Anibal “Michael” Martinez (23) was born in Nueva Esparta El Salvador. He grew up in a mud house. His family grew corn and beans and hunted with dogs to put food on the table, according to Michael.
At the time, El Salvador was flooded with gangs that recruited children and teenagers through threats and manipulation. Innocent people were kidnapped or disappeared, and entire neighborhoods became too dangerous. Public transportation workers were killed if they didn’t comply with gang demands.
The violence became so extreme that Michael’s parents fled to the USA without their children, intending to send for them once established. In early 2011, when Michael was 9, his mom paid about $8000 to human smugglers to transport Michael to the US and smuggle him across the border which took about a month.
“At one point, I was in the box of an 18-wheeler truck for 18 hours with holes in the roof so we could breathe. At the border near Nogales, we walked three hours in the evening, slept freezing in the desert, and walked another eight hours the next day. We crossed into the U.S. and were caught by Border Patrol. I was eventually reunited with my parents but had no legal status. I’ve been going to immigration court ever since,” Michael said.
During his childhood in the US, Michael lived in a poor section of Huston, TX. He was a good student and worked hard at school. After school and on weekend, he helped his dad at his tire shop, from the time he was 13 years old.
His dad suffered with alcoholism and was sometimes violent with his children.
Michael graduated from high school during the Pandemic but couldn’t work legally because his parents had never filed paperwork for him. He was completely undocumented and had no money to hire a lawyer for help.
On June 28th 2025, Michael moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with $300 and a car with 210,000 miles. He lived in his car for three months while working a minimum-wage tire shop job. Then, a stroke of kindness, an organization helped Michael get an apartment.
However, on June 17th 2025, three three uniformed ICE agents appeared at Michael’s door in San Jose.
His American life ended on the night of June 17, 2025. Officers showed Martinez papers confirming his detention at the border over a decade ago, and the removal orders that followed. Martinez was too shocked to even read them. “It’s over,” he remembers thinking.
After letting the ICE agents enter into his South Bay apartment, Martinez gathered some clothes, an empty backpack, two pairs of shoes, a medical device for a sleep disorder, his passport, and $4,500 in savings — $200 or so in cash and the rest on his debit card.
“The whole time that I was over there” — in the United States — “I was just fighting for a life worth living,” said Martinez. “I was kind of starting to make good progress towards that. And then this happened.”
The agents handcuffed him, put him in a van and drove him to the closest processing center.
Martinez’s flight to El Salvador took off at 2 a.m. on June 18, less than 12 hours after he was arrested. “If this plane ends up crashing,” Martinez remembers thinking, “that wouldn’t even sound that bad.”
The flight landed in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. Martinez’s family house, which he hadn’t seen for 14 years, was a four-hour drive away in Nueva Esparta, a small rural town in the northeast of the country.
Martinez paid $60 of his cash reserve to take a taxi to his cousin’s house, an hour and a half from the airport. He spent the night there and then hitched a ride to his old home in Nueva Esparta, what he calls “a mud house in the hills,” that he left because of poverty and hunger.
Martinez said that when he left El Salvador, it was one of the most dangerous countries in the world. He was less afraid than he’d previously been, because of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on crime. But even still, he said, he held his backpack closely during the journey home, keeping his $4,500 in savings near.
As soon as he could, he said, he stashed his money in a Salvadoran bank. He withdraws a little cash every week, trying not to keep too much on him at any time.
The conditions in El Salvador are much worse than what he’s used to. “Where I shower, the other day there were a bunch of frogs in there,” he said. Things that he took for granted — AC, safety from bugs and disease, clean roads — are gone.
He bought a used Hyundai for $1850, to get around the rural area where he lives. After that, rent, and food, he’s left with about $2000 in savings in late July. He estimates that it’ll last him seven months at best, and he’s trying to find work in the meantime.
The minimum wage in Nueva Esparta is $10 a day. If Martinez wants to be smuggled back into the United States again, the trip would cost $12,000. “There’s no way I could do that,” he said. His only hope, he believes, is to start his own tire shop. He doesn’t have enough money to do that, so friends back in the United States have set up a GoFundMe. As of July 30, they’ve raised only $180.
Martinez said that he was sad to know that he won’t see his friends and family in the United States again.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/from-us-dreams-to-el-salvador-reality
https://missionlocal.org/2025/07/ice-data-immigrants-arrested-sf/