by Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica, and Alejandro Bonilla Suárez and Edwin Corona Ramos for ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News.

The Trump administration’s move four months ago to send more than 230 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT took a staggering toll, not only on the men themselves but also on their families. The men were released to Venezuela on July 18 as part of a prisoner swap without much explanation, and they and their relatives have begun sharing the details of their ordeal.

Juan José Ramos Ramos describes the physical torture he says he endured during his incarceration at CECOT as his mother, Lina Ramos, explains the emotional agony of not knowing whether she’d ever see her son again. Andry Blanco Bonilla and his mother, Carmen Bonilla, still struggle to make sense of how they could have been caught up in something like this when Blanco didn’t have a criminal record and, in fact, had a deportation order to be sent back to his home country. Wilmer Vega Sandia, who had migrated to the United States to find work that would help him pay for his mother’s cancer treatment, says he prayed every day of his incarceration that he’d make it home in time to hold her in his arms.

Without providing evidence, the U.S. government branded them all Tren de Aragua gang members, the “worst of the worst,” “sick animals” and “monsters.” Our reporting, a first-of-its-kind, case-by-case examination, shows how the government knew a majority of them had not been convicted of a crime in the U.S. — and only a few had serious convictions such as assault and gun possession. We found a dozen or so had criminal records abroad and included those in our comprehensive database, too.

Nearly half, 118 of the more than 230 men, including Ramos, came to the U.S. legally and were deported in the middle of their immigration cases. He entered the U.S. with a CBP One appointment, a program the Biden administration used to try to bring order to the soaring numbers of migrants attempting to enter the country.

At least 166 of the more than 230 men had tattoos, including Blanco, Ramos and Vega. Our investigation found that the government relied heavily on tattoos to tie the men to the Venezuelan gang, even though Tren de Aragua experts say tattoos are not reliable indicators of gang affiliation.

A handful of the men, including Vega, had been granted voluntary departures by an immigration judge, which means they had agreed to pay their way home to Venezuela. Instead, they were deported to El Salvador.

Watch the video here.

Melissa Sanchez, Perla Trevizo, Mica Rosenberg and Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica; Ronna Rísquez of Alianza Rebelde Investiga; and Adrián González of Cazadores de Fake News contributed reporting. Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Almudena Toral of ProPublica contributed production.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica, Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News, photography and additional reporting by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

Leer en español.

Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.

Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.

Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.

“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.

These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News.

Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.

Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.

Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.

Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.

He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.

For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.

“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”

To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.

Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.

To examine those claims, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) launched an exhaustive investigation of the backgrounds of the 238 men on the list of detainees first published by CBS. Last week, we published a first-of-its-kind database that highlights our findings, including the fact the Trump administration knew at least 197 of the men had no criminal convictions in the U.S. Nearly half the men had open immigration cases when they were deported, and at least 166 have tattoos, which experts have told us are not an indicator of gang membership.

When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.

He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.

“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”

The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.

Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.

“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.

Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.

They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”

The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.

Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”

Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”

Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.

The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.

Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. … Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”

Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”

Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.

About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.

Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.

This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.

Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.

Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”

In a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.

The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.

Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”

During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”

That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.

As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.

Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”

But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.

He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.

Do You Have Information About the CECOT Deportations? Help ProPublica Report.

Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu. Photo editing by Cengiz Yar.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News

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On March 15, President Donald Trump’s administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Without providing evidence, Trump has called the men “some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth.”

Last week, the men were released as suddenly as they’d been taken away. Now, the truth of all their stories — one by one — will begin to be told.

Starting here.

We’ve compiled a first-of-its-kind, case-by-case accounting of 238 Venezuelan men who were held in El Salvador.

ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) spent the past four months reporting on the men’s lives and their backgrounds. We obtained government data that included whether they had been convicted of crimes in the U.S. or had pending charges. We found most were listed solely as having immigration violations. We also conducted interviews with relatives of more than 100 of the men; reviewed thousands of pages of court records from the U.S. and South America; and analyzed federal immigration court data.

