How the Trump Administration declared war on Venezuelan migrants in the U.S.
“It was a kidnapping,” Deicy Aldana said after her partner, Andrés Guillermo Morales Rolón, was sent to El Salvador.Photograph by Fabiola Ferrero for The New Yorker
The plane took off from Texas just before five-thirty on the evening of March 15th. By then, Yoderlyn Daviana Acosta Peña, a twenty-one-year-old from Caracas, had been wearing chains around her ankles and wrists for ten hours. Her skin was cut and irritated, and yet she felt relieved, even excited. Her boyfriend was sitting near the back of the aircraft. After six weeks in multiple immigration jails, she’d been told—along with the other passengers, including seven women and dozens of men, most of them Venezuelan—that they were finally being deported.
A year and a half earlier, Acosta Peña, the eldest of seven siblings, had left Venezuela with one of her brothers to earn money to send home to their family. The trip lasted four months and spanned seven countries. In Honduras, after sudden bouts of nausea, she learned that she was pregnant. When Acosta Peña and her brother turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents in Eagle Pass, Texas, she was entering her third trimester and determined to reach Chicago, a sanctuary city where, she’d learned from TikTok, she could get medical attention and start to look for work. The governor of Texas was sending migrants there on buses. Three days later, she had a bed in one of the city’s shelters. At a nearby medical clinic, she miscarried.
Maikol Gabriel López Lizano was two years older than Acosta Peña, warm and polite. Originally from La Guaira, on Venezuela’s central coast, he had left the country in 2019, with his mother and four siblings, because, he told me, “there’s no future for us there.” After living in Peru for three years, he decided to travel north. He and Acosta Peña met in another migrant shelter in Chicago. López Lizano spoke with a kind of halting formality, which charmed her. They found steady jobs—he in a mechanic’s garage, she in a factory that molded plastics—and moved in together in January of 2025, after dating for a few months.
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On February 1st, less than two weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, Acosta Peña and López Lizano were arrested by immigration officers at a service area outside Chicago. The couple were planning to move to Denver, where López Lizano’s mother lived, and they were running errands to prepare for the trip. “I’d been stopped before,” Acosta Peña told me. “All I had to do was show my immigration papers.” She kept them in her purse; one document authorized her to work and another listed the date of her immigration hearing, which was scheduled for October, 2027. But the officers asked a question that confused her. “I have eleven tattoos,” she told me. “They asked me if I could verify them.”
Most detainees in American immigration facilities are given a uniform in a particular color. Blue jumpsuits indicate an immigration infraction or a minor criminal charge; red ones denote a more serious crime. During her first month in detention, as Acosta Peña was moved among jails in Indiana, Kentucky, and Wisconsin, she was dressed in blue. On March 9th, when she was sent to Laredo, Texas, her uniform changed to red. It was there that she learned the government was accusing her of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, an allegation she found absurd.
At the Laredo detention center, the men and women were held in separate wings. Acosta Peña joined a group of seventeen Venezuelan women, some of whom had been jailed for more than six months. Within the Department of Homeland Security, Venezuelans had a reputation for being “hard to deal with,” a former official told me. “They were called los hijos de Chávez”—the children of Hugo Chávez, the country’s anti-imperialist former President—“because Chávez put this idea in their minds that the U.S. owed them something, that the U.S. was oppressing them.” In Laredo, according to the women, the guards regularly withheld food and medicine. One of the women later told a Venezuelan journalist that she was dragged into an isolation cell known as el hueco, or the hole, as punishment for asking a guard not to throw away her food. “I’m just doing my job,” the guard told her. (D.H.S. denied the existence of “subprime conditions” at Laredo and said any allegation that ICE withheld food or medicine was false.)
Two days after Acosta Peña arrived in Laredo, a prison official said that she was being sent to Venezuela. On the morning of March 15th, the women were shackled and taken from their cells by ICE officers, who seemed rushed and slightly flustered. Of the eighteen women at the detention center, only eight of them, including Acosta Peña, were led to a bus that would bring them to the airport. “Where are the others?” one of the women asked. An official replied, “There isn’t enough space on the plane for everyone.” The bus left for Harlingen, a few hours away, where, later that afternoon, the women were taken onto a plane emblazoned with the letter “X”—for GlobalX, a charter airline.
Eighty-three detainees were on board, most of them Venezuelan men, including López Lizano. There were twenty-eight guards. The plane’s window shades remained closed for the entire flight, and a guard at the front of the plane shouted at anyone who spoke. Two hours after taking off, the plane landed in Honduras, where it sat on the tarmac for more than three hours. Just after midnight, it touched down for a second time. Acosta Peña, who was in a window seat, lifted the shade. “All I saw was puro monte,” she told me—the sticks. Agents dressed in black, with masks covering their faces, stood in formation on the tarmac. “This isn’t Venezuela!” she shouted.
ICE officials began passing out papers with text in untranslated English, which the passengers were told to sign. One woman did so in a panic. Acosta Peña refused. Another detainee, who could read English, told the group, “Don’t sign this! It says that we’re members of Tren de Aragua.”
A day earlier, Trump had signed, in secret, a proclamation that authorized the government, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer suspected Tren de Aragua members out of the country without due process. “Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States,” the order stated. “As President of the United States and Commander in Chief, it is my solemn duty to protect the American people from the devastating effects of this invasion.” Acosta Peña, López Lizano, and the others were passengers on one of three planes that arrived in El Salvador in the early hours of March 16th.
Acosta Peña could see men in handcuffs and chains being led off another plane. She began to scream, calling out for López Lizano. An ICE officer emerged from the front of the plane, grabbed her by the hair, and punched her in the face. “Bitch,” he said. “Fuck you.” The officer was a güero, Acosta Peña told me—blond and light-skinned. The only identifying information she could glimpse, between punches, was a patch he wore that said “HOU-02,” which seemed to indicate that he worked in ICE’s Houston field office. The other passengers were yelling at him to stop. Another guard rushed over to restrain him.
