Jesús Alberto Ríos Andrade, one of the Venezuelans sent by the Donald Trump administration to the Terrorist Confinement Center in El Salvador, is married to a U.S. citizen. When he was detained on February 1 by immigration authorities, he had already started multiple U.S. immigration processes: permanent residency, a work permit, and even Temporary Protected Status.
“To begin with, my husband is not a gang member,” said Angie González, Ríos’ wife, who spoke to El Faro via telephone from El Paso, Texas. “He left home when he was 15 years old. He sold fruit on the street in Colombia and then sold accessories for phones. He learned to cut hair to get into barbershops and cleaned stoves in restaurants. Whatever he could get his hands on, he did,” González said. In the U.S. he was working in construction.
Ríos appears on a list with 238 names of deported Venezuelans, published by CBS and spread by media outlets around the world. El Faro has a copy of the forms sent by González to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), as well as a letter she sent to Democratic Congresswoman Verónica Escobar (TX-16) to request her husband’s case files.
At first, the U.S. and Salvadoran governments officially claimed that every single one of the 261 men sent to CECOT on three flights on March 16 are gang members: MS-13 in the case of the 23 Salvadorans, and Tren de Aragua for the 238 Venezuelans. That narrative soon unraveled: White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt admitted that 101 of the 238 Venezuelans were deported under immigration law. The Salvadoran government told a journalist that “at least 50” of the Venezuelans have no criminal ties.
Dozens of relatives of the arrested men have since denied the accusations. Organizations, lawyers, and journalists have reported on at least 17 cases in which they claim those arrested had no criminal record: a shoe salesman and a soccer player, according to the Los Angeles Times; a mechanic, per the Miami Herald; a volunteer for an organization that helps people with autism, reports Mother Jones. A Univision investigation reviewed 200 names from the list of Venezuelans and found that only 11 have criminal records.
Those stories refer to El Salvador, where hundreds of people were arrested for their tattoos or “suspicious appearance” during the first months of the state of exception, under which 87,000 people have reportedly been arrested in the last three years, making El Salvador the country with the highest prison rate in the world: 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the World Prisons Brief. In second place is Cuba, with 794.
González told El Faro that her husband also has no criminal record, but she believes he was targeted by authorities because of a rose tattoo on his neck. U.S. authorities have used tattoos as evidence of gang membership. But experts such as journalist Ronna Rísquez, author of a book on the Tren de Aragua, maintain that these gang members do not have identifying tattoos, unlike Central American gangs.
Prior to starting the other paperwork to adjust his immigration status, Ríos had entered the United States in July 2023 as an asylum seeker. “He did not enter illegally; they [migrants] were being allowed to enter because they were seeking asylum. They themselves [the U.S. government] opened the door for them,” González said.
Ríos had listed a Maryland address on his application, she says, but stayed in Texas after meeting her. They were married on Sep. 10, 2024. A missed appointment in immigration court put him on file with authorities. “He had an electronic GPS bracelet and had to report in with a photo every day. The immigration people came to visit,” González said.
On February 1, González and her husband had been taking clothes out to wash. “He stepped outside to help me put baskets in the car. I was getting ready and I heard voices, but I thought he was talking to the neighbors. I looked out the window and saw that they were already taking him away in handcuffs. I ran out and one of the immigration officers told me that he had an arrest warrant,” she says.
By then, it had already been three weeks since González sent U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services the Form I-130 Petition for an Alien Relative. According to a document shared by González, Ríos had an appointment for biometric data capture the next day, February 2, in Houston.
Ríos was sent to a detention center in New Mexico. They made plans to see each other in Colombia while the residency was being processed. “I told him, ‘If they deport you to Venezuela, it doesn’t matter, because when they fix your papers you can come back here.’”
While in detention, González was able to communicate with her husband. She also kept tabs on his location through ICE’s detainee tracker. From New Mexico he was transferred to the El Paso and El Valle detention centers, both in Texas.
The last time González spoke to her husband was on Saturday, March 15, at 8 a.m. Ríos told him that he was getting ready for the plane in which he assumed he would be sent to Venezuela. After that call, González called the two facilities where her husband had been. In El Paso, a man who answered left the phone off the hook. “I heard him say: ‘Oh, that's the guy they took to the ugly prison in El Salvador,’” González said. “I felt like I was dying.”
The next day, Ríos disappeared from ICE's detainee tracking system. “I was looking for him in the videos and in the photos, but I didn't see him.”
She confirmed he was in El Salvador only upon reading his name on the list published by CBS. “I’m an American. I have the right to be told where my husband is,” says González. “How can they have a citizen, who has done things the right way here in the U.S., suffering for the man she fell in love with?”
