To those familiar with him offline, Robert Bowers was barely there.

“He was in his own little world,” said one childhood friend of the man accused of gunning down 11 congregants in Pittsburgh on Saturday in what is likely the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in US, according to The New York Times. “He was pretty much a ghost.”

“There was nothing about him, not even a bumper sticker on his car,” said a neighbor.

He kept to himself, as the stock phrase that inevitably follows a mass shooting goes. Yet, as the research shows, no terrorist is an island, and the alleged Pittsburgh gunman is no exception. Mr. Bowers may have been a phantom in the physical world, but on the right-wing social platform Gab, he was enmeshed in a network of values and norms that have an insidious way of making the murder of elderly Jews look like justice.

“Nobody self-radicalizes,” says Mark Hamm, a professor of criminology at Indiana State University. “They do get radicalized. They go through a process of extremist development. But it is certainly by no means independently.”

Professor Hamm is the co-author of  “The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism,” which looks at 123 cases of lone-actor terrorism from 1940 through mid 2016. These include well-known terrorists, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, as well as lesser-known figures like Hussein Kholya, who in 1983 hijacked an airliner over Texas.

Many Americans this week are wondering, what makes a person resort to such lone wolf attacks, and why do they seem to be happening more and more in America? The attack in Pittsburgh was one of three acts of violence last week, each allegedly perpetrated by middle-aged white men who were in various ways motivated by political and racial hatred. 

For many, the state of American political discourse has become more than simply polarized. Expressions of hate and racism abound online, and political pundits serve a steady diet of vitriol.

Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune/AP

Mark and Allie Divine attend a memorial for those killed and injured in Saturday’s deadly shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, at Temple Israel in Crystal, Minn., Oct. 28. Amid an increased police presence, the Twin Cities Jewish community is mourning and gathering in solidarity after the shooting in Pittsburgh.

Many also see the president himself as normalizing a crass and cavalier tone in American politics, using historically loaded terms like “enemy of the people” to refer to the news media, calling immigrant gangs “animals, not people,” and with showman-like bravado, making quips about “knocking the crap out of” protesters at his raucous political rallies. 

After the shooting, US House majority leader Kevin McCarthy deleted a tweet that said three Democratic donors of Jewish descent – George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer – were trying to “buy” the 2018 midterm elections. The tweet was posted last Tuesday, well before the shooting, but after a pipe bomb had been sent to Mr. Soros’s home. Hours after the shooting, President Trump reposted a tweet by Dinesh D'Souza, a GOP activist who, earlier this year, retweeted the hashtag #burnthejews. Earlier this month, Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa met with an Austrian far-right group with ties to Nazis. He did so while on a trip funded by a Holocaust memorial group.

The making of a lone wolf

Clearly, the people who make the decision to commit a “lone wolf” act of violence are relatively few, even if their actions reverberate around the world.

“That extremist rhetoric itself doesn't necessarily lead to individual action, because otherwise the question might be, why are there few of these attacks when there's so much basically hate speech out there?” says Ramón Spaaij, author of “Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism: Global Patterns, Motivations and Prevention” and co-author, with Hamm, of  “The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism.”

But such rhetoric takes on a life of its own on social media, where isolated individuals find like-minded people who help to amplify that rhetoric, experts say.

“They may be enabled by others from a distance, but no no one is giving them commands or directions to carry out these attacks, and certainly no one is helping them go operational,” Hamm says. “These are anonymous online sympathizers who indeed enable the lone wolf through a validation of his ideology. So you have now, all of a sudden, a person [who] is not really truly all alone, because now he has a small online community, but he doesn't know who they are and in real life he doesn’t know their names.” 

Some observers have begun to use the term “stochastic terrorism” to refer to the phenomenon of far-reaching online communications “to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”

This kind of terrorism was put to effective use by tech-savvy manipulators working with ISIS years ago, experts note, leading a number of youth in the West to travel to Syria to volunteer, or for lone wolves to carry out violent acts.  

Indeed, there has been “a dramatic increase in attacks by disaffected people, and people searching for some sense of accomplishment,” John Cohen, a counterterrorism coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security, told Quartz in an Oct. 24 interview. Whether white supremacy or Al Qaeda, they are egged on by what they see and hear on social media to commit a violent act.  

Those most susceptible are easily swayed by hateful rhetoric, he said, and are often “looking for legitimacy and a sense of validation for their violent tendencies.”

A surge in violent extremism

This past June, the US Department of Justice issued a report on the growing problem of home-grown acts of terror. The report traces a cycle of radicalization and reinforcement in which certain individuals “[embrace] a terrorist belief system or narrative that identifies particular others or groups as ‘enemies’ and justifies engaging in violence against them.”

The cycle often includes a “triggering event” in which an individual, who is often already deeply embedded in online communities that normalize violent extremism against those perceived as dangerous others, passes an inner threshold and makes a decision to kill, researchers say.

And the United States appears to be in the midst of a surge of such extremism, especially of right wing and white nationalist groups. Between 2014 and 2017, the number of hate groups in the US grew from 784 to 953, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

This includes a number of white nationalist militias that engage in paramilitary-style training and guerrilla warfare techniques, notes Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist and author of “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead.”

Yet globally, terrorism has declined in the last few years, dropping from about 17,000 incidents in 2014 to about 11,000 in 2017, including about 40 percent fewer terrorist acts in the Middle East and North Africa, according to data from Global Terrorism Database.

In the US however, the numbers are increasing. There were only six acts of home-grown terror 10 years ago, but in 2017 this number grew to 65. Of these, 37 were perpetrated by those with right-wing and racist motives, 11 by left-wing motives, seven by Muslim extremists, and 10 unknown.