As the men were forced to disembark, several of the women started to sob. One man was left seated with them—a Nicaraguan whom ICE had mistakenly included on the flights. “I overheard a Salvadoran official tell an ICE officer that the Salvadoran government would not detain someone from another Central American country, because of the conflict it would cause,” the Nicaraguan said in a subsequent court declaration. “I also heard him say that they would not receive the females.”
The ICE officer made a phone call. When he hung up, he said that the women and the Nicaraguan would have to be sent back to the U.S. The other passengers were being transferred to the custody of the Salvadoran government, to be held in a notoriously brutal prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center—also known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT.
A decade earlier, a team of Venezuelan police officers, out on a routine patrol along a beach in the state of Aragua, spotted a luxury yacht floating placidly off the coast. When they boarded the vessel, one of the officers later told the Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, a passenger identified himself as Héctor Guerrero Flores. The officers knew him by his nom de guerre: El Niño Guerrero, the head of the prison gang Tren de Aragua. He was supposed to be in pretrial detention in Tocorón, a prison thirty miles away, for multiple alleged crimes, including attempted murder. Guerrero produced a document from the ministry of prisons that granted him permission to travel. When the officers called their bosses, the order they received was unequivocal: “Withdraw.”
At the time, many of Venezuela’s prisons were governed from the inside by an inmate known as a pran—which, according to some sources, is an acronym that roughly translates to “natural-born killer.” The gang that forms around him is called a carro, or car. It operates outside the prison through affiliated groups, controlling territory and generating revenue through extortion and drug sales. According to Andrés Antillano, a professor of criminology at the Central University of Venezuela, these cars, strung together in the service of the pran, make up a tren, or train. There are several such operations across the country, each bearing the name of the state or region where it operates.
Tren de Aragua, which was founded by Guerrero and four close associates, first came to the attention of Venezuelan law enforcement around 2014. Aragua, an industrial state with a large military presence, offered a number of geographic and material advantages to a burgeoning criminal enterprise. Money flowed to Tren de Aragua from gold mines that it controlled and from taxes that its members imposed on local businesses. In other states across the country, convicts were funnelled into a range of different facilities, but in Aragua the system was more centralized, and the main prison was Tocorón. As a result, the gang was able to rapidly grow its ranks: virtually everyone sentenced for criminal activity would, at some point, need to submit to the authority of its pran.
By 2017, a sharp drop in oil prices, coupled with catastrophic government mismanagement, had led to extreme inflation and an economic collapse in Venezuela. There were food shortages and power outages; a bottle of ketchup might cost nine dollars, while the monthly minimum wage was six dollars. More than seven million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past decade, an exodus that has reshaped life and politics across Latin America.
For criminal organizations, mass migration created a new business model. Tren de Aragua, Rísquez writes, managed “to follow those who emigrated, by land, to other countries in Latin America, mixing in with them and applying their strategies to impose control in each place they reached.” Starting in 2018, authorities in Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil reported incidents involving Tren de Aragua. The gang’s operations were expanding to include the trafficking of migrants and prostitution. A few years later, the body of a former Venezuelan military officer and opposition figure was found in a suitcase in Santiago. Chilean prosecutors accused Tren de Aragua of carrying out the hit.
But, for the most part, the gang’s influence outside Venezuela amounted to disparate groups operating under the Tren de Aragua banner, either as minor partners in smuggling or drug-dealing rings or as something more akin to franchisees—independently run local organizations that used the name of the broader brand. One of the enduring principles of gangland public relations is that there’s no such thing as bad press; in fact, the more people talk about a criminal group, the easier it becomes to intimidate potential victims. “Tren de Aragua is phantasmagorical,” Antillano told me. “It’s everywhere. It has no face, no clear expression. It can be molded.”
In 2022, when record numbers of Venezuelans began making the overland journey to Central America and the United States, Tren de Aragua was reported to be active on the outskirts of the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle linking Colombia and Panama. That October, the Department of Homeland Security got its first tip about Tren de Aragua, from an investigation in Lima, Peru. “We were seeing criminal activity following the Venezuelan diaspora,” a former high-ranking D.H.S. official told me. It would be a year before government intelligence suggested that the gang was present in the U.S. Another former D.H.S. official told me that the department ultimately estimated that there were about a thousand potential members in the country. “Even then,” he said, “the connections to the gang were weak or spurious.”
Monitoring a transnational gang like Tren de Aragua would typically fall under the purview of Homeland Security Investigations, which is a branch of ICE. But, according to one of the former officials, “Border Patrol was taking the lead.” This was both unusual and revealing. “H.S.I. was saying that Tren de Aragua wasn’t a normal gang that posed the same level of concern as a group like MS-13,” the former official said, referring to the infamous Salvadoran gang, which formed in the U.S. and at one point had as many as ten thousand members in the country. “It was loosely organized. Maybe they were connected with each other, maybe not. Border Patrol was using Tren de Aragua as a shorthand for any Venezuelan men who were doing anything criminal.”
Moises, at home in Colorado.Photograph by Benjamin Rasmussen for The New Yorker
Border Patrol employed highly subjective markers to identify alleged gang membership. One of these, which experts like Antillano and Rísquez dismissed as completely unreliable, was tattoos. U.S. authorities tried to index images and phrases that they associated with members of Tren de Aragua: clocks, nautical stars, crowns, the Michael Jordan Jumpman logo, and famous phrases from reggaetón songs. The evidence linking these symbols to the gang, according to government documents, came from “open source” information available online. Border Patrol also scrutinized personal associations: Who arrived at the border with them, and what numbers were stored on their phones? At one point, a third former D.H.S. official told me, “there was an artist who performed in Tocorón. One of the questions agents would ask migrants was ‘Did you ever see him perform?’ ” (D.H.S. denied that it used concert attendance to determine Tren de Aragua membership.)
It didn’t take long for vague suppositions to harden into dogma. In 2024, Roger Molina Acevedo, a twenty-nine-year-old Venezuelan from Maracay, in the state of Aragua, was provisionally approved for refugee status through a program called the Safe Mobility Initiative. He had just passed through customs at the Houston airport when an agent asked him if he was Venezuelan and led him into an empty room, where he was accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua. Molina Acevedo overheard two agents talking: “One of them said to the other, ‘He says he’s not Tren de Aragua, but look at his shoes.’ ” Molina Acevedo was wearing a pair of Air Jordans.