“I say to my government: Okay, deport them, but to their country. This is a monstrous thing, a thing of the devil. I have nightmares. Sometimes I think he’s dead,” she added.
In her letter to Congresswoman Escobar, González wrote: “This is not just about my husband. It is about whether the U.S. government is following due process or conducting mass deportations in secret that violate fundamental human rights. If ICE cannot provide concrete, verifiable evidence that my husband was a danger to public safety, then he and others like him are being unjustly detained in a foreign prison under false pretenses.”
The Salvadorans deported to CECOT
Three weeks after the first expulsion of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran prison, the government of Nayib Bukele has not revealed any documents of its arrangements with the Donald Trump administration. The agreement between the United States and El Salvador is secret. Not even the complete list of the 23 Salvadorans who came, along with the Venezuelans, on March 16 is known; much less the charges or accusations against any of them. All that is known on the Salvadoran side has been announced through propaganda videos and tweets.
In a Bukele propaganda video, two inmates gave their names: Cesar Antonio Lopez Larios, alias “Greñas de Stoners”, and César Eliseo Sorto. Greñas, one of the founders of the MS-13 gang, and was captured in early June of last year in Chiapas, Mexico, and sent to the United States, where he was facing “narco-terrorism” charges in a New York court until, prior to being sent to CECOT, the Eastern District of New York declined to prosecute him citing “geopolitical and national security reasons”. Sorto is not a gang leader, but he was convicted in absentia for double homicide in El Salvador.
The Atlantic revealed a third Salvadoran: Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a Maryland-based family man with no criminal record. The Trump administration said Ábrego was deported “due to an administrative error,” according to a memo included in a lawsuit Ábrego’s lawyers filed against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
According to the lawsuit, in March 2019, an ICE “confidential informant” identified Ábrego as an active member of MS-13, an accusation the White House maintains. But that accusation was dismissed by an immigration judge who, in October 2019, granted Ábrego a stay of his deportation order to El Salvador. Ábrego's wife Jennifer told CBS News that, “if a judge said he should be here for his protection, he shouldn’t be deported.”
On April 4, a Maryland judge ruled that the expulsion of Ábrego was illegal and ordered the Trump administration to bring him back to the United States. According to CNN, Judge Paula Xinis asked the Justice Department: “Why can’t the United States get Mr. Abrego Garcia back?” According to the article, DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni responded: “The United States can’t call someone in El Salvador, have them pick up the phone and say ‘give us our guy back.’” But he also conceded: “Our only arguments are jurisdictional … he should not have been sent to El Salvador.”
The judge gave the Trump administration until midnight on Monday, April 7, to bring Ábrego back, to which Bukele responded online with a meme of a confused rabbit.
The next day, Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department attorney, was placed on administrative leave, the New York Times reported, for “failure to zealously advocate for the department.”
Ábrego’s case can set legal precedent for the rest of lawsuits filed on behalf of people sent to CECOT. Questions remain: Does the secret agreement between El Salvador and the United States provide a mechanism to send prisoners back? If any of them are facing criminal charges in the U.S., how would those processes continue if they are outside U.S. jurisdiction? Has El Salvador filed charges against any of them since their arrival, or on what legal grounds are they being detained?
Salvadoran law does not penalize undocumented migration; there is no prison sentence for deportees facing no criminal charges in El Salvador.
According to the General Directorate of Migration and Foreigners (DGME), Salvadorans returning to the country are attended to under the program Bienvenido a Casa (“welcome home”), which provides “medical and psychological care, refreshments, national and international telephone calls, WiFi, shuttle to transportation terminals, and payment of internal ticket costs, as well as basic hygiene products.”
El Faro received a report of a fourth name among the Salvadorans sent to CECOT: a 21-year-old man. The woman denouncing his case gave an interview to El Faro on March 24 and said she recognized her son in a video released by the Salvadoran government. Two days later, she insisted that this newspaper not publish the case, for fear of further reprisals by the Bukele administration against her son. El Faro granted this request.
El Faro reviewed U.S. court documents that do not link the fourth man to gangs, but to a deportation for having entered the United States illegally. According to one of the documents, the young man was intercepted by Border Patrol in New Mexico in December 2024. He had been deported three weeks earlier, on November 22, and was attempting to re-enter the United States undocumented.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Salvadorans expelled from the United States were “two dangerous MS-13 leaders, plus 21 of the most wanted back to face justice in El Salvador.” The name of this young man, however, does not appear on the list of the most wanted in El Salvador, published by the Crime Stoppers organization, which collaborates with Salvadoran authorities. El Faro found no criminal record for him in El Salvador.
