Throughout the fall and winter, Alexis Romero de Hernández struggled to accept a grim new routine. She lived in a small town in central Venezuela called Capacho, with her husband and the younger of her two sons. Her eldest, a thirty-one-year-old makeup artist named Andry José Hernández Romero, was being held in an immigration jail in San Diego. He called her every few days, usually late in the afternoon, to reassure her that he was safe. The calls would last about a minute. Alexis had to put money on his calling card to keep them coming. “Mama, relax,” Andry would tell her. “I’m fine. They’re treating us well. What’s bad is that we’re stuck here.”

In Capacho, Andry was a member of a local theatre troupe, and he acted in an annual church procession during the Epiphany, which, in the Spanish-speaking world, is known as El Día de los Reyes Magos, or Three Kings Day. He loved to draw, and had a penchant for bringing aesthetic flourishes to every corner of his life. When he worked as a hotel receptionist for a time, he created balloon decorations in the lobby; at home, he designed costumes and clothes. He made friends easily but, Alexis said, didn’t drink or stay out late. Andry is “very, very humble and very, very open,” she told me, by phone. “He’s comfortable being alone. He cooks for me and helps clean. He’s a homebody.”

In 2023, Andry took a job at a state-run television station in Caracas, the country’s capital. It was an ideal job—he was responsible for prepping the show’s anchors and guests for the screen, and his family, who have a shop that sells glass for mirrors and tables, needed the money. But he was gay and skeptical of the country’s authoritarian regime, which made him a target for abuse. The year he spent in Caracas, Alexis told me, was one of “persecution and discrimination. People in high places always discriminate against those who are lower down. They humiliated him.” At night, after work, he was often followed home and harassed by armed vigilantes aligned with the government; on one occasion, his boss at the station slapped him in front of his co-workers.

When Andry told his parents that he’d decided to leave Venezuela, in late May of 2024, they begged him to stay. “At least see how things go with the elections,” Alexis told him, referring to the country’s Presidential race that August. “His father talked to him, too. But there was no way to convince him not to go.” Andry’s decision initially seemed prescient: the current President, Nicolás Maduro, who appeared to have lost the vote by an overwhelming margin, declared himself the winner. Andry was one of roughly seven hundred and sixty thousand Venezuelans who travelled to the United States during the Biden Administration, traversing an infamously dangerous jungle known as the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama. “He made the journey,” Alexis said. “He wanted to change his life, to reach his potential, and to help us here.”

The first time Andry tried to enter the U.S., he was arrested and sent to Tabasco, Mexico, where a friend helped him download a government app that allowed migrants to make appointments at ports of entry. The system, known as CBP One, was the Biden Administration’s attempt to create a more orderly process for people to enter the country. Part of the premise was to incentivize migrants to come “the right way,” though it often took months for slots to open up. On the morning of August 29th, a U.S. official interviewed Andry at the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego. Andry had no criminal record, and the exchange seemed straightforward.

“Did you claim asylum while in Mexico?” the official asked.

“I didn’t know I could do that,” he replied.

Andry eventually passed his preliminary asylum screening. Officials determined that he demonstrated a “credible fear” of persecution in his home country. But during a physical exam, they had fixated on his tattoos. A snake extending from a bouquet of flowers covers his left forearm and biceps. On each of his wrists is a crown, with the words “Mom” and “Dad” inked next to them in English. The photographs in his file show a thin man, slight of build, with a youthful face and dark hair; there are rings under his eyes, and he is standing before the government photographer without a shirt.

Andry denied belonging to any gang. The agent, who asked him about the tattoos, described his “demeanor during interview” as “uncooperative.” A note was added to his file: “Upon conducting a review of detainee Hernandez’s tattoos it was found that detainee Hernandez has a crown on each one of his wrist. The crown has been found to be an identifier for a Tren de Aragua gang member.” These crowns, according to the government, were “determining factors to conclude reasonable suspicion.”

Often, asylum seekers who pass their initial screening are released with a future court date, but Andry remained in custody, apparently because of the government’s suspicions about his tattoos. In December, three months into his detention, he met Paulina Reyes, a lawyer from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a legal-advocacy organization, who agreed to represent him on a pro-bono basis. Reyes filed an asylum application on Andry’s behalf. They spoke regularly, both in person and on the phone, while waiting for a court appearance scheduled for March 13th.

About a week before the hearing, Andry and a number of other Venezuelans in San Diego were transferred to a facility in South Texas. Reyes, whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had neglected to inform, found this out when Andry called her from Texas. That was the last time the two of them spoke. During his March 13th hearing, in San Diego, Reyes thought he might appear on video. When he did not, the proceedings were postponed until March 17th. Reyes wasn’t able to speak with him, so she didn’t realize that, on Friday, March 14th, he’d managed to make one last phone call to his mother. He told her he was fine, but that the government was about to transfer him again. He had no information about his destination.

When Andry failed to appear at his second hearing, the immigration judge wanted to know why the government wasn’t making him available. “He was removed to El Salvador,” the ICE lawyer replied. “We just found out today.” This surprised the judge, who was there to determine whether or not Andry should be deported. “How can he be removed to El Salvador,” the judge asked, “if there’s no removal order?”

On March 14th: Donald Trump had signed a proclamation declaring that his Administration would begin using vastly expanded Presidential powers under the Alien Enemies Act—a law from 1798 that had previously been invoked just three times, supplying the rationale for the U.S. government to target British nationals during the War of 1812, to intern Germans during the First World War, and to intern Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants during the second. The law allows the President to detain and deport immigrants living lawfully in the U.S. if they are from countries considered “enemies” of the government. In this case, Trump claimed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, operating “in conjunction” with elements of the Maduro government, had “infiltrated the United States” and was “conducting irregular warfare.”

The White House didn’t make the proclamation public for another day. In the meantime, the government was secretly putting Venezuelans who were in federal custody on planes, readying them for deportation. Andry was one of them; there were two hundred and thirty-seven others who, like him, were accused of belonging to the gang. The vast majority were involved in pending immigration cases but were not given an opportunity to contest the alleged evidence against them. 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.”

El Salvador is a conspicuously punitive destination. The country’s President, Nayib Bukele, has suspended parts of the country’s constitution and, during the past three years, jailed more than eighty thousand alleged gang members without clear charges. In February, after a meeting in San Salvador with Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, Bukele offered to house immigrants who’d been arrested on American soil in his newly built prison, which is called the Terrorism Confinement Center. “We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” Bukele wrote on X. “The fee would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”

On the day that Trump signed the order, Lee Gelernt, a veteran litigator with the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in immigrants’ rights, was in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., arguing a case about another controversial decision recently made by the Administration. In February, the President had sent a hundred and seventy-eight Venezuelan men from U.S. detention to the military compound at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After the A.C.L.U. brought a legal challenge, the Department of Homeland Security deported the men to Venezuela, evidently to avoid a court fight over their access to legal representation. But the government said that it planned to send more migrants to Guantánamo. Gelernt was trying to insure that they’d have access to lawyers. In the hours before the hearing, he’d also been monitoring early news reports that the President was preparing to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport more Venezuelan migrants.

As soon as the hearing ended, Gelernt rushed back to his hotel, where he worked through the night with his A.C.L.U. colleagues to prepare an emergency lawsuit. The idea was to prevent the government from deporting anyone under the Alien Enemies Act while the case could be argued in court. “If people already had final orders of removal, the government doesn’t need the Alien Enemies Act,” Gelernt told me. “Using the Alien Enemies Act is all about short-circuiting the immigration process, not only to eliminate hearings in immigration court but to be able to send them wherever the government wants.”