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      Trump DoJ unable to tell court where man wrongly deported to El Salvador is

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      Lawyers for the Trump administration were unable on Friday to tell a federal court exactly where the Maryland resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month is or how he is, as the judge admonished the government at a heated hearing.The US district judge Paula Xinis said it was “extremely troubling” that the Trump administration failed to comply with a court order to provide details on the whereabouts and status of the Salvadorian citizen Kilmar Abrego García and she wanted daily updates on what the government is doing to bring him home.“Where is he and under whose authority?” Xinis asked in a Maryland courtroom.“I’m not asking for state secrets,” she said. “All I know is that he’s not here. The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: where is he?”The government side responded that it had no evidence that he is not still in El Salvador. “That is extremely troubling,” Xinis said.As Newsweek reported, Xinis added: “We’re not going to slow-walk this … We’re not relitigating what the supreme court has already put to bed.”The US supreme court on Thursday upheld the judge’s order to facilitate Abrego García’s return to the US, after a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his summary deportation on 15 March.Abrego García has had a US work permit since 2019 but was stopped and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers on 12 March and questioned about alleged gang affiliation. He was deported on one of three high-profile deportation flights to El Salvador made up chiefly of Venezuelans whom the government accuses of being gang members and assumed special powers to expel without a hearing.Xinis on Friday repeatedly pressed a government attorney for answers but the administration defied her order for details on how or when it would retrieve Abrego García and claimed she had not given them enough time to prepare.“I’m not sure what to take from the fact that the supreme court has spoken quite clearly and yet I can’t get an answer today about what you’ve done, if anything, in the past,” Xinis said.Drew Ensign, an attorney with the Department of Justice, repeated what the administration had said in court filings, that it would provide the requested information by the end of Tuesday, once it evaluated the supreme court ruling.“Have they done anything?” Xinis asked. Ensign said he did not have personal knowledge of what had been done, to which the judge responded: “So that means they’ve done nothing.”The administration said in a court filing earlier on Friday that it was “unreasonable and impracticable” to say what its next steps are before they are properly agreed upon and vetted.“Foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review,” the filing said.Abrego García’s lawyers said in a Friday court filing: “The government continues to delay, obfuscate, and flout court orders, while a man’s life and safety is at risk.”The case highlights the administration’s tensions with federal courts. Several have blocked Trump policies, and judges have expressed frustration with administration efforts – or lack of them – to comply with court orders.Abrego García’s wife, US citizen Jennifer Vásquez Sura, has not been able to speak to him since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She has been rallying outside court and has urged their supporters to keep fighting for him “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard”.The family sued to challenge the legality of his deportation and on 4 April Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” his return. The administration challenged that order at the supreme court, which upheld Xinis’s order but said the term “effectuate” was unclear and might exceed the court’s authority.The justice department in a supreme court filing on 7 April stated that while Abrego García was deported to El Salvador through “administrative error”, his actual removal from the United States “was not error”. The error, department lawyers wrote, was in removing him specifically to El Salvador despite the deportation protection order.Asked at the White House media briefing on Friday if Donald Trump wants the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to bring Abrego García with him when he visits the US on Monday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the supreme court’s ruling “made it very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to ‘facilitate’ the return, not to ‘effectuate’ the return”.Similarly, the administration’s court filing said: “The court has not yet clarified what it means to ‘facilitate’ or ‘effectuate’ the return as it relates to this case, as [the] plaintiff is in the custody of a foreign sovereign. Defendants request – and require – the opportunity to brief that issue prior to being subject to any compliance deadlines.”Maya Yang, Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Lawyers for Venezuelans Challenge Alien Enemies Act Deportations in Texas

