Trump Sent Them To Hell. Now He's Erasing Them Altogether.
The only information Ysqueibel Yonaiquer Peñaloza Chirinos' family has received about him in the past three months came from former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz.
Gaetz probably didn't mean to help. But last month, as part of a propaganda video for the far-right One America News Network, he took a tour of the infamous El Salvadoran prison to which President Donald Trump has sent hundreds of U.S. immigrants for indefinite detention, without charge, trial or sentencing: El Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT. By the time Gaetz arrived, the men Trump had rendered to the prison had already been there for two months.
It happens quickly: The OANN camera pans across a cluster of cells Gaetz says are being used to hold the people Trump sent to El Salvador. Many chant 'Libertad!' Some press their hands together in prayer, pleading.
Peñaloza's face flashes on screen, framed by two metal bars. He looks mournful, almost crying, and does not say anything. But he does what most others are doing, opening and closing his fingers over a closed thumb, making what his lawyers say is an internationally recognized hand symbol for distress — a flashing 'send help' request popularized by domestic violence advocacy groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Immigration policies aren't just politics — they're personal. At HuffPost, we explore the human stories behind the headlines, reporting on how immigration laws impact real people and communities. Support this vital coverage by
Peñaloza's mother, Ydalys Chirinos-Polanco, spotted him in the video. She already knew he was at the prison — Peñaloza's olive branch tattoo was visible in the initial March 15 footage of the U.S. CECOT detainees — but she hadn't seen him since then.
Peñaloza's only encounter with the law in the United States had been a traffic ticket, she said.
'I felt a lot of pain,' Chirinos recalled to HuffPost on a video call Wednesday, speaking in Spanish and through tears. 'But at the same time — a lot of happiness to see that he is alive and that he had the strength to stand up.'
A month later, she hasn't seen any more of her son.
In his absence, the U.S. government has worked to remove Peñaloza, who is Venezuelan, from domestic immigration court entirely. Six days after Gaetz's prison tour, an immigration judge granted the Department of Homeland Security's request to dismiss Peñaloza's case. As far as the United States immigration court system is concerned, he does not exist.
At least 24 people sent to CECOT have had their immigration cases dismissed in their absence, Michelle Brané, the executive director of Together & Free, a nonprofit working to identify and track CECOT detainees, told HuffPost. The actual number may be higher — and it is unclear how many cases have pending dismissal requests from DHS that have not received rulings from immigration judges, who are technically Justice Department employees rather than members of an independent court system.
Some immigration judges are pushing back. Last week, one such judge denied a DHS motion to dismiss a CECOT detainee's immigration case, saying the Trump administration had 'essentially rid itself of its opposing party.' But that is a rare exception to the trend.
The dismissal of immigration cases for the CECOT detainees is yet another example of the Trump administration working to erase any trace of them in the United States, even though hundreds had ongoing legal cases here when they were disappeared.
Without that legal toehold in the U.S. immigration system, CECOT detainees risk falling not only outside the purview of U.S. law but outside of any legal recognition whatsoever.
There was no hearing in Peñaloza's case to discuss the dismissal — a May 30 court date was canceled ahead of time — and no discussion of where Peñaloza is, or how he got there. Instead, in a two-paragraph filing in April, attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said only that the 25-year-old 'was identified as an Alien Enemy and removed from the United States.'
It was a perverse legal argument. Because Trump had removed Peñaloza without legal process, he was no longer present in the United States, and therefore, was not entitled to any legal process, the government claimed. On May 15, an immigration judge granted DHS's motion, stating that 'the Court does not have the authority to demand DHS return Respondent to the United States.'
Peñaloza's legal team plans to appeal, and lawyers for CECOT detainees are involved in several lawsuits on their behalf. While dismissing cases, some immigration judges have said that the proper venue for legal challenges are habeas corpus lawsuits — and despite the Trump administration's open defiance, federal judges have advanced such lawsuits nationally, most notably earlier this month.
'Imagine having to explain to someone's mother, as a United States immigration attorney, that their son has an immigration hearing, and the government attorneys fighting his case say that they have no means of being able to connect you with your client — when the United States government has paid for the detention of that individual in a third country,' Margaret Cargioli, directing attorney of policy and advocacy at Immigrant Defenders Law Center and Peñaloza's attorney in the United States, told HuffPost.
Like other attorneys for CECOT detainees, Cargioli argues that because the Trump administration made an arrangement with El Salvador to imprison Trump's expelled migrants, her client is still in the 'constructive custody' of the United States, and is still owed his day in court.
'It's astounding that I could not get any information about Ysqueibel to provide to their family during immigration court hearings, and that by sheer bravery on his part, he pressed his face against the bars of a dangerous prison to let his loved ones know that he's still alive,' she said, referring to the Gaetz video.
The Trump administration defended the handling of these cases. 'The appropriate process due to an illegal alien terrorist with final deportation orders is removal, plain and simple,' Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told HuffPost in a statement, ignoring a lengthy list of specific questions. McLaughlin said DHS has a 'stringent law enforcement assessment in place that abides by due process under the U.S. Constitution.'
But DHS has not released evidence supporting its assertions regarding the CECOT detainees, and around half of the people the Trump administration has sent to CECOT had no final deportation orders at all. Those who did mostly had orders to be deported to Venezuela, not El Salvador.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said separately, 'Any illegal alien who is deported from the United States receives due process prior to any removal.'
But that's simply not true. Human rights groups and lawyers have characterized the Trump administration's renditions of hundreds of people to CECOT as 'enforced disappearances,' in which someone is detained and deprived of their rights without due process while their captors refuse to even acknowledge their detention.
Peñaloza is just one of at least 278 people, mostly Venezuelans and some Salvadorans, sent by the Trump administration to the Salvadoran prison earlier this year as part of an arrangement in which the Trump administration is paying the Salvadoran government millions of dollars to detain non-U.S. citizens.
