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The Zambrano family had no reason to suspect that anything would go wrong when they arrived at the Charlotte Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on January 29.
As asylum seekers from Venezuela who’d entered the U.S. in November 2023, their check-in was routine, an annual ritual. They were in the country legally, awaiting immigration court dates that were still likely years off. They had valid work permits and state identification cards, and hadn’t been arrested or had any trouble with immigration agents.
Julio Zambrano Pérez, 24, had just gotten a job as a prep cook in an upscale New American restaurant. Luz Zambrano Belandría, also 24, was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with the couple’s second child, a daughter they planned to name Alana. Their 3-year-old daughter, Danna, was in preschool in Davidson, the small town in northern Mecklenburg County where they’d settled into a two-bedroom apartment overlooking a lake.
But President Donald Trump had taken office nine days earlier, heralding a renewed crackdown on immigration. During the campaign, Trump promised to pursue members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua that he said was terrorizing American cities.
At the appointment, an ICE agent asked Zambrano about his tattoos: a small, five-pointed crown inked between his right wrist and thumb, similar to the Rolex logo that he got when he was 15; and a rose with petals made of $100 bills on the top of his left hand.
The crown tattoo, the agent told Zambrano, was a gang mark.
“They called him back,” Zambrano Belandría told The Assembly in Spanish. “It made him nervous. He told me that he was afraid. He told me that they were going to keep him there.”
Zambrano Belandría and Danna sat in the waiting room. At the end of the day, they were the only ones left.
Finally, an ICE official told her they suspected her husband was a member of Tren de Aragua and were detaining him for questioning. “But he doesn’t have a criminal record, and he’s never robbed anyone or killed anyone!” she said.
Zambrano Belandría told The Assembly her husband was never part of Tren de Aragua, and he’d never been charged with a crime in Venezuela, Peru, or Chile, where he lived before immigrating to the United States. Davidson police told The Assembly they had no “current, credible information” about Tren de Aragua activity in the town. Public records show that Zambrano had no criminal convictions in North Carolina, though he’d been cited twice for driving without a license. (Asylum seekers in North Carolina cannot obtain a driver’s license until they have a work permit, which the Zambranos had only recently received.)
Zambrano Belandría’s protests to ICE officials fell on deaf ears. According to documents provided to Zambrano Belandría, ICE Officer Christopher Gomes deemed Zambrano “inadmissible”—meaning the agency determined that he was deportable—at 1:32 p.m. that day. His supervisor, Officer Joshua Burch, agreed and signed off the next day.
By publication, ICE had not responded to The Assembly’s Freedom of Information Act request for records that would explain their reasons. Gomes declined to comment, referring questions to ICE’s public affairs office. Burch and ICE’s regional public affairs office did not respond to requests for comment.
ICE then sent Zambrano to the Stewart Detention Center in southwest Georgia, nearly 400 miles away, where guards dressed him in an orange prisoner’s uniform. Eight days later, his wife gave birth by caesarian section. Zambrano has only met his newborn daughter through video calls.
On March 8, ICE transferred him to a detention facility in Texas, 50 miles north of the Mexico border. His uniform changed from orange to red, an indication that ICE considered him a high-security threat.
Zambrano told his wife in a March 14 phone call that he’d overheard from other detainees that he might be deported. That night, her world was abuzz with rumors that Zambrano and other Venezuelans would be sent to El Salvador, whose right-wing president had offered to jail criminals deported by the U.S. for a “relatively low” fee. But when Zambrano called her at 8 the next morning, he told her he thought he was being sent to Venezuela.
She hasn’t heard from him since.
In court filings, the Trump administration called Zambrano and the 237 other Venezuelans it sent to an El Salvador prison “foreign terrorists,” though a 60 Minutes investigation found that more than 95 percent of them have never been convicted of a violent crime. Reuters reported that dozens of them, like Zambrano, are asylum seekers with pending cases.
The administration has never proven—or attempted to prove—that they’re terrorists, or even gang members. Nor has it given them a chance to show that they’re not.
Instead, ICE agents asserted that Zambrano was a member of Tren de Aragua, and under the Trump administration’s interpretation of an 18th-century statute, that was enough to send him to what a federal judge has called “one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” an overcrowded, squalid facility where human rights advocates fear inmates are abused and tortured.
“For those folks, they had no process at all, absolutely no process at all to be removed from the country,” said Denise Gilman, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Immigration Clinic.
