Facing a crackdown, Central American immigrants are sending more money home

Facing a crackdown, Central American immigrants are sending more money home

In a tangle of strip-mall hair salons and pupuserias in suburban Maryland, the quiet has become palpable amid the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts.

Restaurants in this heavily Central American enclave of Wheaton are emptied out. Grocery stores have come to a standstill. People are working less, going out to eat less and buying less.

But at the VM Services money transfer storefront, lines are out the door most weekends — albeit with cash leaving the area instead of boosting the local economy.

In what may be an unexpected twist as fears of deportation grip the D.C. region, immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras or Guatemala are sending more money home, transferring their savings away from a country where their hopes for the future are dimming.

The trend at storefront operations like VM Services appears to be cutting across people with different immigration statuses, owing to both the heightened arrests of those who entered the United States without authorization as well as the Trump administration’s efforts to wipe out temporary protections that have shielded many Central Americans, the largest group of foreign-born residents in the D.C. area. News of a tax added on those remittances in President Donald Trump’s recently signed One Big Beautiful Bill Act has only added more pressure.

“People who’ve saved up money — who have that money left — don’t want to keep it here,” said Javier Guzman, 43, before sending back $125 to his mother at VM Services in Wheaton last week. “There’s a fear that they might not be able to access it otherwise.”

Guzman, who arrived from Honduras in 2001 amid gang violence and little economic opportunity there, has been wiring money each payday in hopes he might eventually retire there on a farm. Elsewhere, a Salvadoran man in Northern Virginia is ramping up his remittances to finish building a house back home, where he also might retire. And a Guatemalan woman in D.C. is taking on extra shifts as a restaurant cook to keep sending checks to pay for her father’s medical treatments.

Manuel Orozco, who directs the program for migration, remittances and development at the Inter-American Dialogue policy group in D.C., said that the uptick in funds — perhaps more than any other metric — is a measure of how fear about Trump’s policies has rippled across immigrant communities.

For example, in Virginia — home to about 1.16 million immigrants — more than 3,300 immigration arrests have occurred since Trump’s inauguration through early June, more than quadruple the number of arrests in the same period in 2024 and part of a larger surge in U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement actions also taking place in a dozen other states.

In addition to the increased arrests directly targeting unauthorized immigrants, thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans in the region have recently been stripped of the temporary protected status (TPS) they had for decades after fleeing violence or natural disasters in their homelands.

Others who were granted humanitarian parole under the Biden administration have also seen those protections expire. Even green-card holders say they do not feel untouched, citing an increasingly hostile climate and fears that they might be swept up in arrests.

Orozco said those changes are helping to turbocharge the steady growth in remittances to Central America, which has increased more sharply in January through March than in the equivalent period in past years. Remittances to El Salvador shot up 14 percent. Honduras went up 20 percent; Guatemala, 21 percent.

“If you’re detained, you won’t be able to keep sending money. So your only option is to try to send everything you can now,” Orozco said. “The common perspective is that [Trump] is going all the way on immigration — that ‘MAGA’ means ‘Make Aliens Go Away,’ and that will mean removing migrants or making them more vulnerable by any means necessary.”

TPS for Salvadorans — the largest Central American immigrant group in the D.C. area — is set to expire in September 2026.

Rina Aranda, a leader of Comunidades Transnacionales Salvadoreñas (COTSA), a network of hometown associations for Salvadoran immigrants, said the changing economic and political situation has scrambled the conventional logic about remittances — where those who’ve been in the country longer tend to send less back home as they establish deeper roots in the United States.

Now, Salvadorans and other Central Americans who have built up careers and small businesses over decades appear to be sending more money, in part because they fear that the U.S. government will force them to leave, she said.

Even those who have arrived more recently and work in restaurants, construction and other industries that have been harder hit by ICE arrests are still sending money, though likely less than before as their incomes dwindle.

“You might go without paying your rent, without paying your car, without paying your insurance,” Aranda said over a lunch of loroco pizza — a favorite dish in some Central American countries — at a largely empty Italian-Salvadoran restaurant in Wheaton. “But you’re going to send remittances.”

