Rep. Garcia returns from El Salvador with a sliver of hope for deported gay hairdresser

Hello and happy Wednesday. I’m back and it feels like I never left because we’re still talking about Trumpian chaos.

Rep. Robert Garcia traveled to El Salvador with three of his House colleagues this week in an attempt to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the government acknowledged it mistakenly deported, but also the guy it refuses to help despite a Supreme Court ruling to do so.

It is beyond belief, literally, to imagine that a phone call from the White House couldn’t have Abrego Garcia on an airplane within hours. The United States is paying El Salvador millions of dollars to imprison these deportees, so from a simple business perspective it stands to reason that we have leverage, never mind being a superpower.

Garcia, the Long Beach Democrat, and his colleagues (Democratic Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, Maxine Dexter of Oregon and Maxwell Frost of Florida) weren’t allowed to see Abrego Garcia.

But they did deliver a small bit of hope for the family and lawyers of another man stuck in the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT — the promise from the U.S. ambassador in El Salvador to look into the case of Andry José Hernández Romero, another deportee who has vanished into the black hole of this foreign prison.

“His family have no idea if he’s still alive. There’s been no wellness check, no access to legal counsel. No one has heard from him,” Garcia told me Tuesday.

Garcia said he raised the case of Romero directly with the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, William Duncan, and received confirmation Tuesday from the embassy that they would make an official request for information on Romero.

“For the first time since Mr. Romero has been essentially kidnapped and sent to this prison, the embassy did acknowledge the actual case, and they did agree that they are going to actually inquire about his health and wellness, which no one had done up to that point,” Garcia said.

It’s come to this, that even getting someone to ask for proof of life is a win.

A prison guard transfers deportees from the U.S. to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador on March 16.

(El Salvador presidential press office / AP)

Romero is a young, gay hairdresser who left his home in Venezuela, as the old immigration story goes, for a better life in the United States. He reached our southern border at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in August, where he applied for asylum on the grounds that being gay made him a target in his home country, as did his criticism of its authoritarian government.

He passed a “credible fear” interview, the first step in the asylum process and one that required convincing a government interviewer that returning to Venezuela would be dangerous for him. But he was detained because of two of his many tattoos: Along with a butterfly and flowers on his leg and a snake on his arm, Romero has two crowns on his wrists with “mom” and “dad” written next to them. An immigration officer cited these, arguing they were symbols of the Tren de Aragua gang. He remained in custody in California while his case progressed.

Then Romero disappeared, deported to CECOT with more than 200 other Venezuelans with little warning. Romero’s lawyer, Melissa Shepard with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, didn’t know for certain where he was until she saw news photos of Romero bent over and praying in the prison while his head was being shaved.

“He’s a sweet, kind person who’s very close with his family,” Shepard told me. “There is no reason that he should have been taken and disappeared to El Salvador.”

Romero’s plight hits home with Rep. Garcia, he said, because he too is a gay immigrant whose family came to the U.S. seeking safety and better lives.

“I lived a large, large part of my life not being a citizen, not having those same protections, and so it very much resonates,” Garcia said. “Mr. Romero’s case resonates with me, but all of these cases resonate with me, because this could be me or any of my family members or friends that I grew up with. They want to dehumanize, essentially, the people that I grew up with.”

Garcia was a young child when his parents brought him to Southern California from Peru, overstaying their visas as they built a new life. For many years, Garcia was undocumented, with all the anxiety and pressure that comes with that unstable status. But, through President Reagan’s amnesty program, he said, he was finally able to become a citizen in his 20s.

“My family and I, we fought for citizenship. It wasn’t that we were born Americans. We weren’t born into protections like everybody else had. We had to struggle through it. We had to go through paperwork, standing in line at 4 in the morning to hopefully get an appointment, not knowing English, all the things that migrants go through in this country,” he said. “When I actually became a U.S. citizen and took my oath, that meant something to me, and it means something to immigrants that are given that chance.”

Garcia said he finds it “infuriating” that more U.S.-born citizens aren’t outraged by the removal of due process for immigrants. In El Salvador, he met with human rights activists who have endured years of eroding civil rights under the authoritarian regime of Nayib Bukele, an advertising executive who took over the government in 2019 and has imprisoned more than 80,000 people since, claiming he’s cracking down on gangs and crime.

Garcia said activists expressed concern that Trump was following Bukele’s playbook.

“They told us that directly,” Garcia said.

Garcia, like many of us, is alarmed that these deportations aren’t just to a foreign country, but into a prison where a government official once said the only way out was in a coffin. Romero has no criminal record in either Venezuela or the United States and was employed in the broadcast industry before he left his home country. He told Shepard, his lawyer, he dreamed of opening a nonprofit to help homeless people in Venezuela.

Shepard said her office is representing several more detainees at CECOT, and in none of the cases has the government presented evidence of gang affiliation or criminal acts in court. Everything that is happening right now is outside of our normal immigration laws, instead using the arcane Alien Enemies Act, with our president repeatedly musing about applying such extrajudicial tactics to citizens in the future.

Trump and his vice president have also both said it would take too long and be too cumbersome to allow undocumented immigrants to be heard in court — essentially claiming the due process laws of the Constitution should be suspended for expediency.

While Abrego Garcia and Romero, among a few others, have received media and political attention, it is unclear that any of those deported are actually criminals or gang members. A New York Times investigation found most of the 200-plus deported men had no criminal records in the U.S., beyond entering the country illegally, and no clear ties to gangs. By being sent to El Salvador under life sentences, these men also have no way to prove their innocence. Ever.

“It’s monstrous what [Trump is] doing, and I think that more people need to understand that he’s using this to divide the country, and people need to know and stand up against it,” the congressman told me.

Garcia called Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who was the first Democratic legislator to travel to El Salvador last week and who was able to meet with Abrego Garcia, “heroic,” and said he expects more Democratic Congress members to travel to El Salvador to keep focus on the issue.

Though the trips have been denounced by some Republicans as stunts, they are one of the few channels Democrats have to bring pressure on the deportations as the economy continues to tank and that endless Trump chaos (are we still after the Panama Canal?) continues to pull attention in myriad directions.

“A lot of us have come to the conclusion that at this moment, you have to be willing to physically put yourself in the debate and in the fight, or you’re not ready for the moment,” Garcia said. “We cannot just move on to the next horrible thing.”

What else you should be reading:

The must-read: ‘It is time for you to leave’: DHS mistakenly sends notices to U.S. citizens
The what happened: In California Jails, a Rash of Homicide and Negligence
The L.A. Times special: Insurer of last resort kept growing. Then L.A. fire victims paid the price

Stay Golden,
Anita Chabria

P.S. Insurance is the climate topic we should all be talking about. Here’s a chart that explains how much Californians are dependent on the state plan, which does not provide the comprehensive coverage of private plans.

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