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      Broadening their efforts to stop the Trump administration from using a rarely invoked wartime statute to carry out deportations, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday asked a federal judge in Texas to bar the White House from using the law to send Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.The filings by the A.C.L.U., submitted in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas, were in direct response to a Supreme Court decision on Monday. That ruling permitted the migrants to challenge efforts to deport them under the wartime law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, but only in the place they were being held.The three Venezuelans identified in the Texas filings — albeit only by their initials — had already secured a court order from a federal judge in Washington last month shielding them from being flown to El Salvador under President Trump’s invocation of the act. But the Supreme Court, in its ruling, vacated the order by that judge, James E. Boasberg, saying that the A.C.L.U.’s case on behalf of the men should have been filed in Texas, not Washington.On Tuesday, the A.C.L.U. filed a similar case in New York, noting that two of the Venezuelans subject to Mr. Trump’s proclamation had been moved from a detention center in Texas to one in the town of Goshen, in Orange County, N.Y. An emergency hearing has been scheduled in that case for Wednesday morning in Federal District Court in Manhattan.Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport scores of Venezuelan migrants have set off one of the most contentious legal battles of his second term. It began last month, after the president invoked the act, which has been used only three times since it was passed in 1798, to authorize the deportation of people he claims were members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan street gang.The A.C.L.U. immediately challenged Mr. Trump’s use of the act in court filings in Washington, even as the administration rushed more than 100 Venezuelan migrants on to planes to El Salvador. Once there, they were put in a megaprison called CECOT, known for its brutal conditions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Guardian view on the US immigration crackdown: what began with foreign nationals won’t end there | Editorial

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      While running for president, Donald Trump promised voters “the largest deportation operation in American history”. Now he wants to deliver. Thousands of undocumented migrants have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials since he returned to the White House. On Monday, the US supreme court lifted a judge’s ban on deporting alleged gang members to Venezuela under an 18th-century law, though it said deportees had a right to judicial review. Even the Trump-backing podcaster Joe Rogan has described as “horrific” the removal of an asylum seeker – identified as a criminal because he had tattoos – under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.What’s truly new is that the administration is also targeting those who arrived and remained in the US with official approval, such as the Palestinian activist and student Mahmoud Khalil. Normally, green card holders would be stripped of their status if convicted of a crime; he has not even been accused of one. But Mr Trump had pledged to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests that his administration has deemed antisemitic, and Mr Khalil was a leading figure in the movement at Columbia University. The president crowed that his arrest last month was “the first of many”. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts, was detained by masked agents in the street, reportedly for an opinion piece she co-wrote with other students. Unrelated to the protests, dozens if not hundreds more students have had visas revoked, often for minor or non-criminal offences.This crackdown is exploiting legislation in ways that were never intended. The Alien Enemies Act was previously invoked only in wartime – but Mr Trump casts mass migration as an “invasion”. Mr Khalil and others are targeted under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows deportations when the secretary of state determines that a foreign national’s presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. And while this campaign is indiscriminate in many regards, Mr Trump’s offer of asylum to white Afrikaners facing “unjust racial discrimination” in South Africa speaks volumes about who is and is not wanted in his America.The current fear among migrants, with all its social costs, is not a byproduct of this drive, but the desired result. The Trump administration is trying to push undocumented individuals into “self-deporting”, which is cheaper and easier than using agents to hunt people down. It reportedly plans to levy fines of up to $998 a day if those under deportation orders do not leave – applying the penalties retroactively for up to five years. Fairness, never mind mercy, is not relevant. The administration admits an “administrative error” led to the expulsion to El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia – who is married to a US citizen and was working legally in the US – but fights against righting that wrong.This crackdown should frighten US nationals too, both for what it says about their nation’s character and for what it may mean for their own rights. The Trump administration wants to remove birthright citizenship and is ramping up denaturalisation efforts. “I love it,” said Mr Trump, when asked about El Salvador’s offer to jail US citizens in its infamous mega-prisons – though at least he conceded that he might have to check the law first. The chilling effect of Mr Khalil’s arrest on dissent is already being felt by US nationals too: the first amendment’s protection of free speech is not exclusive to citizens.“The friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment; but the citizen will soon follow,” Thomas Jefferson wrote when the alien and sedition laws were passed. That warning now looks more prescient than ever.

