MIAMI — Franco Caraballo called his wife Friday night, crying and panicked. Hours earlier, the 26-year-old barber and dozens of other Venezuelan migrants held at a federal detention facility in Texas were dressed in white clothes, handcuffed and taken onto a plane. He had no idea where he was going.
Twenty-four hours later, Caraballo’s name disappeared from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online detainee locator.
On Monday, his wife, Johanny Sánchez, learned Caraballo was among the more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants flown over the weekend to El Salvador, where they are now held in a maximum-security prison after being accused by the Trump administration of belonging to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
Sánchez insists her husband isn’t a gang member. She struggles even to find logic in the accusation.
Flights by U.S. immigration authorities set off a frantic scramble among terrified families after hundreds of immigrants vanished from ICE’s online locator.
Some turned up at that prison in El Salvador, a massive complex where visitors, recreation and education are not allowed. The U.S. has paid El Salvador’s government $6 million to hold the prisoners, many of them Venezuelan. The Venezuelan government rarely accepts deportees from the U.S.
But many families have no idea where to find their loved ones.
“I don’t know anything about my son,” said Xiomara Vizcaya, a 46-year-old Venezuelan.
Ali David Navas Vizcaya had been in U.S. detention since early 2024, when he arrived from Mexico at a U.S. border crossing where he had an appointment to talk to immigration officers. He called her late Friday night and said he thought he was being deported to Venezuela or Mexico. His name is no longer in ICE’s system.
Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left their homeland since 2013, when its oil-dependent economy collapsed. Most initially went to other Latin American countries but more headed to the U.S. after COVID-19 restrictions lifted during the Biden administration.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced he had invoked an 18th century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the U.S. to deport noncitizens without any legal recourse, including rights to appear before an immigration or federal court judge.
Many conservative have cheered the deportations and the Trump administration for taking a hard line to deal with immigration.
The Trump administration says it is using the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Tren de Aragua members, saying the gang was invading the U.S., though it has not provided any evidence to back up gang-membership claims.
U.S. officials acknowledged in a court filing Monday that many people sent to El Salvador do not have criminal records, though they insisted all are suspected gang members.
“The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” said a sworn declaration included in the filing, adding that along with their suspected gang membership “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.”
On Feb. 3, Caraballo went to an ICE office in Dallas office for another mandatory check-in with the agents handling his asylum request. He had been coming regularly to the office for months.
What gang member, his wife asked, would walk into a federal law enforcement office during a Trump administration crackdown that has left immigrants across the country terrified they would be deported?
“We followed the law like we were told to. We never missed any” meetings with authorities, said Sánchez, who remains in the U.S. trying to secure her husband’s release. Sánchez said her husband, who she married in 2024 in Texas, has had no run-ins with the law in the U.S. She also showed The Associated Press a Venezuelan government document showing he has a clean criminal record there.
Sánchez believes he was wrongly accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua because of a tattoo in the shape of a clock marking the birthday of his daughter from a previous relationship.
“He has lots of tattoos but that’s not a reason to discriminate against him,” she said.
Sánchez said she and her husband left Venezuela in 2023 with barely $200 and spent the next three months sleeping in plazas, eating out of trash cans and relying on the goodwill of fellow migrants as they journeyed north.
She thought the sacrifice would be worth it. Her husband had been working as a barber since the age of 13 and in the United States he was hopeful he could find a new start, escaping the poverty wages and toxic politics of Nicolas Maduro’s ironfisted rule in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan government has blasted the transfers, calling them “kidnappings” and urging people to protest Tuesday in the capital, Caracas, to demand that detainees in El Salvador be sent to their homeland.
Jorge Rodriguez, Maduro’s chief negotiator with the U.S., urged Venezuelans living in the U.S. to return to home.
The American dream, he said, had turned into “a Salvadoran nightmare.”
Sánchez agrees. She wants to leave the U.S. once she finds her husband.
“We fled Venezuela for a better future. We never imagined things would be worse.”
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Associated Press journalists Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, and Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed to this report.