Some of our findings:

• We obtained internal data showing that the Trump administration knew that at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. — and that only six had been convicted of violent offenses. We identified fewer than a dozen additional convictions, both for crimes committed in the U.S. and abroad, that were not reflected in the government data.

• Nearly half of the men, or 118, were whisked out of the country while in the middle of their immigration cases, which should have protected them from deportation. Some were only days away from a final hearing.

• At least 166 of the men have tattoos. Interviews with families, immigration documents and court records show the government relied heavily on tattoos to tie the men to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — even though law enforcement experts told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

• The men who were imprisoned range in age from 18 to 46. The impact of their monthslong incarceration extended beyond them. Their wives struggled to pay the rent. Relatives went without medical treatment. Their children wondered if they would see them again.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not respond to questions about the men in the database but said Trump “is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public.” She referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond.

Read the men’s stories in our database.

Reporting by: Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Melisa Sánchez, ProPublica; Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica; Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica; Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica; Ronna Risquez, Alianza Rebelde; Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News; Adriana Núñez Moros, independent journalist; Carlos Centeno, independent journalist; Maryam Jameel, ProPublica; Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica; Cengiz Yar, ProPublica; Gabriel Pasquini, independent journalist; Kate Morrisey, independent journalist; Coral Murphy Marcos, independent journalist; Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Nicole Foy, ProPublica; Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria; Lisa Seville, ProPublica

Design and development by: Ruth Talbot, ProPublica

Additional design and development by: Zisiga Mukulu, ProPublica

Additional data reporting by: Agnel Philip, ProPublica

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Melissa Sanchez, ProPublica; Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica; Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga; and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News

Leer en español.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News.

On Feb. 15, José Manuel Ramos Bastidas called his wife from inside a Texas immigration detention facility.

He asked her to record a message so there would be some lasting evidence of his story.

“They detained me simply because of my tattoos. I am not a criminal.”

The Trump administration had sent dozens of Venezuelan immigrants to Guantanamo. He was afraid the same would happen to him.

“Just in case something happens to me, so you can be aware.”

Uncertain about his fate, Ramos wanted to make sure there was a record of what happened to him.

A month later, he was gone.

Ramos never set foot in the U.S. — at least not as a free man. He left Venezuela in January 2024, hoping to earn enough money to pay for his newborn son’s medical needs. Born with a respiratory condition, the family’s “milagrito,” or “little miracle,” had severe asthma and repeatedly needed to be hospitalized. The cost of treatment had become impossible to manage on the meager wages Ramos made washing cars in Venezuela’s collapsed economy, so he trekked thousands of miles through a half dozen countries to reach the U.S. border.

When Ramos arrived, he didn’t sneak into the country. He followed the rules established by the Biden administration for immigrants seeking asylum. He signed up for an appointment through a government app and, when he was granted one, turned himself in to request protection. An immigration official and a judge determined he didn’t qualify, and Ramos didn’t fight the decision.

The government kept him in detention until he could be deported back to Venezuela.

In the months that followed, Donald Trump was elected president for a second term and began his mass deportation campaign. Among his first actions was to fly groups of Venezuelan immigrants whom he had labeled dangerous gang members to a U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ramos, 30, panicked and called his wife to say he was worried that the same was going to happen to him. On a video call his wife recorded, he held up a document he said was proof that immigration authorities had agreed to deport him to Venezuela. But he worried that they would not honor that promise.

“I have a family,” he said, staring directly into the camera. “I am simply a hard-working Venezuelan. I haven’t committed any crimes. I don’t have a criminal record in my country nor anywhere else.”

A month later, a more upbeat Ramos called again. He seemed confident that U.S. officials would send him home. Ramos’ family started preparing for his return. They planned to bake him a cake, cook his favorite chicken dish and go to church together to thank God for bringing him home safely.

They never heard from him again.