Around half of the immigrants in that group were sent to CECOT after they received 'removal' orders in standard deportation proceedings — an unprecedented punishment given immigration proceedings are civil in nature, not criminal.
The other people, including Peñaloza, were accused by the U.S. government of being 'alien enemies.' They were declared members of the Tren de Aragua gang, often simply because of common tattoos. The Trump administration considers Tren de Aragua to be not only a gang but also a terrorist group, as well as essentially an invading army that's allegedly working hand-in-glove with the Venezuelan government.
In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used in World War II, to allege that the gang was actually 'supporting the [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro regime's goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.'
Veteran intelligence analysts who disputed that claim were fired. Suddenly, it only took a low-level bureaucrat's say-so to banish someone from the country and into indefinite detention in one of the world's most notorious prisons, without any review by judges.
The same day Trump signed his declaration, the administration began flying hundreds of Venezuelans in U.S. custody to CECOT. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt the removals and turn the flights around, but government officials ignored the directive.
The judge opened criminal contempt proceedings against the administration in April, but the administration made no effort to return the expelled men. Officials even defied a Supreme Court order telling them to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who multiple government officials acknowledged was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador despite a judge's prior order protecting him from being returned there.
The Trump administration finally returned Abrego Garcia to the United States on June 6, nearly two months after the Supreme Court spoke on his case; he now faces criminal charges for alleged conspiracy to transport aliens and unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens. Abrego Garcia was arraigned Friday and has entered a not guilty plea.
The U.S. government has never acknowledged the full list of people sent to CECOT, but CBS News, Bloomberg and other media outlets have used leaked lists and court records to establish that the vast majority of people had no criminal record at all, either in the United States or elsewhere around the world.
The administration's own records showed the same thing, journalists from ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and the Venezuelan outlets Cazadores de Fake News and Alianza Rebelde Investiga recently reported. And out of 90 cases in which the detainee's method of coming to the United States was known, 50 cases described people who had entered the United States legally — 'with advanced US government permission, at an official border crossing point,' the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, found.
Peñaloza was one of them. He came to the United States through a pre-scheduled appointment on CBP One, the cellphone app used by the Biden administration to process asylum-seekers.
Nevertheless, due to the Trump administration's actions, hundreds of active cases in U.S. immigration courts suddenly ground to a halt, with worrying implications for CECOT detainees' futures.
Like other people Trump has banished to CECOT, Peñaloza had a legal right to make a case in the United States for why he should stay here — a right that the government usurped.
If a given immigration case is dismissed, 'you don't have legal status and you don't have a way to get it, because you're not in the process,' said Brané, the Together & Free executive director, who previously worked as a Biden administration official focusing on immigration.
Should CECOT detainees who have had their immigration cases dismissed somehow return to the United States someday, it's not clear what their next steps would be, Brané said. 'Like all this [Alien Enemies Act] stuff, it's never happened before and they're not following normal procedures,' she said, referring to the Trump administration.
The detainees 'were denied due process, they are disappeared, and they are now in this legal limbo where they remain in a prison with no legal protections, excluded from the protection of the law, and they don't know if they'll ever have a chance at a fair trial,' Isabel Carlota Roby, an attorney for Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, told ABC News.
Jerce Reyes Barrios, one of the people who faced having his immigration case tossed, was in the final stages of his asylum proceedings when the government disappeared him in March. A professional soccer player and youth soccer coach, Reyes Barrios fled Venezuela last year after being detained and tortured with electric shocks and suffocation for protesting authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, his lawyer Linette Tobin wrote in a court declaration.
While in Mexico, Reyes Barrios made an appointment on CBP One and presented himself to immigration officials at the U.S. border. Immigration officials detained him at a facility in San Diego and accused him of being a member of Tren de Aragua, citing one of his tattoos and a hand symbol he made in a social media post.
The tattoo, which shows a crown atop a soccer ball and the words 'Dios,' or 'God,' resembles the logo of Reyes Barrios' favorite soccer team, Real Madrid, Tobin wrote in the declaration. And the hand gesture, she wrote, 'is a common one that means I Love You in sign language and is commonly used as a Rock & Roll symbol.'
After submitting Venezuelan documents showing he had no criminal record, as well as letters of employment, a declaration from the tattoo artist, and documents explaining the meaning of the tattoo and the hand gesture, Reyes Barrios was removed from maximum security. His final hearing on his asylum case in immigration court was set for April 17.
'We were completely prepared. Everything had been submitted to the court. Everything was ready,' Tobin said in an interview.
But by March, Reyes Barrios was feeling nervous, his lawyer said: 'Just in the seven days before his removal, he was expressing a real concern. I think he had a premonition.'
In the following days, he was abruptly transferred from a detention facility in California to one in Texas. And then, he went dark.
Shortly after the March 15 deportation flights to El Salvador, Reyes Barrios' family saw a picture of some of the men in CECOT with their hands clasped behind their freshly shaven heads. Their faces were mostly obscured by their arms, but his family thought they recognized Reyes Barrios.
Tobin called the ICE office in Texas, Reyes Barrios' last known location. She received confirmation he had been 'removed,' but the person on the phone refused to say where, she said.
The family's fears were confirmed on March 20, when Reyes Barrios' name appeared on the CBS News list naming some people detained at CECOT. His family spotted him again in the footage released by Gaetz in May.
Less than two weeks after Reyes Barrios disappeared, DHS filed a motion to dismiss his immigration case.
The four-line motion did not provide any clarity on his location, condition or the reason the government considered him a so-called 'alien enemy.' Instead, a DHS attorney simply argued, 'The respondent is no longer in the United States. As such, there is authority to dismiss on this ground.'
Tobin urged the judge to deny the government's request, arguing 'dismissal is inappropriate' and would 'be affirming and exacerbating DHS' gross and flagrant violations of [Reyes Barrios'] due process rights.' She noted that ongoing federal litigation over the legality of the CECOT transfers could result in her client returning home — only to find that his asylum case had been tossed.