“While there is no standard profile of the lone wolf terrorist, most of them are unemployed, single white males with a criminal record,” reported Professors Hamm and Spaaij, in a 2015 study commissioned by the Justice Department. “Compared to members of terrorist groups, lone wolves are older, less educated and more prone to mental illness.”

While mental illness may constitute a piece of the puzzle to understanding lone-actor terrorism, it by no means fully accounts for it. Indeed, a person’s address, says Noemie Bouhana, an associate professor in security and crime science at University College London and an expert in radicalization, can be a more reliable predictor.

“By applying this label of mental illness, [saying] this is someone who of outside society, this is a nutcase,” says Professor Spaiij, “I think the risk we run there is that we fail to hold an attack like that out as a mirror to ourselves, in terms of what does it say about our own social and cultural condition or political conditions that also produces these kinds of attacks?”

Ed Kennedy/Reuters

Cesar Sayoc’s van is seen in Boca Raton, Fla., Oct. 18, in this picture obtained from social media. Mr. Sayoc was arrested on Friday in connection with a spate of pipe bombs that had been mailed to prominent critics of President Trump.

For many, the series of events of the past week have been a wake-up call that something about our social and political discourse cannot be ignored.

On Friday, the FBI arrested Cesar Sayoc, an outspoken Trump supporter and self-avowed white supremacist who had attended at least one Trump rally. Mr. Sayoc is suspected of sending a series of at least 14 pipe bombs to well-known critics of Mr. Trump.

On Wednesday, a gunman named Gregory Bush allegedly attempted to barge into a black church near Louisville, Ky. Unable to enter, he went to a nearby Kroger grocery store, where he shot and killed two black people at random.

Like these two men, Bowers, who denigrated President Trump as a “globalist” – “There is no #MAGA as long as there is a k*** infestation,” he once posted on Gab – had a long history of making racist comments online and had a history of violence.

When Bowers walked into The Tree of Life congregation on Saturday and opened fire, his attack struck against the name of this Conservative Jewish congregation in a deeply literal way. He brought hate and death to a celebration of love and life.

But amid their grief, the congregants have refused to meet hate with hate. 

“My cup overflows with love,” Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers told 2,000 people gathered Sunday in remembrance of the lives lost. “That’s how you defeat hate.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The rotunda of the Montana State Capitol in Helena depicts four important archetypes of people from the state’s history: a fur trapper, Native American, gold miner, and cowboy.

Jaime MacNaughton’s future in law can be traced back to the time when she was locked in the trunk of a car, sweating inside a garbage bag. She was doing a scene for a TV pilot that ended up going nowhere. It marked the nadir of the theater major’s quest to make it big in Los Angeles. “Obviously, that never panned out,” she says.

Meanwhile, her second job – the one she had gotten just to pay the bills – was taking off. After starting as a file clerk at an immigration law firm, she’d been promoted to run the department that handled green cards, helping everyone from auto mechanics to Hollywood actors get their ticket to a new life in the United States. She was hooked. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Jaime MacNaughton, a lawyer with Montana’s Commissioner on Political Practices, stands outside her office in Helena.

Fast-forward 15 years and Ms. MacNaughton, now a lawyer, is a key player in enforcing Montana’s strict laws against mega-spending in politics. From a humble rambler in the shadow of the grand state capitol building in Helena, MacNaughton keeps track of campaign finance violations in tiny, exquisite handwriting on a dry-erase board and digs through boxes of original documents next door to help prepare two cases under consideration by the US Supreme Court. 

Seventy miles to the south, in the brick historical district of Butte, Mont., Anita Milanovich is marshaling arguments for her side of those cases. She is fighting against what she sees as Montana’s unconstitutional limits on an important form of political speech: spending money to support candidates and promote political causes. 

One floor up from the chandelier-filled lobby of the old Finlen hotel, she sits alone in a spacious office with views out toward the undulating landscape once scraped and scalloped by copper barons. Ms. Milanovich, who recently relocated here from Bozeman, Mont., has almost finished unpacking all her framed honors and her diploma from Valparaiso University Law School in Indiana, where she was a member of the conservative Federalist Society.

These two women are central figures in an epic fight in Montana over money in politics – one that may well set the tone for the rest of the nation on an issue crucial to the functioning of American democracy.

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Lawyer Anita Milanovich is fighting against limits on political donations.

MacNaughton is the sole lawyer at the Commissioner of Political Practices (COPP), the state’s unique but perpetually underfunded office tasked with enforcing Montana’s 111 pages, single-spaced, of strict campaign finance laws. 

Milanovich serves as the Montana outpost for the Indiana-based Bopp Law Firm, which is led by the preeminent lawyer fighting campaign finance regulations across the country. It was her boss, James Bopp Jr., who successfully argued the 2010 Citizens United case before the Supreme Court, opening the floodgates for corporate money in politics. Now the firm is pursuing the legal cases against MacNaughton’s office.

COPP and Bopp represent two competing strains of thought in the US about how much money should be spent on political campaigns, who should be allowed to contribute, and whether the public has a right to know who is behind the largess.

Underlying the debate are critical questions about the relative value of each citizen in elections, and if politics – and democracy as a whole – are stronger, healthier, and more effective when political spending is kept in check or allowed to flow freely. Whether the Supreme Court takes up these two Montana campaign finance cases, and how it decides, could dramatically affect the ability of states to regulate political spending.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The National Institute on Money in Politics in Helena, Mont., tracks spending on state races nationwide.

