Pedro Escobar Blanco, one of two hundred and thirty-eight Venezuelans who got the boot by the Trump Administration to a super intense prison in El Salvador on March 15th, never actually met the lawyer who’s supposedly repping him in U.S. immigration court. They haven’t chatted on the phone, texted, or even had a middleman pass along messages. He probably doesn’t even know he’s got someone in his corner. Fast forward a month after he landed in Salvadoran custody, an immigration judge in Southern California decided to have a pow-wow about his asylum case. Problem is, Escobar Blanco was a no-show—no one’s had a peep from him since he got shipped off to El Salvador—and the judge, seeing his empty chair, said “adios” and ordered him out of the country.
Judges like to hand out deportation orders in absentia for folks on what they call the non-detained docket. These peeps have been released from the slammer on the condition they show up to court later. But if you’re stuck in the clutches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, like Escobar Blanco was since October, 2024, there’s no way you can show up for a court date unless big brother government lets you. The judge’s logic—punishing him for not showing—didn’t quite add up. It also meant he couldn’t set foot in the U.S. for the next decade. “I was all like, ‘Hold up! His no-show wasn’t on him, but on ICE for not bringing him out’,” Andreana Sarkis, Escobar Blanco’s lawyer, said in a statement later on.
The government kicked Escobar Blanco out based on some secret proclamation that Donald Trump scribbled his John Hancock on the day before. They accused him of rolling with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. They said they didn’t really need to show the receipts, thanks to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Sarkis could only guess the accusations had to do with his ink, like the nautical stars on his shoulders and the names of his folks and his kids, aged ten and thirteen.
Most of the Venezuelans who got shipped to El Salvador had pending cases in U.S. immigration courts. Since they vanished into thin air, lawyers all over the map started scrambling to rep as many as they could. Their job mostly involved showing up to hearings in their place and giving judges the lowdown on where their clients went. Trump’s crew has been tight-lipped about who exactly got sent to El Salvador. The list going around, courtesy of CBS news and still not confirmed by the government, is missing some names.
These clients are like “ghosts,” one lawyer helping out said. Escobar Blanco lucked out a bit: at least a lawyer was around to fill in for him in immigration court (lots of the guys didn’t even have that), and the judge handed down an order that could, in theory, be fought (other outcomes can be a real pain to contest). Sarkis, who’s been practicing law for six years and never had a client she couldn’t chat with, took on Escobar Blanco’s case just two days before the hearing.
When Escobar Blanco first hit the U.S. in July, 2024, he followed Uncle Sam’s lead and booked an appointment with border patrol. That led him to chill in Mexico for ten months before he finally got grilled, screened, and given the green light. It looks like ICE nabbed him during a worksite raid near San Diego last October; it’s not totally clear why he didn’t have his papers at the time. “I’m shook. No criminal record, no ties to any shady crew,” Sarkis said. “Dude did everything by the book.”
At the heart of the push to organize legal help for the Venezuelans is Michelle Brané, a lawyer and long-time fighter for immigrants’ rights. She was a big part of the effort to find the families torn apart at the border during Trump’s first term. When Joe Biden took office and vowed to reunite them, Brané jumped on board with the Department of Homeland Security. These days, she’s at Together and Free, a non-profit that’s all about giving “emergency and ongoing support to asylum seeking families impacted by federal immigration policies.”
In February, before the Alien Enemies Act came into play, Brané and her crew were trying to track down a bunch of Venezuelans who Trump’s team had sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The White House labeled these guys, without proof, as crooks and threats to public safety, and stashed many of them in cells once used for alleged Al Qaeda terrorists. Brané heard from families of the detainees and linked them up with lawyers at the ACLU, who filed a lawsuit.
The ACLU went after the Trump Administration again on March 15th, right after the Prez whipped out the Alien Enemies Act. A fed judge quickly told the government to freeze the first deportation flights and turn back any planes that had already taken off from Texas, where the detainees were being held. The government shrugged off the order, and three planes loaded with dudes touched down in San Salvador soon after. The next morning, El Salvador’s Prez, Nayib Bukele, posted vids of the men being marched into a rough joint called the Terrorism Confinement Center. Brané said the calls started pouring in right away. “At first, it was folks who saw a vid and said, ‘My bro or my kid was in there.’ Then we heard from people whose loved ones weren’t in the footage, but the story matched.”