By 2024, D.H.S. had tripled the number of local task forces dedicated to Tren de Aragua. It was undeniable that some Venezuelan migrants were committing crimes. There were thefts and assaults in New York City, an uptick in domestic-violence calls from shelters, and robberies in a number of cities, including Chicago and Denver. Grand juries across the country handed down indictments for crimes such as sex trafficking, possession of weapons, and drug dealing. But it’s common to find the perpetrator described in legal documents as an “associate”—rather than a member—of Tren de Aragua. “There’s no one way to say, ‘Aha, this person is clearly a gang member,’ ” one of the D.H.S. sources told me. “What Border Patrol would hang their hat on wouldn’t have flown in domestic law enforcement.”
The ambiguity surrounding gang membership tended to breed distinctly partisan interpretations of recent events. Democrats downplayed the presence of Tren de Aragua; Republicans tried to connect any crime committed by a Venezuelan to the gang. In February, 2024, when a nursing student named Laken Riley was brutally raped and murdered by a Venezuelan immigrant in Georgia, Republicans at the state and national level argued that the perpetrator was connected to Tren de Aragua. (D.H.S. said that the perpetrator is a “suspected” member of the gang.) According to one of the D.H.S. officials, there was no credible connection, but the claim persisted because of its political convenience. “Lots of people are gullible,” he said. “They are going to believe what they’re told, especially if it’s repeated by lots of people.”
On the night of December 22, 2022, Moises, his wife, Carmen, and their ten-year-old daughter stepped off a bus in Denver, and saw snow for the first time. A storm had blanketed the city. The three of them, dressed in flip-flops and T-shirts, were wandering the streets downtown when a woman in a minivan pulled over to offer them a ride. She didn’t speak Spanish, and they didn’t speak English. The driver had to call someone who could explain what Moises was saying: when he mentioned “el quality,” he was referring to a Quality Inn that had recently been converted into a migrant shelter.
The family was from the state of Aragua, though they had been living in Ecuador and Peru since 2017, because at home they’d begun to starve. Their journey to the U.S. lasted four months. Moises broke his foot in the Costa Rican jungle. In Mexico, a migrant mentioned a tranquilo state near the border called Colorado. “We would have gone wherever God told us to go,” Moises said.
A few months after their arrival, Moises, a skilled electrician and handyman, earned enough money to pay a sixteen-hundred-dollar deposit on a one-bedroom apartment. He worked two jobs—on a construction crew, from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon, and at a pizzeria, from four till midnight—but the money he earned barely covered other costs such as food and a used car, without which he couldn’t get to work. That spring, the family learned that cheaper apartments were available at a housing complex in Aurora, a city of four hundred thousand people outside Denver.
The property, on Dallas Street, was an unsightly cluster of brick buildings, each with a run-down interior courtyard. The problems began shortly after the family moved in. There were infestations of mice, bedbugs, and cockroaches. In the winter, the heat didn’t work. One evening, Moises and Carmen returned home from dinner to find the entire apartment flooded from a leak in the ceiling. The lobby doors wouldn’t close, because of busted locks. At night, the entranceway filled with homeless people who came inside to sleep; addicts smoked fentanyl in unoccupied apartments.
“O.K. . . . we take a bite, we get the definitive explanation for why we’re all here and what happens afterward, then we go back to relaxing and hanging out.”
Cartoon by Maddie Dai
The complex’s management company, CBZ, which owned nine properties in the Denver area, had been receiving regular complaints and citations for building-code violations since 2020. The owners of CBZ, brothers from Brooklyn named Shmaryahu and Zev Baumgarten, had expanded their holdings to Colorado around the time that a tenant-protection law passed in New York in 2019. The legislation, Maureen Tkacik wrote in The American Prospect, “triggered a landlord diaspora toward more permissive regions.” But, even in Denver, CBZ racked up tens of thousands of dollars in penalties. (CBZ did not respond to a request for comment.)
At the Dallas Street property, small cliques of armed men, mostly Venezuelans and Mexicans, fought an ongoing turf war. Some of them, according to Moises and Carmen, moved friends and family into the building. These apartments, the residents said, were tomados, or taken over. Many of the tenants were forced to pay a tax known as a vacuna, or vaccine, because it inoculated them from harassment. “You couldn’t come back late, because you didn’t know what you were going to find,” Moises said. “The guys had weapons.”
Between 2022 and 2024, the Denver metropolitan area received more new immigrants, per capita, than anywhere else in the country—some forty thousand, the vast majority of them from Venezuela. At first, the Venezuelans found their own way to the city. But beginning in May of 2023, around twenty thousand Venezuelans arrived on a fleet of buses chartered by Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who claimed that his state had been “invaded.” Many residents were unnerved by the sudden arrival of so many people. Venezuelans washed car windows for tips at stoplights and congregated in the parking lots of Home Depot and other stores, looking for work. “You wouldn’t see it, and then all of a sudden it was all you’d see,” a Mexican pastor of a local ministry told me.
Certain events contributed to the impression that the city had lost control of its newest residents. On July 28, 2024, thousands of people gathered in the parking lot of a Target in Aurora to celebrate what was widely forecast to be the defeat of the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in that day’s election. Many of the Venezuelans I met in Aurora had been there, including Moises and Carmen, who painted their car in yellow, blue, and red, the colors of the Venezuelan flag. Maduro appeared to lose the election but claimed victory anyway, and protests erupted in Venezuela. In Aurora, some of the attendees became drunk and rowdy. Someone fired gunshots into the air. “It allowed people to see a whole cross-section of the Venezuelans in Aurora,” Jesús Sánchez Meleán, the editor of El Comercio de Colorado, the state’s most prominent Spanish-language newspaper, told me. “The families who came out to celebrate, and others who were up to no good.”
