SÃO PAULO, Brazil – Many in Latin America are upset over the deportation of 238 Venezuelan immigrants by President Donald Trump’s administration to El Salvador, where they were put by President Nayib Bukele’s administration in a mega prison on Mar. 16.

Catholic activists who work to help immigrants and refugees in El Salvador are feeling impotent in the face of the arbitrariness of Bukele’s regime, which simply ignored information requests and didn’t bother to clarify any doubts from the detainees’ families.

Since the presidential campaign, Trump had pledged to resort to the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in order to expel undocumented immigrants who were allegedly members of criminal or “terrorist” organizations.

If in the last presidential campaign Trump would repeatedly mention MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha, coincidently formed by Salvadorians in Los Angeles and then expanded throughout Central America and Mexico), now he cited on numerous occasions the Venezuelan mafia Tren de Aragua, claiming without evidence that it had infiltrated in the United States.

The Venezuelans who were deported were accused by the U.S. government of being members of Tren de Aragua. On Mar. 14, Trump issued a proclamation in which he invoked the Alien Enemies Act – despite the prohibition of the Washington D.C. federal judge James Boasberg – and reiterated that the organization is a terrorist group connected to President Nicolas Maduro’s regime in Venezuela. Foreigners linked to Tren de Aragua would then be subjected to “immediate apprehension, detention, and removal.”

Bukele posted on X on Mar. 16 that the 238 “members of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua” were immediately taken to the Center of Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), a maximum-security facility, where they shall be detained for at least one year. Trump paid US$ 6 million for that and also promised to Bukele the extradition of two leaders of MS-13 and of 21 Salvadorians arrested in the United States.

Bukele’s regime’s traditional pictures of detainees with their heads shaved, sitting in line while they wait to be taken to their cells, were released on the same day. By seeing the tattoos of the new inmates, many families discovered where their loved ones were.

That’s the case of Arturo Suárez Trejo, a 33-year-old singer who had been trying to build his career and got into the United States in Sept. of 2024. His family identified him in one of the pictures released by El Salvador after having no contact with him for a number of days.

His wife, Nathali Sanchez, said he decided to go to the U.S in May of 2024 in order to make a living there and invest in his music.

“He was the first among his siblings to leave Venezuela in 2016 due to the economic hardships. He went to Colombia and then to Chile. We’ve been living together over the past three years in Santiago,” his wife said.

In Chile, he worked as a refrigeration technician in one company and in the warehouse of another one. He continuously used part of his income to produce his songs and music videos, gaining some notoriety in the reggaeton scene.

He traveled by land to the U.S. and was allowed to get into the country while requesting political asylum. He went to live with his older brother Nelson and was working in construction.

“In February, he traveled to Raleigh in order to record a music video. The ICE agents appeared during the production of the clip and arrested everybody, including his manager,” Nelson Suárez told Crux.

After his arrest on Feb. 8, Arturo was taken to a detention center in Georgia, where he was kept for a month, and then to another one in El Paso.

His relatives were able to talk to him by video calls during that period. They tried to request his release so he could voluntarily leave the U.S., which was not allowed, and also tried to pay a bail, which was also impossible, given that he was not a criminal undergoing prosecution. His wife said that during his detention he got ill and coughed blood for days, but never received medical attention.

“The last news we received from Arturo was that he was going to be deported to Venezuela. He was very happy about it,” Nelson said.

Then it became impossible to talk to him. They tried to discover what was happening but no information was given to them. That’s when they heard about the flight to El Salvador and decided to check if he was there. One of his tattoos helped them to recognize him.

Nelson Suárez emphasized that he had a court hearing scheduled for 2026 and that his situation in the U.S. was not irregular at that point. Nathali said the family has certificates that he doesn’t have criminal records in Venezuela, in Colombia, nor in Chile.

“The sad part is that El Salvador doesn’t recognize Venezuela as a democratic country and doesn’t have diplomatic relations with it. We don’t have any institution to help us there,” Nelson said.

Nathali affirmed that a Salvadoran lawyer offered to help him, but he hasn’t managed to get any information about Arturo yet. She’s alone taking care of their daughter, who is three months old, in Santiago.

Other families of deportees equally claim their relatives are not members of any criminal organization and that they have been arrested only because they were Venezuelan and had tattoos.

The Church seems to be with hands tied just like Arturo’s family. According to Father Fernando Cuevas, in charge of El Salvador’s chapter of the Latin American and Caribbean Ecclesial Network on Migration, Displacement, Refuge and Human Trafficking (known as Red Clamor), Catholic movements and organizations have lost all channels of communication they used to maintain with the government.

“We’ve been living in a state of emergency. There’s no information nor public access to it,” he told Crux.

He said that even groups that used to regularly visit penitentiaries, like the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy, have been impeded to do so over the past years.

“So, any intention of giving support to detainees is fruitless,” Cuevas said.

He recalled that last week the Church handed in to the Congress a document containing 150,000 signatures of citizens that opposed Bukele’s project of resuming metal mining in the country, something that has been forbidden since 2017.

“The government hasn’t even expressed any kind of response,” he said.

Cuevas argued that Bukele became some kind of myth and “everything he says is seen almost as the word of God.”

“But we lament very much that those deportees are facing such a situation. They have not been judged, they were directly criminalized,” he said.