Anyone who has dipped a toe into the news cycle over the past several weeks can see that accusations of “terrorism” are at the center of many developing stories. Former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro sits in a federal detention center facing charges of “narcoterrorism.” Days after Maduro’s arrest, ICE agents in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, quickly labeling her a “domestic terrorist” who paid the consequence for jeopardizing their operation. Similarly, within hours of ICE agents’ execution of Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex Pretti this weekend, Senior White House aide Stephen Miller announced that Pretti was, like Good, a domestic terrorist. Meanwhile, over the past year, accusations of terrorist sympathies have increasingly played a key role in the justifications for detaining and deporting individuals on university and college campuses across the country.
The pace, intensity, and vast geography of currently unfolding crises is overwhelming. How did we get here? When did everything become about terrorism? As scholars who research and teach about migration, detention, and abolition, we field these questions alot. For those of us that find ourselves at the helm of a classroom, wrapping our head around this rat king of a newscycle is one thing, but how, from there, do we go on to teach about it… to process it in community with our students? Where to begin?
As professors of Latin American & Latino Studies, we train students to recognize the deeply linked histories and realities of this hemisphere. “The hemisphere is a lens, not just a place” is a phrase that we often bring up in faculty meetings. In other words – centering the interconnectedness of moving beings, things, and ideas in this hemisphere is at the core of how we understand the politics, economies, cultures, and environments of the Americas.
As it turns out, this perspective is helpful when it comes to disentangling the murky, rapidly-expanding definitions of “terrorism” that the Trump administration is actively leveraging at home and abroad. Furthermore, it allows us to see how today’s shifting goalposts of “terrorism” are the product of a process set in motion decades ago. Our students were born and came of age during the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) – they’re no stranger to the term. Yet they often don’t have a sense that “terrorism” as an idea, rhetoric, justification for the atrocities of ‘counterinsurgency’ – is so deeply rooted in a history of inter-American relations.
Terrorism & Intervention in Central America
“Terrorism” as a justification for U.S. intervention and regime change in Latin America expanded in the mid-1980s. Some of its first appearances in the discourse of U.S. politicians were in references made to Central American people. For example, at that time, the Reagan administration (1981-1989) sought to depose Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, and bring an end to a socialist revolutionary project that it cast as unfolding in the U.S.’s “backyard.” This was a moment when the U.S. was becoming ever more involved in the Middle East, as Reagan moved combat forces into the region and, among other objectives, sought to secure U.S. access to oil. In labeling the Sandinistas as “terrorists” (not just “communists”, as had been more standard until then) conveniently tied U.S. actions in Latin America into its broader geopolitical agenda.
During this era, the U.S. government developed strategies to deal with a set of political and economic conditions that politicians such as Henry Kissinger had taken to referring to as the “Central American crisis.” Tactics hinged on overt and covert intervention operations designed to destabilize governments and movements who, like the Sandinistas, the U.S. cast as a threat to democracy and (importantly!) capitalist enterprise. Over the course of the 1980s, thousands of officers sent from Latin American military dictatorships trained in “counterinsurgency” (read: torture-forward curriculum) programs sponsored by the US Government at the School of the Americas military training center in Georgia. As the Cold War entered its last decade, Latin America became a testing ground for the strategies and rhetoric deployed in escalating US involvement in the Middle East in the years that followed.
When Bush declared the Global War on Terror in 2001, his administration pressured Latin American militaries to crack down on “ungoverned spaces” where “terrorism” could take root. The number of Latin American military personnel trained in the U.S. between 2002-2003 ballooned by 52% in just a year, and the fragile divide between military and police forces that many Latin American human rights activists had fought for since the Cold War era, fell apart.
As we try to unravel today’s events – why go back to the 1980s? Because it’s important that we connect the dots between the politics of empire that surfaced during the Reagan years, evolved in US policy toward the Middle East in the early 21st century, and which show up today in US actions in Venezuela and the deployment of “terrorism” as an excuse to violently repress immigrants and their advocates on US soil. When it comes to excavating the roots of terrorist rhetoric in inter-American relations, we have to go deeper than the 21st century GWOT and its aftermaths.
Terror in the Backyard: Trump 1.0
From the jump in his first administration, Trump took advantage of the groundwork already laid in terms of terrorist discourse as a tool to promote free-market capitalist goals: In 2018 the Trump Administration attempted to add Venezuela to the U.S. list of sponsors of state terrorism – a move that concerned members of Congress at the time. Eliot L. Engel (D., N.Y. 1989-2021), for example, openly questioned Trump’s lack of evidence of international terrorist actions coming from Caracas. Pushing ahead undeterred in 2020, the Department of Justice indicted Maduro and 14 other Venezuelan officials on narcoterrorism charges, accusing Maduro of a decades-long partnership with the Colombian cocaine traffickers.