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      DoJ lawyer put on leave after not backing erroneous deportation of Maryland man

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      A federal justice department attorney has been placed on leave by the Trump administration for purportedly failing to defend the administration vigorously enough after it says it erroneously deported a Maryland man to El Salvador, which a US judge called a “wholly lawless” detention.The action against justice department lawyer Erez Reuveni came after US district judge Paula Xinis had ordered that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who lived in the US legally with a work permit, be returned to Maryland despite the Trump administration’s position that it cannot return him from a sovereign nation.The administration has appealed the case, and a ruling is expected as soon as Sunday night ahead of an 11.59pm Monday deadline for his return, which was set by the judge.Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, went on Fox News Sunday and announced there that Reuveni was no longer actively working on the Abrego Garcia case or in the justice department in general.At a court hearing on Friday, Reuveni struggled to answer questions from the judge about the circumstances of Abrego Garcia’s deportation.Reuveni said he had raised questions with US officials about why the federal government could not bring back Abrego Garcia but had received no “satisfactory” answer. He acknowledged what he called an “absence of evidence” justifying Abrego Garcia’s detention and deportation.Of Reuveni, Bondi told Fox News Sunday: “It’s a pending matter right now. He was put on administrative leave by [deputy US attorney general] Todd Blanche on Saturday.“You have to vigorously argue on behalf of your client.”Reuveni’s supervisor, August Flentje, was also placed on leave, ABC News reported.The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.Reuveni and Flentje, who according to his LinkedIn page is the deputy director of the justice department’s office of immigration litigation, civil division, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump’s administration asserted in previous court filings that it had erroneously deported Abrego Garcia to his home country despite a previous court order prohibiting his removal.The White House and administration officials have accused Abrego Garcia of being a criminal gang member, but there are no pending charges. His lawyers have denied the allegation.Xinis, in a written order on Sunday explaining her Friday ruling, said “there were no legal grounds for his arrest, detention or removal” or evidence that Abrego Garcia was wanted for crimes in El Salvador.“Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless,” she wrote in the filing.Abrego Garcia had complied fully with all directives from immigration officials, including annual check-ins, and had never been charged with or convicted of any crime, the judge wrote.Abrego Garcia was stopped and detained by immigration agents on 12 March and questioned about his alleged affiliation with the MS-13 gang, which he has denied.Abrego Garcia has been detained in El Salvador’s terror confinement center, colloquially known as Cecot, which the judge called “one of the most dangerous prisons in the western hemisphere”.The Trump administration has faced criticism in the US courts and elsewhere of its stepped-up enforcement against immigration rights. A judge in Washington DC is separately weighing whether the Trump administration violated a court order not to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members amid ongoing legal proceedings.Some of those deported have active asylum cases, and civil rights groups have argued the administration has failed to provide due process under the law.Bondi on Sunday vowed to continue the administration’s deportations, maintaining: “The best thing to do is to get these people out of our country.” More

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      Judge Calls Mistaken Deportation of Maryland Man a ‘Grievous Error’

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      The Trump administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by inadvertently deporting a Salvadoran migrant to a notorious prison last month and then declaring there was little it could do to bring him back, a federal judge in Maryland said on Sunday.The strongly worded order by the judge, Paula Xinis, served two purposes: It offered a more detailed explanation of a brief ruling she issued on Friday, demanding that the White House bring the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, back to the United States by the end of Monday. And it rejected a request by the Justice Department to pause the order as a federal appeals court considered its validity.Over 22 pages, Judge Xinis took Trump officials to task for deporting Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador on March 15 in violation of a previous court order that allowed him to stay in the United States. Administration officials then argued that neither they nor she as the judge overseeing the case had any power to retrieve him from the prison.“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” Judge Xinis wrote. “Having confessed grievous error, the defendants now argue that this court lacks the power to hear this case, and they lack the power to order Abrego Garcia’s return.”Moreover, Judge Xinis questioned the administration’s underlying claims that Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, was a member of a violent transnational street gang, MS-13, which officials recently designated as a terrorist organization. The judge described those claims as being based on “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As deportations ramp up, immigrants increasingly fear Ice check-ins: ‘All bets are off’

