By Daniel Alvarenga
Secretary Kristi Noem, the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda — and the massive backlash against it — was recently fired from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Salvadorans might remember her as the woman who filmed propaganda for Salvadoran’s authoritarian regime, posing in front of tattooed prisoners at CECOT, the now-infamous mega prison where Trump made a deal with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and sent Salvadoran Marylander Kilmar Abrego and around 250 Venezuelans without trial to be tortured. Noem is just the latest example of Trump disposing of someone when they’ve outlived their usefulness and become a public relations disgrace.
I grew up in Latino communities in Southern California, and I’ve been reporting on the Central American diaspora and immigration for a decade. And I can tell you this: we are at a different juncture when it comes to immigration enforcement in the United States. And let’s be clear, this didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t start with Trump. The immigration hell the United States finds itself in was paved over decades, by both Republican and Democrat administrations expanding the budgets for the Department of Homeland Security, which was created in the months following 9/11.
If you’ve from a mixed-status family, or have lived in an immigrant community in the U.S., much of this may not be new. But now the fear is heightened. Me and everyone in my circle knows someone that’s been detained by ICE or CBP in recent months. It used to be that before Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) couldn’t arrest anyone in what’s known as “secure” locations: schools, hospitals and places of worship. That changed in early 2025 at the start of the Trump administration, when they issued an executive order that ended “secure” locations effectively ending sanctuary cities. No place in the U.S. feels safe for immigrants or people of color who could be mistaken for immigrants right now.
To add salt in the wounds of our communities, it dismantles part of our struggle in this country. The modern sanctuary movement emerged as a reaction to Americans organizing against U.S. intervention during the Guatemalan, Nicaraguan and Salvadoran civil wars in the 80s. Something we are not really taught in American school curriculums that often gloss over the Reagan-era. This is when hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans, like much of my family, came to the U.S. The U.S. finds itself in the throes of another massive anti-war movement as its war machine strikes Iran, something that surely will reverberate for generations to come. Sick how history rhymes and repeats.
Over the years there has also been plenty of precedent for the violations we’re seeing in immigration enforcement today: from contracting with private prisons for immigrant detention, family separation, deaths in detentions, sexual assaults in detention, the unlawful detention of U.S. citizens, even the deportation of U.S. citizens. The list of egregious acts feels too long to list. This is all happening now. It has also happened before in the U.S. in just the past few years — while I was a reporter at places like Al Jazeera and Telemundo. Not to mention historical moments like Operation Wetback, where the U.S. deported around a million Mexicans in the 1950s, or the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII — events that people alive today can recall happened in their lifetime. Again, history rinses, whitewashes and repeats.
The difference now is that you can’t cover it up or pretend it didn’t happen. No se puede tapar con un dedo, as my Salvadoran elders would say. The masses have been galvanized by the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two white American citizens who were killed in broad daylight by federal agents conducting immigration enforcement during different incidents in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And if people are not moved by that, at least they are aware and can’t pretend it didn’t happen. These are only the most high profile cases. At least 13 people were killed by ICE in 2026, a number unfortunately likely to climb. And 32 people died in ICE custody last year, one of the deadliest years on record. ICE is constantly compared to fascist Italy’s Blackshirtsor Nazi Germany’s Gestapo, but to put in terms Salvadorans who lived through the 1980s civil war would understand — they’re death squads.
People are indeed resisting and rising up, especially in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Charlotte Portland, Chicago, among others; Places that have been especially targeted by the Trump administration. High school students have staged walk outs across the United States, a generation of children actively losing classmates, neighbors, parents and loved ones as the days drag on. In Washington, D.C., where Salvadorans are the largest immigrant group and the national guard seem to have what feels like a permanent presence, I’ve seen with my own two eyes community members of all backgrounds band together in the historically Latino neighborhoods of Columbia Heights and Mt. Pleasant to push out ICE from kidnapping more community members. Though these kidnappings persist. ICE has been quietly purchasing warehouses around the country to expand its detention of immigrants and political dissidents. Currently in neighboring Maryland, people are protesting the building of a new ICE facility near the city of Hagerston. These acts of resistance throughout that country, along with the wisdom of my elders who came up in 1980s El Salvador, remind me that in the times of government terror, all we have is each other.