On March 15, a day after that call, Ramos and more than 230 other Venezuelan men were sent to the CECOT maximum-security prison in El Salvador, one of the most notorious in the Western Hemisphere. Without publicly providing evidence, the administration accused each of them of being members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan prison gang it designated a terrorist organization.

In the months since the mass deportation — one of the most consequential in recent history — the Trump administration has released almost no details about the backgrounds of the people it deported, calling them “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” Several news organizations have reported that most of the men did not have criminal records. ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) went further, finding that the government’s own records showed that it knew the vast majority of the men had not been convicted of violent crimes in the U.S. We also searched records in South America and found that only a few had committed violent crimes abroad.

Now, a case-by-case examination of each of the deportees, along with interviews with their lawyers and family members, reveals another jarring reality: Most of the men were not hiding from federal authorities but were instead moving through the nation’s immigration system. They were either in the middle of their cases, which normally should have protected them from deportation, or they had already been ordered deported and should have first been given the option to be sent back to a country they chose.

Like Ramos, more than 50 of the men had used the government app called CBP One to make an appointment with border officials to try to enter the country. Others had crossed illegally and then surrendered to border agents, often the first step in seeking asylum in immigration court.

According to our analysis, almost half of the men were deported even though their cases hadn’t been decided yet. More than 60 of them had pending asylum claims, including several who were only days away from a hearing where a judge could have ruled on whether they would be allowed to stay. Judges or federal officials had issued deportation orders for about 100 of the men, and a handful had even agreed to pay their own way home. Others, like Ramos, had spent their entire time in the U.S. in detention. They had no opportunity to commit crimes in the U.S.

Meanwhile, many of those who were allowed into the country had been appearing at their court hearings and immigration check-ins. At least nine had been granted temporary protected status, which gives people from countries affected by disasters or other extraordinary conditions permission to live and work in the U.S.

By and large, these were men who had been playing by the rules of the country’s immigration system.

Then, the Trump administration changed the rules.

A day before the administration deported the men to El Salvador, Trump invoked an obscure 18th-century law called the Alien Enemies Act and declared that Tren de Aragua was invading the country. Administration officials argued that the declaration authorized them to take extraordinary measures to remove anyone it had determined was a member of the gang and to make sure they would not threaten the U.S. again.

Following the March 15 deportations, the Trump administration moved to shut down their pending immigration cases. Since then, more than 95 cases have been dismissed, terminated or otherwise closed by judges, according to our analysis. They disappear from the dockets, some marked as dismissed just hours before a scheduled hearing.

Michelle Brané, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official in the Biden administration, said it was “very un-American” to deport people who followed the immigration rules at the time. “You can’t retroactively say that those people were acting illegally and now punish them for that,” she added.

Lawyers for the Venezuelan men have filed several lawsuits against the administration, calling the summary removals from the country a gross violation of their clients’ rights. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled in June that the move deprived the men of their constitutional rights and called their plight Kafkaesque. He wrote that the men “never had any opportunity to challenge the Government’s say-so,” and that they “languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”

The government has appealed the ruling.

Meanwhile, Ramos’ mother, Crisálida del Carmen Bastidas de Ramos, waits anxiously for any news about her oldest child. “What is my son thinking? Is my son eating well? Is my son sleeping? Is he cold?”

“Is he alive?”

Although the Trump administration routinely describes the men as criminals and terrorists, it has not provided evidence to support the claim. Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at DHS, defended sending them to the Salvadoran prison. “They may not have criminal records in the U.S., beyond breaking our laws to enter the country illegally,” she said in a statement, “but many of these illegal aliens are far from innocent.”

For example, she said one of the TPS holders sent to El Salvador admitted he had previously been convicted of murder. We obtained Venezuelan court records confirming that the man had been convicted of murder and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. McLaughlin said his case proved that immigrants had been granted status in the U.S. under Biden without being thoroughly vetted. Three former DHS officials from the Biden administration said the vetting process has remained standard across administrations, including during the first Trump term, and that many governments do not share criminal background histories with U.S. officials.