After the Department of Homeland Security’s planes left Texas, Zambrano disappeared from the government’s detainee locator system. Had a list of names of men sent to El Salvador not leaked to the media on March 20, his family wouldn’t know for sure where he was.
‘For Your Family’
Zambrano Belandría left Venezuela when she was 15, just as the country plunged into the depths of an economic and political crisis.
Two decades ago, Venezuela was a wealthy petrostate with a belligerent socialist president, Hugo Chávez, who frequently antagonized the U.S. But its economy faltered when oil prices dropped in the mid-2010s. Escalating sanctions the first Trump administration imposed on the regime of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, in response to political repression and human rights abuses, exacerbated the damage.
A mass exodus ensued. About 8 million Venezuelans left, most to other South American countries. Zambrano Belandría, who’d grown up in Mérida, high in the Andes mountains, migrated to Colombia, where she found work on farms cooking and cleaning.
But as Venezuela’s economy cratered, competition for jobs in neighboring countries stiffened. Zambrano Belandría found that she couldn’t scrape together enough money. Two years later, she moved to Piura, the capital of a northwestern province in Peru.
That’s where she met Zambrano. In 2018, he and two of his sisters left their home in Maracay, a city of roughly 1 million in Venezuela’s northern coastal state of Aragua. Zambrano got a job in construction, grading land, laying brick, and building homes.
After hearing about his imprisonment in El Salvador, his construction boss in Peru, Miguel Ruiz, posted in Spanish on Facebook: “We worked together for more than four years. You always worked for your loved ones, for your family to get ahead. God will help you to get out of this because He is just.”
Zambrano Belandría met her future husband at a restaurant in Piura where she worked with his sister Josí. They began dating a few months later. They moved in together at the end of 2018, and Zambrano Belandría got pregnant with the couple’s first child in 2020.
Life in Peru wasn’t easy, but they made do. They lived in a small house without electricity or running water and took Zambrano’s three-wheel motorcycle to a cousin’s house to wash clothes.
In July 2022, the motorcycle—Zambrano’s only transportation to his construction jobs—was stolen. It didn’t surface for two weeks, and by then it had been stripped for parts. To make matters worse, Zambrano Belandría says their landlord began charging them an exorbitant sum for rent.
They moved to Chile in March 2023. In some ways, life there was better. They had power and running water. But two-thirds of Zambrano’s income went to rent, and they often didn’t have enough left over to buy food. Zambrano Belandría says she was robbed while walking through the downtown business district.
After several months, she’d had enough. “I told him that we’re going to go to the United States,” Zambrano Belandría said. “That I want my daughter to have a good life, to be able to study.”
Their trek to the U.S. border was easier than it was for many migrants. Zambrano Belandría’s mother sold a couple of acres of land she’d inherited, and that, along with money they’d saved, paid for lodging, food, and buses until they reached Mexico. For that last stretch, they slept on the street, begged strangers for money, and ate cornflakes three meals a day.
Finally, on November 30, 2023, the Zambranos crossed the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, where they were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection officers. They were processed and released without bond the next day.
They planned to go to New York, but Zambrano’s brother-in-law, who lived in Davidson, offered to host them. By May, the family had applied for asylum, saying they feared for their safety if they returned to Venezuela. By the end of the year, they had received work permits, North Carolina IDs, and Social Security numbers so they could pay taxes.
They expected to be here for years, maybe permanently. Experts say that because immigration courts are notoriously backlogged, the average asylum case takes at least three to five years, and perhaps as long as a decade, to be processed.
Statistically, Zambrano’s claim had a decent chance of success, as Venezuelans have fared relatively well in immigration courts. Most years, significantly more asylum claims are rejected than granted, according to U.S. Department of Justice data. But in the 2024 fiscal year, nearly two-thirds of Venezuelans won their asylum cases. Austin Kocher, a political and legal geographer who studies immigration enforcement at Syracuse University, said that even in Charlotte’s “very difficult” immigration courts, more than half of Venezuelan asylum seekers prevailed in the last decade.
On December 10, 2024, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the Zambranos showed up at ICE’s Charlotte office for their annual check-in. More than 100 people were outside trying to get in. They left and came back later that month. The large crowd that day was pressed up against the doors.
An employee poked his head out and said they were only taking the first 100 people. They were too late. He told the Zambranos to come back next month.
Their new appointment put them just days into the new Trump administration. They’d soon find that bad luck had sent them into the maw of a ravenous deportation machine.
