Mirelis Casique last spoke to her 24-year-old son on Saturday morning while he was being held in a detention center in Laredo, Texas. He told her he was going to be deported with a group of Venezuelans, she said, but he didn’t know where they were headed.
Shortly after, his name disappeared from the website of U.S. immigration authorities. She has not heard from him since.
“Now he’s in an abyss with no one to rescue him,” Ms. Casique said on Sunday in an interview from her home in Venezuela.
The deportation of 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador this weekend has created panic among families who fear that their relatives are among those handed over by the Trump administration to Salvadoran authorities, apparently without due process.
The men were described by a spokeswoman for the White House, Karoline Leavitt, as “terrorists” belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang and “heinous monsters” who, she said, had recently been arrested, “saving countless American lives.”
But several relatives of men believed to be in the group say their loved ones do not have gang ties.
On Sunday, the Salvadoran government released images of the men being marched into a notorious mega-prison in handcuffs, with their heads newly shaven.
Like other Venezuelan families, Ms. Casique has no proof that her son, Francisco Javier García Casique, is part of the group, which was transferred to El Salvador on Saturday as part of a deal between President Nayib Bukele and the Trump administration. The Salvadoran leader has offered to hold the Venezuelan migrants at the expense of the U.S. government.
However, Ms. Casique said that not only had her son’s name disappeared from the website of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she also recognized him in one of the photos of the recently arrived deportees that El Salvador’s government has circulated. When she saw him in the photograph, she felt “broken at the injustice” of what was taking place.
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