Indeed, earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the government must 'facilitate' the ability of those transferred to CECOT to pursue habeas claims, or challenge the legality of their detention. Reyes Barrios' family texted Tobin emojis of party hats in celebration of the ruling. 'To have the injustice recognized by a court made them very happy,' Tobin said.
There have been four hearings for Reyes Barrios' asylum case since he was removed from the U.S. The judge asked the government to provide information in support of its dismissal motion, including confirmation that Reyes Barrios was removed from the U.S. and evidence that he is a member of Tren de Aragua. But at each hearing, the government just restated that it is moving for dismissal, Tobin said.
'They never say anything else. They don't cite to regulations. They don't cite to case laws. They just say, 'Dismiss the case,'' Tobin said.
At a hearing last month, Tobin asked the judge to administratively close the case, which would effectively pause proceedings. When the DHS lawyer opposed the request, the judge asked for their reasoning.
'Their response, after a very long pause, was, 'Well, because we're moving for dismissal,'' Tobin recounted.
Then, on Tuesday, came a crucial development. In a ruling, the judge in Reyes Barrios' case granted Tobin's motion to administratively close it. As a result, his asylum case is still pending.
'Any opposition to administrative closure involves the Department's preference to dismiss proceedings [...] which the court deems inappropriate under the unclean hands doctrine since the Department essentially rid itself of its opposing party,' the judge wrote in his order, noting several so-called 'Avetisyan factors,' a reference to existing immigration court precedent concerning when it is appropriate to administratively close immigration cases, even if one side disagrees.
'Ongoing litigation questions the legality of the Department's removals under the [Alien Enemies Act],' the judge added. 'The court anticipates the respondent's ability to proceed with his [asylum] application, which he filed on December 3, 2024, although it is difficult to determine the ultimate outcome of his proceedings at this stage given that the respondent never had his 'day in court.''
Tobin celebrated the decision in a statement to HuffPost.
'DHS is feeding the public lies every day, saying that they're deporting violent criminals, monsters, the worst of the worst,' she said. 'To see judges call out the Government for their illegal actions, 'unclean hands,' and obfuscations gives me some degree of hope that justice will eventually prevail and people who were unlawfully disappeared/deported without due process will finally get their day in court.'
In several other cases, immigration judges have been willing to grant DHS's dismissal requests quickly, sometimes without even holding a hearing. After the CECOT deportation flights, immigration lawyers around the country scrambled to keep the cases alive.
In addition to Peñaloza, Immigrant Defenders Law Center has seven other clients in CECOT. Three have had their immigration cases dismissed, and one received removal orders in absentia, communications director Renee Garcia said in an email.
Perhaps the most recognizable case, due to national news coverage, is that of Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist who was seeking asylum in the United States and who was targeted for indefinite CECOT detention due to benign tattoos, including two crowns with 'Mom' and 'Dad' printed under them.
An immigration judge dismissed Hernandez's case late last month, as NBC News reported. A judge also dismissed the case of Arturo Suárez Trejo, a Venezuelan singer and friend of Peñaloza's, who had appeared in Suárez's music videos in the past, Garcia said.
Last month, Judge Jason L. Stern, a Houston-based immigration judge, dismissed Frizgeralth de Jesús Cornejo Pulgar's case despite the government filing a motion for a continuance in the case, Mother Jones reported.
Another CECOT detainee whose case was dismissed, Henrry Jose Albornoz Quintero, missed the birth of his child while languishing in El Salvador's infamous prison.
Quintero and his wife, Naupari Rosila, came to the U.S. in late 2023, initially sleeping in a car until they saved enough for a deposit on a Dallas apartment. In January, when his wife was seven months pregnant, Quintero was detained during a routine ICE check-in. Rosila found an attorney and raised money for him to be released on bond. Days before a hearing in immigration court, he told her he was going to be deported home to Venezuela. He was sent to CECOT instead.
In April, an ICE attorney moved to dismiss the case against Quintero, writing in a two-paragraph filing that 'the respondent was identified as an Alien Enemy and removed from the United States.' Quintero's attorney, John Dutton, told HuffPost the dismissal motion was the first time the Trump administration acknowledged using the Alien Enemies Act against his client.
The motion to dismiss was 'morally repugnant,' Dutton wrote in a court filing, describing Quintero as being sent to 'an extrajudicial dungeon in a middle of the night, unannounced, covert operation between our government and a foreign dictatorship, bankrolled, directed and fully controlled by the United States.'
'The government cannot be allowed to erase people from its jurisdiction simply by shipping them abroad,' Dutton wrote. 'If DHS's motion were granted, it would establish a chilling precedent: that DHS may abduct noncitizens mid-proceedings, contract out their indefinite detention to foreign governments, and then declare the case moot due to their own unlawful conduct. This would not be an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. It would be a blueprint for lawless tyranny, a dictatorship. This is not hyperbole.'
On May 1, a judge granted the government's motion. Quintero's case was dismissed.
'Regardless of the merits of the respondent's opposition to his physical removal from the United States, this Court does not have jurisdiction to consider constitutional issues,' the immigration judge wrote. 'The requirements for dismissal of the Notice to Appear have been met in this case.'
***
Over the phone Wednesday, Peñaloza's mother told HuffPost about her son – that he's hard-working, principled, and respectful. He's a trained refrigerator technician who has worked in construction in the past. He's a good cook who loves making chinchurria— a stuffed, fried intestine dish popular in Venezuela — but can also dress up humble meals like vegetarian arepas or rice with tomato sauce.
He's an older sibling who, in years past, would remind his younger sisters to listen to their parents. Part of his income from his time in the United States went to paying for his younger sister's physical therapy education.