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      Jorge, a 22-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela, reported in February to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Portland, Oregon, for what he figured would be a routine check-in. Instead, he was arrested and transferred to a detention center in another state.Alberto, a 42-year-old from Nicaragua who had been granted humanitarian parole, checked in with Ice using an electronic monitoring program that same month. Three days later, he was arrested.Sergei and Marina, a young couple from Russia with a pending asylum case, went into an immigration office in San Francisco in March, thinking they needed to update some paperwork. Agents arrested Sergei and told Marina to come back in a few weeks.For years, immigrants of all sorts with cases in process, pending appeals or parole, had been required to regularly check in with Ice officers. And so long as they had not violated any regulations or committed any crimes, they were usually sent on their way with little issue. Now, as the Trump administration pushes for the mass arrest and deportation of immigrants, these once routine check-ins have become increasingly fraught.Ice does not appear to keep count of how many people it has arrested at check-ins. But the Guardian estimates, based on arrest data from the first four weeks of the Trump administration, that about 1,400 arrests, or about 8% of the nearly 16,500 arrests in the administration’s first month – may have occurred during or right after people checked in with the agency.The Guardian reviewed cases in the arrest data, which was released by the Deportation Data Project from UC Berkeley Law School, where people who had previously been released on supervision were now arrested, as well as cases of people with pending immigration proceedings who were arrested in their communities. According to immigration lawyers, these types of arrests are most likely to match arrests that are occurring during or shortly after check-ins – though the actual number of cases may be higher.View image in fullscreen“Essentially, these people are low-hanging fruit for Ice,” said Laura Urias, a program director and attorney at the legal non-profit ImmDef. “It’s just very easy to arrest them.”Under the Biden administration, immigration officials had been instructed to prioritize detaining and expelling people who posed threats to public safety, and had criminal records. There were arrests during Ice check-ins during the Biden administration, too. A Guardian analysis found there were 821 arrests per month, on average, in 2024 that appeared to have occurred during or right after check-ins. But officials often used their discretion to allow immigrants who weren’t considered a priority for deportation to remain in their communities, on orders of recognizance or supervision.One of Donald Trump’s first actions after he was sworn in for his second term was to broaden Ice’s mandate – now all immigrants without legal status are prioritized for arrest, including those who have been checking in and cooperating with authorities.“Under this new administration, all bets are off,” said Stefania Ramos, an immigration lawyer based in Seattle. “So anyone with an Ice check-in appointment is frantic, looking for a lawyer, trying to figure out what they can do to protect themselves.”Attorneys and advocates cannot advise clients to skip check-ins because doing so would mean violating immigration regulations. And because these immigrants have been complying with Ice requirements, the agency knows their current home and work addresses. Many under Ice supervision had been ordered to wear ankle monitors or use facial recognition apps to check in – and allow the agency access to their real-time whereabouts.But lawyers are advising clients to prepare for the possibility that they could be detained at check-ins, and to bring someone, either a family member or an attorney, along with them.Jorge, the 22-year-old from Venezuela, had been checking in with Ice every three months while awaiting a court date to assess his asylum case. “Truly, I was never afraid I’d be arrested, because I did everything right,” he said on the phone, from the detention center in Tacoma where he is now being held.When an immigration official in Portland summoned him to sign some paperwork on 20 February, he had no reason to think he’d be relocated to a detention center one state over. “The truth is, this is so crazy,” he said. “I have a clean record. That’s why I voluntarily went to Ice.”In detention, he’s seen glimpses of the news that the president has declared war on Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, that Venezuelan men with no criminal convictions were being sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. “I’m afraid,” he said. He isn’t from the state in Venezuela where Tren de Aragua operates, and he has no tattoos – which the government has spuriously cited as evidence that men are members of a gang. “But I don’t know what to think. It