers of youth offenders being deported back to Central America and the Caribbean in particular grew at an accelerated rate. Most young deportees came from this region for two reasons--the proximity means that many more undocumented immigrants come from these countries to the U.S., and these immigrants generally live in the enclaves of major cities where drugs and gangs are prevalent. Their kids are affected by the realities where they live and law enforcement targets these neighborhoods more than others.

It was after these policy changes that I visited Haiti, Belize, and Guatemala to document the continued effects of U.S. deportation policies on youth and some of the programs in those countries designed to help deportees as well as to document the high human rights costs of the U.S. deportation policy.

Donna DeCesare is an award-winning photographer now on the faculty of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Her 10-year project on youth violence and violence prevention in the Americas will soon be published on an Internet site devoted to this issue.