Valentina Polanco-Chirinos, Peñaloza's 17-year-old sister, briefly chimed in on the call. Her brother was sentimental, she said, and would cry when his mother scolded him. But especially given her mother's travels throughout Venezuela for work, she was grateful for him. He was almost a father figure to her, Valentina said.
Peñaloza's mother — who'd just returned from Caracas, where a group of CECOT detainees' family members were petitioning the United Nations — said her son's disappearance to El Salvador in March came as a shock to her. He, like many others who ended up in CECOT, believed while in U.S. immigration detention that he was headed home to Venezuela. She said he'd given all of his clothes away to relatives when he'd left for the U.S., and that she'd set out to buy him a new pair of shoes.
When news broke that a handful of deportation flights had landed in El Salvador, she figured they'd been diverted due to weather. Reality set in when she saw that one of the prisoners had her son's tattoo.
The United States seems to be moving backward, she said: The CECOT detainees were kidnapped, and they weren't given an opportunity to defend themselves.
And her son's immigration case in the United States? If he's eventually released from CECOT, did she think he would want to return and fight for his right to stay in the country?
She didn't think so.
'I don't think he would feel safe there.'
Lawyers Are Sounding The Alarm About Trump Disappearing People
The Trump Administration Is Using A Legal Loophole To Keep Mahmoud Khalil In Custody — Despite A Court Order
Kilmar Abrego Garcia Has Returned To The United States
People Are 'Disappearing' Since Trump Took Office. Here's What That Means.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
16 minutes ago
- New York Post
Americans at risk ‘anywhere' after 6 illegal immigrants are charged in mother's murder: congressman
A South Carolina congressman is warning of threats that face Americans 'anywhere' after four years of an open border following the random murder of a Lancaster mom of two last month. The comments come after Lancaster authorities charged six illegal immigrants, between the ages of 13 and 21, in connection with Larisha Thompson's May 2 murder. Advertisement She was shot to death while driving to meet friends in Rock Hill. 'Two children will not have a mother to come home to,' Republican South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. 'It can happen anywhere, at any time. That's the sad part. We've seen it all over the country.' He added that while Laken Riley, the Augusta University student killed by illegal Venezuelan migrant Jose Ibarra in February 2024, has become 'the face' of crimes committed by those living illegally in the United States, there are similar victims in states across the country, including Thompson and others, such as Lizbeth Medina, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin and Kayla Hamilton. 'The positive thing is: the border's secure now, but you've got to realize: four years of leaving the doors open to over 160 countries to put criminals and anybody else that wanted to come into the country,' Norman said. 'You wouldn't open your house up like that. Yet the Democrats are still not condemning what Joe Biden intentionally did. But it's a new day, and hopefully, [it is] going to be straightened out in time.' Advertisement 7 Larisha Thompson was shot to death while driving to meet friends in Rock Hill on May 2, 2025. Family handout Lancaster County Sheriff's Office deputies located Thompson, 40, deceased with a gunshot wound behind the wheel of her vehicle on Riverside Road in Lancaster, which is located about an hour south of Charlotte, North Carolina. On May 12, authorities announced the arrests of three adults – Asael Aminadas Torres-Chirinos, 21, Jarby Ardon Ramos-Odari, 18, and Jeyson Sobied Pineda-Salgado, 17 – and three juveniles, ages 13, 14 and 15, in connection with Thompson's death and a separate burglary that occurred on April 30. 'The unknown is what we fear,' Norman said when asked about people with criminal intentions who may have crossed illegally into the United States during the Biden administration. 'When you hear [FBI Director] Kash Patel talk about threats… the fact is that they're doing their best, but… we don't know who's here. And we're getting a lot of them out, but there's still the unknown of who's left here. And that's the problem. How many more deaths do we have to have that are just so senseless?' Advertisement 7 Jarby Ardon Ramos-Odari. Lancaster Co. Sheriff's Office 7 Rep. Ralph Norman arrives for a meeting at the Capitol Building on May 20, 2025. Getty Images Norman said he hopes prosecutors pursue the death penalty against the adult suspects accused of murdering Thompson. 'South Carolina is a great state,' Norman said, but added that people have 'got to be aware' and 'diligent.' Advertisement Lancaster Sheriff Barry Faile said Thompson's 'shooting defies any sense of decency in a civilized society,' during a May press conference. 'Ms. Thompson was going about her business on a Friday night, not bothering anyone. All of a sudden, these six men and boys – out to get something for nothing from someone they did not know and had no business bothering – pulled alongside her car, and Torres-Chirinos opened fire, killing Ms. Thompson,' Faile said at the time. 'There's no place in our society for acts like this or the people who commit them, and my hope is these six are never again among us.' The Department of Homeland Security has placed detainers on all six individuals charged, Faile said during a press conference, adding that the community is a 'much safer place today because these six individuals are off the streets.' Faile alleged that the suspects pulled up alongside Thompson and fatally shot her in what authorities described as a 'random robbery attempt.' Authorities believe the other five suspects were in the vehicle with Torres-Chirinos, who was driving and allegedly fired the fatal shot at Thompson. They are accused of attempting to enter her vehicle and then fleeing the scene upon realizing that it was locked. On April 30, deputies were dispatched to the Van Wyck Mart at 644 Rock Hill Highway before 8 a.m. to investigate a burglary. The store owner told deputies that surveillance video footage showed several young men trying to get into the store around 10:30 p.m. on April 29. When they could not get inside, they allegedly broke open a door on the northwest corner of the building, which opened up to a bathroom that had access to the inside of the store. The suspects are also accused of firing a handgun at a security camera and the bathroom door. Detectives collected ballistics evidence at the scene. 7 Jeyson Sobied Pineda-Salgado. Lancaster Co. Sheriff's Office Advertisement 7 Asael Aminadas Torres-Chirinos. Lancaster Co. Sheriff's Office The store the suspects allegedly broke into and the location of Thompson's murder are a seven-minute drive apart. Detectives determined that ballistic evidence recovered from the scene of the murder came from the same 9 mm handgun used at the burglary days before. Through digital surveillance, investigators also identified Torres-Chirinos at the scene of both crimes. They questioned him at the sheriff's office on May 8, and by the end of that day, they had identified, located and detained the five additional suspects. Advertisement 7 Mom Larisha Sharell Thompson was found dead in her car on May 2, 2025. 7 Lancaster officials announce the charges against the six illegal immigrants in the murder of Thompson. Fox News The three adult suspects are charged with murder, attempted armed robbery and second-degree burglary. Authorities believe Torres-Chirinos fired the handgun in both incidents, and he is charged with two counts of firearms possession during the commission of a crime and one count of firearms possession by an unlawful alien. A judge denied bond for all three men. Advertisement The three juvenile suspects are also charged with murder, attempted armed robbery and second-degree burglary. All six suspects are subject to removal from the United States under federal immigration law based on their immigration status, the sheriff's office said. Thompson's family is 'grieving and trying to get their heads around how something like this could happen,' Faile added.