feels like I am being unjustly imprisoned simply for being Venezuelan.”Jorge had himself fled violence back home. He had first escaped to Colombia in 2022, but he had found it impossible to make money and survive there. That year, he continued north, through the Darién jungle, to Panama, but eventually decided to return home to Venezuela when he realized the US was enforcing its “remain in Mexico” policy, sending migrants arriving at the southern border back to Mexico. “I was back for only three months, but I was living a nightmare. I had to leave,” he said. He witnessed multiple homicides and was harassed by local law enforcement. “I was afraid for my life.”View image in fullscreenHe crossed through the Darién Gap again in 2023, and registered an asylum claim and was given a court date in 2025. In the two years since, he enrolled in community college and completed the accredited irrigation program in partnership with Portland Community College, worked as an advocate with the Voz Workers’ Rights Education Project and trained in emergency preparedness. He danced bachata and played on pick-up sports teams in town. “I left my family in Venezuela, but I found my community in Portland,” he said.“Now I feel despair. My future is literally hanging in the balance,” he said. On 20 March, a judge denied his appeal for bond – which means he will likely have to remain in detention until September, unless his lawyers are able to successfully appeal. Meanwhile, his friends have been raising money to cover legal expenses and commissary funds in detention.“I’m trying to keep courage,” he said. “But I don’t know why I’m here.”More than a dozen immigration lawyers, advocates and former immigration officials that the Guardian interviewed for this story said they have been hearing of similar cases across the country.ImmDef, which maintains a rapid response hotline for the families of people who have been detained, has received several calls from people who said their loved ones were arrested at check-ins. But the organization has also seen a number of cases where people went to their check-ins, and encountered no problems.“It hasn’t been consistent,” said Urias. “We haven’t seen much of a pattern, per se.”Ice did not respond to questions about whether its agents are increasingly arresting people at check-ins, or whether the frequency of these check-ins had changed, though the agency acknowledged it received the Guardian’s query.View image in fullscreenUrias was especially worried for one of her clients, a woman who survived domestic violence. She has a removal order but a pending application for a U-visa, which is offered to the victims of certain crimes.“She had been checking in with Ice since 2016, we actually survived the first Trump administration,” said Urias. Normally, Urias doesn’t accompany her to the check-ins but did so earlier this month. But then, the check-in happened without incident – and she was told to come back in a year. “It was a huge relief,” said Urias. “But also it feels like there’s no rhyme or reason why some people are ok, and others are picked up.”Lawyers and advocates said people such as Urias’s client – who have been given prior “orders of removal” by Ice, but were allowed to remain in the US because they had pending cases or appeals, because they had children or family in the US under their care, or because home countries weren’t accepting deportation flights – were among the most vulnerable to deportation at the moment.Ice always had the power to execute removal orders at any time – and now the agency seems particularly poised to wield that power.That’s what worries Inna Scott, an immigration attorney in Seattle, whose client had crossed into the US from Mexico as a teenager, and was issued a deportation order in 1997. But he has continued to live in the US since then. In 2021, he was able to get a permit to work legally in the US after complying with Ice’s orders to regularly check in.When he reported, as usual, in March this year, immigration officials told Scott that they would likely seek to enforce her client’s removal order from the 90s, and instructed them to return in a month. “My client has no criminal history and has been a well-behaved resident of the country for decades,” she said. “But now he’s all of a sudden subject to detainment.” Ice could reinstate his old deportation order without giving him any opportunity to make his case in front of an immigration judge.Scott said she wasn’t particularly shocked because Ice officials made similar arrests during the first Trump administration – which had also issued a broad mandate to deport anyone without legal status. “But it is unfortunate. These are people without any kind of criminal history. These are people who are not national security risks. They’re not fugitives, they are living their lives working lawfully, with their work permits,” she said. “And they’re still being uprooted from their lives and taken to a country they haven’t been to in decades.” More

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      Federal judge rules return of Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador prison