The total outlay in this fall’s midterm elections is expected to surpass the $3.85 billion spent four years ago, and much of it comes from undisclosed sources – so-called dark money. Amid the growth of unrestricted giving, Montana is taking one of the boldest – or most egregious, depending on one’s perspective – stands in the country for limiting spending and requiring disclosure of the source of contributions.

And the reason for that goes back to those hills outside Milanovich’s office mined for their invaluable metals. 

*** 

On a crisp fall day, a steady procession of veteran politicians streams into Gamer’s Cafe in Butte’s historic downtown for coffee or stacks of pancakes the size of pizzas.

Among them is Evan Barrett, a longtime Democratic operative and former state business development chief with a ponytail poking out of his baseball cap. Mr. Barrett spearheaded the 1975 law that formed COPP. Tucked under his arm is the 1889-1976 Atlas of Montana Elections. “It’s my Bible,” he says.

He doesn’t really seem to need it. After sliding into a vinyl booth, he rattles off so much of that history that the waitress has to come several times to refill his coffee cup.

Montana was ushered into statehood in 1889 via a constitutional convention presided over by William Clark, a businessman from Pennsylvania who came here seeking gold. Clark found not only gold, but silver and a world-class copper lode in Butte, which became known as “the richest hill on earth.” A 34-room Victorian mansion just up the street stands as a testament to the prodigious wealth he accrued.

As the mining corporations became bigger and wealthier, Barrett says, progressives became concerned about their influence, particularly in politics. Clark, one of several men known as the Copper Kings, didn’t bother with penny-ante contributions or underwriting political ads. He bought himself a seat in the US Senate by throwing money at the state legislators, who in those days were responsible for electing senators.

Clark and his agents tossed brown paper bags of cash into legislators’ hotel rooms, purchased ranches, and paid off mortgages and debts. The copper baron later admitted to spending more than $272,000 in bribes for the seat – the equivalent of nearly
$8 million in today’s dollars.

It was blatant bribery – so blatant that it changed the way senatorial elections were conducted in America. Clark’s high-profile corruption was one of several cases that prompted Congress to pass the 17th Amendment, which put the election of senators directly in the hands of the people.

Montana, too, enacted changes.

The misdeeds of copper barons like Clark are often cited as the precipitating reason for the state’s landmark 1912 Corrupt Practices Act, a ballot initiative banning corporate money in politics. But the law was neither unique to Montana nor a cure-all for corporate exploitation.

Proposed amid a national movement led by progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to root out corporate corruption in politics, the law was copied verbatim from an Oregon statute. Business interests, however, continued to wield outsize power in the state, which by midcentury was referred to as a corporate colony. But the 1912 law stood for nearly 100 years, until Mr. Bopp came along.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The statue of Thomas Francis Meagher, a onetime governor of Montana Territory, occupies a prominent place in front of the State Capitol in Helena.

In the landmark case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, he persuaded the Supreme Court to allow corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against candidates, arguing it was a form of free speech. As Milanovich explains it, the government should not be in the business of deciding who is allowed to “speak” in support of political candidates or issues, because the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law that abridges freedom of speech.

In the majority opinion for the 5-to-4 decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged that while corporate spending may result in “influence over or access to elected officials,” it does not amount to corruption.

But many Montanans castigate the 2010 decision. “Citizens United, in my mind, enabled legal bribery,” says Barrett, who calls money the root of all evil in politics. “I personally believe that every citizen has an equivalent value in every election and that money ought to flow in the same way.”

The Citizens United decision called into question laws restricting corporate spending in 24 states, many of which were repealed or struck down. Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock fought to keep his state’s 1912 law intact, going all the way back up to the Supreme Court, with Bopp representing the defendants. The same justices who had supported Citizens United ruled against Mr. Bullock in a one-paragraph opinion just a few months shy of the law’s 100th birthday.

But one key restriction established by Montana progressives was left standing – the tiny office where Jaime MacNaughton now works. 

***

When MacNaughton showed up in 2013, the COPP office had a rap as being slow and toothless. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, says Barrett.

In the wake of Watergate, as states were passing laws aimed at preventing the corrupting influence of money in politics, he was part of a small group assigned to draw up a new campaign finance law.

The intent was not to replace Montana’s 1912 law but to augment it – and, crucially, create a way to enforce it. Barrett pushed hard to put that power in the hands of a single individual rather than establishing a board or commission like so many other states were doing. “If everyone’s in charge, no one’s in charge,” he says.

So Montana entrusted a single commissioner – appointed by the governor but confirmed by the Legislature – to enforce its campaign finance laws. It remains the only state in America with such a structure, and it stands in stark contrast with the Federal Election Commission, which has been deadlocked for years along party lines.

But by 2013, COPP had gone through three commissioners in two years and was facing a massive backlog of complaints that needed to be investigated.

Then lawyer Jonathan Motl arrived, and he hired MacNaughton as his right-hand woman. That marked the first time the office had ever had two lawyers, giving it more firepower. They put the teeth back into the COPP, working through 100 complaints in two years and bringing the docket current for the first time in more than a decade. They also benefited from a bizarre breakthrough in the fight against dark money.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A white board in lawyer Jaime MacNaughton’s office keeps track of open and closed cases she is prosecuting. MacNaughton is general counsel with the Montana Commissioner on Political Practices, which enforces the state’s campaign finance laws.

A staffer for Western Tradition Partnership (WTP), an anti-environmental group active in Montana, was driving some sensitive documents back to Colorado in a beat-up Honda Civic when she parked in Denver and the car was stolen. Police found the vehicle, but the boxes were gone.