That same day, a gunfight broke out at a CBZ residence on Nome Street, injuring three people. By then, the city of Aurora was already planning to condemn the property. The three to four hundred people who lived there were given a week’s notice to vacate the premises. CBZ, meanwhile, was delinquent on a series of loan payments and mired in lawsuits. The company began to argue that Tren de Aragua members had prevented it from maintaining the property and collecting rent. On August 5th, journalists in the area received an e-mail from Red Banyan, a Florida-based public-relations company that CBZ had hired as part of its legal campaign. “An apartment building and its owners in Aurora, Colorado, have become the most recent victims of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua’s violence, which has taken over several communities in the Denver area,” the e-mail said. “The residents and building owners of these properties have been left in a state of fear and chaos.”
On August 18th, Cindy Romero, an American tenant of CBZ’s Dallas Street property, recorded a video of six men with rifles storming a hallway in her building. The footage from her doorbell camera, which was later broadcast on the local news, went viral. Right-wing media seized on the story, using it to attack President Joe Biden. Danielle Jurinsky, a first-term city-council member, had been accusing the Aurora Police Department of failing to take the Venezuelan gang threat seriously. She visited the apartment complexes to interview residents and made regular appearances on Fox News. “It got to a point where I could identify a lot of these gang members myself,” she told me. Art Acevedo, then the chief of the Aurora Police Department, told me, “Was there Tren de Aragua presence? Yes. Were parts of the city overrun? Total hyperbole.” (All told, the Aurora Police Department has arrested ten people alleged of being tied to the gang.)
Trump began calling out Tren de Aragua on the stump. In October, he travelled to Aurora to deliver a speech, and Cindy Romero joined him onstage. He had promised to carry out mass deportations nationwide, but now he gave that effort a name: Operation Aurora. Laura Lunn, an immigration attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, told me, “People had contacted me about the apartment complexes in Aurora, and I thought, This isn’t an immigration issue—it’s about a slumlord and a shitty housing complex where immigrants live. Then Trump said he would start mass deportations in Aurora. That’s when I started paying attention.” To the assembled crowd, Trump explained that, if he was elected, his Administration would invoke the Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport immigrants lawfully in the U.S. who came from countries deemed “enemies” of the state.
One of Trump’s last acts before leaving office, in 2021, was to extend a form of protected status to some two hundred thousand Venezuelans. The memorandum mentioned the “deteriorative condition” of their country under Maduro and called for the “deferral of the removal of Venezuelan nationals who are present in the United States.” In 2022, Senator Marco Rubio—now Trump’s Secretary of State—called deportation to Venezuela “a very real death sentence.”
During the Biden Presidency, the government faced a double bind with Venezuelans: Their country, run by a vicious dictator and beset by a humanitarian crisis, had for years refused to accept deportations from the U.S. To manage the flow of arrivals, Biden eventually granted various forms of parole and legal relief to more than half a million Venezuelans, allowing them to enter the country legally and begin working. But the government couldn’t screen everyone it released at the border. Reports of criminal activity became a source of acute political anxiety. Late one December night in the final weeks of Biden’s term, a large team of police arrived at the Dallas Street apartment complex. A couple living there had been taken to an empty apartment in one of the buildings, tied to chairs, and beaten, before managing to escape and call the police. The officers went floor by floor, seizing people and handing many of them over to ICE agents. (An Aurora Police Department spokesperson told me that such collaboration “is nothing new to law enforcement.”)
The new Administration took such measures to an unprecedented extreme. Once Trump returned to the White House, Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff and top immigration adviser, demanded that ICE arrest three thousand people across the country every day. Denver, with its high number of recently arrived Venezuelans, was a natural place for the effort to begin. ICE has a large privately run immigration jail in Aurora that serves as a kind of hub for arrests made in the region. But, even at its most aggressive clip, ICE initially struggled to fill it. The White House has since expanded the pool of arrestable immigrants by cancelling or simply ignoring the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people. The U.S. government knows who these immigrants are and where they live because they willingly shared their personal information. “Those folks were the easiest ones for them to find,” Mike Johnston, Denver’s mayor, told me. “But they were the ones who should have the most legal protections.”
On February 5th, armed agents from ICE, working in partnership with Customs and Border Protection, the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service launched a sprawling operation in the Denver area to target “100+ members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.” Residents at apartment complexes in Aurora and Denver said that officers went door to door, demanding to know whether the tenants were U.S. citizens. They used battering rams and flash-bang grenades. Jordan Garcia, a veteran community organizer with the Colorado branch of the American Friends Service Committee, travelled to Cedar Run, one of the Denver housing complexes that was raided, to record video and provide assistance. “There was so much weaponry,” he told me. “All the agents’ faces were covered.”
Cartoon by John O’Brien
I obtained a copy of a search warrant for one of the buildings that was raided in Denver. Typically, a warrant is directed at a person or a group suspected of having committed a specific crime. The warrant I reviewed simply gave an address and a photograph of a building where authorities might find evidence of an immigration infraction. An attachment titled “Description of Items to Be Seized and Searched” listed “identification documents issued by the government of any country,” “documents relevant to determining the target’s location or travel” to the United States, and “any document relevant to country of nativity or citizenship.” These items were noteworthy, according to the warrant, insofar as they might “constitute evidence” of “improper entry by alien.”
By the end of the operation, ICE had reportedly arrested thirty people, only one of whom was said to be a member of Tren de Aragua. Tim Macdonald, the legal director of the A.C.L.U. of Colorado, told me about a family with two children whose door had been kicked in. They had asylum applications pending and, just a few days before, had gone to a local ICE office for their biometric scans. Macdonald, who interviewed the family afterward, told me that they had since been deported to Venezuela. “After the flash-bangs and the screaming kids, the family said, ‘Here are our asylum petitions. We just came from an ICE interview.’ The officers said sorry and left,” Macdonald recounted. “Then, a short time later, they came back and took the dad away.”
Deicy Aldana, a twenty-six-year-old from Colombia, had lived in Denver for eight months when her partner, Andrés Guillermo Morales Rolón, who is Venezuelan, was arrested on the morning of February 5th at their apartment, on South Oneida Street. Aldana and Morales Rolón were awakened around dawn by agents banging on their door. Morales Rolón’s father, who lived with them and slept in the living room, made the mistake of opening it. “When they took Andrés,” Aldana told me, “they asked for his immigration papers, and he had them.” A day later, while visiting Morales Rolón at the ICE detention center in Aurora, Aldana learned that the government was accusing him of being a gang member. “It was a kidnapping,” she told me. “They had nothing incriminating on him.”