Escobar Blanco’s wife, kids, and sister fall into that second group: they hadn’t spotted him in any of the clips. His sister Mariela, back in Venezuela, said she and Escobar Blanco chatted nearly every day once he jetted off to the U.S. The only time they lost touch was when he trekked through the Darién Gap, a gnarly jungle stretch between Colombia and Panama. Early March, he called her up and said, “Yo, Mari, I’m lost.” He’d just been moved from California to Texas, and he spilled the beans about the government aiming to boot him and a crew of other dudes back to Venezuela for their ties to the Tren de Aragua gang. Both are from the state of La Guaira on Venezuela’s north coast. “We had no clue who these folks were,” she said. A few days later, radio silence from her bro.
On the night of March 14th, a buddy Escobar Blanco met in the clink rang Mariela up with a heads-up. The detainees were about to hop on a plane at the airport—off to Venezuela, they thought—when ICE officers herded them back to the slammer due to bad weather. “He’s stuck in line ’cause they gotta re-check us in before pulling us back in,” the buddy said. “There’s a ton of us, so it might take a bit. But they told us we’re shipping out to Venezuela any time between Sunday and Monday.” Mariela said, “But they never showed, and rumors started swirling about flights to El Salvador. I thought, ‘Dang, my bro’s gotta be there ’cause where else is he? Why isn’t he hitting us up?'”
Brané and her squad started piecing together lists based on calls they got. It was a lot like how their work kicked off during the family-splitting mess in 2018. Back then, the government was a mash-up of ineptitude, carelessness, and a lack of will; this time, it seems more like a cold, calculated move. “It’s all about flexing,” Brané said. “It’s about showing they don’t play by the rules.” Brané and her folks started building detailed profiles on about fifty names from their list. They got hold of the men’s Venezuelan IDs, chatted with their kin, ran checks in Venezuela, linked up with gang experts and reporters, and combed an Interpol database. They even dug around in Chile, Colombia, and Peru, where some of the guys had been or rolled through before hitting the U.S.
These guys got nabbed for all sorts of reasons. Some got busted during traffic stops, while others got collared as “collaterals” when ICE was hunting someone else. Brané and her team found that most of the men they checked out had clean records. In many cases, they only found minor or vague infractions. Two dudes were linked to a robbery in a Venezuelan news piece, but it looks like they were never charged. One teen caught a pot charge in Chile. There were a couple exceptions: two guys had records for domestic violence, and someone else was picked up in a hit-and-run. In New York, a guy got popped for having a firearm, but the charge got dropped. “He got locked up at Rikers and handed over to ICE, thanks to the Big Apple Mayor’s new stance,” Brané said.
The advocates kept tabs on each guy’s basic info and the date and time of any upcoming court hearings. They tried to keep cases open as long as they could, then freeze ’em officially. But at these hearings, the lawyers were left scratching their heads at how the government’s attorneys talked about where the guys were.
On March 19th, Monique Sherman, an attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, swung by a hearing at an ICE lockup in Aurora, Colorado, for a guy named Jefferson Laya Freites, whose case later got tossed. “The judge called his name, and he didn’t show, ’cause he wasn’t there,” she said. Sherman told the judge that Laya Freites’s wife picked him out in a video from the Salvadoran clink. But when the judge asked the D.H.S. lawyer to weigh in, the response, as per USA Today, was that Laya Freites had been handed over to “local authorities.” Sherman said, “D.H.S. said three times he was in local-law-enforcement custody. I was like, ‘I’ve been chatting with the dude’s wife. She’s dying to know where he is. If he’s with law enforcement, can the government let us know where he’s at?’ The D.H.S. lawyer said, for privacy reasons, she couldn’t.”
Margaret Cargioli, from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, was standing up for Miguel Rojas-Mendoza, who had Temporary Protected Status when he got deported to El Salvador. His mom said she called him after Trump’s win last year and pleaded with him to watch his back. He was living in Louisiana then. “Don’t sweat it, mama,” he said. “I’m good. I’ve got T.P.S.” Local cops in January and February had him for driving with an expired plate and no valid license. When Cargioli got Rojas-Mendoza’s file, the day before a virtual hearing on April 8th, she hadn’t even seen pics of the guy yet. Once the judge popped up on screen, another box showed a room at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, where Rojas-Mendoza had been before heading to Texas the month before. “I see a guy, kinda far from the camera, chilling at a table,” Cargioli said. “Next to him was a detention officer holding a sheet of paper.” For a sec, Cargioli thought they’d crossed wires; her new client seemed to be in the U.S. Then the detention officer said, “Oh, wait. Wrong dude.” The Louisiana screen went black. During the hearing, Cargioli asked the D.H.S. lawyer where Rojas-Mendoza was. “I don’t have any info,” the lawyer said.