They showed up in a Colorado meth house and were eventually shipped to the commissioner’s office, where Mr. Motl and MacNaughton pored over them. They concluded, based on internal memos and subsequent research, that conservative Republicans running for Montana’s statehouse had, in violation of state campaign finance laws, been directly assisted by groups such as WTP and National Right to Work, which attacked their more moderate colleagues in primaries. 

Motl and MacNaughton used the files to bring cases against nine GOP lawmakers and candidates, and won or settled all nine cases, the last of which concluded in October.  

Many people, including Montana documentary filmmaker Kimberly Reed in her new film, “Dark Money,” hold up Motl as a hero for preserving the integrity of Montana politics. But critics describe his crusade as a thinly veiled partisan attack on GOP politicians. Milanovich says there was minimal investigation and Motl sued the candidates because it was politically expedient.

“Here in Montana, I do believe that the vagueness in campaign finance rules has been used against conservative Republicans,” says Milanovich, who adds that Motl testified that he is biased against dark money. “If that’s not an agenda, I don’t know what is.”

Motl vigorously denies the charge, noting that the office is nonpartisan. His term expired in 2017 and former Democratic state legislator Jeffrey Mangan is now the commissioner. But Motl’s legacy looms large, in part because his protégé, MacNaughton, is soldiering on.

*** 

The future of Montana’s campaign finance laws may not lie in Helena but in Washington, D.C., with nine robed justices. Bopp Law is urging the Supreme Court to strike down the state’s laws dealing with two chief pillars of post-Watergate campaign finance: limits on how much individuals can give to political campaigns and rules about disclosing contributions. 

Montana has the lowest limits on individual giving in the nation – $180 for candidates running for the state Legislature. Motl, who spearheaded a 1994 ballot initiative that dramatically lowered the individual limits, calls them “the most essential remaining element” of Montana campaign finance law, because they level the playing field for would-be donors.

“If your brother or best friend were running, it’d be within reach to give the maximum ... and that’s the way it should be,” says the former commissioner, his fleece jacket flecked with debris from working on his hobby farm. “That’s true participatory democracy.” It’s not just the elite, he says, who should influence who runs for office or shape how people govern.

But Milanovich says influence is different from bribery or quid pro quo corruption, which in her view would be the only justifications for restricting political spending. “I have serious doubts that $181 would buy a political candidate,” she says.

That’s why Bopp Law and its clients sued COPP in Lair v. Mangan, arguing that Montana’s limits violate the First Amendment right to speech.

Montana’s defense is being handled by the attorney general’s office, but MacNaughton is in frequent contact, bringing her depth of knowledge about campaign finance to help the state build a solid case. The stakes are high not just for Montana but for 37 other states with individual contribution limits.

“The Lair case is particularly interesting ... because they’re challenging basically every contribution limit in the country. So it has potential repercussions way beyond Montana,” says Dale Schowengerdt, solicitor general in the attorney general’s office. 

The second case deals with whether citizens have a right to know who’s behind the glossy fliers that show up in their mailboxes just before elections. Bullock, the former attorney general, thinks they do.

After losing his fight against Citizens United, he came back home, ran for governor, and won. In his second term, amid the revelations of “dark money” influence swirling around groups such as WTP, he was able to muster enough Republican support to push a campaign finance law through the GOP-controlled Legislature. The 2015 Disclose Act requires any group spending money in state elections to reveal its donors. (It doesn’t apply, however, to federal races.)

Milanovich argues that the Disclose Act has a chilling effect on citizens or groups who want to make their voice heard in elections. That, like Lair, is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, she and Bopp argue in Montanans for Community Development v. Mangan.

The case highlights Montana’s role at the forefront of efforts to make campaign contributions more transparent. “Montana is on the leading edge. It’s trying to make sure that voters and citizens know who is paying for politics,” says Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute in New York.

Helena is also the home of the National Institute on Money in Politics, a nonprofit that has become the premier group monitoring and collecting data on spending in state elections across the country. Armed with a small group of diligent staffers and powerful computers, the institute has become a valuable resource for media outlets, campaign watchdog groups, political scientists, and even people in foreign countries studying how American democracy works. 

Edwin Bender, a founder of the institute, tells the story of a visiting delegation from Algeria, which at one point asked him, “By what authority do you collect this [information]?” He told them it was all available through open records and offered to come to Algeria to share more of his work.

As they were leaving, one of the Algerians pulled him aside and said, “Thank you very much for the offer, but people who do what you do in our country get shot.”

***

Lair was one of the first Montana cases that MacNaughton and Milanovich worked on.

MacNaughton was two years out of law school and thrilled to be back working for her old boss, Motl. She left her family nearly four hours away in Billings and moved into her mom’s basement in Helena while she found housing and child care. “My husband knew it was my dream job,” she says.

Milanovich, who had developed a love for constitutional law at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., had been working for Bopp since she graduated from law school eight years earlier. When she moved to Montana in 2012 to be with her now husband, a third-generation Montanan, her boss allowed her to continue working remotely and she took on the Lair case.

MacNaughton still has a polite email she got from Milanovich about the Lair case just as she was settling into her new job at COPP. Milanovich signed off, “Happy Thanksgiving!”

But underneath the civility that they strive to maintain lie vastly different views of American politics and values. Milanovich says campaign finance law has justifiable underpinnings; she, too, doesn’t want to see another bribery scandal like that of copper baron William Clark.

But in her view, what began as a way of monitoring the government and making sure it wasn’t corrupt has veered away from that original purpose and is being used as a political tool.

“Disclosure has become about something more than scrutinizing the government. It has become a means of monitoring Americans, and it has become weaponized,” she says.

MacNaughton, for her part, thinks all Montanans have the right to know who is underwriting the people who run for office and sees herself as carrying out the will of the people. “I wouldn’t be here doing this,” she says, “if I didn’t think that the people of Montana, and the nation at large, deserve to know who is influencing their votes.”

