In the span of two days, Venezuelan migrant Mervin Jose Yamarte Fernandez went from working at a restaurant in Texas to the Trump administration using an emergency wartime law to deport him to a notorious El Salvadorian prison alongside other alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
The 29-year-old’s sister, Jare, told The Miami Herald she saw Mervin in a promotional video released touting the deportations.
“He was asking for help. And that help didn’t come from the lips. It came from the soul,” she told the paper, adding that her brother wasn’t affiliated with the gang and had no previous criminal record. “You know when someone has their soul broken.”
Attorneys and family members say some of the 238 men who were deported have no ties to the gang targeted in the sweep, the first major immigration operation since the White House took the unprecedented step of invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to conduct mass deportations without public evidence or due process.
Ivannoa Sanchez, 22, believes her husband, Jose Franco Carballo Tiapa, 26, is among the men sent to El Salvador.
The 26-year-old Venezuelan came to the U.S. in November 2023, surrendering to authorities before submitting an asylum claim. The man was released and made regular check-ins with immigration authorities, according to his wife, and had a planned court appearance in March before his arrest.
“He went to his routine ICE appointment and he didn’t come out,” Sanchez told ABC News.
She believes her husband, who she said has no gang ties, was targeted because he has tattoos.
“He has never done anything, not even a fine, absolutely nothing,” she added. “We chose this country because it offers more security, more freedom, more peace of mind. But we didn’t know it would turn into chaos.”
Mirelis Casique said her son Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, had no gang history but was also targeted in the operation because immigration officials believed he had gang tattoos. He was detained last year, but a judge released him under the condition of wearing an electronic monitoring device, she said.
“I told him to follow the country’s rules, that he wasn’t a criminal, and at most, they would deport him,” she told The New York Times. “But I was very naïve — I thought the laws would protect him.”
Attorneys challenging the deportation flights say one of those sent to El Salvador was actually fleeing Tren de Aragua.
“He was in fact victimized by that group and the group is the reason he cannot return to Venezuela,” they wrote in a court filing.
The Trump administration has admitted in the deportation suit that “many” of those sent to the Salvadorian prison, which human rights officials have criticized as a “tropical gulag” with a history of abuse, do not have any criminal record, though it has framed this lack of evidence as evidence itself.
“The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” ICE official Robert Cerna wrote in a sworn declaration.
He argued that “the lack of specific information” about them “demonstrates that they are terrorists” who “lack a complete profile.”
The scant public evidence of gang ties is just one of the irregularities in the Venezuelan deportation flights.
The administration also defied a court order from a judge to turn the deportation flights around on Saturday amid a challenge to Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act.
The Justice Department has challenged the judge, seeking to remove him from the case and arguing disclosing further information about the deportees risks national security.
Last night, Justice Department lawyers filed a motion to reverse Judge James Boasberg’s order that blocks deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, a move that government lawyers called “an affront to the President’s broad constitutional and statutory authority to protect the United States from dangerous aliens who pose grave threats to the American people.”
Legal experts recently warned The Independent the administration appears to be abusing its national security powers while ignoring federal courts.
“The courts should shut this down,” Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said in an interview. “If the courts allow it to stand, this move could pave the way for abuses against any group of immigrants the president decides to target — not just Venezuelans — even if they are lawfully present in the U.S. and have no criminal history.”
Last month, the administration admitted that about one-third of the migrants it detained in a round of deportations at Guantánamo Bay — framed by officials as hardened killers and the worst of the worst — were actually considered “lower-threat” and likely do not have any serious criminal records, according to court filings.