Six years later, with Maduro behind bars in Brooklyn, the D.O.J. quietly acknowledged that the cartel named 32 times in the original 2020 indictment (el “Cartel de los Soles”) did not, in fact, exist. The petrochemical resource grab that we see unfolding today is, in reality, a long-game play that Trump’s apparatus has been chipping away at since these early years of his first presidency.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has leveraged the term “terrorism” to justify the expansion of ICE raids, migrant detention, and deportations that have dominated the headlines of the Trump 2.0 era. Just as terrorism rhetoric has been mobilized internationally in the case of Venezuela to legitimize extraordinary state actions, it is repackaged domestically to normalize ICE’s exceptional (read: increasingly violent) reach and tactics of immigration enforcement. As with Venezuela, this process has unfolded over the course of both Trump administrations.
In January 2020, Trump signed Executive Order 1415, which designated international cartels and gangs as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” and “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.” This marked a departure from policy which typically reserved these designations for ideologically driven groups. In 2025 we saw the catastrophic consequences of this expanded definition come home to roost, when the Trump administration deported 261 migrants to El Salvador’s maximum security prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) on unsubstantiated terrorism allegations.
The deportees were not given trials, and in the case of about half of those individuals, their deportation was carried out under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – a historic wartime authority act that arose at a moment when the recently-independent United States feared an invasion by France. In one fell swoop, the administration asserted a legal argument for the immediate authorization of mass deportations, and in doing so pushed the boundaries of executive authority on immigration issues.
Terrorism & the Icarceration-Deportation Machine
In the same way that it’s illuminating to look at the longer trajectory of terrorism as a framework for U.S. intervention in our hemisphere, it’s important to bring this same perspective to Trump’s general realignment of the Federal Government as a “Mass Deportation Machine”. In doing so, we can find some common roots.
Back to the ‘80s: Let’s examine the case of El Salvador, home today to the Terrorism Confinement Center megaprison. Between 1980-1990, the population of Salvadorans living in the U.S. increased fivefold from 94,000 – 465,000. People fled en masse as a Civil War rocked this tiny Central American country. In the name of National Security, the U.S. backed the Salvadoran Government in its extermination campaign against left-wing guerilla groups. It sent a billion dollars in military aid, trained officers in counterinsurgency techniques, and sent weapons to the Salvadoran military.
The Reagan administration repeatedly framed this situation as a fight against Soviet-backed terrorism. State security forces and paramilitary squads killed upwards of 70,000 people in the 1980s, routinely targeting civilians: in some cases whole families were slaughtered – grandparents, mothers, children, infants. It is no wonder so many people chose to risk the treacherous journey across Mexico and into the U.S. during this time. Today, Salvadorans represent one of the largest immigrant populations in the U.S., despite the fact that El Salvador is Latin American’s second-smallest country (after Suriname) – roughly the size of Massachusetts, but less densely populated.
In his first ever State of the Union address in 2018, Trump set his sights on El Salvador, and railed against that country’s “savage gang MS-13” and called on Congress to stop gang-affiliated criminals from “breaking into” the U.S. 8 years later, gang violence and organized crime continue to be a favorite talking points for Trump administration officials. The inconvenient historical context of MS-13, however, is that their origins lie, in part, in the U.S.’s own prison system.
In the 1990s, Clinton’s major expansion of the prison system led to a boom in prison populations, and part of the administration’s tough-on-crime stance included the ramping-up of mass detention and deportation systems. Expanding definitions of ‘terrorism’ codified into official policies such as the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) paved the way for expedited deportation. In this context, as MS-13 grew, and many of its members were sent back to El Salvador, organized crime exploited weak local institutions that had been destabilized by decades of a U.S.-backed civil war.
Gang members deported from the US returned to an El Salvador scarred by decades of entrenched systematic violations of human rights, and reeling from the profound, long-term destruction of economic opportunity. It is no wonder that the impact of organized crime on the everyday lives of Salvadorans ballooned in the 2000s. Indeed, it served as the pretext for El Salvador’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, to declare a state of emergency starting in 2022 that is still in effect today. During this time, his administration cracked down on crime by granting unrestricted power to state security forces (all the while, it turns out, continuing to negotiate with gang leaders). Today, more Salvadorans are imprisoned, relative to the country’s total population, than anywhere else in the world.
When Trump looked to President Bukele for an ally in his mass deportation scheme, Bukele agreed to house deportees at CECOT. He even offered to house incarcerated U.S. citizens there – an unprecedented scenario in inter-American relations. Trump’s first presidential address of 2018, in which he leaned heavily on images of migrant “invasion,” is deeply connected to this hemispheric historical context that ties together foreign and domestic policy. One of the key connective threads at the heart of this story is the continuously expanding definitions, and increasing deployment, of terrorism as a rationale.
