By Sarah Kinosian and Kristina Cooke
(Reuters) – Family members of Venezuelan migrants who suspect their loved ones were sent to El Salvador as part of a rapid U.S. deportation operation over the weekend are struggling to get more information as a legal battle plays out.
Advocates have launched a WhatsApp helpline for people searching for family members, while immigration attorneys have tried to locate their clients after they went dark.
In a proclamation published on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport what the White House said were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The Trump administration used the authority to deport 137 Venezuelans to El Salvador on Saturday even as a judge ordered the removals halted, sparking a legal standoff.
The sudden move caused confusion among family members and immigration advocates.
“This chaos is purposeful,” said Anilú Chadwick, pro bono director of the advocacy group Together & Free. “They want to exhaust people and exhaust resources.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration has provided few details so far on the identities of those who were deported.
But Solanyer Sarabia believes she saw her 19-year-old brother, Anyelo, among images shared online of the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s mega-prison. His head had been shaved and he was dressed in white prison garb.
Anyelo had told his sister on Friday night that he would be deported to Venezuela, she said in a phone interview with Reuters from Texas.
Solanyer said her brother had been detained on January 31 after an appointment at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. He had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally with Solanyer and another sister in November 2023 and had been released to pursue a claim for asylum.
Solanyer said an ICE officer told her that her brother was detained because of a tattoo that linked him to Tren de Aragua, a violent gang with Venezuelan prison origins that has spread through the Americas. She said the tattoo depicted a rose and that he had gotten it in a tattoo parlor in Dallas.
“He thought it looked cool, looked nice, it didn’t have any other significance,” she said, stressing that he is not a gang member.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sarabia’s case.
“It’s extremely disturbing that hundreds of people were flown on U.S. government planes to El Salvador and we still have no information on who they are, their attorneys were not notified and families are left excruciatingly in the dark,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has gained international attention for his crackdown on gangs in the Central American country. Supporters say his tactics have driven down violent crime, but rights groups have accused his administration of torture, arbitrary detentions, and other abuses in the country’s prisons.
MISSING
Johanny Sanchez, 22, suspects her husband Franco Caraballo, 26, who was detained in Texas, could now be in El Salvador, but does not know for sure.
Sanchez says Caraballo called her on Friday at around 5 p.m. to tell her he would be deported to Venezuela. He was confused because he had a pending asylum claim and a court date set for Wednesday.
Sanchez said on Saturday morning she looked him up on an online U.S. government immigration system where detainees’ locations are logged and saw that it said he was no longer listed as being at a detention center.
She spoke with Caraballo’s family in Venezuela who told her they had not heard anything. By 7 p.m. on Saturday, she was desperate for information. Then at around 11 p.m., she saw news reports about deportations from the United States to El Salvador.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Caraballo’s case.
Caraballo had multiple tattoos including ones of roses, a clock with this daughter’s birth time, a lion and a shaving razor, said his wife.
“I’ve never seen him without hair, so I haven’t recognized him in the photos,” she said. “I just suspect he’s there because of the tattoos that he has and right now any Venezuelan man with tattoos is assumed to be a gang member”, she added, citing also the fact that he has effectively gone missing.
Sanchez said her husband has never been a member of Tren de Aragua.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday that U.S. law enforcement authorities had spent the better part of a year assembling a roster of known gang members. All the people deported to El Salvador had been on that list, he said.
“If one of them turns out not to be, then they’re just illegally in our country, and the Salvadorans can then deport them to Venezuela,” Rubio said.
(Reporting by Sarah Kinosian in Mexico City and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Writing by Ted Hesson; Editing by Ross Colvin and Rosalba O’Brien)
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