Venezuelans watch in horror as Trump sends family to El Salvador

by Margioni BERMÚDEZ

Mervin Yamarte's family in Venezuela thought the 29-year-old -- arrested by US authorities amid President Donald Trump's migrant crackdown -- would be put on a deportation flight home. But the plane never arrived.

Instead, they learned he had been flown to El Salvador after spotting him in a video, head shaven and bowed, sitting on the floor of a maximum security prison.

Yamarte was arrested last week at his home in Dallas with three friends, all of whom survived the brutal Darien jungle on their journey north in September 2023.

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Three days after being detained, they were deported in shackles to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which has a presence in the United States.

Mervin and his friends were among 238 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador under a centuries-old wartime act invoked by Donald Trump which can be used to repel an "invasion" or "predatory incursion" by an enemy country.

The deportations took place despite a US federal judge granting a temporary suspension of the expulsions order.

Mervin, Andy, Ringo and Edwuar grew up in Los Pescadores, a poor neighborhood of small homes with tin roofs and dirt streets in the country's oil capital of Maracaibo.

With Venezuela's economy, including its oil industry, in meltdown, the four decided to follow in the footsteps of the nearly eight million Venezuelans to have emigrated in the past decade.

But life in the United States, surviving off odds jobs, was a struggle.

"My son wanted to come home because he said this wasn't the American dream, it was the American nightmare," his mother Mercedes Yamarte told AFP.

After their arrest, the four -- who were never charged with any crime, according to their families -- agreed to be deported to Venezuela, where their families were waiting over the weekend to welcome them home.

Instead, they were flown to El Salvador, whose gang-busting President Nayib Bukele struck a deal with Trump to house alleged gang members at his showpiece mega-jail.

One of Mervin's brothers recognized him in a video released by the Salvadoran presidency showing the prisoners being led in chains from a plane, having their heads shaved and sitting in rows on the floor.

A sobbing Yamarte is haunted by her son's "terrified" look in the footage.

"It's the greatest pain in my life, because it's like a cry for help from my son," said Yamarte, adding her two other children in the United States are now "begging" to return home but fear suffering the same fate as Mervin if they agree to be deported.

- Tattoos -

In Canada Honda, another impoverished Maracaibo neighborhood, Yajaira Chiquinquira Fuenmayor was also anticipating an emotional reunion with her son.

After 16 months in the United States, Alirio Belloso was detained in Utah on January 28, a week after Trump returned to office vowing the biggest deportation wave in US history.

He too was awaiting deportation to Venezuela but instead was transferred to El Salvador's CECOT, where prisoners are crammed in windowless cells, under 24-hour surveillance and barred from receiving visitors.

In the Salvadoran propaganda video, Belloso is shown having his head shaved.

Legal experts in the United States have challenged the legality of the expulsions, saying that even if courts ruled that Tren de Aragua's presence in the United States constitutes an "invasion," authorities must still prove that each detainee is a member of the gang.

"My son is not a criminal; my son is a decent person. He went to the United States to work to support his family," Fuenmayor argued.

Belloso's 19-year-old wife Noemi Briceno, who lives in Venezuela, wondered "was it the tattoos" that led him to be tagged a gang member.

"My husband has tattoos of his niece, who died of leukemia, and (others with) the name of his daughter and his mother," Briceno said.

"And an hourglass," she added, adding that it was a nod to a promise he made by his daughter to return home soon.

Yamarte said that Mervin too had a tattoo on his hand, which she now sees as a call to action.

It reads "strong like mum."