The last time Miriam Aguilera spoke with her 27-year-old son, Gustavo, was March 14. He told her he would be deported to Venezuela the next day. He called her from a detention center in Texas, where he had been held since February. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained him at his home in Lewisville, outside of Dallas-Fort Worth, where he lived with his Venezuelan partner and their now 10-month-old baby, who was born in the U.S. in June 2024. But instead of arriving in Venezuela, as he was promised, he was sent 1,600 miles away — roughly the distance from Texas to Washington, D.C. — to a prison in El Salvador.
Two days later, the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, posted a video showing shackled men being forced into lines by prison guards. Bukele confirmed that 238 Venezuelans had been transferred from the U.S. to El Salvador’s “Terrorist Confinement Center” (CECOT), the largest prison in the Americas, inaugurated in 2023 as part of Bukele’s campaign to combat crime and gang violence in the country. CECOT has faced criticism from human rights organizations for its harsh conditions and violation of due process. Built to hold 40,000 people, visitation, recreation and education are not allowed in the megaprison.
Miriam saw the news on social media but refused to believe her son could be in CECOT. Only “high-profile criminals” were supposed to be there. Her son left Venezuela in 2023 seeking better opportunities to help his family in Tachira, a western Venezuelan state bordering Colombia. Yet, on Gustavo’s birthday, March 18, Miriam recognized him in Bukele’s videos and photos because of the way he sat on CECOT’s floor: his body hunched to one side, handcuffed, feet shackled and head shaved. Miriam explained that he had not been able to sit well after a fall at a young age.
A nightmare thus began for Miriam, alongside hundreds of other families in Venezuela and abroad who have also identified their sons, nephews, husbands and fathers among those imprisoned. With no official information about their loved ones’ whereabouts or conditions, many are taking to the streets to protest and demand their release.
Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. government has used the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting Venezuelan male immigrants to El Salvador. The statute grants the U.S. president authority to detain and deport foreigners without due process during wartime. It had been invoked on only three previous occasions — during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. In May, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s use of the act was unlawful.
The Trump administration claims that these individuals are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal gang that the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. According to the Department of State, “terrorist designations expose and isolate entities and individuals, denying them access to the U.S. financial system and the resources they need to carry out attacks.”
Trump has claimed that many gang members infiltrated the United States, undermining public safety by committing crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortion and human and drug trafficking. He has also accused the gang of working closely with high-ranking officials in the administration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
The number of Venezuelans in the U.S. has multiplied in recent years, and during Joe Biden’s presidency they were among the main beneficiaries of legal protections afforded by temporary protected status (TPS), a mechanism that allows migrants to remain in the U.S. rather than being deported to home countries considered dangerous, and by the program of humanitarian parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, which has allowed people to enter the country temporarily. The increase in the number of migrants, together with information about the presence in the United States of members of Tren de Aragua, put Venezuelans in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
In the past, Trump has accused migrants of rape, murder and robbery. Since he took power, the closure of the border and the fight against illegal migration have been a central focus in his administration.
Miriam, however, denies the allegations against her son, describing him as a quiet worker who installed fire alarm systems in the U.S. “He likes to work and be at home. In his free time, he spends time with his wife or makes coffee and watches TV,” she told New Lines in a phone interview from La Fria, Tachira, where unstable electricity and internet service make communication difficult. Gustavo was told he was taken for “further investigations” but has not been accused of any crime.
Gustavo entered the U.S. in December 2023 using CBP One, a mobile app launched during the Biden administration. It allowed migrants without entry documents to schedule appointments at designated ports of entry on the southern border with Mexico, expanding legal pathways to enter the U.S. in an attempt to discourage illegal border crossings. Trump ended the program on his first day back in office in January, as part of a series of measures aimed at stopping immigration into the U.S.
People held in CECOT are denied communication with their relatives and lawyers. For decades, Salvadoran gangs controlled areas in poor neighborhoods, committing homicides and extortion. Following a wave of murders in March 2022, Bukele declared a month-long state of emergency as part of his iron-fist policy to combat gangs. Under this mandate, which limits fundamental rights and remains in effect three years later, police and soldiers have captured more than 85,000 people, conducting hundreds of indiscriminate raids, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Human Rights Watch has documented widespread abuses, including torture, denial of medical care and extreme overcrowding in Salvadoran prisons.
In 2020, the Salvadoran news outlet El Faro revealed meetings between government officials and gang leaders to negotiate a reduction in homicides, which led to certain prison privileges being introduced. In 2022, El Faro also reported that high-ranking Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13, a Salvadoran criminal gang) sources confessed their responsibility for the wave of murders that year, in response to what they called a “betrayal” by Bukele’s administration of the covert pact that had reduced homicides since 2019.
Two weeks after the arrival of the 238 migrants, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that “a group of 17 violent criminals from the Tren de Aragua and MS-13” were also transferred to El Salvador.