As the Central American community in the United States has grown, so has the flow of cash being sent back home.

Over the last quarter century, the volume of remittances sent to Central American countries has increased more than tenfold, particularly following the pandemic. Migrant cash transfers rose from 10 percent of the Central American region’s GDP in 2010 to 23 percent last year, Orozco has found.

The result — more than $45 billion in the region’s economy comes from remittances — has become both a social safety net and an engine for mobility across countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Migrants from the U.S. have used the money to build homes, schools and churches and improve basic infrastructure in their home communities, with the growth in remittances far exceeding the growth in migration.

Scholars who study the topic consider remittances an efficient and effective form of monetary aid.

However, the uptick in money flowing to Central America has not occurred in Mexico, an even larger beneficiary of remittances because of the size of the Mexican immigrant community in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. The flow of such payments to Mexico fell by about 12 percent from last April to this year, the steepest drop in more than a decade. Orozco cautioned that the increase to Central America may be slowing down, too.

But interviews with immigrants across the D.C. region pointed to a concerted effort to shift funds back home, as some prepared to leave the area voluntarily and others worried they would not be able to access their hard-earned savings if their worst fears about deportations came true.

Flags at VM Services in Wheaton.

Outside a combo bank and cellphone store in the Arlandria portion of Alexandria — often called Chirilagua for its deep and long-standing connection with that Salvadoran department — Raúl Castro eyed a receipt for the $500 he had just sent back to the rural hamlet there where he grew up.

Castro, who makes his living as an Uber driver, has few family members in El Salvador who still need his help. His parents died years ago. His siblings are all grown up and have graduated from school. Yet, he has ramped up the amount of cash he transfers to a nephew there in hopes that he might build out a farm around the house he inherited from his late mother.

“It’s just because of how things are right now,” Castro, 49, said, as vendors hawked stuffed animals and mangoes on a largely vacant Mount Vernon Avenue. “I never thought it was necessary to have a second savings account, but it’s just in case something happens to you as an immigrant.”

He rattled off his list of monthly expenses: $150 for electricity each month. $130 for his phone plan. $630 for his share of a one-bedroom apartment down the street, split with two other people. Most of what was leftover went to his nephew, with whom he had bought four cows and was hoping to purchase more when he saved up enough to move back.

“I don’t want to age here. I’ve seen how the elderly suffer,” Castro said. “If it’s hard for people who have papers imagine what it’s like for people who don’t. It’s easier to have an escape plan.”

Guzman enters VM Services to send $125 to his mother in Honduras.

That escape plan, he noted, might get more expensive with the tax added on through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Each transfer already costs $8 at the Ria Bank he normally visits.

The tax rate that Trump signed into law this month is lower than an earlier proposed version, down from 5 percent to 1 percent. But it is yet another reason that immigrants across the region say they are moving to increase the size and frequency of their payments ahead of the tax’s implementation on Jan. 1.

Orozco said that the tax likely would not apply to about half of immigrants who send remittances because they transfer money through phone apps that would be exempt from the tax. Those who take cash to storefronts, however, are the same people who make less money, particularly an estimated 22 percent of people who do not have bank accounts.

Yheimmy Poma, a 21-year-old restaurant cook who lives in D.C., said she agreed in some sense with Trump’s sentiment that the United States was not her home. She had arrived to earn more than she could in Guatemala, with the goal of helping to pay for her ailing father’s hospital expenses as well as college tuition for her four siblings. She then planned to go back home.

Poma said she didn’t understand what that tax would be paying for. It would only keep her here longer, even if it amounted to just a few dollars tacked onto each transfer, she said.

“It’s sad because everyone is here to fight, to work. It’s affecting us more because we’re the ones sending money to our families,” Poma said. “God willing, I will be able to go back and because it’s not easy to make a life here.”

Emmanuel Martinez contributed to this report.

Yheimmy Poma, 21, sends money back to Guatemala to help pay for her father’s hospital expenses as well as college tuition for her four siblings.