John Adams of the Montana Free Press contributed to this report.

This story has been changed to offer greater clarity on several points.

The couple who sought an investigation into their son’s murder. A woman who received grim warnings after bringing her grandchildren to their mother’s funeral. A family torn apart by brothers’ attempts to avoid gang recruitment.

Like tens of thousands of other Hondurans, these families faced threats so pressing that they felt forced to uproot and find new homes. Each got tangled in the web of unwritten rules for survival here, such as keeping silent about crimes, in a nation rife with gangs, trafficking networks, and police corruption.

It’s a maze of risks that can sometimes lead people to the United States. But what’s often overlooked in US conversations around migration is that trekking north is rarely a migrant’s first choice. Most desperately search for safety in their own country.

“My [teenage] children all sleep in my bed with me now,” says Maritza, whose partner and two eldest sons were killed in the span of three years by gang violence. (Like the other displaced people in this story, she requested to use a pseudonym for her family’s safety.) She sent her youngest son, a teen, to live with relatives two hours away, and is seeking relocation assistance from an international NGO. Her kids have dropped out of school and a family friend does their grocery shopping. “We barely leave the house,” she says.

Maritza is on her way to becoming an internally displaced person (IDP): someone who is forced to flee her home, but remains within her country’s borders. Within the Northern Triangle – a region made up of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – an estimated 432,000 people became IDPs in 2017, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.

What tends to get attention in the US, on the other hand, are numbers about cross-border migration: Some 163,000 immigrants from the Northern Triangle were halted at the US border in 2017. Another 82,000 were repatriated from Mexico to Central America the same year. Asylum applications from people fleeing the region are reaching new heights in both Mexico and the US, with 45 percent of asylum requests in Mexico in the first half of 2018 coming from Hondurans.

Violence, gang recruitment, and poverty feed the growing numbers of IDPs and migrants alike, experts say. In Honduras alone, at least 174,000 people became IDPs between 2004 and 2014, according to an estimate by the United Nations and the Honduran government.

Most everyone agrees the statistics on IDPs here are severely underreported, which can affect everything from education to employment to international migration. The more precisely researchers and officials can track the phenomenon, and understand causes unique to each community, the higher the chances they can prevent displacement – and possible migration – in the first place. There are also deeper-seated issues that need addressing, like job creation and improving graduation rates, so gangs don’t seem like one of few economic opportunities in so many Honduras neighborhoods and towns.

“Many Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans, they love their countries. If they could go somewhere else at home they would,” says Elizabeth Kennedy, a prominent researcher in Central America who has spent the past five years studying motivations for migration in Honduras and El Salvador. She estimates that 90 percent of the people she’s interviewed in Honduras try to move somewhere else at home before looking beyond their national borders.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Ana sits with her daughter as she waits for her own mother to arrive at the Attention Center for Returned Migrants in San Pedro Sula, Honduras on Sept. 11, 2018. After fleeing violence in Honduras, Ana's mother was picked up in the United States and deported back to Honduras.

'Honduras is different'

In a nation where only 4 in 100 homicides are solved, Ana says it’s safer not to report crimes to the police. Including her brother’s murder.

“My mom didn’t want to make a report, but [the police] saw her screaming and knew she was his mother,” she says, remembering his lifeless body outside the bus where he worked as the driver’s assistant, collecting fares.

The family was told the fleet’s owners had resisted an extortion attempt – and the murder was a message that the payments weren’t optional. Soon after, the family started getting threats. When they uprooted to a new home about 15 minutes away, they didn’t tell anyone: neighbors, relatives, and least of all the government. When they feared ties between criminal groups in their new and old neighborhoods, the family tried to move again, and her mother eventually decided to migrate to the US.

IDPs’ “options are limited: to stay or keep moving to new places where there is [further] risk that they will face the same high-risk factors again and again,” says Luca Guanziroli, a protection officer for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Honduras.

“People fear talking about what’s going on, which limits the help [the government and NGOs] can give,” says Evlin Chacon, a project manager at World Vision Honduras, who works with IDP cases. “People move on their own.… They have no support, no network for finding work or getting their children into school, which makes them even more vulnerable.”

In Honduras, forced internal displacement is driven mainly by violence, including organized crime and gender-based violence. It is also propelled by land conflicts or mega-projects, and human rights violations, according to a 2017 report by Honduras’ National Human Rights Commission. Gang recruitment is a central reason for displacement.

In countries with more high-profile conflicts and IDP populations, like Sudan or Colombia, “an entire village moves,” says Mr. Guanziroli. “Honduras is different.

“It’s mainly urban and small-scale movement. One or two families one day, then nothing. There’s no specific communities of origin or of destination,” which makes identifying and responding to IDPs particularly challenging.

Sister Joana Da Silva directs the Attention Center for Returned Migrants, at the edge of the airport in San Pedro Sula, which offers services to people deported home from the US. Then they board taxis and buses that take them back to the communities they originally left, which many find more terrifying than the migrant trail north.

The fact that so many people see migrating to the US – with all the risks of violence, extortion, or death that journey entails – as their best option reflects the realities of Honduras today, Sister Da Silva says.

“Some turn right around and try again,” she says. “People are more aware of the risks of migration today. But the nature of migrants [and refugees] is to never lose hope.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Honduran deportees wait for transportation outside the Attention Center for Returned Migrants in San Pedro Sula, Honduras on Sept. 11, 2018. At the center, people deported from the United States receive services and are sent back to the communities they originally left.

