On Friday,<\/span> Mar\u00eda Daniela learned that her younger brother, Neri Alvarado Borges, and more than 200 other Venezuelans sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador were being released after spending more than four months in an infamous prison. \u201cNow it\u2019s done,\u201d Mar\u00eda Daniela said in a call from Venezuela. \u201cNow we can say we are done with this nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n Alvarado\u2019s case, which Mother Jones <\/em>reported<\/a> on in March, was emblematic of the cruelty of the Trump administration\u2019s decision to send hundreds of Venezuelans to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele\u2019s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison. Like many others, Alvarado, who worked as a baker in the Dallas area, appears to have been targeted simply because he was a Venezuelan man with tattoos. It did not matter that his most prominent tattoo was an autism awareness ribbon adorned with the name of his teenage brother.<\/p>\n \u201cWe got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The Venezuelans were released as part of a prisoner swap deal including 10 Americans. (The Venezuelan government has been reported<\/a> to imprison foreign nationals to gain diplomatic leverage.) The exchange comes after a previous deal being negotiated fell through<\/a>, and despite the Trump administration\u2019s insistence in court and in public statements that it did not have the power to compel El Salvador to return the removed migrants to the United States. (Court records show<\/a> that Bukele\u2019s government told the United Nations the men were under the authority of the United States, contradicting the White House\u2019s claims.)\u00a0<\/p>\n A relative shared a video from Venezuelan broadcaster teleSUR featuring his brother, Arturo Su\u00e1rez, on the plane after it landed near Caracas. \u201cWe spent four months without any contact with the outside world,\u201d Su\u00e1rez said. \u201cWe were kidnapped.\u201d He went on to say: \u201cWe got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n Family members of some of the Venezuelan men held at CECOT told Mother Jones<\/em> they were relieved, but still heartbroken over what they consider a wrongful detention. On Friday, families had been instructed by the Maduro government\u2019s office to go to the airport near Caracas to reunite with their relatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Anaurys Orlimar, the sister of one of the men, Julio Zambrano<\/a>, said that earlier on Friday their mother was contacted with \u201cgood news\u201d and told to travel from Maracay to the Caracas area. Her son, Julio, had been seeking asylum in the United States. The father of two was detained in January during a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His then-pregnant wife, Luz, said an officer told her they suspected Zambrano\u2014who has two tattoos of a crown with his name and a rose\u2014was part of a gang, which his relatives dispute.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are all happy and eager to see him,\u201d Orlimar, who lives in North Carolina, said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t expect this. We didn\u2019t know anything. What we all did was cry with emotion knowing that my brother is going to return, that he\u2019s going to get out of this.\u201d Later, she recognized her brother, wearing a red face mask and a Puma t-shirt, in Telemundo\u2019s live coverage of the flight\u2019s arrival.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mariangi Sierra, sister of Anyelo Sierra Cano, said in a message she was feeling \u201cemotional, happy, truly something inexplicable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For some relatives, the news of the men\u2019s return to Venezuela evoked more mixed feelings. Maria Quevedo, the mother of Eddie Adolfo Hurtado Quevedo, told Mother Jones <\/em>she was feeling relieved but still scared. \u201cHappy because God gave me the gift of seeing my son free on my birthday,\u201d she said. \u201cScared because my son is going to Venezuela, where he was threatened by the [paramilitary group] colectivos<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Dozens of Venezuelans sent to CECOT had pending asylum applications in US immigration courts when they were removed. In some instances, their cases have been dismissed<\/a> by immigration judges. They could now be vulnerable to potential harm and persecution back in Venezuela.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe bitterness is still there,\u201d said a friend of one of the men sent to CECOT about the release. \u201cThe anger about what happened to him is still there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The men released today had been held at the maximum security prison since March, when the Trump administration sent more than 230 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador. At least 130 of them were removed without due process under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime power that Trump invoked for only the fourth time in US history. Investigations by Mother Jones <\/em>and other publications<\/a> revealed that many of the men had no connection to Tren de Aragua and appeared to have been targeted over benign tattoos\u2014like Alvarado\u2019s autism awareness ribbon. Most of them had<\/a> no criminal history in the United States, according to ProPublica<\/em><\/a> and Bloomberg<\/a>. (The administration has repeatedly refused to provide evidence to support its assertion of gang affiliation.)\u00a0<\/p>\n In a statement on Friday, the Venezuelan government said it had secured the release of 252 Venezuelan nationals who \u201cremained kidnapped and subjected to forced disappearance in a concentration camp\u201d in El Salvador. \u201cVenezuela has paid a high price,\u201d the statement continued, to free the men as part of an agreement with US government authorities. The deal also reportedly<\/a> included the return to Venezuela of seven migrant children who had stayed<\/a> behind in the United States after their parents were deported, according to the country\u2019s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.<\/p>\n When Mar\u00eda Daniela, Alvarado\u2019s sister, spoke to Mother Jones <\/em>on Friday, she and her family were about to make the roughly four-hour drive from their home to the Caracas area. Once there, they would finally be reunited with Alvarado, the brother and son they had no contact with for more than four months.<\/p>\n Juan Enrique Hern\u00e1ndez, a US citizen who came to the United States from Venezuela nearly three decades ago, was Alvarado\u2019s boss at the bakery in the Dallas area. The two became good friends, and Hern\u00e1ndez visited Alvarado in detention in Texas multiple times following his February arrest.<\/p>\n Hern\u00e1ndez said he did everything in his power to get Alvarado out. \u201cI went to many lawyers here and none wanted to take the case,\u201d he explained. \u201cThey said they didn\u2019t have jurisdiction.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI have mixed feelings. I\u2019m happy on one hand,\u201d Hern\u00e1ndez said on Friday about Alvardo\u2019s imminent release. \u201cBut the bitterness is still there. The anger about what happened to him is still there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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