‘Operation Aurora’
During his first administration, Trump severely restricted asylum, expedited deportations, and separated migrant children from their parents. Vying to reclaim the White House last year, Trump promised “the largest deportation in the history of our country.”
After his victory, Trump declared a national emergency at the border, tightened legal immigration, halted refugee admissions, eliminated funding for lawyers for children in immigration courts, and revoked the immigration statuses of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Trump also sought to deport foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests and end birthright citizenship. Federal courts have blocked several of those initiatives, in one case saying the administration’s justification “smacks of racism.”
Critics painted these measures as extreme, but Trump’s allies say they worked. By the end of February, apprehensions at the southern border had fallen to historic lows. Polls showed that immigration was Trump’s most popular issue.
But Trump’s attempts to counter the purported “invasion” of a Venezuelan gang few Americans had heard of a year ago has sparked intense pushback from legal scholars and even some Trump allies.
Spanish for “Train of Aragua,” Tren de Aragua formed in 2005 as a railway workers’ union that began embezzling funds and extorting contractors. It evolved into a prison gang based in Aragua’s Tocorón penitentiary and grew into the country’s largest crime syndicate, an ultraviolent narcotrafficking and human smuggling operation.
When Venezuela’s economy collapsed and refugees fled, Tren de Aragua expanded, extorting and exploiting migrants in several South American countries. It established permanent cells in Chile and Peru—the latter of which is accused of assassinating a Venezuelan political dissident last year.
“They were important,” said David Smilde, a sociology professor at Tulane University who lived in Venezuela during the economic crisis. “I think they’re still important.”
But Smilde cautioned against inflating the group’s influence. Tren de Aragua never dominated Venezuela or competed with big cartels outside of its home country, he said. “The idea of them having an organized presence in the United States is a complete fantasy,” Smilde said.
“For those folks, they had no process at all, absolutely no process at all to be removed from the country.”
Denise Gilman, University of Texas at Austin
Even so, the group became central to Trump’s closing argument last fall. Trump and other Republicans said President Joe Biden’s lax immigration policies had allowed the gang to flourish. They blamed Tren de Aragua for a litany of crimes: the murders of nursing student Laken Riley and retired Florida police officer José Luis Sánchez Valera; sex trafficking in Louisiana and Tennessee; gun trafficking and the shootings of two cops in New York City.
Most of all, they pointed to Aurora, Colorado, a Denver suburb that Trump said Tren de Aragua had “invaded and conquered” with “better guns than our military has.” At campaign rallies, Trump said the gang had taken over entire sections of Colorado’s third-largest city.
That wasn’t true, but Tren de Aragua did have a presence in Aurora. The Denver area saw an influx of Venezuelan immigrants during the Biden administration. Some lived in dilapidated Aurora apartment buildings that an out-of-state landlord effectively abandoned.
When the property managers moved out, Tren de Aragua took over and used the buildings as a hub for criminal activity, according to media reports. One person was murdered. A video of gang members stalking the halls with guns, looking for their intended victim, went viral.
Aurora’s Republican mayor tried to correct the “exaggerated” narrative being pushed by Trump and conservative media outlets. The city was not under siege, he said. Gang members had been arrested.
But Trump was undeterred. In October, he campaigned in Aurora—an unusual stop, since Colorado isn’t a swing state—flanked by mug shots of unauthorized immigrants. “Our criminals are like babies compared to these people,” he declared. “These criminals are the most violent people on earth.”
Trump promised to use the military to deport undocumented criminals. The campaign, he said, would be called “Operation Aurora.”
‘Extraordinary Threat’
The day he took office, Trump designated Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization, saying it presents “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
Tren de Aragua isn’t a terrorist organization like ISIS, experts say. It has no political or religious agenda. Its god is greed.
“They are a criminal organization, period,” said Ernesto Castañeda, director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. “The activity that they have been doing in the U.S. has mostly been contained to targeting other Venezuelans.”
But calling alleged gang members “terrorists” gave Trump latitude to treat them differently. In a March 14 proclamation, Trump said the group had “unlawfully infiltrated the United States” and was “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a statute crafted in 1798 and employed only three times in the country’s history: The War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. The law gives him broad authority to detain and remove natives of an enemy nation or invading force.
The afternoon of March 15, three flights carrying 261 immigrants—238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans—departed from Texas and landed in San Salvador. The Trump administration had brokered a $6 million deal with El Salvador’s authoritarian leader, Nayib Bukele, who has branded himself the “world’s coolest dictator,” to house the men in the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, for at least one year, “pending the United States’ decision on their long-term disposition.”
