Many Ecuadorian children and their families have been kidnapped by ICE in Minnesota this past month. The detention of Liam Conejo Ramos on January 20, a five-year old kid whose photograph wearing his now-famous bunny-ear hat and red Spiderman backpack as an ICE agent holds him in front of a black van went viral, illustrates the brutality of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Besides Liam, who still fears deportation after being released with his father, Adrián Conejo Aria, from the Dilley detention facility in Texas, the two-year-old Chloe Renata Tipan Villacis and her father, Elvis Joel Tipan-Echeverría, were arrested in Minneapolis while returning home from the supermarket on January 23. Almost a month before Liam and Chloe’s detention, Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano, a fourth-grader recently released from the Dilley detention center, was also arrested along with her mother in the same Columbia Heights school district as Liam.
Many people in the United States assume Mexican origin when they see a brown face and hear a “Hispanic” name, which highlights the invisibility of the many migrant diasporas in this country, such as the Andean diaspora. However, the specific country of origin of these children and its recent history matters for understanding the migration context of their families. As the Ecuadorian writer and feminist activist Cristina Burneo Salazar reminds us, “these are not decontextualized or dehistoricized migrations.” While there is a long history of Ecuadorian migration to the United States that dates back to the 1920s, migration to the north has intensified in recent years, tied to the country’s multiple crises. In fact, what binds most of these children’s experiences, beyond their nationality, is that their families have been forced to leave the place they once called home as the profound crises have turned into a state of “war.”
Over the last decade, the intensity of Ecuador’s intersecting crises has deepened to the point that “war,” not “crisis,” is a more apt description of the county’s contemporary reality. This war, a specific phenomenon that is best understood as an “everywhere war,” is crucial to grasp how Ecuadorians at home and in the U.S. navigate unprecedented violence. A form of governance through warfare and abandonment holds the lives of many Ecuadorians captive, trapping them between the impossibility of a dignified life in their country of origin and the hostility of a country that never gave them refuge.
Ecuador’s State of “War”
The various facets of Ecuador’s state of “war” are exemplified by the story of Carlos*, an Ecuadorian asylum seeker who was sent to a detention facility in Texas. In contrast to the official narrative that dates the beginning of its “war” to President Daniel Noboa’s declaration of an “internal armed conflict” against gangs in January 2024, Carlos’ migration was driven by multiple forms of violence that predate the presidential declaration and are related to his participation in community resistance movements. These forms of violence converge with a unique intensity in certain territories like Cordillera del Condor, Carlos’ hometown and a place that I have visited several times since it was occupied by the mega-mining project Mirador, one of the largest copper projects in the region.
With state support, the forces behind the Mirador project have evicted and dispossessed several campesino and Indigenous families from their territories. Carlos’ decision to flee the country is tied to the political persecution and extreme violence he experienced due to his involvement in the fight against mining extraction in the Cordillera del Condor. He also participated in several anti-extractive protests and demonstrations as an active member of the Indigenous Pachakutik party, including the 2019 national strike, which was met with unprecedented violence by the government of President Lenin Moreno (2017-2021). In 2020, he was captured and brutally tortured by men, who he identified as drug traffickers. The men threatened to kill him unless he stopped his political work. Fearing a similar fate as other Indigenous leaders like José Tendetza and Eduardo Mendúa who were assassinated as a result of their anti-extractive organizing, he left his community and moved to the city of Cuenca, the first in a series of difficult migrations. Before crossing into the United States in 2021, Carlos went through the heavily militarized border in Mexico, a country for which Ecuadorians need a visa since August 2021.
Carlos’s story shows how extractive, economic, and narco violence constitute Ecuador’s state of war.
Carlos’s story shows how extractive, economic, and narco violence constitute Ecuador’s state of war. Extractive violence is characterized by the forced displacement, assassination, and environmental destruction of communities that resist megaprojects on their lands. It goes hand in hand with economic violence waged on the country’s popular classes by the state through land dispossession and austerity programs. When social movements fight against these intertwined policies, they are dubbed “narcos” or terrorists, thus making them victims of yet another “war”—the “war on drugs.” While Ecuadorians like Carlos do indeed suffer violence at the hands of narcotraffickers, the state’s alleged commitment to tamp down on the drug trade is contradicted by narco-scandals involving military generals, judges and Noboa himself.
While these forms of violence have different dates of origin, their intersection has disproportionately impacted the country’s impoverished and racialized populations. From the territorial dispossession experienced by Indigenous and peasant communities, to the exponential rise in femicides, to the brutal violence inflicted on Black Ecuadorians, these communities are on the frontlines of an Ecuadorian war waged by a powerful rentier elite who benefits from the war’s prolongation and have little interest in seeing it end.
This war has pushed thousands, including Indigenous leaders like Carlos and many other poor and racialized Ecuadorians, out of the country. But, for Ecuadorians like Carlos, this “war” was just the beginning. In the United States, many have been subjected to an intensified anti-migrant war that has swept cities across the country.
The “Boomerang” and the “Everywhere” War
Journalists, activists, and scholars have argued that the nature of borders has changed. No longer solely a physical wall between two nations, borders are everywhere, as they have escaped its spatial expressions and grown to encompass a series of surveillance regimes within and beyond the United States. Border patrol agents play a leading role in immigration raids in major cities far from U.S.’s borders and “smart borders,” which collect migrant data for U.S. surveillance purposes, function across Latin America. In the case of a tech company like Palantir, which creates systems to target migrants for deportation in the United States and helps the Ecuadorian government track the flow of goods across its own borders, the expansive geographic scope of U.S. “migration” enforcement is evident.
