Trump versus Salvadorans in the US

Donald Trump has put in place his campaign promise of massive deportation of undocumented persons in the US.  Those expulsions included 1600 Salvadorans in the month of May, and that number is on an upward trajectory.  The number of Salvadorans living in the US is estimated at 1.4 million.  Of these, 741,000 lack legal immigration status in the US according to data from the Migration Policy Institute.

Contrary to narratives coming out of Washington which paint the deportees as gangsters and criminals, several stories of Salvadorans sent back to the country of their birth provide a different reality.

This week Yessenia Ruano and her twin daughters arrived in El Salvador. Yessenia had found herself forced to self deport after living the last 14 years in the US. Her options for relief from the immigration court system had ended. Her young girls are both US citizens.

Yessenia had made a life for herself as a teacher's aide in a public school in the Milwaukee area. She told her story very publicly in the Midwestern city in the hopes of educating the public and perhaps earning a reprieve from immigration authorities.   But ICE would soon make her status clear -- she would need to self deport, or face an involuntary removal courtesy of the US government.

She talked about the impact on her children:

Advocates in Milwaukee called for Yessenia to be able to remain:  

“Quite frankly, if she doesn’t warrant it, I don’t know who does.” [immigration attorney Mark] Christopher said. Ruano did not have a criminal record. She crossed the southern border in 2011 to escape gang violence after local gang members murdered her brother. Christopher added that “she’s very involved in the community,” as  a teacher’s aide for kindergarten teachers, owns  her own house and  pays taxes into a safety net system she is not eligible to access. 

 “I am extremely disappointed in ICE’s decision to deny an emergency stay for my constituent Yessenia Ruano,” U.S. Rep.  Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) said in a statement. “It is outright cruel to force a human trafficking victim to return to the place she was fleeing from.” Ruano was applying for  a T-visa, which confers legal status on  victims of human trafficking. “T-visas are meant for people like Yessenia, but sadly, she wasn’t even given the chance to have her case heard,” said Moore. “Yessenia is a wonderful person and her and [her] children’s removal from Milwaukee will be a loss to our community.”

Other public officials also called for her to be permitted to stay.  The Milwaukee County Board held 14 minutes of silence for Yessenia's 14 years living in the US.   But Trump's immigration apparatus was unmoved.      

When I spoke to Yessenia as she prepared to board a flight to El Salvador, she was already planning next steps.  Fluent in English, she thought perhaps she could find a job teaching that language in a Salvadoran school, while she kept her dreams alive of some day returning to the US.   

ICE also cut short the dreams of two Salvadoran teenage boys described in this CBS News story:

Brothers Jose and Josue Trejo Lopez were born in El Salvador, but they hardly know the country and have no family there. Their mother brought them to the U.S. nine years ago in an effort to escape gang violence.

Asylum was repeatedly denied, but during appeals to legalize their status, the brothers went to U.S. schools, earned diplomas and had dreams of careers as mechanics.

Earlier this year, their mother took them to a routine ICE check-in appointment, where the brothers said they were shackled and detained.

Now the boys are back in El Salvador, a country they barely remember, without any support system, after being quickly flown out of the US courtesy of ICE Air.   

The most recent statistics from the Salvadoran migration ministry (DGME) document that almost 3800 persons were deported to El Salvador on ICE flights in January through March 2025, compared to 2800 persons during the same time period in 2024.  The quantity of persons deported from the US to El Salvador so far in 2025 is comparable to the numbers seen during 2019 during the first Trump administration before the COVID-19 pandemic, but lower than removals during the Obama administration.     

According to Tom Cartwright, who tracks deportation flights from the US, seventeen flights landed at El Salvador's international airport with their human cargo during the month of May 2025, carrying an estimated 1600 Salvadorans. This was an increase of 65% over the average number of ICE Air flights touching down in El Salvador in the prior six months.  

Deportees in current months are more likely than ever before to be persons who were seized in the interior of the US after living for years or even decades without legal status like Yessenia or the Trejo Lopez brothers.  

Another Salvadoran facing deportation after making a life for decades in the US is photo journalist Mario Guevara.  CNN tells his story in the article Salvadoran journalist arrested while streaming a ‘No Kings’ protest could face deportation:

A Salvadoran journalist who built a big social media following by documenting immigration raids may be facing deportation. 

Mario Guevara, who was arrested during a “No Kings” protest near Atlanta last Saturday, was transferred to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody early Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for ICE in Atlanta confirmed to CNN. 

Although a state judge had granted him release without bail, ICE authorities requested that he remain detained due to his immigration status.

Guevara had tens of thousands of followers at his site MG News, where he would live stream immigration raids as they happened in the Atlanta area.  Apparently this did not endear him to ICE which issued an immigration detainer to take him into their custody, after a state court decided a journalist should not be jailed while awaiting charges that he had violated police orders while documenting a protest.

Before arriving in the US, Guevara had been a photojournalist for La Prensa Grafica according to that paper:

Guevara fled El Salvador with his family in 2004, claiming he was repeatedly beaten and harassed because of his work as a photojournalist for the newspaper La Prensa Gráfica. They emigrated to Georgia.

For these immigrants, and thousands of others returned to El Salvador by the US, El Salvador's migration ministry describes the following aspects of its Bienvenido a Casa (Welcome Home) program:

During the reception process for returning Salvadorans, the following services are provided: Transportation to transportation terminals for transportation to their places of origin or residence. Medical and psychological care. Refreshments. National and international phone calls. Payment of domestic travel costs. Basic hygiene supplies. Wi-Fi for wireless devices. Other services determined according to the needs of returning Salvadorans.

Traditional news organizations like La Prensa Grafica or El Diario de Hoy regularly cover Trump's implementation of his plans for mass deportation. The Salvadoran government's newspaper, Diario El Salvador, however, does not cover the detention and removal of Salvadorans from the US, apparently as part of that government's close alliance with Trump.  

El Salvador is receiving many hundreds of deported persons every month, and there is a substantial pipeline of many thousands more who will probably be deported under Trump's mass deportation regime.   This means that El Salvador's economy not only needs to grow to provide jobs for all those who are currently unemployed or underemployed, but also to provide for all the deportees of working age arriving back in the country.  In addition, deportees may be in need of protection from the forces that may have caused them to flee, housing, trauma-counselling and more.       

It is a substantial burden for a country that has many other challenges to face.