Franco Caraballo called his wife on Friday night, crying and panicking. Hours before, the 26-year-old barber and dozens of other Venezuelan migrants held at a federal detention facility in Texas were dressed in white, handcuffed, and flown on a plane. He had no idea where he was headed.
Caraballo’s name was removed from the online detainee locator maintained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement 24 hours later.
Johanny Sánchez, Caraballo’s wife, learned on Monday that he was one of over 200 Venezuelan immigrants flown to El Salvador over the weekend and is now being held in a maximum-security prison after being accused by the Trump administration of belonging to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
Sánchez insists that her husband is not a gang member. She struggles to see logic in the accusation.
Weekend Flights
Flights by US immigration authorities sparked a panic among terrified families after hundreds of immigrants disappeared from ICE’s online locator.
Some showed up at El Salvador’s massive prison, which does not allow visitors, recreation, or education. The United States has paid El Salvador’s government $6 million to hold the prisoners, many of whom are Venezuelans. The Venezuelan government rarely accepts deportees from the US.
However, many families have no idea where their loved ones are.
“I don’t know anything about my son,” said Xiomara Vizcaya, 46, a Venezuelan.
Ali David Navas Vizcaya had been detained in the United States since early 2024, when he arrived from Mexico at a border crossing where he was scheduled to meet with immigration officers. He called her late Friday night and said he believed he was being deported to Venezuela or Mexico. His name is no longer in the ICE system.
Since 2013, when Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy collapsed, nearly 8 million people have fled the country. The majority initially went to other Latin American countries, but more migrated to the United States after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted during the Biden administration.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced that he had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an 18th-century wartime law that allows the United States to deport noncitizens without any legal recourse, including the right to appear before an immigration or federal judge.
Many conservatives have praised the deportations and the Trump administration’s hard line on immigration.
The Trump administration claims to be using the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Tren de Aragua members, claiming that the gang is invading the United States, despite the fact that it has provided no evidence to support gang membership claims.
In a court filing on Monday, US officials admitted that many of the people sent to El Salvador do not have criminal records, but insisted that they are all suspected gang members.
“The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” stated a sworn declaration included in the filing, adding that, along with their suspected gang membership, “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.”
“We followed the law”
On February 3, Caraballo visited an ICE office in Dallas for another mandatory check-in with the agents handling his asylum application. He’d been coming to the office on a regular basis for several months.
What gang member, his wife asked, would walk into a federal law enforcement office during a Trump administration crackdown that has left immigrants across the country terrified of being deported?
“We followed the law exactly as instructed. “We never missed any” meetings with authorities, said Sánchez, who is still in the United States trying to secure her husband’s release.
Sánchez claims her husband, whom she married in Texas in 2024, has had no run-ins with the law in the US. She also showed The Associated Press a Venezuelan government document indicating that he has a clean criminal record there.
Sánchez believes he was falsely accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua because of a tattoo in the shape of a clock commemorating his daughter’s birthday from a previous relationship.
“He has lots of tattoos but that’s not a reason to discriminate against him,” she told me. Sánchez stated that she and her husband left Venezuela in 2023 with only $200 and spent the next three months sleeping in plazas, eating out of trash cans, and relying on the generosity of other migrants as they traveled north.
She thought the sacrifice would be worthwhile. Her husband had been working as a barber since he was 13, and he was hoping to make a fresh start in the United States, away from the poverty wages and toxic politics of Nicolas Maduro’s ironfisted rule in Venezuela.
Venezuela responds.
The Venezuelan government has condemned the transfers, calling them “kidnappings,” and has called for a protest in Caracas on Tuesday to demand that El Salvador detainees be returned to their home country.
Jorge Rodriguez, Maduro’s chief negotiator with the US, urged Venezuelans living in the US to return home.
He claimed that the American dream had become “a Salvadoran nightmare.”
Sánchez agrees. She plans to leave the United States once she finds her husband.
“We left Venezuela for a better future. We never imagined things would get worse.”