But, what if it is not only the ‘everywhere border’ but the ‘everywhere war’ that marks our time? What if the stories of migrants like Carlos reveal a contemporary condition that entangles us all in an inescapable state of interconnected wars?
But, what if it is not only the “everywhere border” but the “everywhere war” that marks our time? What if the stories of migrants like Carlos reveal a contemporary condition that, even if it affects us differently, entangles us all in an inescapable state of interconnected wars?
The idea of an interconnected state of near-permanent war that ensnares U.S. citizens, migrants, and citizens in the Global South alike is not merely hyperbolic: Trump’s war on migrants is deeply connected to U.S. imperial ventures of the recent past, including the “forever wars” in the Middle East and ongoing support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. To draw out these connections, scholars have invoked the image of the “imperial boomerang,” a term coined by the Afro-Martiniquan French poet and politician Aimé Césaire. This concept has been extremely generative, even as scholars studying the ties between anti-black racism and the rise of fascism in the United States, or the connections between Indigenous genocide and the founding of a country rooted in white supremacy have successfully argued that U.S. nativism cannot be seen as solely an import of imperialism.
The anti-migrant war we are witnessing in the United States today is both a product of the reverberations of U.S. colonial and imperial expansion abroad and rooted in centuries of domestic settler colonial dispossession and racist policing. The foundation wars that gave birth to this nation and the imperial wars haunting us from the dispossessed periphery are converging with a unique intensity today, with intense consequences for the most vulnerable. This network of past and present intra-related wars have produced the “everywhere war,” trapping migrants like Carlos in a state of limbo. It is precisely through the prism of these intra-related wars that we can better understand the entanglement between Ecuador’s state of war and the anti-migrant war in the United States.
Deepening Ties
Ties between Ecuador and the United States are long-running. From the presence of U.S. oil companies on Ecuadorian soil in the 1920s and the CIA surveillance of the Ecuadorian left in the 1950s, to the structural adjustment policies of the so-called “Washington Consensus” that pushed many of our families to leave the country in the 1990s, different forms of U.S. interventionism have historically shaped the lives of many Ecuadorians. Nevertheless, the connection has tightened as Ecuadorian elites have, in recent years, turned to governing the country according to a U.S.-backed project without hesitation, now crystalized in the White House National Security Strategy made public in December 2025.
Starting with Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso’s expansion of US military presence in the country, the unbending loyalty of Ecuadorian elites to the United States has intensified since Noboa’s ascension to power in 2023. Noboa seems to prefer governing his country from Miami, where he was born and to which he constantly travels, rather than from the Carondelet Palace in Quito. During his re-election campaign in 2025, Noboa flew to Florida to take a photo with Trump and actively campaigned with Erik Prince, a prominent Trump supporter and founder of private military firm Blackwater, with whom he announced a “strategic alliance” to fight crime and so-called “narcoterrorism.” In the lead-up to Ecuador’s referendum last November, Noboa invited U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to tour facilities at the former U.S. military base in Manta, an image that felt like a slap in the face to the thousands of Ecuadorian migrants who have been terrorized by ICE.
The deepening ties between Noboa and Trump have created a situation in which Ecuadorians at home and in the United States have been completely abandoned by their government.
Even though Ecuadorians rejected Noboa’s package of referendum measures, including the establishment of foreign military bases and the convening of a Constituent Assembly, many fear that the popular vote will do little to halt the spread of the “Donroe Doctrine” in the region. In fact, many of us wonder whether the Ecuadorian government has become a cheap and laughable mimic of Trump’s style of governance, as his recent spats with the progressive leaders of Mexico and Colombia reveal.
The deepening ties between Noboa and Trump have created a situation in which Ecuadorians at home and in the United States have been completely abandoned by their government. As opposed to other leaders who have protested the inhumane treatment of their citizens, Noboa has stayed silent as his compatriots are terrorized abroad. Not even the highly public kidnapping of Liam Conejo and his father by ICE was enough to prompt Ecuador’s Foreign Minister, Gabriela Sommerfeld, to mobilize her office to advocate for their release. Instead, she cynically claimed that the Foreign Ministry did not intervene because “Liam’s family did not want it,” an excuse that was heavily criticized by Ecuadorian human rights organizations. Even the attempted murder by U.S. drones of Ecuadorian citizens in the Caribbean sea, an ongoing campaign that brings out the connections between Ecuador’s domestic state of war and Trump’s war on migrants, has drawn no protest from the Noboa administration.
The entrenchment between Trump’s aggressive “gangsterism” abroad and Noboa’s governmental inaction reveals a new era of U.S. interventionism in the region, characterized by a form of governance through warfare and abandonment of those racialized migrants who have tried to escape the breakdown of the social, political and economic fabric in their communities. For many who are kidnapped and subjected to deportation proceedings, a renewed condition of violent displacement beckons. Carlos’s case was terminated because the U.S. government filed a motion to deport him to Honduras, subjecting him once more to a renewed condition of violent displacement and capture and “the everywhere war.”
*The name of this person has been changed to protect them.
Andrea Sempértegui is an Assistant Professor of Politics and a Paul Garrett Fellow at Whitman College. She teaches and writes on Indigenous politics, environmental and feminist movements, conflicts over territory and natural resource extraction, and decolonial thought in Latin America.
The author would like to thank her former student assistant, Elle Palmer, for contributing to this piece with her research on Daniel Noboa’s autocratic governing style.