The Hill
19 minutes ago
- The Hill
Trump megabill narrowly advances in Senate despite two GOP defections
Senate Republicans on Saturday narrowly voted to advance a sprawling 1,000-page bill to enact President Trump's agenda, despite the opposition of two GOP lawmakers. The vote was 51-49. Two Republicans voted against advancing the package: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who opposes a provision to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who says the legislation would cost his state $38.9 trillion in federal Medicaid funding. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) changed his 'no' vote to 'aye,' and holdout Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) also voted yes to advance the bill. The bill had suffered several significant setbacks in the days and hours before coming to the floor, at times appearing to be on shaky ground. The vote itself was also full of drama. Signs of trouble started to pop up 50 minutes after the vote opened when three GOP senators who had expressed misgivings about the bill — Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Lee and Scott — still hadn't showed up on the Senate floor. Three other Republican senators, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Johnson, announced well in advance of the vote that they would oppose the motion to proceed and could not support the bill in its current form. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) stood along the back wall of the chamber — appearing somewhat nervous — waiting for his missing colleagues to arrive on the floor. Thune was surrounded by members of his leadership team, including Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), the deputy whip, and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. When Murkowski finally appeared on the floor, she was quickly surrounded by Thune, Barrasso, Graham and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who barraged her on all sides with points and interjections. Then Murkowski walked away from the leadership group and sat down next to Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to have a quiet tête-à-tête. Murkowski eventually voted in favor of advancing the measure, but the vote remained open. Almost three hours after the vote began, Johnson, Lee, Scott and Lummis walked out of Thune's office with Vice President Vance and headed to the Senate floor to cast the final votes to advance the bill. Earlier in the week, perhaps the most notable setback was a ruling by the Senate parliamentarian earlier this week that a cap on health care provider taxes, which is projected to save billions of dollars in federal Medicaid spending, violated the Senate's Byrd Rule. GOP leaders were able to rewrite that provision for it to remain in the bill. And the legislation appeared in danger moments before vote when Sen. Tim Sheehy, a freshman Republican from Montana, threatened to vote against the motion to proceed if the bill included a provision championed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) directing the Interior Department to sell millions of acres of public lands. Sheehy agreed at the last minute to vote for the legislation after GOP leaders promised he would get a vote on an amendment to strip the language forcing the sale of public lands from the bill. In the end, Thune pulled off a major victory by moving the legislation a big step closer to final passage. Thune hailed the legislation Saturday as a 'once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver legislation to create a safer, stronger and more prosperous America.' He cited $160 billion to secure the borders and beef up immigration enforcement and $150 billion to increase the Pentagon's budget, as well as an array of new tax cuts in addition to the extension of Trump's expiring 2017 tax cuts. He pointed to the bill's elimination of taxes on tips and taxes on overtime pay for hourly workers as well as language allowing people to deduct auto loan interest when they buy a new car made in the United States. President Trump has set a July 4 deadline for Congress to get the bill to his desk. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) blasted his Republican colleagues for unveiling the 940-page Senate substitute amendment late Friday night, giving senators only a few hours to review the legislation before the vote. 'Hard to believe, this bill is worse, even worse than any draft we've seen thus far. It's worse on health care. It's worse on [the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.] It's worse on the deficit,' he said. Schumer slammed Republicans for advancing the bill before having an official budgetary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. 'They're afraid to show how badly this will increases the deficit,' he said. 'Future generations will be saddled with trillions in debt.' A preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget Office circulated by Senate Finance Committee Democrats Saturday estimates the bill will cut Medicaid by $930 billion, far more substantially than the legislation passed last month by the House. Tillis cited the impact on Medicaid as the reason he voted 'no' on the motion to proceed and plans to vote 'no' on final passage. 'I cannot support this bill in its current form. It would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities,' he said in a statement. 'This will force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands in the expansion population, and even reducing critical services for those in the traditional Medicaid population,' he warned. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a critical swing vote, said she voted to advance the legislation out of 'deference' to the GOP leader but warned that doesn't mean she will vote 'yes' on final passage. She said that Senate negotiators improved the legislation before releasing it Friday but added that she wants to make additional changes. 'Generally, I give deference to the majority leader's power to bring bills to the Senate floor. Does not in any way predict how I'm going to vote on final passage,' Collins told reporters. 'That's going to depend on whether the bill is substantially changed,' she said. 'There are some very good changes that have been made in the latest version but I want to see further changes and I will be filing a number of amendments.' Former senior White House advisor Elon Musk blasted the Senate bill on social media shortly before the vote, calling it full of 'handouts to industries of the past,' referring to the oil, gas and coal industries. 'The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country! Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future,' he wrote on X, the social media platform he owns. Schumer told Democratic senators before the vote that he would force the clerks to read the entire 1,000-page bill on the Senate floor, which is estimated to take up to 12 hours and delay the start of debate and the start of a marathon series of amendment votes, known as a vote-a-rama. It's unclear whether Republican senators will keep the Senate in session overnight Saturday into Sunday morning to have the bill read aloud on the floor, an exhausting process for the Senate floor staff. An overnight reading of the bill would leave the clerks and floor staff weary before senators are scheduled to hold 20 hours of debate on the legislation and then launch into a multi-hour vote-a-rama.