Building community

Awareness of the IDP crisis has increased in Honduras in recent years, but clear-cut solutions are rare. As the government focuses on “Iron Fist” punishments for crime, many nongovernmental and multinational organizations try to short-circuit the cycle of gang recruitment. That could mean a safe space for young people to hang out, build a sense of community, get job training, or take GED and English courses.

Although Honduras is often described as having generalized violence, so far-reaching that it essentially touches people indiscriminately, it’s the quieter, targeted threats – like the extortion of elementary school students and teachers, or gang-imposed curfews – that make living here so tough.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Children play on the grounds of a school in San Miguel, Honduras on Sept. 13, 2018. The neighborhood has been plagued by gang violence.

Earlier this year, an elementary and middle school near the mountainous neighborhoods of San Miguel, Tegucigalpa, was shuttered for nearly two weeks due to a bomb threat. Locals whisper that a school security guard didn’t let a gang member hang around collecting weekly extortion payments. The bomb threat was in retaliation.

Fourteen-year-old Pamela says the situation was terrifying – but not because of the risk of violence. “I thought they were going to close down my school forever,” she says.

Pamela sits inside a small community center on a green- and brown-splotched yard in San Miguel. Funded in part by Save the Children and UNHCR, it offers weekend classes and daily activities for youth like Pamela and her cousins. They gather every Saturday for foosball tournaments or to play on the rusted jungle gym.

UNHCR has opened 12 similar centers in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula since 2016. The hope is that interventions tailored to each community can deter the next generation of gang or drug-trafficking recruits, and offer opportunities to stave off displacement or migration.

Sloane, a young single mother, volunteers in the bookstore here. Until recently, her family lived about 20 minutes away, unable to enter or exit their neighborhood after 8 p.m. due to gang-imposed curfews.

“I couldn’t go to school. I couldn’t find work. Everywhere I looked, it was a dead end.... No one explicitly told us to get out, but we were forced all the same,” Sloane says of moving.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Sloane, a single mother, sits on a swing set outside a community building in San Miguel, Honduras on Sept. 13, 2018. The community center is funded in part by Save the Children and UNHCR, and Sloane volunteers in its bookstore.

Many of the same problems exist in her new neighborhood. But she’s found a glimmer of hope taking English courses and finishing up her high school degree. She’s put aside plans to migrate to the US, and dreams of working in tourism; of setting an example for her son.

“It might sound like nothing, a place to gather or learn,” she says of the community center. “But if kids get good information, if they feel part of the community, maybe it could all be different one day.”

Courtesy of Mahak charity

A psychologist and a volunteer work with a patient at a Mahak hospital. A private charity that is Iran's largest charity for children with cancer, Mahak says supplies of certain imported medicines are dwindling because pharmaceutical companies and banks fear running afoul of US sanctions rules.

One sign of the impact of stepped-up American sanctions on Iran can be found on the northeast edge of Tehran: anxiety at Iran’s largest charity for children diagnosed with cancer.

Mahak, a private charity with a $60 million annual budget that cares for 17,500 patients across the country, free of charge, is deeply concerned that crucial drug supplies from abroad are already dwindling as foreign banks and suppliers cease doing business.

While humanitarian goods such as medicine are exempt from US sanctions, which were reimposed after President Trump withdrew the United States from the multinational deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, the severe banking restrictions that are part of the sanctions regime have just as negative an effect.

Even with a specific license from the US Treasury to transfer charitable donations to Mahak, banks normally used by the Iranian charity in Europe won’t forward the cash, it says.

“You want to talk about realities?” asks Arasb Ahmadian, the chief executive officer of Mahak. “The reality is that no companies, no banks want to be involved in any operation with Iran’s name, because they don’t know what will happen to them.”

While the charity has successfully imported a year’s worth of some medicines, Mr. Ahmadian says, inventory is empty of four specific drugs that have short expiration dates and therefore can’t be stockpiled. And pharmaceutical companies and banks abroad are not filling those gaps, fearful that they will incur mammoth US fines, he says.

“Can you ask these sanctions designers what we should do?” he asks.

When Mr. Trump unilaterally withdrew from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal, it was despite continued support for the deal from European countries, Russia, and China, which have all vowed to help Iran soften the sanctions blow in order to keep Iran committed to the accord.

Firms pulling out

Now Iranians are bracing for the next round of US sanctions, with Washington set to impose broad new measures on Nov. 4 designed to bring Iran’s lifeblood oil exports to zero.

The European Union is creating a mechanism it calls a “special purpose vehicle” to circumvent the US measures, under which Washington can cut off or fine any bank that enables transactions with Iran.

But for months, big Western companies that signed lucrative deals with Iran such as Boeing, Airbus, and European vehicle manufacturers, as permitted and encouraged by the 2015 nuclear accord, have been pulling out of Iran.

And the White House has made clear that its new sanctions, which Trump says will be “tougher than ever before,” aim not just to compel Iran to negotiate a broader deal that limits its ballistic missile program and support for regional proxy forces – a concession that Tehran rejects outright – but also to deepen antigovernment anger among Iranians themselves.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

An Iranian couple in a Tehran supermarket Sept. 16, 2018, shops for diapers that have tripled in price as US sanctions have led to shortages and the tumbling value of Iran's currency.

Indeed, the sanctions are biting at the same time that Iran’s economy has reeled this year, with a collapse of the currency, soaring inflation, layoffs and widespread protests, all combined with the expectation of more sanctions-induced hardship.

One joke told pithily by Iranians sums up what it’s like to be caught in the US-Iran sanctions stranglehold.

“Mushak hast, pushak nist,” the joke goes: “Missiles we have, diapers we don’t.”