In March, ICE announced the arrest of Jeanette Vizguerra, a prominent Mexican activist who has been in the U.S. since 1997 and who spent three years during Trump’s first term living in sanctuary in a Denver church. Officers were waiting for her in the parking lot of a Target where she worked as a cashier. In 2017, Vizguerra was named one of the hundred most influential people of the year by Time. Johnston, the mayor, summarized the government’s message as: “If we can come for the most famous of you . . . then any one of you should be afraid.”
The Mexican pastor, who’s undocumented, told me that a group of activists had asked him to speak at a vigil for Vizguerra outside the Aurora detention center, where she’s still being held. “I decided not to,” he said, ruefully. “They could focus on you if you do something like that.”
Prior to March 14th, the Alien Enemies Act had been invoked just three times—during the War of 1812 and the First and Second World Wars. The day after Trump signed his proclamation, a federal judge in Washington issued a temporary restraining order that blocked deportation flights from leaving the country under the new policy. When he did so, Acosta Peña’s plane and the two others, which carried more than two hundred Venezuelan men—along with the eight women, a group of Salvadorans, and the Nicaraguan—hadn’t yet reached El Salvador. Two of them were in Honduras, and the other remained on the tarmac in Texas. In court, a government lawyer claimed not to have known about these flights. This assertion, according to a subsequent whistle-blower complaint, was false. Emil Bove, a senior official at the Department of Justice who has since been confirmed to an appellate-court judgeship, told colleagues that they needed to “consider telling the courts ‘fuck you.’ ” (Bove denies this.)
The Trump Administration presented its use of the Alien Enemies Act as a matter of national security, saying that Maduro was conspiring with Tren de Aragua to infiltrate the U.S. and undermine the country from within. The U.S. intelligence community widely rejected the premise, but the White House was undeterred. This past spring, reporting revealed that a top official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had pressured his colleagues to “rethink” their assessment that there was no direct link between Maduro and gang activity. “Flooding our nation with ‘migrants’ and especially ‘migrants’ who are part of a violent criminal gang,” he wrote in an e-mail, “is the action of a hostile nation, even if the gov of Venezuela isn’t specifically tasking or enabling TDA operations.”
A senior Administration official told me that the plan to send Venezuelans to El Salvador had been conceived during the Presidential transition. “It was always on the table,” he said. “It actually took longer than we thought it would.” A diplomatic agreement with the Salvadoran government was drawn up in secret: the U.S. would pay El Salvador six million dollars to house migrants for the “duration of one year.” (The Salvadoran government did not respond to a request for comment.)
A report in ProPublica confirmed, using government data, that the Trump Administration knew that the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelans—at least a hundred and ninety-seven of them—had never been convicted of a crime in the United States. Among the few who had been, most were guilty of nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic infractions. A government spokesperson said, in response to the report, that those who were labelled “non-criminals” were, in fact, “terrorists, human-rights abusers, gang members, and more—they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.” But a team of Venezuelan investigative journalists consulted a set of domestic and international gang databases and found that none of the men sent to El Salvador appeared on them.
The Administration official told me that the government determined gang membership based on “a totality” of factors—“the whole person, the language they use, how they communicate with each other.” In fact, ICE officers were given a document called the “Alien Enemy Validation Guide,” which supplied a point system based on different categories of potentially incriminating behavior. Tattoos, which fall under the “Symbolism” category, constitute four points; social-media posts “displaying” gang symbols are two points. If an immigrant in custody scored eight points or higher, according to the document, he “may be validated” as a gang member.
Roger Molina Acevedo, who had been provisionally approved for refugee status, was sent on one of the first flights to El Salvador.Photograph by Fabiola Ferrero for The New Yorker
On March 13th, Cardier, a father of three who lived in Aurora, received a call from his son, who said that he was going to be deported the following day. Two years earlier, his son had been kidnapped and held for ransom outside Denver by a group of men claiming to belong to Tren de Aragua. Cardier, who had worked in state government in Venezuela, believed that the kidnappers had mentioned the gang only to try to get more ransom money. His son eventually escaped. Later that year, however, he was arrested for selling cocaine, and eventually pleaded guilty to possession. A public defender had said that, because his conviction was for a “minor crime,” he had a decent chance of being allowed to stay in the U.S. But in October, 2024, while he was on probation, ICE agents came to his apartment and arrested him.
On the day that his son was supposed to be deported, Cardier turned on a Venezuelan news program. Diosdado Cabello, one of the top figures in Maduro’s government, was discussing the Trump Administration’s announcement, earlier in the week, that the government of Venezuela had agreed to resume deportation flights from the U.S. They were scheduled to begin that day, and Cardier assumed that his son would be on one of them. “Cabello was saying something like ‘Here we are, waiting for the planes to arrive, but they’re telling us there’s a technical problem in the United States—it seems that there was a storm, and that the Venezuelans couldn’t leave,’ ” Cardier recalled. “But I’m here in the U.S., and there’s no storm.” The next morning, his son’s girlfriend checked ICE’s detainee locator, which gives the name and address of the detention center where someone is being held, but his son was no longer listed as being in federal custody.
Early on the morning of March 16th, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, posted video footage of Salvadoran agents marching the Venezuelan men into prison and shaving their heads. Four days later, CBS News obtained a list of two hundred and thirty-eight men sent to El Salvador. One of the men, Andry José Hernández Romero, was a gay makeup artist from the state of Táchira whose tattoos—two crowns and the words “Mom” and “Dad”—had led Border Patrol agents to suspect, wrongly, that he belonged to Tren de Aragua. Hernández Romero, like many of the others, had a pending immigration case.
Deicy Aldana, whose partner, Andrés Guillermo Morales Rolón, had been arrested in the Denver raid on February 5th, had returned to Venezuela, where the U.S. government said that he would be deported. She was in San Antonio del Táchira, on the Colombian border, when she saw his name on the CBS list. “We never saw him in the photos or videos,” she said. Her immediate worry was for his health. In 2023, he had suffered a cardiac event that an emergency-room doctor characterized as a “pre-heart attack.” Aldana told me, “He never went back for a follow-up, because it was expensive and he didn’t have insurance.” Two months later, she spotted Morales Rolón in a video from the Salvadoran prison. “He was thin,” she said. “He and the others were pleading for help.”
