A pervasive atmosphere of fear and anxiety grips Latin American migrant communities in the wake of intensified ICE raids in Los Angeles. Public spaces usually occupied by these communities are largely deserted. The parks are quiet, the shopping centers emptied, and street corners once lined with vendors now stand bare.
The emptiness is reminiscent of the COVID lockdowns, but with one critical difference: This is not a reaction to a public health crisis. Instead of fearing a virus, migrants now live in fear of government agencies carrying out daily detentions and deportations. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), California National Guard, local police departments, and even the Marines are involved in terrorizing these communities. Unlike COVID, which was a collective experience, this fear is racially and legally targeted. It is specific, isolating, and deeply personal for Latin American migrant families, who now feel under siege in their own neighborhoods.
The material consequences of this fear are devastating. Basic aspects of daily life have been disrupted. Many are now developing emergency plans in case a family member is suddenly detained, preparing for the unthinkable as part of their daily routine. This environment of constant uncertainty and dread is not accidental: It is state-sanctioned intimidation. For migrant communities, life in Los Angeles no longer feels like refuge. It feels like a trap.
Migration Is the Response, Not the Problem
Recent ICE raids across Los Angeles have brought renewed attention to the issue of immigration enforcement. Mainstream narratives around migration tend to focus on border security, legal status, or the economic contributions of migrants. Even sympathetic portrayals often reduce migrants to their labor value. Yet these narratives rarely ask why so many migrants are forced to flee in the first place.
As a key site of Latin American migration, Los Angeles is home to the largest Central American migrant population in the nation. Often invisibilized in migration narratives, the Central American migrant experience is crucial to understanding the realities of the so-called migration crisis in the United States.
For Central Americans, displacement is not a choice but the outcome of decades of U.S.-backed economic and political interventions that destabilized their countries. The current wave of repression —from raids to deportations— is not a break from that past but a continuation of it.
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To understand Central American migration, we must first recognize this long arc of U.S. involvement. Migration is not a crisis; it is a response to a crisis manufactured by the United States.
A Crisis Made in the U.S.A.
Beginning in the 1990s, after decades of brutal civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the U.S. managed to roll back all organized opposition to its policies and establish itself as the political architect of the postwar neoliberal order in the region. Backed by U.S. influence, new Central American governments now embraced policies that served the interests of transnational corporations.
These policies were not homegrown. They were the result of mounting debt, failed industrial development, and pressure from global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Under the banner of “economic reform,” these institutions imposed structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that demanded sweeping changes: privatization of public services, deregulation of markets, dismantling of labor protections, slashed social spending, and the opening of national economies to foreign capital.
In reality, this wasn’t reform — it was a gutting of social protections and national sovereignty. The promise of prosperity never arrived. What followed were decades of instability.
Locking in the Damage
Rather than reversing course, Central American countries doubled down on these neoliberal policies in the 2000s and 2010s. Free trade agreements like the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), signed in 2004, were celebrated by U.S. policymakers as a path to growth. In practice, they only deepened inequality.
These trade deals favored U.S. corporate interests, flooded local markets with subsidized American goods, and wiped out small-scale farmers. Meanwhile, job creation was limited to exploitative sectors like export-processing zones (industrial sweatshops), non-traditional agriculture, and tourism and hospitality. For most, a living-wage job was not an option.
What economists call “flexibility” in the labor market simply meant instability for workers. Precarity became the norm. Wages fell. Informal jobs replaced formal employment. Survival, not advancement, became the central concern of everyday life.
Violence and the Breakdown of Security
With the economy gutted and jobs scarce, the role of the state also changed. No longer focused on public welfare, Central American governments, often at the urging of the U.S. and international financial institutions, shifted their priorities to protecting foreign investments and elite interests.
This created a political vacuum. In many areas, extralegal groups stepped in to fill the gaps left by the retreating state. Organized crime syndicates, paramilitaries, and vigilantes offered what the government did not: income, identity, control and, in some cases, security. For some, crime became the only available form of employment. For others, it became a threat they sought to escape.
The result was widespread social violence. The same policies that created economic despair also fostered insecurity and fear. In turn, Central Americans have resisted these systemic failures by migrating to the United States.
From Central America to Los Angeles
Today we are witnesses to a disturbing escalation in the criminalization of Central American migrants in Los Angeles. Masked, heavily armed agents are violently arresting street vendors, gardeners, garment workers, and nannies — poor and working-class migrants who are being treated as enemies of the state. They are not threats to public safety. They are the very people who make the city run.
So why target them? Why unleash such force against the poorest and most vulnerable?
A partial answer lies in the long history of U.S. intervention in Central America outlined above. For decades, the United States has treated the region as a site of economic extraction, using political influence and military power to secure access to cheap labor and resources. U.S.-backed structural adjustment programs, free-trade agreements, and regime changes have all contributed to the collapse of local economies and the erosion of democratic institutions.
El Salvador Plays at Home in the United States
In this system, Central American workers were never meant to leave their countries. Their labor was intended to be exploited where they lived. When people flee those conditions and arrive in cities like Los Angeles, they are not just seeking refuge; they are refusing the role assigned to them by a global economy. Migration, in this sense, becomes an act of defiance.
The current wave of ICE raids is not merely about enforcement. It is about discipline. It is about reasserting control over a population that has dared to step outside the bounds of what the U.S. political and economic order deems acceptable. These migrants are being punished not for breaking the law, but for trying to survive outside the structure that was built to contain them. That is the deeper violence we must confront.
Dr. Axel Montepeque is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Politics at California State University, Northridge. Dr. Linda Alvarez is Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University, Northridge.