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Inside Trump’s Lightning-Fast Deportation of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran Prison

The planes full of migrants were in the air just hours after the president invoked wartime authority. Families say innocent people were swept up in the rush.

Obed Navas and his wife, Eirisneb Rodríguez. Photo: Eirisneb Rodríguez

Obed Navas and his wife, Eirisneb Rodríguez. Photo: Eirisneb Rodríguez

The proclamation hit the White House website just before 4 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday: President Trump was invoking wartime powers to immediately deport alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. In less than four hours, three planes with more than 250 migrants were in the air.

At an immigration detention facility in Texas that morning, many of the men knew they were about to be deported but thought they were headed home to Venezuela. Some told family members they were even happy that their ordeal in America appeared to be over.

“He was relieved because he was ready to leave the hole where he had been,” Eirisneb Rodríguez said, recounting a call last Friday from her husband, Obed Navas, a barber who lived in Sherman, Texas.

The next night, the Venezuelans stepped off planes to learn they had landed in El Salvador. There, President Nayib Bukele’s government met them with hundreds of soldiers and police officers in riot gear to film their handover and lock them up in the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, known as the world’s largest prison and home to the country’s most violent gang members.

On Sunday morning, family members began recognizing the Venezuelans in a cinematic video posted on social media and shared by the White House. The video shows the deportees—now prisoners—being marched into the maximum-security prison, stripped of their clothes and made to kneel while their hair was sheared. One young Venezuelan man began weeping and begging to see his mother, said a person who was present. 

The White House signaled that the use of wartime powers to send deportees to a Salvadoran prison and broadcasting their treatment was meant to serve as a deterrent. The Trump administration is “encouraging illegal immigrants to actively self-deport, to maybe save themselves from being in one of these fun videos,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. She described the deportees as “heinous monsters” and gang members who had invaded the U.S. from Venezuela intent on committing violent crimes. 

 

The showdown between President Trump’s Justice Department and a federal judge over deportation flights to El Salvador is turning into a closely watched test of executive power. WSJ’s Shelby Holliday reports. Illustration: Annie Zhao

Immigration officials said they saw peril in having the Venezuelans—whom they said were members of Tren de Aragua, or TdA, as police call them—on American soil. The president had designated TdA a foreign-terrorist organization, and his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 cited an invasion by TdA, giving what immigration authorities said was the legal tool to carry out lightning-fast expulsions of the gang’s members.

“It was critical to remove TdA members quickly,” Robert Cerna, an acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement field-office director who works on removal operations, said in a federal court filing this week. “These individuals were designated as foreign terrorists.”

The Wall Street Journal spoke with the families of seven of the deported Venezuelan migrants who had all left their homes between late 2023 and last year for the U.S., where they applied for political asylum. Many of the men, who worked as barbers and at other jobs, are married with small children. They were detained in the days after Trump took office in January, accused of being affiliated with TdA and sent to detention centers in Texas.

 

Nighttime view of a prison entrance with guards.
The Venezuelan migrants are being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as the world’s largest prison and home to El Salvador’s most violent gang members. Photo: Alex Peña/Getty Images

 

Some families said the accusations of gang membership weren’t true. Lawyers for the migrants said the Venezuelans’ abrupt transfer to a Salvadoran prison was illegal and based on flimsy evidence: the tattoos that many of the men have. Their affiliation with the gang wasn’t adjudicated by a court, their lawyers said, and many weren’t accused of any crimes. 

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has questioned whether the Trump administration defied a court order demanding that any planes be turned around until he could determine whether the wartime powers were invoked properly. Boasberg scheduled a hearing for Friday on whether he should extend his earlier order blocking Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to carry out deportation flights.

Justice Department officials said two of the planes were already out of American airspace by the time the judge’s written order came down, and the other plane held migrants deported under a different law. 

Martín Rosenow, a Miami immigration lawyer, said his client Franco José Caraballo was taken to El Salvador without a chance to show he wasn’t a gang member.

“They’re using tattoos to show that people are members of the gang, and that is all they’re using,” said Rosenow. Immigration agents detained Caraballo on Feb. 3 when he had gone for his immigration appointment in Dallas. 

