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.

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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 peoplemostly 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 Barriosone 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 absentiacommunications 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?

“I don’t think he would feel safe there.”