San Francisco Chronicle
21 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
A farmworker had broken no laws. A California sheriff and ICE took him anyway
Fresno County Sheriff John Zanoni stood at the podium, his office's six-pointed star displayed in triplicate: on the breast of his uniform, on a long-necked microphone and larger than life on the swamp-green curtain behind him. On a black video screen under the word 'ARRESTED' flashed five mug shots — a big one in the middle and four small ones arrayed around it. The men were responsible for a series of armed robberies in August 2024, Zanoni said, of a taco stand and two grocers. There was also a carjacking and, Zanoni said, a home invasion. 'These are very violent and very dangerous individuals,' the Central Valley sheriff said. The men, he added, were 'possibly connected to Tren de Aragua, TdA, which is also known as a violent criminal street gang.' What Zanoni did not say at the April 23 news conference was that the mug shot in the bottom left corner belonged to an innocent man. Nonetheless, at that moment, Yan Garcia-Heredia was inside a West Texas detention center, a wrong man in a wrong place. The legal asylum seeker had been living and working in Fresno County when Zanoni's officers arrested and released him without ever requesting that criminal charges be filed, according to the district attorney's office. Garcia-Heredia left the county jail on Feb. 15 and entered immigration custody the same day — under circumstances that suggest cracks in the story the Trump administration is telling about the immigrants it seeks to deport. And the story Zanoni is telling his majority Latino community. In April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved Garcia-Heredia to a Texas detention center that has been a waystation for U.S. migrants shipped to El Salvador based on unproven gang claims. ICE posted Garcia-Heredia's photo on its Facebook and Instagram channels, the 22-year-old's startled face crowded by text that said 'Tren de Aragua' and 'robbery & assault with a firearm' — a gang he denies belonging to and crimes he denies committing. Tren de Aragua is the Venezuelan gang that President Donald Trump made the basis of his March 15 executive order activating the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Trump summoned the arcane wartime authority to send at least 288 migrants — including asylum seekers, refugees and those with protected statuses — to a Salvadoran super-prison until more than a dozen federal judges and the Supreme Court intervened. The administration is resisting court orders to identify and return the people it sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador. At the same time, it is appealing injunctions on its efforts to rendition hundreds more, including many who have said in court petitions that they are fleeing the gangs they are accused of serving. Trump recently won the Supreme Court's permission to expel migrants to countries they are not from, including ones where they face possible torture. Even as Trump seeks to ban or sharply restrict asylum, refugee admissions, humanitarian parole, temporary protected status, student visas, travel from 19 African and Middle Eastern countries, and birthright citizenship, among other legal pathways, his immigration enforcers insist that they are prioritizing dangerous criminals on the way to meeting the president's quota of 1 million deportations by the end of the year. Zanoni, who declined to be interviewed, has criticized California's sanctuary laws but says he obeys them, including what's known as the California Values Act, or Senate Bill 54, which says local law enforcement agencies can coordinate with ICE only if the people in their custody have been convicted of or charged with serious crimes. Garcia-Heredia has no criminal record. He had permission to be in the country. He is not the kind of immigrant the Trump administration or Zanoni's office admit targeting. So how did he become a poster child for their synchronized effort? 'My time to go' According to a phone interview from the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, and two declarations he filed with a federal court in California — all translated from Spanish by attorney Victoria Petty of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area — Garcia-Heredia doesn't remember much about where he came from. He was young when the family left Caucagua, a balmy city surrounded by cocoa fields in the Venezuelan state of Miranda. He was 5 when his father was slain. 'I don't remember him much, either,' he told the Chronicle. Garcia-Heredia quit school at 15 and got a job as a machine operator in a plastics factory. As hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan kids do each year, he left a collapsing education system to help his family pay the bills. Like about 2,000 Venezuelans each day, he would later leave a collapsing country to do the same. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, more than 7.7 million Venezuelans have been displaced by hyperinflation, gang violence and food shortages under the decade-long regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Most go to Latin America or the Caribbean. Garcia-Heredia decided on the U.S. His mother and two younger brothers shared doubts. 'But it was my time to go,' he said. Garcia-Heredia said it was important to him to follow the laws and immigration rules of the country he was seeking to enter. 'I wanted to show the United States government that I was a trustworthy person,' he said in an April 28 declaration identifying him by his initials as Y.G.H. Garcia-Heredia left Venezuela in July 2023, when he was 20. He traveled mostly by bus, he said. He reached Mexico City and downloaded CBP One, a notoriously glitchy app that became the Biden administration's gatekeeper for an overwhelmed asylum system. The Trump administration has turned CBP One into a self-deportation app. Garcia-Heredia waited two months for an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, presented his Venezuelan identification card and requested asylum. In September 2023 — three months before border encounters peaked that December — he was granted temporary humanitarian parole and given an August 2026 immigration court date. He went first to Chicago but found it too cold. He went to Fresno County, which felt more familiar. The Central California county of about 1 million residents is 55% Hispanic or Latino and nearly 20% foreign-born, with about 77,000 unauthorized immigrants, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and Migration Policy Institute. It is also home to an $8.6 billion agricultural industry with 1.9 million acres producing 350 different crops and 20% of the area's jobs, according to the county's 2023 crops report. Garcia-Heredia joined the farming economy's large unauthorized workforce, planting and picking watermelons, tomatoes, squash and broccoli. Sometimes he worked 12-hour days, sometimes seven-day weeks. He found a place to stay in Mendota, a western-county city bisected by two state routes and known for its cantaloupes. Almost everyone there is Latino or Hispanic and speaks a language other than English. On Feb. 12, he was arrested at his home. The sheriff's office would later say its detectives and those from the Mendota Police Department were serving an unrelated search warrant when they connected Garcia-Heredia to the August 2024 robberies. The sheriff's office said this more than two months after it decided not to seek charges. Garcia-Heredia said it was raining when the police came. He put his hands on his head and got into a patrol car, he said. He asked what was happening, but no one answered, he said. Then the investigators arrived. Two detectives interrogated him, he said, one acting as interpreter. 