The Administration never released a complete list of the men sent to CECOT. In court, government lawyers frequently made false or misleading claims about the men’s whereabouts. On March 19th, Monique Sherman, an immigration lawyer in Denver, told a judge that her client wasn’t in court because he’d been sent to El Salvador. When asked by the judge if this was true, Sherman told USA Today, the government lawyer “said three times that he was in local law-enforcement custody. I asked, ‘If he’s in law-enforcement custody, can the government tell us where he is?’ The D.H.S. attorney said that, for privacy reasons, she couldn’t.”
In nearly every case, the Administration refused to present any evidence or specific charges against the men sent to El Salvador. This, after all, had been the point of using the Alien Enemies Act, the Administration official said. With “all the machinations of a Title 8 case or a 240 proceeding,” he told me—referring to removal protocols laid out in immigration law—“they get to contact the lawyer and sit in detention until they see a judge. All that gets set aside with the Alien Enemies Act.” Circumventing the usual legal channels was crucial in the case of Venezuelans, he added, because, “if you can remove them in large numbers quickly, the stuff that happened in Aurora just goes away.”
When the planes landed in El Salvador, on March 16th, many of the men didn’t immediately panic. There were at least two dozen Salvadorans on the flights, so it seemed possible that the ICE officers were simply dropping them off before the plane proceeded to Venezuela. Then the guards ordered all the men to get off the aircraft. “That’s when the movie began,” Miguel Rojas Mendoza, one of the detainees, told me. He’d had Temporary Protected Status; the previous morning, when ICE officers in Texas told him it was time to leave, he thought he was being released back into the United States.
The men were chained in three separate places—at their ankles, wrists, and waists. The guards pushed them to the exits. Outside, on the tarmac, there were more Salvadoran officers than the men could count, lined up like riot police, creating a human tunnel through which the Venezuelans had to pass to reach a row of buses. The officers used batons and the butts of their rifles to strike the men in the face, neck, chest, and abdomen. The ride to the facility took forty minutes. Hardly anyone spoke. Most of the detainees weren’t from El Salvador, but many of them had seen video clips about CECOT on TikTok. “A Presidential suite is waiting for you,” one of the officers said. “You will be living here for the rest of your life.”
When they arrived, they were forced to kneel. Agents shaved their heads and made them change into white boxer shorts and T-shirts—their new uniforms. The handcuffs and leg shackles they’d worn while in ICE custody were replaced with new ones that were so tight the men could barely walk. “I thought my wrists and ankles would actually pop off,” Roger Molina Acevedo, the refugee from Aragua who had been arrested while wearing Air Jordans, said. He had to hop on his right foot because his left had gone numb. “Don’t fall,” the guards taunted. Whenever one of the men did, guards would lift him up not by his limbs but by the cuffs. Blood and vomit sloshed on the floor, and some of the men fainted from the pain and the stress.
The Venezuelans were taken to a wing of the prison called Módulo 8, where they were isolated from the Salvadoran inmates. Eventually, the warden showed up and welcomed them to el infierno—hell. This was the first time Maikol Gabriel López Lizano was told that he’d been accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua. “It was the warden who told us that we were there because we were all gangsters and terrorists,” he said. “Here I am in El Salvador, a country that is not my own, that I’ve never been to and that I’ve never known, and I’m arriving as a ‘terrorist.’ ”
“Careful! I took a really bad spill here once.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
There were thirty-two cells, each roughly thirty-nine feet by twenty-six feet, with metal bunk beds. About ten men were typically assigned to each cell, but there were unexplained inconsistencies. For a time, only two men occupied one cell; another had eighteen. Several were empty. Each cell had two toilets and two small tanks of water, for washing and drinking; each man was given a plastic cup and a quarter of a bar of soap.
The day started at 4 A.M., with roll call. Meals consisted of tortillas with some combination of beans, rice, and spaghetti. The men ate with their hands, which they washed as best they could. They had to use their soap—each sliver was meant to last for at least fifteen days—to clean themselves and their clothes. The monotony of their time in the cells was broken only by punishments: beatings, mainly, but also whole nights in which they were required to sit in stress positions facing a wall, with their hands behind their necks. The beatings became so routine that the Venezuelans scored them on a scale of one to five—the higher the number, the worse the treatment. A typical beating might fall anywhere from a one to a three, but there were a few places where the punishments were unmistakably fives. One was Cell 32, where guards sent inmates they judged to be unruly; another was a bloc of isolation cells called la isla, or the island. Rojas Mendoza spent a few weeks in Cell 25, which was close to la isla. The screams from it were unbearable.
Occasionally, when the men were visited by representatives from the U.S. or the Red Cross, the guards would bring out fresh sheets and put mattresses on the bunks, both of which were taken away once the observers left. At the end of March, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, came to CECOT to praise the U.S. partnership with El Salvador and to pose for photos. “We were happy when she got here,” Molina Acevedo told me. He didn’t know her by name—he called her the woman with los ojos claros, or light-colored eyes—but he could tell that she was someone important. He thought there would be a chance to tell her about the conditions inside. “I was in Cell 27 at the time,” he said. “She walked to Cell 28, then turned around. She didn’t speak to anyone.”
The worst part of the internment was its indeterminacy. The men were never given sentences, so they had no idea how long their stint in CECOT would last. The heat was asphyxiating. López Lizano had malaria but went without medication. “We were, as they would say, in ‘the cemetery of the living,’ ” he told me. “They beat me with metal chains. They kicked me. They hit me in the ribs. They said, ‘You’re going to die in here, and we’re going to throw your body in a pot of acid.’ ”
About a month after the men’s arrival, the guards decided to punish the detainees in Cell 32 by filling it with some sort of gas. One of them, who was asthmatic, fainted. Afterward, the men announced that they were going on a hunger strike. The guards didn’t seem to care. Their indifference persuaded some of the men to go on a different sort of strike—a huelga de sangre—in which they shattered their plastic drinking cups and used the sharp edges to cut themselves. With their blood, they wrote messages on the sheets in their cells: “The blood of Christ has power”; “Being Venezuelan is not a crime.”