Silver lining for ideologues

To help Iranians brace for the added hardship, the government of President Hassan Rouhani has announced plans to provide food packages to 9 million people from low-income families.

Officials have also tried to reassure panicking Iranians that current shortages will be overcome, and high prices will be checked. Iran has stockpiled enough wheat for a year. And the head of the “Supreme Council for Cyberspace” has even floated the possibility of creating a digital currency that would bypass US sanctions rules.

US efforts are “definitely doomed to failure thanks to our great nation’s spirit of resistance,” Mr. Rouhani declared on Oct. 23.

But Khorasan newspaper last week reported a 47.5 percent price rise for basic goods in a single month ending Oct. 20, attributing it to the looming US sanctions.

Regime ideologues say Iran is locked in an “economic war” and see a silver lining in the renewal of US sanctions, because they force Iran to be self-sufficient, despite the economic pinch.

“We believe the current situation is good for Iran. Why? The idea that we need to solve our economic problems through the Europeans – even the US – is gone forever,” says Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper. “This is a big achievement.”

But that is far from the majority view. In mid-October, four newspapers that span Iran’s political spectrum published a joint editorial, in which they cited the Declaration of Independence to decry US sanctions as an assault on the “certain unalienable rights” of Iranians to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The editorial read: “Sanctions have brought about destructive repercussions for the lives of millions of Iranian citizens who legitimately enjoy the right of life.”

Less inventory, fewer jobs

As the new energy sanctions loom, it’s not just a charity like Mahak that is feeling the pinch. On the opposite side of Tehran, on its western outskirts at a sprawling modern supermarket, for example, retail salespeople hired to sell foreign appliances have been losing their jobs by the dozen as inventories are depleted.

“They told me at the end of the month they don’t need me,” says a young salesman with an industrial design degree, who has sold food processors and microwaves there for two years and asked not to be named.

The number of sellers on the floor went from 70 last March to 45 in late summer. Soon the eight or nine rows now stacked with appliances will shrink to one or two.

Stealing has become an increasing problem, says the salesman, who has a thin beard and worn black shoes. Someone tried to walk out the door the night before with a small food chopper that was on display.

Indeed, the Tehran police have warned that robberies are increasing in the capital, because so many Iranians are hoarding gold and cash dollars at home, as a hedge against economic disaster.

“My grandfather always said: ‘If your stomach is empty, you have no religion,’ ” says the salesman. He mentions one Iranian food company that fired 100 people in one week, and another rice wholesaler that let 700 people go.

Job losses are growing and were one reason for widespread protests that erupted last winter and continue episodically around the country.

One factory owner who asked not to be named says he fired 50 people three months ago, out of a workforce of 250. He says his brother, who owns a cardboard factory south of Tehran, recently planned to fire most of his 300 workers. But intelligence officers came and told him to keep them on the payroll because it was a “national security issue.”

“All these companies are at the end, all are waiting,” he says.

Jason Getz/USA TODAY/Sports NPStrans/TopPic wow

Atlanta United defender Michael Parkhurst (No. 3) and goalkeeper Brad Guzan (No. 1) enter the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Aug. 4. An initiative to create soccer fields at subway stations is challenging economic and racial divides there.

Curtis Jenkins grew up like most native Atlantans: riding MARTA trains, playing pick-up games of basketball, hanging his head about the Hawks.

But after several failed attempts to build a team in his neighborhood of East Point, his favorite sport – soccer – went unplayed. 

Decades later, Mr. Jenkins leads the Footie Mob, one of a number of supporters’ groups that have latched onto the Major League Soccer expansion team Atlanta United. Last week, the team did what many thought impossible: It knocked Real Madrid out of the Top 25 global soccer rankings, becoming the first MLS team to enter that echelon. The team regularly hosts the third or fourth best-attended soccer games – in the world.

For a Southern metropolis where 37 percent of residents are transplants, and which ranks dead last in the US when it comes to upward mobility, there’s a “1,000 percent civic pride” that Jenkins says he feels he is part of now. And that sense of connection, in a city where people historically keep to their own neighborhoods, is translating far outside the big stadium downtown. The team is drawing an increasingly diverse set of kids and adults into the sport – and soccer is literally interconnecting the city, with pitches being built inside transit stations.

Sanjay Patel got an idea while on the London Metro, watching kids carrying soccer balls on the train: Why not in Atlanta?

“A lot of kids we work with are locked in these communities and don’t have access to sport, to life opportunity,” says Mr. Patel, who brought the idea of “station soccer” to Atlanta. Two transit stations currently house new soccer fields, with eight more stations to go. “What we are noticing ... [is] people are coming together into a space they normally would walk by and not even look at, and becoming like a community. [We want] to stitch the [transit] demographics or network together, including lot of communities that have often been swept under the rug or forgotten.”

Enthusiasm for Atlanta United is creating an unprecedented “mixing of neighborhoods” in a city defined by its tight neighborhood fiefdoms, says Phil Hill, director of Soccer in the Streets, which has worked for 30 years to use soccer as a way for city kids to grab life opportunities.

“I was driving through a neighborhood and I see a guy crossing the street with a Roma top on – and not a white middle-class guy, either,” says Mr. Hill, referring to the professional Italian soccer club. “Then you see a guy with a Messi shirt on. It’s cool to be behind soccer.”

While soccer in the US remains largely a game of the middle-class suburbs, Atlanta’s sudden futbol bonanza has its own urban flair: Rap legends like Jeezy have hammered the “Golden Spike,” an Atlanta tradition and symbol of unity; Hispanic cheering sections bounce in the stands; and supporters’ groups like the Footie Mob and The Faction get down with some competitive tailgating before they march to Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

Tailgating a United game is “such a cool thing, because visitors come and say, ‘You all don’t hate each other? You’re right here together and no fights?’ ” says Jenkins. “Our answer is we’ve all got things to do in the morning. And loving my team doesn’t mean putting anyone else down.”