Roughly half the 261 deportees were removed under Trump’s wartime authority, according to the White House. Another 101 were removed under Title 8, or regular immigration proceedings, and 23 were members of El Salvador’s MS-13 gang. 

 

Franco José Caraballo and Johanny Sanchez on their wedding day.
Franco José Caraballo with his wife, Johanny Sánchez. He is among those detained in El Salvador. Photo: Johanny Sánchez

 

ICE officials said they vetted each Venezuelan, taking court records, interviews with suspected members, surveillance and other evidence into account. “ICE did not simply rely on social-media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures or tattoos alone,” Cerna said in his filing.

Among those detained was César Francisco Tovar, 23 years old, who had come to the U.S. with his family in October 2023, claimed political asylum and started work in a barbershop. His wife, Yulainy Herrera, said police on Jan. 27 pulled him over in San Antonio, where they had been living, and asked to see his driver’s license. 

Sitting in the front seat, she turned to watch as the officers had him take off his jacket so they could see the tattoos of roses, clocks, an eye and a cross on his left arm. They took photos of the tattoos, she said, and put him in the back of the patrol car. An officer told her he was being held because he didn’t have a driver’s license.

The next day, calling from the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, Tovar told her “it wasn’t because of the license” but rather his tattoos. She said he was told immigration authorities tied him to Tren de Aragua. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office didn’t respond to a detailed email seeking comment. ICE officials also didn’t respond for comment about Tovar and the other detained Venezuelans whose families the Journal contacted.

 

César Francisco Tovar holding his daughter, Alanna Sophia, in a car.
César Francisco Tovar, with his daughter. Tovar claimed political asylum when he came to the U.S. Photo: Yulainy Herrera

 

“They identify the gang members with the tattoos, and so they say they’re with the Tren,” said Herrera, who has a 9-month-old baby with Tovar and is expecting another. “But many people have those in Venezuela. People like them. That doesn’t mean you’re with a gang.”

The use of tattoos by Tren de Aragua, a group that began to be noticed in the U.S. about two years ago, isn’t as central to its membership as is the case with, say, El Salvador’s MS-13, said Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight Crime, which tracks organized-crime groups in Latin America.

Herrera said she had now lost all contact with her husband in El Salvador. He has no access to a lawyer and no way to get home to Venezuela, she said.

Deportation flights to El Salvador

 

U.S.

A third plane had yet to take off.

Harlingen

Flight locations when the judge ordered a halt at 6:48 p.m.

Mexico

Honduras

Gua.

Plane 1

Comayagua

Plane 2

El Salvador Intl. Airport

Plane 3

El Salvador

Note: Eastern times
Source: Flightradar24
Carl Churchill/WSJ

 

She said their dream of building a new life in the U.S. is gone. “We wanted to come here and make a living and save up, then go back to Venezuela and buy a house and have a business,” she said.

Venezuelan officials said they attempted to pick up the deportees last Friday to repatriate them, but poor weather prevented them from landing in Texas.

Instead, the migrants were designated as the first to leave under Trump’s wartime-powers invocation, which immigration officials said they considered official when the proclamation was posted to the White House website on Saturday afternoon.

Boasberg held an emergency hearing to temporarily block the deportations. At the time the order was issued on Saturday evening, one plane was still on the ground in Texas and two others were hours from reaching El Salvador. All three landed at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras—an airport where last month deportees had been transferred to Venezuelan aircraft to go home. 

 

Man in red shirt and baseball glove.
Francisco Javier Garcia had migrated to the U.S. to work as a barber. Photo: Mirelys Casique

 

This time, the planes were routed to El Salvador. In Venezuela, families began wondering what happened when they lost contact with their detained relatives. Francisco Javier Garcia, a 24-year-old Venezuelan who migrated to the U.S. to work as a barber, called his mother every day—and then suddenly stopped on Sunday.

Then his mother, Mirelys Casique, saw the video of migrants in El Salvador. She immediately recognized her son.

“It’s my son, I can tell by his ears, his head, his body—I’m his mother,” said Casique. “I felt my heart sink.”

Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com and Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com

Appeared in the March 21, 2025, print edition as 'Behind the Rapid-Fire Migrant Removals'.

Author: Editors Desk, Juan Forero in Bogotá, Colombia, and Vera Bergengruen in Washington

Source: WSJ:

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