At CECOT, prisoners’ heads are shaved upon arrival. They are never allowed outdoors, only leave their cells for 30 minutes a day, and cannot receive visitors or communicate with family members or lawyers. Human rights groups suspect many prisoners are abused or tortured, according to court documents. The Salvadoran government has said CECOT inmates will never return to their communities.
On March 26, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured CECOT. Standing in front of a large group of shirtless, tattooed men and wearing a $50,000 Rolex, Noem issued a warning to undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
“First of all, do not come to our country illegally,” she said. “You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
Zambrano—who, like about 90 percent of the migrants the Trump administration sent to El Salvador, has no criminal record—was somewhere inside that 40,000-inmate complex.
So was Arturo Suárez Trejo, another North Carolina resident caught in Trump’s dragnet.
‘A Fool’s Errand’
Suárez, a 33-year-old musician and father, was recording a music video at a Wake County house on February 8 when ICE and the FBI showed up, his brother Nelson Suárez told The Assembly. ICE agents detained him and several other men.
Arturo Suárez left Venezuela in 2016, moving first to Colombia and then to Chile, where he gained a following performing as “Suárez Vzla.” He hoped to build his music career in North Carolina, where his brother lives. In September 2024, Arturo Suárez was granted humanitarian parole, a temporary status that allows people with urgent humanitarian needs to enter the U.S. legally.
Suárez’s family members believe his tattoos led to him being branded a gang member and sent to CECOT. He has a hummingbird on his neck, which his wife told Mother Jones signifies “harmony and good energy.” His other tattoos depict such things as a palm tree, a sunrise over water, and the words “Amen” and “La salvación es individual.”
“People who know my brother know that he has never belonged to and will never belong to a gang, whether it’s Tren de Aragua or another,” Nelson Suárez posted on Instagram.
In recent weeks, numerous families have said ICE wrongly accused their loved ones of being Tren de Aragua members based on tattoos, hand gestures, and clothing.
According to ICE’s “Alien Enemy Validation Guide,” which surfaced in court records, the combination of “tattoos denoting membership/loyalty to TDA” and “dress known to indicate allegiance to TDA” is enough to punch one’s ticket to a Salvador prison.
The guide awards points for various metrics. Gang-affiliated tattoos and dress get four points each. “Hand signs” associated with Tren de Aragua and social media posts that have Tren de Aragua symbols or include other alleged gang members are worth two points each. Court records identifying someone as a member of Tren de Aragua are worth five points. Engaging in criminal activity with a known member is worth six.
If your total adds up to eight, ICE deems you a Tren de Aragua member.
Critics have noted several potential issues. Most importantly, experts say that Tren de Aragua doesn’t use tattoos or hand gestures, and its members don’t identify by clothing.
“This is not a gang that has a tattoo culture,” Castañeda, of American University, said. “To be a member or to show your belonging, there’s not any particular tattoo, and a random tattoo doesn’t mean anything. These people at ICE are not experts on Tren de Aragua, not experts on gangs. They were just trying to profile.”
“Tattoos are not traditionally an identifying marker of Venezuelan gangs,” added Smilde, the Tulane University professor. “That is typical of Central American gangs and Mexican gangs. But it’s actually not true of Venezuelan gangs. In fact, they don’t tend to have certain clothes that they use or even the hand gestures that gangs in the United States have. So trying to identify Tren de Aragua members through tattoos is just a fool’s errand.”
“These people at ICE are not experts on Tren de Aragua, not experts on gangs. They were just trying to profile.”
Ernesto Castañeda, American University
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told CBS News that he hadn’t read the case files of all the men sent to CECOT, but he insisted nonetheless that “every one of them” is a member of Tren de Aragua. He said he trusted the ICE agents who made those determinations. “I’m not aware of any mistakes at all, but I can tell you this, not every gang member has a criminal record.”
Since that interview, the Trump administration has admitted to one mistake. The Department of Homeland Security sent Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, to CECOT in direct violation of a judicial order. The administration blamed an “administrative error,” though it has also alleged in court—with scant evidence—that he is a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
In court records, ICE has argued that each of the “foreign terrorists” was “carefully vetted.” Acting Field Office Director Robert Cerna said that agents “did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone.”