Jenkins, a fire marshal, is part of a grassroots movement that believes soccer can challenge ingrained economic and racial divides apparent even in a city that has had a black mayor since the early 1970s. 

Planners say part of the city’s divides were by default, if not design, baked into the way MARTA, the public transit system, was built. For example, rail spurs from hubs were at times either built or not built based on racial and economic considerations, sometimes at the cost of equal access. But such barriers have begun to fall away, experts say.

“The way these stations are helpful in bringing people together is an equity issue,” says Chris Wyczalkowski, an urban studies researcher at Georgia State University. “These stations were originally intended to be neighborhood centers and they are finally making that happen. That can create spillover effects.”

The transit system in Atlanta is more known for its brutalist architecture than its foresight. Yet when Patel approached its directors, they agreed to give station soccer a try. The first pitch was created out of an unused small amphitheater at Five Points, the system's nerve center. Two months ago, the city's West End stop received two outdoor pitches. A transit system that has for years been the butt of unkind jokes, meanwhile, is now being hailed in transit conferences from Pittsburgh to Munich. At the “Rail-olution” conference in Pittsburgh earlier this month, transit managers from the around the US queued up to talk to Patel after his presentation. The excitement has given way to new ideas to create community spaces out of hard-edged concrete buildings. Next up are station farmers’ markets.  

From the tailgates to the incorporation of traphouse lyrics (a rap style popularized in Atlanta) into cheerleading chants, the team has indubitably brought the city together in unexpected ways. When the microphone failed for the singer of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a game last year, the entire stadium picked up the slack, belting out the tune in heartwarming harmony.

And last month, the Atlanta City Council, after a year of deliberation in the wake of Charlottesville, erased “Confederate Avenue” from one of its streets. Its new moniker? United Avenue.

That a football club could turn a racially and economically challenged city into unified soccer mob has come as a surprise to native Atlantans like Jenkins, who say they never understood the depth of the pent-up desire not just to win on the pitch, but to be a part of something bigger than their porch.

Before the Five Stripes, as the Atlanta United are known, came to town, “We’re all watching games in our bar with our friends – Manchester United – and it’s like 50 people and you get to know them and you think, ‘Maybe there’s 1,000 of us in the city that are willing to do this,’ ” says Jenkins. “Then 52,000 people show up for the first game and they come again for the next game and the next, and it keeps building. I don’t think any of us had any idea how many people were watching in their corner bar or on their couch on Sunday mornings. We really found out how many people there were, that were ready for this.”

Reuters

A Honduran migrant is helped by fellow migrants after crossing the Suchiate River between Guatemala and Mexico on Oct. 29.

As they trek together toward the United States, a few thousand migrants from Central America could end up doing more than pose a crisis at the border. The mass exodus has the potential to build a better partnership between the US and Mexico in addressing the “push factors” that drive such people to leave home.

To be sure, part of any new US-Mexican coordination should include enhanced enforcement of immigration laws as well as adherence to treaties regarding refugees. The US is justified in seeking to keep its border from being overwhelmed by unregulated flows of people. Yet a long-lasting solution must include incentives for people in the three Northern Triangle countries (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) to not take such a perilous journey.

Media coverage of the migrant caravan makes clear that the vast majority are poor and merely seek a better life. They are not criminals or terrorists. Some may qualify as refugees if they can prove persecution or violent threats back home. Already, both the current president of Mexico as well as the incoming one have magnanimously offered to support the migrants who want to stay and work in Mexico.

Mexican leaders are searching for a constructive path that balances US demands to stop the caravan, popular sympathy among Mexicans for the Central Americans’ plight, their country’s migrant-friendly laws, and Mexico’s limited capacities to manage and care for migrants.

This intense political moment provides a chance to build a new regional consensus.

The incoming president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who will be sworn in Dec. 1, has been an advocate for protecting migrants’ rights and using job creation to reduce migration and crime. In a July letter to President Trump and a phone call this month, he pushed for joint development in both Central America and Mexico that would address poverty and border security.

On Friday, outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto announced a program offering the migrants temporary identification documents, jobs, and education for their children, if they register for asylum to stay in southern Mexico. Some 1,700 have already sought asylum, according to Mexican officials. Officials will certainly encourage more to accept the offer.

In the past five years, the US has increased its aid to Central America. But it will take sustained and substantial money to diminish the migration flow. The US has not yet explored a well-regulated temporary worker program for Central Americans, which could bring income to their impoverished communities while meeting the need for low-skilled labor in certain US sectors. Canada and Mexico already run a successful temporary worker program which could be a model.

At present there is insufficient capacity in Central America and Mexico to address the legitimate claims of individuals to be refugees fleeing persecution. Recognizing this, the government of Mexico invited the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to help individuals in the current caravan.

Over the past decade, views in Mexico toward immigration have evolved as more Mexicans returned from the US than sought to migrate there. Mexico now understands it must effectively control its border or manage entering migrants. One big reason: to reduce organized crime, which makes more than $1 billion a year from migration, according to some estimates.

Mexican authorities steadily deepened cooperation with the US along their common border. In the south, they have only started to strengthen feeble management of the border. One sign of this shift is that Mexico has sent home some 500,000 Central Americans who entered without proper documentation.

Mr. Trump’s plans to bolster border security hardly begin to address the core issues. A far better move would be solutions that improve long-term cooperation with a Mexico that wants to become a better partner.