Andry José Hernández Romero was among more than two hundred immigrants on the planes that the Trump Administration sent to El Salvador. He is now in jail. In today’s newsletter, our immigration reporter Jonathan Blitzer investigates these deportations—and the questionable justification behind them. Plus:

The Makeup Artist Donald Trump Deported Under the Alien Enemies Act

The President has invoked the law to send Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador without due process—and, in many cases, under false pretenses.

As the Trump Administration moves swiftly to deport immigrants, some individual names and stories among the many people being seized have broken through the chaos. Andry José Hernández Romero is one such person. The thirty-one-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker was, without warning and before a judge could rule on a removal order, sent by the government to El Salvador, which has imprisoned deportees on behalf of the United States. Today, Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer who reports extensively on immigration, tells the full story of Andry’s deportation, drawing from interviews with his American attorneys, his mother, and members of his home community in Venezuela, where he had been a cherished part of the local theatre scene and, as one resident notes, a “great talent of our town.” “There was something painfully desperate in their insistence,” Blitzer writes, “as if seeing images of Andry for myself would help correct an otherwise stunning cultural misunderstanding.”

One key misunderstanding, whether willful or ill informed, seems to center on tattoos—the kinds that Andry, and many of the other deportees, have. The government claims that the tattoos are evidence of affiliation with the gang Tren de Aragua. But experts on Venezuelan gang culture tell Blitzer that tattoos identifying membership in Tren de Aragua do not exist. “The guidance ICE provided to its officers for identifying members of Tren de Aragua seems to be based on the operations of the Salvadoran gang MS-13,” Blitzer writes. “It flags graffiti, hand signs, and tattoos—all hallmarks of MS-13, but ‘irrelevant’ to how Tren de Aragua functions.”

Other than these supposed cultural signifiers, the government has offered little justification for its most recent mass removal of Venezuelan immigrants. “The vast majority were involved in pending immigration cases but were not given an opportunity to contest the alleged evidence against them,” Blitzer writes. And he points to the leaps in logic that have characterized so many of these cases, noting that “a high-ranking ICE official later acknowledged that many of these men had no criminal records in the U.S. but insisted that the absence of such a history ‘actually highlights the risk they pose.’ ”

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