'They asked me if I was a person who participated in the robbery,' he said. 'Then they took me to the jail. They accused me of the (crimes). And I was really afraid because they said I was going to pay 15 years of my life for a crime that I didn't commit.' No one mentioned Tren de Aragua, he said. He said he spent three days in jail, which would violate state laws requiring that he be charged or released within 48 hours. A sheriff's spokesperson said Garcia-Heredia was released after two days, but did not respond to questions seeking specific dates. Garcia-Heredia said he was woken from a sleep, escorted out of his cell and told to change back into his clothes. He asked his jailer if someone had posted his bail. He didn't understand why he had been arrested or why he was being let go. 'He told me that I was already free,' he said. 'As soon as I walked out of the door of the jail, there was ICE right there.' What did that feel like? 'I felt bad,' Garcia-Heredia said. 'I felt so, so bad.' 'About law and order' Zanoni was born, raised and educated in Fresno, where he attended Catholic high school and state college. He joined the sheriff's office as a reserve deputy in 1996 and worked his way up the ranks to assistant sheriff. In June 2022, he won the top job in a two-person race that saw 25% of registered voters participate and 15% of registered voters choose him. Zanoni promised to continue the tough-on-crime approach and lenient concealed gun permitting of the retiring Margaret Mims, the county's first female sheriff. He also telegraphed differences. 'I believe firmly that law enforcement does not exist to avoid mistakes. We exist to accomplish something important, and that is to reduce crime and make our communities safer,' Zanoni said at his January 2023 swearing-in ceremony. 'While many things the sheriff's office does will remain the same, there will be changes.' Maria Romani, the immigrant rights program director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, welcomed one of those changes. In February 2022, she published a report showing that Mims transferred more people to ICE than her office disclosed. She said Zanoni agreed to end his predecessor's practice of letting ICE arrest people in the jail's vestibule, enabling the sheriff's office to claim the person had been released and skirting the state's sanctuary laws and reporting requirements around ICE transfers. 'It spoke volumes of him,' Romani said. 'In a good way, I think.' But Zanoni was not a fan of state laws restricting his ability to cooperate and coordinate with immigration authorities. In a Feb. 12 video with Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig, Zanoni criticized SB54's limits on contacting ICE about people in his jail, saying such policies essentially forced ICE to cast wider nets that also snare immigrants without criminal records. 'Criminals are the focus. Not just people who are here illegally — because that is a crime, but that's not our focus,' Zanoni said. 'We have to make changes. We have to be about law and order.' Trump's immigration lieutenants have said the same thing. But being in the country as an undocumented immigrant is a civil violation and not, on its own, a crime. And ICE agents operating in California from the Oregon border to Kern County are increasingly taking people without criminal records, a Chronicle data analysis found. Of the 56,397 people in ICE detention nationally as of June 15, 72% (40,433) had no criminal record, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. ICE detentions are at their highest number in at least six years. Meanwhile, the administration has exerted tremendous pressure to bend blue states to its signature deportation project. In California, it has sent immigration authorities to schools, clinics, courthouses and worksites, dispatched the military to deal with protesters, roughed up a Democratic senator who questioned the policy, and tried to cut funding to jurisdictions that place legal limits on their assistance. While California limited sheriffs' ability to respond to ICE's detainer requests in 2013 — citing the legality and costs of holding people past their release dates, and the distrust they stoked between immigrants and police — exceptions were granted for people with past convictions or current charges for serious or violent felonies, including gang-related offenses. The administration says that cities such as San Francisco and states such as California abet criminals and endanger the public by preventing immigration agents from entering jails and taking lawbreakers, even though nothing is stopping them from simply waiting outside the jails. Multiple courts have upheld the sanctuary laws. Romani said she attended a March meeting with a small group of immigrant activists in which Zanoni expressed empathy for the county's immigrant community and a willingness to host a public town hall to address its concerns. After that meeting, Romani said Zanoni stopped responding to messages. On May 20, Zanoni told the Fresno County Board of Supervisors that the sheriff's office honored 102 of the 389 detainer requests it received from ICE in 2024 — sharp increases from his first year in office, when the agency received 204 immigration detainers and honored 39. Most supervisors championed the increased cooperation. 'We have seen people murdered, raped by these illegals, who traffic in children, drugs and sex,' said Supervisor Garry Bredefeld. 'And hopefully one day we continually elect people who will stop this in this state and make it safe.' None of the transferred people was accused of murder. Supervisor Luis Chavez asked how many sheriff's office investigations rely on victims and witnesses who are undocumented. Zanoni said he didn't have those numbers, that his deputies don't ask anyone's immigration status, that his office doesn't give ICE information the public doesn't have. 'There is no special pipeline,' said Zanoni, whose term was extended two years through 2028 after a judge ruled against Fresno County's bid to hold sheriff and district attorney elections during lower-turnout governor elections. 'This isn't about politics. This is about public safety.' On June 10, Zanoni became the only California sheriff to publicly endorse Trump's choice to activate the military in a U.S. state against its governor's will. Neither Amador County's sheriff, who said he would violate California's sanctuary laws in a county with few immigrants, nor Yuba County's sheriff, the last to let ICE rent his jail, released statements supporting the deployments. Trump, Zanoni said on Facebook, 'did what he had to do.' Gov. Gavin Newsom, he said, 'failed his duties.' 