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      A federal judge on Friday afternoon ordered the US to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison after a Trump administration attorney was at a loss to explain what happened.The wife of the man, who was flown to a notorious Salvadoran prison had earlier joined dozens of supporters at a rally before a court hearing on Friday, where his lawyers had asked the judge – Paula Xinis – to order the Trump administration to return him to the US.Xinis on Friday called Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation “an illegal act” and pressed US justice department attorney Erez Reuveni for answers. Reuveni had few, if any, to offer, conceding that Abrego Garcia should not have been removed from the US and sent to El Salvador. He could not cite any authority held by the Trump administration to arrest Abrego Garcia in Maryland.“I’m also frustrated that I have no answers for you for a lot of these questions,” he said.Reuveni said, “I don’t know,” when asked why Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador, which has a history rife with human rights abuses.Abrego Garcia’s wife, US citizen Jennifer Vasquez Sura, hasn’t spoken to him since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She urged her supporters to keep fighting for him “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard”.View image in fullscreen“To all the wives, mothers, children who also face this cruel separation, I stand with you in this bond of pain,” she said during the rally at a community center in Hyattsville, Maryland. “It’s a journey that no one ever should ever have to suffer, a nightmare that feels endless.”The campaign to reunite the couple will shift to a courtroom in Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC.The White House has cast Abrego Garcia, 29, as an MS-13 gang member and assert that US courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because the Salvadoran national is no longer in the US.Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have countered that there is no evidence he was in MS-13. The allegation is based on a confidential informant’s claim in 2019 that Abrego Garcia was a member of a chapter in New York, where he has never lived.Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation, described by the White House as an “administrative error”, has outraged many and raised concerns about expelling noncitizens who were granted permission to be in the US.Abrego Garcia had a permit from the Department of Homeland Security to legally work in the US, his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said. He served as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license.He fled El Salvador around 2011 because he and his family were facing threats by local gangs. In 2019, a US immigration judge granted him protection from deportation to El Salvador because he was likely to face gang persecution. He was released and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) did not appeal the decision or try to deport him to another country.Abrego Garcia later married Vasquez Sura. The couple are parents to their son and her two children from a previous relationship.“If I had all the money in the world, I would spend it all just to buy one thing: a phone call to hear Kilmar’s voice again,” Vasquez Sura said. “Kilmar, if you can hear me, I miss you so much, and I’m doing the best to fight for you and our children.” More

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      ‘He is not a gang member’: outrage as US deports makeup artist to El Salvador prison for crown tattoos

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      For as long as anyone can remember Andry José Hernández Romero was enthralled by the annual Three Kings Day celebrations for which his Venezuelan home town is famed, joining thousands of fellow Christians on the streets of Capacho to remember how the trio of wise men visited baby Jesus bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh.At age seven, Andry became a Mini King, as members of the town’s youth drama group Los Mini Reyes were known. Later in life, he tattooed two crowns on his wrists to memorialise those carnival-like Epiphany commemorations and his Catholic roots.“Most Capacheros get crown tattoos, often adding the name of their father or mother. We’ve lots of people with these tattoos – it’s a tradition that began in 1917,” said Miguel Chacón, the president of Capacho’s Three Kings Day foundation.The Latin American tradition appears to have been lost on the US immigration officers who detained Hernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist, hairdresser and theatre lover, after he crossed the southern border last August to attend a prearranged asylum appointment in San Diego.Hernández, who is gay, told agents he was fleeing persecution stemming from his sexual orientation and political views. Just weeks earlier, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, had unleashed a ferocious crackdown after being accused of stealing the presidential election to extend his 12-year rule.But Hernández’s tattoos were deemed proof he was a member of Venezuela’s most notorious gang, the Tren de Aragua, and a “security threat” to the US.View image in fullscreen“Detainee Hernandez ports [sic] tattoos ‘crowns’ that are consistent with those of a Tren de Aragua member,” an agent at California’s Otay Mesa detention centre claimed, according to court documents published this week.Those 16 words appear to have sealed the fate of the young Venezuelan stylist, who friends, family and lawyers say has never committed a crime.On 15 March, after more than six months in custody in the US, Hernández was one of scores of Venezuelans flown from Texas to a maximum security prison in El Salvador as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. To the horror of their relatives, some detainees were paraded before the cameras and filmed being manhandled by guards and having their heads shaved before being bundled into cells.