On a Monday afternoon in June, I met Celimer Hernández in the parking lot of her apartment complex, on a quiet residential street that served as a rough dividing line between Denver and Aurora. Forty-three years old with long straight hair, she is a soft-spoken mother and grandmother who arrived in the U.S. in early 2024. We went to a coffee shop a few blocks away. She was scared to travel farther. A couple of nights earlier, she and her partner had been going grocery shopping at a nearby strip mall when they’d spotted a group of ICE officers. Her partner had a deportation order, the result of his failure to show up for a recent immigration-court hearing, which he’d avoided out of concern that ICE officers would target him at the courthouse. At the café—seated a safe distance from the other patrons—she told me that she was desperate to leave the United States.
“We don’t go out anywhere, and we’re barely even working,” she said. She was a nanny and a cleaner who made and sold arepas for extra money. Her partner, who had been working as a delivery driver, had recently sold his car. Her own court date was more than a year off, and the local economy was beginning to buckle under the weight of the Administration’s enforcement crackdown. “I was supposed to take care of a kid,” Hernández told me. “But then his mother couldn’t get work, and she cancelled on me.”
There was only one reason that Hernández was still in Colorado: her daughter Yusneri was in the ICE detention center in Aurora. On April 25th, Yusneri, who was then nearly five months pregnant, ordered a food delivery. When the deliveryman rang the bell, she went to the door and found a team of ICE officers waiting for her. They took the deliveryman, too, simply because he was there.
It was the second time this year that Yusneri had been arrested by ICE. She and her sister, who each had a daughter, lived together in CBZ’s Dallas Street property. In January, Yusneri’s partner, a man named José Miguel Flores Rodríguez, had been taken into custody when agents from ICE showed up at the housing complex. Hernández received word from one of her daughters and rushed over to help. When she arrived, her daughters were being held by ICE agents, their children crying. Hernández took her grandchildren while the officers led her daughters away in handcuffs. “They released my daughters in the end,” Hernández said. “But it was a horrible day.”
Flores Rodríguez and the father of Yusneri’s sister’s daughter, who was also arrested that day, were eventually sent to CECOT. Hernández recalled a video call with them in March, when they were in Texas, awaiting what they thought was their return flight to Venezuela. “They were so happy,” she told me. “They were practically dancing.”
The fact that they’d been lied to made her even more worried about what might now happen to Yusneri. The family was praying that she would be deported, but they didn’t have a lawyer and couldn’t expedite her case. Hernández doesn’t speak English, so friends would call on her behalf, asking for more information. Yusneri didn’t want her mother to visit; ICE could arrest her, too. Yusneri was set to appear before a judge on June 27th. “The money my partner got from selling his car we’ve been sending to my daughter so that she can make calls from the detention center,” Hernández said.
Many Venezuelan families I spoke to in Aurora had similar stories. Perhaps the most striking involved two brothers, Nixon and Dixon Azuaje Pérez, who were nineteen and twenty years old and had lived at the CBZ property on Nome Street. In July of last year, after the shooting at the property, the brothers found bullet casings on the floor in front of their apartment. “The bullets are going to bring us problems,” Nixon recalled thinking. “We’ll throw them downstairs, so the police won’t come and blame us for anything.”
Later that day, the brothers were arrested for tampering with evidence. A police document—“Statement in Support of Warrantless Arrest”—said that officers who arrived at the scene “observed two Hispanic males picking up fired casings along the walkways of the third floor” before entering their apartment. “Dixon stated that he didn’t want the Police to think he was involved in the shooting, so he and his brother (Nixon) picked up the shell casings and threw them in the court-yard.” The report continued, “Nixon later told your affiant (via Google Translate) ‘the people who shot from the side of my apartment live, they are my neighbors and there are many other people there who are armed, that’s why I entered my apartment.’ ”
The residents of the building were stunned by the turn of events. Nixon and Dixon had entered the country the previous summer, using a government app called CBP One, in accordance with instructions from the Biden Administration, and they had since submitted asylum applications. They were beloved and trusted, known to be hardworking, community-oriented, and generous with their time and money. They were, multiple people told me, the exact antithesis of the menacing criminals who walked the building’s halls. One tenant, a mother of three named Vanessa, told me that they routinely played soccer with her youngest child. Ronny, a neighbor who met the brothers when Nixon gave him a ride to a construction job, recalled how they regularly walked around with trash bags, cleaning up the hallways. “The management had stopped coming,” he told me. “So we cleaned in shifts.”
The brothers were released on bond and fitted with ankle monitors last August. Two weeks later, the video of armed gunmen at the Dallas Street property went viral. Local authorities, under increasing national pressure to take action against Tren de Aragua, redoubled their displays of vigilance. On September 4th, the Aurora Police Department posted photographs of Nixon and Dixon next to those of two other brothers who had been arrested in connection with the shooting at Nome Street, and described them as “suspected” members of Tren de Aragua. When a reporter for Aurora’s the Sentinel asked about evidence, the police department said that Nixon and Dixon “have not been tied to TdA or any other specific gang at this time.”
Dixon had a court hearing on September 6th. He and his brother still didn’t know what they’d been accused of. “It was all so confusing,” Nixon told me. A judge sent them to an office north of Denver to have their ankle monitors checked; while they were there, ICE officers arrived. “Why are we being arrested?” Nixon asked them. “We came legally.” One of the officers told them that, because of the criminal charges, their immigration cases no longer mattered. They were in custody when Trump took office. In March, Nixon was transferred from an ICE detention center in Colorado to one in Texas, and was then sent to CECOT. Dixon’s criminal case was further along and he was being held in a county jail, which likely spared him his brother’s fate. In late June, he was sent to Venezuela.
Around that time, I got a relieved text message from Hernández, saying that, after almost two months in detention, Yusneri had been deported to Venezuela. Hernández was beginning to save money to finance her own trip out of the country. But, on July 15th, she was arrested by ICE. At the time, she was caring for her two granddaughters, who were both four. The girls were taken into state custody. On August 6th, Hernández was deported to Venezuela. Her granddaughters are now awaiting court hearings before they can be deported to rejoin their family. (D.H.S. denied that ICE separates families without their consent.)