ICE & the Specter of the Security
Tying this specter of terrorism to ideas, and public discourse, about mass migration has increasingly been at the crux of discourses related to migration and “security” over the past two decades. ICE itself was created through the strategic and expanding use of the term “terrorist.” After 9/11, U.S. officials repeatedly falsely suggested that terrorists were entering the country through the U.S.-Mexico border.
These claims helped link immigration enforcement to national security and made the expansion of border policing appear necessary and urgent. It was in this climate of fear, the U.S. created the Department of Homeland Security (including ICE), and reorganized 22 other federal agencies which further solidified issues of migration as a security threat. Increasingly, people are coming together to question the future and legitimacy of ICE today, and as migration scholars we urge people to interrogate how the word “terrorism” has been used to justify its existence.
Today, the language of terrorism has been used not only to expand ICE’s reach but to recast opposition to ICE’s violence as a security threat. This framing was formalized in National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) , which broadly categorizes dissent, including criticism of ICE, as “domestic terrorism” or “organized political violence.” The Trump administration’s immediate characterization of the January 2026 killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent as “domestic terrorism” illustrates how expansive and politically charged the term has become. Within hours of the shooting in Minneapolis Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted that“If you look at what the definition of domestic terrorism is, it completely fits the situation on the ground.” This vague use of terrorism should give pause to anyone who critically engages the government: it signals a dangerous slippage in which oversight and political critique can be recast as security threats, eroding free speech and normalizing state violence against those critique the current administration.
Never an Endgame
If we’ve learned anything from taking a hemispheric perspective on terrorist rhetoric and the roles it has played in inter-American relations over the past half-century, it’s that it’s never about an endgame. Raising the specter of terror, of national security – it’s about testing the waters, and setting precedents for the targeting of the next regime, group, or identity to come into the crosshairs. As we witness the repression of citizen bystanders in Minnesota, we can’t help but be reminded of how the idea of terrorism is chameleon-like, deliciously malleable to those in positions of power – a convenient framework for reaching people in spaces that have traditionally been more protected from ICE.
We see this play out all around us in higher education institutions, where our colleagues face the expansion of terrorism’s definition to encompass ideological dissent and fracture the bedrock of academic freedom. The language in Presidential Memorandum-7 directs federal agencies to counter “domestic terrorism” and “organized political violence” by including “networks, ideology, funding, and support structures.” This lowers the threshold for treating political movements as security threats. For academics and students, this shift has material consequences we have already witnessed, it enables the surveillance and criminalization of ethnic studies, DEI initiatives, and student groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine.
Now more than ever it’s critical that we don’t compartmentalize news about what the US is doing abroad and what is going on at home. And that we don’t periodize it as a 21st century phenomenon of the GWOT. The deployment of ‘terrorism’ as an excuse for violating human rights and suppressing dissent at home, and unilateralism / preemptive war as a framework for actions abroad are two, mutually reinforcing strands of the same project. We need to be aware that the use of “terrorist” labels to target and discredit people on American soil – including Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and so many others – is not the apex of a dystopic moment. It’s a fast and loose laboratory for developing new systems of repression at home, and resource extraction abroad.
Always a Path Forward
Despite all this, our hemispheric perspective also teaches us radical hope as we bear witness to bravery and solidarity that defies borders. At a moment when the U.S. government continues to expand the language of “terrorism” to justify violence both at the border and abroad, grassroots organizers are building powerful transnational counter-frameworks. Organizations like Unión del Barrio link local struggles against ICE to long-standing solidarities with movements across Latin America, including Cuban and Venezuelan communities. In response to Trump’s deportation machine and widespread ICE raids, Unión del Barrio has built a grassroots network of community patrols and collective defense across Southern California.
On January 3rd, they were also among the first organizations to denounce U.S. aggression against Venezuela, calling emergency protests in Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego to oppose “war abroad and terrorism at home.” As much as the history of inter-American relations has been forged by the deep imbalances of power in this hemisphere, so too has it been born of the ceaseless and relentless circulation of moving people and ideas who, collectively, hold the power to forge different paths forward and imagine different futures.
Dr. Lily Balloffet is a historian of inter-American relations and global migration. She is an Associate Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz where she teaches about the history of moving people, animals, and ideas, from tropical ecology to hip hop and social movements.
Dr. Cinthya Martinez is an Assistant Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on migrant detention, state sexual violence, and feminist abolitionist approaches to borders, incarceration, and reproductive justice.