“Let my son go. Review his case file. He is not a gang member,” Hernández’s mother, Alexis Dolores Romero de Hernández, pleaded as she came to terms with her son’s disappearance into the notorious Central American “terrorism confinement centre”, known by the Spanish acronym Cecot.“Everyone has these crowns, many people. But that doesn’t mean they’re involved in the Tren de Aragua … He’s never had problems with the law,” said Hernández, 65, who has not heard from her son since he called on the eve of his transfer to let her know – incorrectly – that he was being deported to Venezuela.View image in fullscreen“We know nothing. They say nothing. They give no information. That’s the trauma – not knowing anything about these young men, especially mine,” Alexis Hernández complained.Her son’s plight has caused outrage in Táchira, the western state where he grew up, with people packing Capacho’s picturesque 19th-century church, San Pedro de la Independencia, to demand his freedom.“We’re talking about someone who has been part of Capacho’s Three Kings Day celebrations for 23 years,” said Chacón, who is leading the campaign. “That’s why I’m doing everything I can to get this young man released. He is completely innocent.”Krisbel Vásquez, 29, a manicurist, denied her “calm, kind and humble” childhood friend was a villain. “I’ve known him all my life. He doesn’t bother anyone,” Vásquez said, urging Trump and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to backtrack.Xiomara Ramírez, 57, said her son had grown up with Hernández, with the pair doing homework together at her house. “I wonder why so much injustice. Why doesn’t the US give good people like Andry opportunities?” Ramírez asked.Melissa Shepard, an attorney from the California-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, representing Andry, was perplexed that her “very sweet, kind and thoughtful” client had been incarcerated in “one of the worst places in the world.“The fact that this administration has taken somebody who is so vulnerable and put them into such a terrifying situation has just been horrific. We fear that if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone,” she said.View image in fullscreenGrowing indignation over Hernández’s plight, and that of other apparently innocent Venezuelans deported to El Salvador on the basis of their tattoos, is spreading to unexpected places.“It’s horrific,” Joe Rogan, a Trump-endorsing podcaster, said on his latest show. Rogan supported Trump’s offensive against Venezuelan “criminals” the president claimed terrorised the US. “But let’s not [let] innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs,” he said, asking: “How long before that guy can get out? Can we figure out how to get them out? Is there any plan in place to alert the authorities that they’ve made a horrible mistake and correct it?”But the Trump administration has shown no sign of reconsidering its decision to send so many Venezuelans to El Salvador on the basis of such flimsy evidence.On Monday, Trump thanked Bukele for receiving another group of alleged Latin American criminals “and giving them such a wonderful place to live!”Bukele said the deportations were “another step in the fight against terrorism and organised crime”, claiming the 17 detainees were all “confirmed murderers and high-profile offenders”.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, bristled when questioned about agents’ use of a “points system” to classify detainees as gang members based on their tattoos or attire. “Shame on you and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these [criminal] individuals,” she replied, claiming “a litany of criteria” was used to correctly identify “foreign terrorists” or “illegal criminal aliens” for removal.View image in fullscreenShepard questioned the administration’s assertion that detainees such as Hernández were being “removed”. “He has been disappeared,” she said. “I know the government tries to use the language that he was ‘removed’ [but] … he has absolutely been disappeared.”Thousands of miles away in Capacho, Hernández’s mother spoke sorrowfully of how her son had decided, against his family’s wishes, to abandon their economically damaged country last May and make the perilous journey north through the Darién jungles between Colombia and Panama. “He left because he wanted to help us … and to fulfil his dream,” Hernández said, adding: “Now the reality is different.”On a recent evening, she and hundreds of protesters filled the San Pedro church for their latest vigil in support of Hernández. The crowd included three men dressed as the Three Kings, who wore theatrical beards and diadems dotted with fake jewels and carried plaques bearing the words: Conscience, Justice and Freedom.“We, his family, and the entire town vouch for [Hernández’s] innocence. It’s not possible that in Capacho having a crown tattoo is a symbol of pride, but for him, it makes him a criminal,” Chacón said, appealing directly to the presidents of the US and El Salvador.“I know Trump is a good man and Bukele is a good man,” Chacón said. “But it cannot be that they have sent this young man to prison. There must be many others like him.” More