Gustavo Aguilera’s body is covered in tattoos — stars, flowers, skulls and song lyrics. The name of his son, “Santiago,” is inked across his neck. When U.S. immigration agents detained him in Texas in February, his tattoos drew immediate attention. “He told me the agent stared at his neck, made him take off his jacket, saw the rest of his tattoos, and said, ‘You are under arrest,’” said Miriam.
Gustavo’s story is not unique. Juanita Goebertus, Americas Director at Human Rights Watch, said during a video interview with New Lines that many Venezuelans who entered the U.S. after last year’s presidential election have been accused of belonging to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua based solely on their tattoos.
Orianny Vasquez told New Lines a similar story about her husband, Luis Nunez, a Venezuelan fisher now imprisoned at CECOT. Vasquez said that Nunez was pulled over by police in Detroit in December 2024. Officers reportedly noticed his tattooed chest and arms — adorned with roses, a clock and a boat — before transferring him to a detention center in Texas.
Neither U.S. nor Salvadoran authorities have released an official list of those deported. However, CBS News published a leaked document listing the names of detainees, including those of Gustavo Aguilera and Luis Nunez.
“As established by international law, when a person is detained and their whereabouts or situation is not revealed, that constitutes a forced disappearance,” Goebertus explained.
The last time Vasquez talked to her husband was March 15, when he called from El Valle Detention Facility in Texas and said he was being deported to Venezuela. She has heard nothing since.
Norma Gonzalez, a Venezuelan housewife, also believes her 25-year-old nephew, Kleiver Travieso, was targeted because of the roses and angel tattooed on his arms. “I think it is because of [these tattoos], because what else? He also tattooed my name. How could we have imagined that this would ruin my boy’s life?” she told New Lines through tears at her home, wearing a T-shirt printed with Travieso’s face. Gonzalez, who raised Kleiver from the age of 4, firmly denied any link between him and Tren de Aragua.
Travieso crossed into the U.S. through Mexico in September 2024 and spent six months at a detention center in New Mexico before being transferred to El Salvador.
In early April, the BBC reported that a U.K. citizen’s tattoo appeared in a U.S. government document used to identify Tren de Aragua members, despite the man having no ties to the gang. The document cited images of clocks, stars and skulls as indicators.
According to Goebertus, Human Rights Watch has interviewed around 40 relatives of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador. “We have conducted criminal background checks in Venezuela, other Latin American countries and the United States at the state and federal levels. So far, our checks have shown that the vast majority have no convictions or charges of involvement in an organized crime group like Tren de Aragua,” she said.
Venezuela has suffered a catastrophic economic and humanitarian meltdown under 25 years of the socialist ruling party, which was led by the country’s late charismatic president, Hugo Chavez. During the reign of his successor, Maduro, the oil-rich country has faced severe food and medicine scarcity and skyrocketing hyperinflation, which averaged 130,060% in 2018. Inflation has slowed down since 2020, however, as citizens have started to use dollars to protect themselves, and the government has made the foreign exchange market more flexible after a period when it was tightly controlled. Since Maduro took power, Venezuela’s economy has contracted by more than 80%. Additionally, people have been arrested or killed during anti-government protests in 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2024.
The economic and political situation has caused a massive migration of almost 8 million Venezuelans, a quarter of the population, who have left the country escaping repression or seeking better opportunities abroad. The monthly minimum wage in the country is worth roughly $1.50, pushing people to take informal and precarious jobs while battling with high inflation, which could reach up to 200% this year, according to independent projections. Conditions are even more difficult outside Caracas, with frequent power outages and a lack of basic services like running water.
During his first administration, Trump offered temporary legal status to around 145,000 Venezuelans due to the deteriorating conditions in the country.
Political unrest intensified last year, after Venezuela’s disputed presidential election in July, during which Maduro was proclaimed the winner without official final results, and protests erupted nationwide. Arrests, torture and forced exile have followed, deepening fears of repression.
Desperate to escape these conditions, thousands of Venezuelans — including Kleiver, Gustavo and Luis — risked their lives crossing the perilous Darien Gap, a lawless stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama. Along the way, migrants face violence, sexual assault, death and extreme weather.
And now many of them are accused, without any clear evidence, of being members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang founded in 2014 in Tocoron, a lawless prison in Venezuela. From inside, its leaders ordered extortions, robberies, kidnappings and murders, while also charging prisoners fees for food, use of space and protection from violence. Tren de Aragua eventually took control of Tocoron prison and took advantage of the mass migration, establishing criminal cells in Colombia, Peru and Chile.
The gang has expanded to the United States, and alleged Tren de Aragua members were arrested in recent months in Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois. Trump has often said that Venezuela’s crime rate has fallen because the country “emptied out its prisons” by sending migrants to the U.S.
