Walking and traveling by bus and taxi through Central America and Mexico, Andry José Hernández Romero hoped to find a new life in the U.S. He used a U.S. Customs and Border Protection phone app to arrange an appointment at a U.S. border crossing in San Diego.
That’s where he was asked about his tattoos, and where his trouble started.
U.S. immigration authorities use a series of “gang identifiers” to help them spot members of Tren de Aragua. Some are obvious, such as trafficking drugs with known Tren members.
Some identifiers are more surprising: Chicago Bulls jerseys, “high-end urban street wear,” and tattoos of clocks, stars or crowns, according to government instructional material filed in court by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Tattoos were key to marking many deported men as Tren members, according to documents and lawyers.
Romero, who is in his early 20s, has a crown tattooed on each wrist. One is next to the word “Mom.” The other next to “Dad.” The crowns, according to his lawyer, also pay homage to his hometown’s Christmastime “Three Kings” festival, and to his work in beauty pageants, where crowns are common.
Romero, who insists he has no ties to Tren, was taken into ICE custody and transferred to a California detention center.
And then, around March 7, he was suddenly moved to a facility in Laredo, Texas, a three-hour bus ride from the Harlingen airport.
Friday, March 14, was supposed to be quiet for Javier Maldonado.
“I had come in to work late, like 10 in the morning,” said Maldonado, a Texas immigration lawyer based in San Antonio. “I was having my coffee, and thought I was going to do admin work and catch up on emails and phone calls.”
He was wrong.
The Alien Enemies Act was hours away from being invoked, and more than a day from being announced, but word was starting to filter out from a group of Venezuelan men held at El Valle Detention Center, near Harlingen. Around 3 a.m., roughly 100 had been roused from sleep by guards and told they were being deported. Some were told they would be flown to Mexico, some to Venezuela. Many were told nothing.
Ten hours later, the men were back in their bunks. The flight had been canceled, they were told, and they would leave soon.
But a few men contacted relatives or lawyers.
Within hours, an informal legal network was frantically at work, from a lawyer in Brooklyn to a law school professor in Los Angeles to a University of Florida law student interning with an El Paso immigrant advocacy firm. All were working with Texas lawyers like Maldonado who would file petitions in federal court.
“It’s a small circle, relatively, of lawyers that do this sort of work,” he said.
Even people who cross illegally into the U.S. have rights. Some of the men the lawyers were defending have Temporary Protected Status, a legal classification that shields roughly 350,000 Venezuelans from deportation.
Communication between lawyers and detainees was often chaotic. Messages sometimes were relayed through relatives in Venezuela.
But guards, said one man, had made something clear.
“The order from the president is to deport them all.”
Trump was aboard Air Force One that Friday when he invoked the Alien Enemies Act en route to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Tren de Aragua, his proclamation said, was attempting “an invasion or predatory incursion” of the United States.
Publicly, though, the administration said nothing.
Still, word was spreading about the planned flights to El Salvador. A Texas lawyer had filmed a bus leaving the El Valle facility under police escort, apparently heading to the airport.
While Trump’s use of the law had not yet been announced, two legal advocacy groups, the ACLU and Democracy Forward, felt they had to file preemptively.
“We couldn’t take a chance that nothing was going to happen,” said Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, the lead attorney.
They spent hours drafting a petition on behalf of five detained Venezuelans who feared being falsely labeled members of Tren and deported. They crafted legal arguments until they felt time was running out.
Finally, they filed the petition with the U.S. District Court in Washington, seeking to halt all deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
It was 2:16 a.m. Saturday.
Later that day, after Judge James E. Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order in response to the ACLU lawsuit and scheduled a 5 p.m. hearing, things in Texas began to move faster.
Guards gathered prisoners at the El Valle detention center, ordering them onto buses for the airport at about 3:30 p.m.
The flights carried a total of 261 deportees, the White House later said, including 137 Venezuelans deported under the Alien Enemies Act, 101 under other immigration regulations, and 23 El Salvadoran members of the gang MS-13.
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