Cerna admitted that many of the men sent to CECOT did not have criminal records. But he argued that this only showed how dangerous they were. “The lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” he wrote. “It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
When CBS News asked Homan whether the alleged Tren de Aragua members should be afforded due process rights, he scoffed. “Due process rights for a terrorist?”
The problem, legal scholars say, is that if the government can strip your due process rights by merely calling you a terrorist, those rights never existed in the first place.
“This is just a radical expansion of extra-constitutional, extra-legal authority being wielded against a very vulnerable population,” said Kocher, the Syracuse University immigration expert. “It’s really, really dangerous for democracy and the stability of our political system.”
‘The Rules of Monopoly’
Hours before the flights to El Salvador lifted off, the ACLU asked a federal court to intervene, arguing that Trump was circumventing the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment says the government cannot deprive “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has said that includes undocumented immigrants.
Under federal law, immigrants facing deportation usually have the right to go before a judge. (The Trump administration is seeking to bypass this requirement for many newer arrivals by vastly expanding a process called expedited deportation.) Courts have also ruled that those targeted under the Alien Enemies Act should have a chance to leave on their own before being removed.
During an emergency hearing on March 15, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the administration’s lawyers to turn the planes around if they were already in the air. The government ignored him. Boasberg also barred the administration from sending anyone else to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act and ruled that immigrants must have a “meaningful opportunity” to argue that deporting them to a country other than their own might endanger them.
The DOJ called his order “an affront” to Trump’s authority and has appealed to the Supreme Court. On March 31, the administration announced that it had sent 17 more “foreign gang terrorists” to El Salvador. The administration didn’t specify its legal authority for sending the men to CECOT.
“They don’t believe in the authority of the courts,” Ty Cobb, who served as White House special counsel during Trump’s first administration, told The Assembly. “They believe in their own implied powers, which are implied not by anything legal, but just in their own minds and their own egos.”
There are several legal questions at play, not least of which is whether Trump can invoke the Alien Enemies Act. The law requires a declared war or invasion by a “foreign nation or government.” The U.S. has not declared war on Venezuela. To get around that, Trump asserts that Tren de Aragua is invading the U.S., and the gang is “closely aligned” with the Venezuelan government.
But experts say the gang and the Maduro regime have a complicated and amorphous relationship.
“It’s not that Maduro is necessarily the head of Tren de Aragua and he wears two hats,” said Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez, a Northwestern University professor who studies economics and politics in Latin America and lived in Venezuela.
During the economic crisis, Venezuelan governments lacked the resources to provide services, much less crack down on organized crime, Lansberg-Rodríguez said. Criminal actors like Tren de Aragua filled the vacuum and helped the government preserve order—a situation not uncommon in failing states. Officials went from turning a blind eye to getting cut in.
The Venezuelan government claims it wiped out Tren de Aragua in 2023, when it raided the prison that served as the gang’s base. Inmates had taken over the penitentiary and turned it into a luxury resort, with a swimming pool and zoo.
There’s a separate question of whether Tren de Aragua is invading the U.S.
About 800,000 Venezuelans live in the U.S.—most with legal status—and more than 600,000 Venezuelans crossed the border between fiscal years 2022 and 2024. But few have gang ties. As of last October, the Department of Homeland Security had identified about 600 Venezuelans in the country who might be affiliated with Tren de Aragua. Only about 100 of them were confirmed members.
Even if the Alien Enemies Act applies, that presents another question: Can the government send people who have not been convicted of a crime to prison in a third-party country for an indefinite period? (Lawyers for some Venezuelans have petitioned El Salvador’s supreme court for their release, but the judges are Bukele’s allies.)
And there’s one final question: If the courts find that the Trump administration acted unlawfully, can they do anything about it?
“These guys think they’re playing a game. They’re trying to see what they can get away with.”
Ty Cobb, White House special counsel during Trump’s first administration
The ACLU wants the courts to order the government to return the men to U.S. soil. But the Trump administration says the courts lack jurisdiction. The alleged Tren de Aragua members are in Salvadoran—not American—custody now. Even in the case of Abrego Garcia, the man sent to CECOT by “administrative error,” the administration said its hands were tied.
A federal judge disagreed, ruling that the Trump administration must quickly return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
The administration appealed, and the White House struck a defiant tone: “We suggest the judge contact President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.” On April 7, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary stay of the lower court’s ruling.
“These guys think they’re playing a game,” Cobb said. He and other conservatives filed an amicus brief supporting the ACLU’s case. “They’re trying to see what they can get away with. They’re like 14-year-olds trying to figure out what the rules of Monopoly are and how to use them against little kids.”