'A good person' On Feb. 15, ICE transported Garcia-Heredia to the Golden State Annex detention center in McFarland (Kern County), run by the GEO Group. Kathleen Kavanagh met him there on April 4 in a big, open room used for family visitations and, once a month, legal clinics hosted by the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. Kavanagh, the Oakland nonprofit's supervising attorney, registered Garcia-Heredia's hair — dense, curly and whimsily half-bleached — and his youth. In a crowd of dozens, 'He stood out to me right away,' Kavanagh recalled. 'He looks and is incredibly young.' The two spoke Spanish, Garcia-Heredia telling Kavanagh what he had told her colleague: He came to the U.S. to escape gang violence. After he was granted entry to pursue asylum, he went to Chicago, found it too cold and headed west, landing farmwork in California's Central Valley. 'Someone like Yan did it the 'right way' more than anyone else could,' Kavanagh said. 'Yan followed all of those protocols. All of those rules. All of those background checks. He made every attempt to pursue asylum in a legal way. And the way the administration has reneged … it's unprecedented and so cruel.' Garcia-Heredia said it was at the for-profit detention center that he was first asked about Tren de Aragua. He said he was told his tattoos incriminated him. Garcia-Heredia has the names of his brothers and dead father tattooed on his arms. The names are dressed in crowns, Garcia-Heredia said, signifying 'the king of my life' whom he struggles to remember and 'the little princes' he hopes to see again. A cousin told Garcia-Heredia about ICE's March 26 Facebook post. ' ARRESTO Tren de Aragua,' the post read beside Garcia-Heredia's photo. 'Yan Ernesto García Heredia — robo y agresión con un arma de fuego.' Kavanagh said she became instantly worried on Garcia-Heredia's behalf. Just a few weeks earlier, on March 16, the U.S. transported 261 alleged Tren de Aragua and MS-13 members to El Salvador in a highly choreographed transfer that saw the men bent low, roughly marched into the country's terrorism confinement center, CECOT, shaved bald and put in cages. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele posted a video on X, boasting that the deal with the U.S. would financially benefit his government and help the $200 million CECOT sustain itself through free prison labor. 'I was real with him that he was in a very dangerous situation,' said Kavanagh, whose organization sued the U.S. Department of State this month over its agreement with El Salvador, contending it violates constitutional protections of due process and against torture. 'Yan got swept up into something way bigger than him.' She handed him a document with the email address to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and a speed-dial code for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that handles removal proceedings and appeals, and reiterated that he should use it if they moved him. At the top of the document, it said, 'This is a notification establishing that if I am transferred to Guantánamo Bay, or if ICE plans to remove me to a third country where I am not a citizen, I wish to have legal representation.' Ten days after that meeting, on April 14, Garcia-Heredia said, guards woke him before sunup and ignored his requests to retrieve the document. He said he was put in a van, driven to a big building, put in an icy cell with another Venezuelan man, put back in a van, driven for a long time, put on a plane with other men, flown in chains and relative silence to one location, then another, then another. He said he exited the plane and boarded a bus. An hour later, he left the bus in a single-file line, entered a dirt-yellow building and then a barred cell where he and the other men spent the night on the floor. They were at Bluebonnet in Anson, Texas, where 31 detainees would form a human 'SOS' in the dirt yard two weeks later, in a desperate attempt to prevent their expulsion to CECOT, Reuters reported. On April 15, a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to keep Garcia-Heredia in the country and within the judge's jurisdiction. When U.S. District Judge Kirk E. Sherriff, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, learned that Garcia-Heredia was already in Texas, he ordered the government to explain why it had moved someone with a 'pending immigration proceeding before the Immigration Court in Adelanto, California,' and to say how frequently ICE does this to other detainees. But on May 22, the judge granted the Trump administration's request to dismiss the case. Writing that the 'cases raises important questions concerning the lawfulness of the President's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act,' Sherriff concluded that he couldn't hear the petition because the Trump administration had moved Garcia-Heredia from his jurisdiction when it was filed. The Lawyers' Committee appealed the ruling and accuses the federal government of forum shopping — transferring detainees to red-state jurisdictions in the hopes of arguing before sympathetic judges. Ironically, Garcia-Heredia won a reverse decision in immigration court, which said his removal proceedings can shift from El Paso to Adelanto, meaning he will argue for asylum in California and for his freedom in Texas. For now, he remains in a white-walled dormitory crowded with bunk beds, a table and two dozen men like him, from Venezuela, with tattoos they've been told are proof of criminality. Every day is dreary and absurd. It's sweltering inside and outside the facility. There is no library and not much to do. The guards shout orders and take away the detainees who don't obey quickly enough, he said. Sometimes they are gassed, he said. He sleeps on a thin mattress with a thin pillow. He eats bread and grains. He sees the outside world 90 minutes a day. He wears an old, torn uniform and doesn't think about how many other men wore it or what happened to them. 'Truly, I don't know what's going to happen next,' Garcia-Heredia said, his voice faint over the susurrous connection. 'In the future, I want to work, I want a family and I want to be a good person.' He would return to Fresno County if he could, he said. It will be a different place than he left, local activists say. Recent rumors of an ICE raid kept immigrants from a popular flea market. Grocery stores in Latino neighborhoods are empty, the ACLU's Romani said. The people who pick the produce are too scared to buy it. 'People are more afraid than they ever have been,' said Romani, a Fresno resident. In one of his court declarations, Garcia-Heredia said he is scared of Tren de Aragua, scared that ICE will deport him to CECOT, scared that his mother won't know how to find him. What does his mother tell him now? 'She tells me that she prays to God and that she's worried about me,' he told the Chronicle. 'I tell her that I'm still here and that I still have hope.'