Trump has moved to strip TPS protections from hundreds of thousands of people.

Ramos, McLaughlin said, was a terrorist who was flagged as a Tren de Aragua member in a law enforcement database at his CBP One appointment. His family denies he has anything to do with the gang. His lawyers said in court records that U.S. authorities wrongly identified him as a gang member based on his tattoos and an “unsubstantiated” report from Panamanian officials. A spokesperson for the Panamanian security ministry said he could not locate any documents about Ramos.

At least 163 men who were deported had tattoos, we found. Law enforcement officials in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

Days before Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra was whisked away, he appeared in immigration court and tried to convince a judge that his tattoos did not mean he was part of the gang.

He had come to the U.S. with a brother in 2023, applied for asylum and settled in Chicago. He told his mother that it was difficult to find work, but that he’d gotten an electric razor, learned to cut hair and offered trims on the street. In January 2024, he was arrested at a Walmart in the Chicago suburbs for shoplifting about $1,000 worth of food, laundry detergent, shampoo and other items. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, served a two-day jail sentence and tried to move on.

Rodríguez Parra, 28, got a job working in concessions at Wrigley Field, moved in with his girlfriend and sent money home to his mother to buy a refrigerator and a stove. Then, in November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents picked him up at his apartment. McLaughlin said he was in the country illegally and was a Tren de Aragua member. Rodríguez Parra continued his asylum case from immigration detention in Indiana.

He told his family he believed he would be released soon. But in early March, he was transferred to a jail in Missouri, then to one in Central Texas, then another in Laredo, in South Texas, each move bringing him closer to the border. Uncertainty began creeping into his calls home.

Despite the transfers, Rodríguez Parra’s attorney, Cruz Rodriguez, who works for a small immigration unit at the Cook County public defender’s office in Chicago, said he was confident in the merits of the asylum case. He felt optimistic when he logged into his client’s virtual bond hearing before Judge Eva Saltzman on March 10.

At the hearing, a government attorney asked Rodríguez Parra about a TikTok video he’d made of himself dancing to a popular audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you.” Close to 60,000 users on TikTok have shared the clip.

Rodríguez Parra scoffed at the notion that a real gang member would make such a video. “It would be like they were outing themselves,” he said in Spanish. The audio clip has been used by Venezuelans to ridicule the widespread suggestion that everyone from the country is a gangster.

The government attorney also asked Rodríguez Parra about the tattoos that covered his neck, arms and chest — a rose, a wolf, carnival masks and an angel holding a gun. “In my country, it’s very normal to have tattoos,” he responded. “Each one represents a story about my life.”

He was also questioned about a suspected Tren de Aragua gang member who had crossed the border at the same time as him. Rodríguez Parra said he did not know the man.

At the end of the hearing, he pleaded with the judge to free him on bond. “I’m a good person,” he told her. “If I was in a gang, I wouldn’t have applied for asylum. I came fleeing my country.”

Saltzman denied Rodríguez Parra’s request, citing his shoplifting conviction. But she offered him a sliver of hope, reminding him that his final hearing was just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be released and could continue his life in the U.S.

“You’re not facing a particularly lengthy detention without a bond,” she told him.

Five days later, he was gone. At what was supposed to be his final asylum hearing on March 20, Rodríguez Parra’s lawyer sounded despondent. He had barely slept. He didn’t know where the authorities had taken his client, but he’d seen a video posted online of shackled men being frog-marched into CECOT. The attorney had visited El Salvador and was aware of that country’s reputation for mistreating prisoners. He feared his client would face a similar fate.

He felt powerless. At the hearing, he turned to the government lawyer on the call. “For his family’s sake,” he told her, “would you happen to know what country he was sent to?”

The government’s lawyer had little to say.

“I’m operating under the same information as you,” she responded. “I have no further information to provide.”

Design and development by Anna Donlan and Allen Tan of ProPublica. Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed data reporting. Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed research. Adriana Núnez and Carlos Centeno contributed reporting.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.