Last Saturday night, 238 Venezuelan migrants deported from the U.S., in apparent violation of a federal court order, arrived in El Salvador and were processed into a high security prison.
The Trump administration had expelled most of them, with no legal hearing, as terrorists under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act because — it said — they were members of the violent Venezuelan criminal gang known as Tren de Aragua.
The administration has not released the names of the deportees. But at least one migrant who appears to be among them also appears not to be a gang member, let alone an alien enemy terrorist — and appears to have been branded as such for nothing more than a tattoo.
"It's a travesty," says Miami immigration attorney Martin Rosenow of Coconut Grove. He represents Franco José Caraballo Tiapa, a 26-year-old Venezuelan barber who crossed the U.S. southern border with his wife two years ago seeking asylum.
READ MORE: Trump administration deports hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even amid court challenge
When Caraballo went to an asylum application appointment in Dallas, Texas, last month, an agent from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, noticed a tattoo on his arm.
“It was a clock with the time of birth of his daughter," Rosenow told WLRN.
That kind of tattoo is popular in Venezuela. But U.S. authorities identify it as a favorite of Tren de Aragua, which formed back in the Venezuelan state of Aragua.
So, according to court records reviewed by WLRN, ICE agents — apparently solely on that basis — accused Caraballo of being a Tren de Aragua gang member, despite the fact that he had no criminal record in either Venezuela or the U.S.
The document also accuses Caraballo of not crossing the U.S. border "at a prescribed point of entry," although that appears not to have been an issue in his case until ICE decided to accuse him of Tren de Aragua membership.
ICE acknowledged on Tuesday that "many" of the Venezuelans deported as gang members in fact did not have criminal records. But it asserted — questionably if not speciously, say critics — that this "actually highlights the risk they pose."
“I’m nauseous. We fight for our clients’ civil rights and we’re taught to abide by the Constitution — and this is just a flagrant violation of everything we know.”Attorney Martin Rosenow
Either way, Caraballo is likely not the only Venezuelan migrant deported last weekend who was rounded up under that seemingly arbitrary criterion. Several families in Venezuela claim to have recognized the faces of sons or siblings in video released from the arrival of the Venezuelan migrants in El Salvador; and they too insist their relatives are not Tren de Aragua members.
Moreover, in many cases, they insist the deportation involved a hasty and unjust assumption that a tattoo identified a terrorist.
ICE says it cannot comment on individual immigration cases. But Caraballo was detained and processed for deportation, according to ICE locator records — and Rosenow is convinced he was on Saturday's flight from Texas to El Salvador.
“We don’t have a hundred percent certainty, because they haven’t released a list," Rosenow says, "but all the people that fit under this pattern, the ICE locator system as of Saturday shows that they no longer exist in the system.”
In almost all cases, this means deportation.
In the court records, ICE plainly acknowledges Caraballo had no criminal history in the U.S. According to Venezuela’s government, he had no criminal past there, either.
A hearing on his case was supposed to take place this week — but Saturday's peremptory deportation, Rosenow says, denied him of that due process, which is supposed to apply to undocumented migrants as well as U.S. citizens.
“I’m nauseous," Rosenow said. "We fight for our clients’ civil rights and we’re taught to abide by the Constitution — and this is just a flagrant violation of everything we know.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the deportations were “a historic measure to make America safer.” But the Trump Administration may have carried them out in defiance of a federal judge’s ruling that questioned the constitutionality of invoking the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act.
A just as big question hanging over the operation is how U.S. authorities determined the Venezuelans were so-called Tren de Aragua “terrorists" under that law.
This week President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said it as done "through various investigations.”
"Through social media, through their activities, through their criminal records here and abroad. The review of this issue was at the highest level I’ve seen,” he said.
READ MORE: Migrant crimes bring Venezuelans to their own 'Mariel moment'
But Franco Caraballo’s case seems to contradict Homan’s claim of thorough investigation.
Caraballo’s 22-year-old wife, Johanny Sánchez, told WLRN from Dallas the couple arrived in the U.S. in October 2023 after an often dangerous, three-month trek from their home state of Yaracuy, Venezuela.
The couple settled in Sherman, Texas, near Dallas, where they married last year, and have supported themselves with barber and housecleaning work. Caraballo's daughter — whom he insists his tattoo is dedicated to — is from a previous marriage and lives in Venezuela with grandparents. He planned to send for her after he and Sánchez received asylum.
In Yaracuy, Sánchez says, Caraballo was a barber (his shop had a Facebook page) an avid soccer player — and, as he told U.S. immigration authorities, a target of persecution by Venezuela’s brutal dictatorship.
“It’s like he was kidnapped for nothing more than a tattoo. It feels like any Venezuelan immigrant now is labeled as Tren de Aragua."Johanny Sánchez
The reason: he opposed the left-wing regime — which the U.N. has accused of crimes against humanity, and which is widely blamed for the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history — and he had taken part in anti-regime marches led by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, they say.
"In 2019 he was arrested and held for two days," Sánchez said, "and they beat him up. He's afraid if goes back now they'll treat him as a traitor to the state."
Caraballo spoke to Sánchez last Friday from detention in Laredo, Texas. He told her they'd boarded him and the other Venezuelans on a deportation flight that day, but it was canceled due to bad weather, and they were told they would be flown out of the U.S. on Saturday.
Sánchez said she hasn’t heard from him since that call.
“He told me, ‘Honey, this is probably the last call I’ll be able to make to you,’ and then he just disappeared,” Sánchez says. “It’s like he was kidnapped for nothing more than a tattoo.”
Tattoos like Caraballo’s have become a focus of whether migrants are being fingered arbitrarily as gang members.
One advice many immigration attorneys now give clients who have the popular clock tattoos marking birth times, for example, is to have a birth certificate with that time on hand, to confirm to authorities that the tattoo commemorates a child, not a gang.
Either way, says Sánchez, “It feels like any Venezuelan immigrant now is labeled as Tren de Aragua."
Rise in anti-Venezuelan discrimination
The gang represents only a miniscule share of Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. But anti-Venezuelan discrimination has in fact been on the rise since Trump’s presidential campaign last year — when he made the Tren Aragua gang and its crime sprees in cities like New York and Aurora, Colorado, central to his xenophobic anti-immigration platform.
“It’s troubling for all Venezuelans that we are being painted as criminals, when we make up only 2% of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States," says Venezuelan exile and Miami attorney Maria Corina Vegas, a diaspora advocate.
"We are being vilified and scapegoated for the immigration crisis. It flies in the face of constitutional due process," Vegas added, "And it can happen to any national group now."
Vegas says that’s why Trump felt emboldened last month to strip hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants of their Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which shields them from deportation.
"They were granted in TPS precisely in recognition that deporting people back to Venezuela would be inhumane."
Meanwhile, as for migrants like Franco Caraballo and the rest who were deported over the weekend to a prison in El Salvador as gang members on questionable evidence like tattoos?
Their best hope for freedom now is that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele will deport them back to Venezuela — the hell they came to the U.S. to escape in the first place.