In an earlier interview, Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis told NOTUS, The Assembly’s reporting partner, that the administration had a “moral obligation” to get Abrego Garcia out of CECOT.
“I’ll give the decision makers the benefit of the doubt, but we’ll follow up with the facts,” Tillis said when asked this week about Suárez and Zambrano. “What I don’t want to do is discredit a program that, on its face, I support. I love the idea of taking thugs who came to this country illegally and putting them in their place, and their place could be El Salvador. But you gotta move at a pace that ensures due process and that makes certain that an innocent person’s not going down there.”
Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Budd declined to comment. U.S. Rep. Tim Moore, who represents Davidson, where the Zambranos live, did not respond to a request for comment.
U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, a Democrat who represents the Raleigh area where Suárez was apprehended, told The Assembly in a statement, “I strongly oppose the Trump administration’s inhumane deportations of immigrants legally residing in the United States. These individuals are entitled to due process, and the administration is violating their rights.”
Jeff Jackson, the state’s Democratic attorney general, told The Assembly in a statement that he could not comment on the specifics of Zambrano’s and Suárez’s cases. But he added, “Every person in the United States is entitled to due process under our Constitution. That includes the right to challenge serious allegations before an impartial judge—especially when those allegations carry life-altering consequences. Due process is a cornerstone of our democracy. If we start deciding who does and doesn’t get due process, we’ve abandoned the rule of law.”
In a 5-4 decision on April 7, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Boasberg’s stays and allowed the Trump decision to resume sending Venezuelans to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act, at least for now. The majority ruled that the ACLU’s case should have been filed in a different jurisdiction and challenged the removals under a different statute.
But the majority also said that detainees must be afforded due process before being sent to El Salvador. “The detainees’ rights against summary removal, however, are not currently in dispute,” the court declared.
On April 8, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the ACLU filed a new petition in New York on behalf of potentially thousands of Venezuelans who “were, are, and will be” subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act.
‘Why Isn’t He Here?’
Fifty-eight days after Zambrano’s fateful ICE check-in, his wife sat on the edge of the queen-sized bed she now shares with Danna, brushing the toddler’s hair into a sleek high ponytail.
She’s moved Zambrano’s cologne collection to a bottom drawer because it hurts too much to look at it. She put his soccer jerseys in vacuum-sealed bags. Two of his ballcaps—one with the Chicago Bulls logo, the second bedazzled with “GUESS”—hung on the wall separating the bedroom’s double closet. On the opposite wall, a rainbow of hair bows cascaded down two parallel ribbons.
Zambrano Belandría unclipped a light pink bow to crown Danna’s ponytail.
It was a sunny spring day, but Zambrano Belandría stayed indoors, battling depression and afraid to leave her apartment.
“All day long, my mind is preoccupied with what happened,” she said. “It’s something that torments a person. I fear that this isn’t going to be over tomorrow, that they’re going to put me away and take my girls from me.”
Her family’s situation is precarious. Her oldest daughter is a Peruvian national. Her infant is an American citizen. She’s a Venezuelan seeking asylum. She’s followed the rules, she said. But so did her husband.
Zambrano’s employer, Danna’s teacher, and the director of her preschool have all written letters vouching for his character.
“Julio Zambrano Pérez exemplifies what America represents: working hard, planning for the future, raising the next generation of responsible citizens,” wrote Michelle Covey, director of La Escuelita Bilingual Preschool in Davidson.
Zambrano Belandría initially hoped the letters would convince a judge to release her husband after ICE detained him. Now, she doesn’t know what good they’ll do. According to the government’s case information system, he still has a court date scheduled for May 13. But if he’s in CECOT, he won’t be able to attend.
Most of all, Zambrano Belandría doesn’t know what to tell Danna, who turns 4 this month.
‘My daughter always asks me, “Why doesn’t my dad come home? Why isn’t he here?”’ she said between tears. “I tell her, ‘Your dad is working. He has a lot of work. This week he won’t be back, but soon.’”
But Danna is smart and observant, and the lie only prompts more questions that have no good answers.
“Why doesn’t he call us?”
Reporters Casey Murray and Heidi Perez-Moreno contributed to this story.
Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.
Ren Larson is a staff reporter at The Assembly. She previously worked for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica’s investigative team, and as a data reporter with The Arizona Republic. She holds a master’s of public policy and an M.A. in international and area studies from the University of California, Berkeley.