In late July, in the western Venezuelan state of Yaracuy, Franco Caraballo stepped out of a police car and into the arms of weeping relatives who'd thought they’d never see him again.
Caraballo and some 250 other Venezuelan migrants had just been released from the brutal high-security prison in El Salvador called the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
The Trump administration had deported them there back in March as part of President Donald Trump's sweeping migrant deportation crusade.
They were accused of being Venezuelan gang members — but often with little or no evidence or legal due process, which is supposed to be accorded to anyone in the U.S., even undocumented migrants.
“The worst thing was the complete loss of hope,” Caraballo told WLRN by phone from Venezuela.
“When the CECOT guards beat us they’d say, ‘You’ll never leave, you’ll die in here. No one’s coming to help terrorists like you.’”
Like several other Venezuelan migrants sent to CECOT, Caraballo has now asked to be included in legal claims being drafted against the Trump administration. The Venezuelans are seeking reparations for what they call wrongful detention, physical and psychological trauma — and to clear their names.
“The United States offered no proof that I belonged to a gang,” said Caraballo, “except my tattoo of a clock that shows what time my daughter was born.”
Most Venezuelan crime experts do say U.S. immigration authorities are mistaken when they claim such tattoos mean someone’s a member of a gang like the notorious Tren de Aragua.
But that was the chief basis — and in Caraballo's case, likely the only one — for sending him and hundreds of other Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, an experience Caraballo called “hellish.”
“We usually weren’t allowed to talk, and if you did, you’d have to put your hands behind your head and they’d beat your legs with clubs,” he said.
He added there were at least eight men in a cell at all times, and that they were often made to sleep on metal beds with no mattresses.
The 27-year-old asylum-seeker had no criminal history in the U.S. or in Venezuela when he was detained in Texas in February, after a check-in appointment with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE. That was the case with many if not most of the others who were flown to El Salvador the next month with him.
READ MORE: Was a Venezuelan deported as a terrorist because of a tattoo celebrating his child?
Caraballo's Miami attorney, Martin Rosenow, says the mass deportation was largely unprecedented — especially since Trump used questionable emergency, war-time powers, under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, in order to secretly circumvent constitutional due process.
“This kind of situation is unheard of," said Rosenow.
"Among all the agencies involved in executing this illegal deportation — it was just cruelty, nothing more than an ill conceived scheme to meet the deportation quota numbers the Trump administration has set for them.
"So I don’t think at the time they cared about the potential humanitarian blowback.”
Blowback beginning?
But it looks as if that blowback could be coming now in the U.S. courts.
For one thing, the U.S. Supreme Court is now poised to decide whether Trump's use of the Enemy Aliens Act was lawful — Trump asserts it is because, he claims, the U.S. faces an "invasion" of criminal migrants — after a federal appeals court ruled this month that it was not.
Just as important, one of the Venezuelan migrants sent to El Salvador and CECOT, Adrián Rengel, has filed a Federal Torts Claim Act (FTCA) claim with the Homeland Security Department, ICE's overseer, seeking $1.3 million in damages.
“We’re tracking a list of about 191 of those that were at CECOT that have shown an interest in wanting to file an FTCA claim," said Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which is helping Rengel in his case.
"We’re now spearheading a group of organizations that are actually working on all these different cases. The civil rights violations are all-encompassing — routine beatings, psychological and, frankly, sexual abuse, family separation, among others.”
The organizations include the American Civil Liberties Union and the immigration aid nonprofit Together and Free.
Suing the federal government, though, is never easy. In a statement issued after Rengel's claim was filed, Homeland Security insisted it had cause to deem the Venezuelan migrants “public safety threats” as "confirmed associates of the Tren de Aragua gang."
Shortly after the Venezuelans' mass deportation in March, Trump's immigration czar, Tom Homan, said the men's detentions resulted from "various investigations ... [t]hrough 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."
Rengel himself does not have a felony criminal history. Last fall he pleaded guilty to a drug paraphernalia misdemeanor and paid a fine.
ICE acknowledged days after the March deportation that "many" of the Venezuelans did not in fact have criminal records — but asserted, inexplicably, that it "actually highlights the risk they pose."
Proaño, who splits his time between Miami and Washington D.C., calls that a specious argument that he believes will fall apart in court if Homeland Security does not respond to Rengel's administrative claim by early next year and it's then brought as a bona fide lawsuit.
“We’ve pored through everything," Proaño said. "We’ve seen all the documentation that [Homeland Security] has put together — the 23 tattoos as supposed gang evidence and all that — and it’s just ridiculous.”
Human rights lawyers like Natalie Cadwalader, a senior staff attorney for the nonprofit Human Rights First, agree that in this instance, plaintiffs may have a stronger than usual case against the feds.
Cadwalader, who represented some of the Venezuelans when they were still locked up in El Salvador, says the “forced disappearance” nature of their deportation — the Trump administration never officially acknowledged their identities, for example — adds weight to their claims.
So, she adds, does the CECOT prison’s reputation for human rights violations, including sexual abuse.
“What happened to these people — enforced disappearance and torture, and let’s not forget the pain and suffering their families went through, four months of not knowing if their loved ones were dead or alive — can never happen again,” Cadwalader said.
"The especially egregious nature of this case is likely to make the courts feel more serious about accountability."
Cadwalader also points to the reality that migrants like Caraballo were essentially stripped of their opportunity to complete the U.S. asylum process.
And she notes the episode’s end result — the migrants’ return, as part of a U.S.-Venezuelan prisoner swap in July, to the severe dictatorship and humanitarian crisis they were escaping in Venezuela in the first place.
Caraballo told WLRN he left Venezuela in no small part because he’d been persecuted, including a beating in a police precinct, for taking part in anti-regime protests there.
“It’s hard,” Caraballo said. “I’m starting to go out in public more now, but here you never know what’s going to happen to you.”
Still, he added: “I didn’t think what happened to me this year would happen in a country of laws like the United States — in a country where legal rights matter."