In February, Trump announced that nearly 300,000 Venezuelans would lose their TPS, the designation created by the U.S. government in 1990 to shield foreign nationals from deportation to unsafe countries. A federal judge blocked the move the following month. However, in March, the administration revoked humanitarian parole, leaving hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans potentially vulnerable to deportation. Another federal judge has since signaled plans to halt the administration’s attempt to dismantle humanitarian parole programs.
“We are the most vulnerable diaspora,” said Adelys Ferro, a Venezuelan-American activist and director of Venezuelan-American Caucus, an organization advocating for humanitarian and democratic policies for Venezuela and Venezuelans and the restoration of TPS for Venezuelan nationals living in the U.S. “We are the ones who have become the focus of attack by an entire administration and, before that, by an entire political campaign,” Ferro told New Lines. “Because we were the most vulnerable, who have no representation … who have no one to refute the narrative that the Venezuelans who crossed the southern border are linked to Tren de Aragua.”
Although Miriam Aguilera, Orianny Vasquez and Norma Gonzalez do not know each other, they have joined forces in Caracas, marching through the streets wearing T-shirts printed with their loved ones’ faces and carrying banners. They have filed complaints with the Venezuelan government, the prosecutor’s office and even the United Nations offices in Caracas — but so far, they have received no response.
In April, Venezuela’s Maduro demanded that El Salvador release hundreds of Venezuelan deportees whom he described as “kidnapped,” after his Salvadoran counterpart proposed a prisoner swap. In a post on X, the Salvadoran president offered to repatriate the Venezuelans currently detained in El Salvador in exchange for the release of the same number of domestic political prisoners from among the thousands that he claims Maduro’s regime is holding.
Bukele added that many of the Venezuelan deportees had committed “rape and murder” while Venezuelan political prisoners were jailed only because they opposed Maduro. Nongovernmental organizations such as Venezuela’s Foro Penal claim that there are more than 800 people detained for political reasons in Venezuela.
Among the names proposed for release are Rafael Tudares, the son-in-law of exiled former Venezuelan presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, and Corina Parisca de Machado, the mother of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who is not detained, but it has been reported that Venezuelan officials have surrounded her home and cut off electricity. Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab — who is strongly aligned with the Maduro regime — criticized Bukele’s proposal as “cynical” and requested the immediate release of the Venezuelan prisoners.
Families often protest in Caracas because the national government and international organizations are located there. This represents a huge effort for many, especially for those who travel from other parts of the country. The capital is expensive and exhausting.
Orianny Vasquez must take at least five buses over a seven-hour journey to Caracas and back to her coastal home in Puerto Cabello, a Venezuelan coastal state. “I was at a dancing school and I couldn’t continue. Now I am only working on weekends because I need to go to Caracas almost every day,” she told New Lines. “My health is deteriorating; you sleep, but you don’t rest. I don’t know where to get more money.”
But even those based in Caracas, like Norma Gonzalez, are struggling. “I am constantly eating — that’s what I do when I’m nervous,” she said, describing the toll taken by her nephew Kleiver Travieso’s six-month detention. “What we believe — what my whole family believes — is that he didn’t deserve this.”
Meanwhile, Gustavo Aguilera was the financial support system for Miriam. In Venezuela, he transported food across the border from Colombia to sell locally, a common survival strategy in the economically ravaged region. Later, working in the U.S. installing fire alarm systems, he continued to send money home. Now, it is Miriam who struggles to put food on the table.
With no answers from U.S., Salvadoran or Venezuelan authorities, families say they have no choice but to keep protesting. “I will stay in the streets until I get some answers,” Vasquez said. ”Having tattoos is not illegal.”
Gonzalez and Aguilera have been in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union. However, they have yet to receive concrete answers.
For Miriam Aguilera, Gustavo’s release would not be enough. “I would like to have a response from the United States for the psychological damage. Freedom is not enough, I want them to recognize the damage to my son,” she said. In the early hours of the morning, she joins video calls with other mothers of deported Venezuelans, praying for their loved ones.
With a bitter laugh, she recalled how she once saw El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison inaugurated on the news. “I never imagined this could happen. We watched the inauguration of the prison, and I said at the time that it was a great thing to clean the streets.”
Following the deportation of the alleged criminal gang members, many Venezuelans celebrated the news on social media and saw it as a way to tackle criminality in Venezuela.
Since the mid-2000s, the country has been ranked alongside El Salvador as one of the most violent countries in the world, peaking in 2016 with 28,479 murders, according to the NGO Observatorio Venezolano de Violencia. Criminal gangs control many territories in the country.
The Venezuelan government claimed to have wiped them out, including Tren de Aragua, through police operations in neighborhoods and prisons, but human rights organizations reported unlawful killings of brown-skinned youths in low-income neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the protests demanding the release of detainees in the Central American country are only attended by the families, who are still waiting for their loved ones to return home.
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