After the first three planes of deportees flew to El Salvador, some government lawyers might’ve been in the dark about where their cases were. ICE has a detainee finder that only shows where someone’s held in the U.S.; once they’re deported, they’re ghosts. But after news outlets like CBS started naming names, the government seemed to straighten up. By the end of March, Sherman said, D.H.S. lawyers were giving canned responses about the guys “not being here” and wanting to put cases “on hold.” They rarely went off script.
In recent weeks, government lawyers might be trying a new hustle—convincing judges to toss cases. “It’s sneaky and it’s shady,” Ann García, from the National Immigration Project, said. “The D.H.S. lawyer is saying either ‘We’re not chasing this deportation anymore and we’re dropping the charges’ or ‘We’d like to ditch this case ’cause the immigrant’s not in the U.S. anymore,’ which is wild ’cause ICE made the dude vanish.” If there’s a removal order, like the one Escobar Blanco got, there’s a legal way in the immigration system to ask for a case redo. Dismissals, though, mean pulling cases from the immigration courts. You can try to appeal a dismissal, but, García said, “the current immigration appeal group probably won’t look at that call fair.” Without a removal order, she went on, “a federal appeals court likely won’t touch that.”
On April 7th, the Supreme Court slapped the Prez’s wrist. Those charged as “alien enemies,” the Justices said, had to get a heads-up before they got the boot. But they didn’t spell out what that notice should say or how guys in cuffs, with limited lawyer time, could fight back. A few weeks later, after a federal judge in Texas blocked the government from deporting more Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, the feds moved a bunch of detainees to a spot in North Texas. ICE then handed out notices in English to ’em, just hours before trying to drag ’em to the airport. The notices didn’t say how the prisoners could check out or argue the evidence against them.
At that point, the Supreme Court put the kibosh on the deportations. By then, around three hundred people had already landed in El Salvador, including seventeen dudes sent packing on March 30th, ten more a few weeks later, and a Salvadoran dad of three named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who accidentally got shipped out on March 15th. His case sparked another lawsuit that also got to the Supreme Court; in a unanimous decision, the Justices told the government to “make it happen” and bring him back to the U.S.
Lately, Brané and her group have been hearing about new, unreported cases of folks sent to El Salvador. Near the end of last month, the Times ran a piece on Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a thirty-two-year-old food deliverer in Michigan who landed in El Salvador on March 15th. He wasn’t on the CBS list, flight logs, or government records of recent transfers from immigration lockup. Neiyerver Adrian Leon Rengel, a Venezuelan living in Texas, also vanished, but the Miami Herald confirmed it. Brané said, “Who knows how many more are out there?”
Like Brané, Ann García has spent the last seven years trying to track down all the families split up at the border during Trump’s first term. “I still can’t tell you how many families were torn apart,” she said. “One scary part of all this is the government won’t give us squat.” At a Cabinet meeting, a reporter asked Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, if he’d hit up El Salvador’s government about bringing Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “I’d never tell you that,” he said. “And you know who else I wouldn’t tell? A judge.”
The Supreme Court never said what the guys sent to El Salvador in March can do next. The ACLU just filed a new brief in federal court, in D.C., to get a judge to order their return. In the filing, the ACLU pointed to the Supreme Court’s cue from the Abrego García case. “Family members of those in [El Salvador] swear they have zero ties to TdA,” the lawyers wrote. “These screw-ups are brutal ’cause lots of these folks came to the U.S. ’cause they were thrown in the slammer for no reason in their home country and have solid cases for help under our immigration laws.”
Mariela, Pedro Escobar Blanco’s sister, told me that long before her bro got yanked to El Salvador, he was shook. When he first got picked up last year, he couldn’t wrap his head around why the ICE officers who showed up at his job acted like they were in a movie. “I thought it was a joke,” he told her back then. “They rolled in like they were hunting some dangerous criminal. They screamed at us to hit the deck, not to move. It felt like a hidden camera was gonna pop out.” A few months later, while he was still in ICE custody, he told his sister, “I’m just gonna tell ’em to deport me ’cause I can’t be locked up anymore. I’m not doing anything for my kids or for you. I’m not even doing anything for myself. I’d rather just go back.”