Earlier this year, the city of Aurora closed the Dallas Street complex, and Moises and Carmen moved into an apartment in Denver. They had been looking for a new place for months, but their address had led other landlords to reject their applications. “Everyone was talking about Tren de Aragua,” Moises told me. “No one wanted to rent to us.” The new apartment was small, tidy, and simple. It had two bedrooms, a modest living room, and a cramped galley kitchen. On a wall, next to the television, Carmen had hung a sign that said, in English, “Home Sweet Home.”
Just as on Dallas Street, they mostly stayed indoors, only now their caution stemmed from a fear of ICE agents. They are applying for asylum, but they had learned this would not protect them from arrest. Several of their neighbors have been deported. One of them recently scheduled his “self-deportation” with a government phone app, CBP Home. During the Biden Administration, he’d used the previous version of the app, CBP One, to schedule his appointment to enter the country at the southern border.
Recently, over dinner, we watched videos of the unrest in Los Angeles, where the Administration had sent armed federal troops and legions of ICE officers to make arrests. Moises called up footage showing the California senator Alex Padilla being thrown to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents during a government press conference about the military’s presence. “We never thought we’d come to the United States,” Moises told me. “We thought we had everything we could ever need in Venezuela.” Carmen added, in reference to the situation in California, “Now that we’re here, we never thought we’d see things like this.”
According to recent figures from the Deportation Data Project, at the University of California, Berkeley, May marked an inflection point for ICE: the agency began arresting more people without criminal convictions than with them. By July, more than forty thousand of the fifty-seven thousand immigrants in ICE detention, or seventy per cent, had no criminal convictions. The Administration had already spent more money on immigration enforcement than ICE’s annual operating budget. In a report released in mid-June, members of the House Appropriations Committee wrote, “ICE began spending more than its appropriated level shortly after the fiscal year commenced and operations now far exceed available resources.”
Additional funding to resolve the shortfall was included in Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which moved swiftly through Congress. It gave seventy-five billion dollars to ICE, tripling the agency’s budget, most of it aimed at expanding detention capacity. By the time the bill was signed, on the weekend of July 4th, ICE had identified six more locations in Colorado where the government could detain people. Nationwide, the agency’s expanded budget will allow it to hold a hundred thousand people at a time.
A few weeks later, ICE announced the arrest of two hundred and forty-three people in an operation in the Denver area. An agency official claimed that all of them were criminals who “pose a significant threat to public safety,” yet a report in the Denver Post noted that “ICE did not provide a breakdown of convictions or charges for most of those detained.”
In June, Yoderlyn Daviana Acosta Peña, after languishing in the Laredo immigration jail for almost three more months, was finally deported to Venezuela. Her recovery from the beating had been slow and painful. When we spoke on the phone, she told me that the left side of her face was still partially paralyzed. At the time, she was in Caracas, getting ready to attend a demonstration calling for the release of López Lizano.
Since March, Venezuelans across the country had been staging protests on behalf of the men in El Salvador. Family members, friends, and neighbors turned out, holding signs and sharing testimonials; some of them posted direct appeals to Bukele, the Salvadoran President, on social media. On July 18th, Acosta Peña was outside, chanting on the streets, as she’d been doing for the past few weeks, when someone announced that planes carrying the men had just touched down in Venezuela. She was too surprised and ecstatic to recall how the news spread through the crowd. At first, no one understood exactly what had happened.
Earlier that week, the men awoke in their cells at four in the morning, the usual time. Soon, a team of doctors and nurses arrived to give them physicals. The next day, barbers showed up to cut their hair and help them shave. “We started to suspect that something was happening,” López Lizano told me. “We thought someone was visiting, because they shaved us. They never shaved us.” Then guards brought them shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant. By Thursday, prison officials had put up a basketball hoop, which led the men to expect the arrival of a foreign dignitary or an aid organization.
The U.S. and Venezuela had reached a deal for a prisoner swap, but the men learned of their release only when, for the first time in four months, they were led from their cells unshackled and told to change out of their uniforms. The Venezuelans in El Salvador were being returned to Venezuela in exchange for the release of ten U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents who’d been held in Venezuelan jails, along with dozens of Venezuelan political prisoners. In a statement heralding the agreement, Rubio blamed the Venezuelan government for holding the Americans “without proper due process.” He went on to say that “every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland,” which was true up to a point. One of the men was an Army veteran who had fled to Venezuela after being convicted of killing three people in Madrid, in 2016.
News accounts described the end of a saga, and the release of two hundred and fifty-two men from CECOT. But the Trump Administration still refused to share their names or provide evidence supporting its claims against them. (D.H.S. said that the Venezuelans deported on March 15th were given due process and had final deportation orders.) It seems entirely possible that something similar may happen again. Already the government has deported migrants to third nations far from their homes—South Sudan, Eswatini, and countries in Latin America. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who was wrongly sent to El Salvador with the Venezuelans in March, in violation of another court order, was returned to the U.S. in June; last month, ICE rearrested him and said it planned to deport him to Uganda. Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told the Times, “If the government gets away with sending people to what’s essentially a gulag in a country with which they have no connection, then we are no longer talking about the immigration system we’ve known for more than a century.” He added, “This is a whole new unlawful and gratuitously cruel phase.”
On September 2nd, an appeals court ruled that the government’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was unlawful. That same day, on the President’s orders, the U.S. military blew up a boat travelling in international waters in the Caribbean, killing all eleven passengers. Trump claimed that they were “terrorists” from Tren de Aragua who were transporting “massive amounts of drugs.” In the Oval Office, he said, “Venezuela has been a very bad actor.”
Acosta Peña travelled from Caracas to La Guaira to see López Lizano and his family. “We went to the beach,” she told me. Until now, the life they shared had consisted mainly of a migrant shelter and an immigration jail. I spoke to her after she returned home. There were voices in the background, pulling her away. At one point, someone asked her who was on the phone and what we were talking about. Without covering the receiver, she replied, “Just all that shit.” ♦