Read more about the episode here.
Maria Hinojosa: Dear listener, before we start, just a warning that suicide is going to come up in this piece. Take care.
Juan is a former migrant from Venezuela. He remembers the day, two years ago, when he posed for a photograph that would end up changing his life.
Juan: “Me tomé fotos con mi hermano, todos nos tomamos fotos.”
Maria Hinojosa: It was September of 2022 and he and a small group of his family members had just arrived in Ibagué, in Western Colombia. It was the first days of a long journey to the United States where he hoped to find work, a new life, all of it far away from the economic and political crises in his homeland in Venezuela.
Juan: “Es que tengo una plaza que un tren antiguo, que es bonito, pues.”
Maria Hinojosa: When the group spotted a monument of an old train car outside the bus terminal. It felt like the perfect spot to take a picture to document the moment.
Maria Hinojosa: It’s an old train engine surrounded by colorful flowers. It’s a group of five men and one woman all in their twenties, and they stand there smiling at the camera.
Maria Hinojosa: Juan sits on one side of the train engine giving a thumbs up. He looks happy. He was happy.
Juan: “Y mi hermano todos contentos ahí porque así somos nosotros.”
Maria Hinojosa: Now, almost two years and 2,000 miles later, this photo would land Juan in one of the most infamous prisons on Earth that’s run by the U.S. government. It’s called Guantánamo.
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Maria Hinojosa: From Futuro Media and PRX, it’s Latino USA. I’m Maria Hinojosa. Today, Juan’s story and how the Trump administration is taking his war on immigrants to a whole new level.
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Maria Hinojosa: Producer Ariel Goodman has the story.
Ariel Goodman: Juan is one of the 177 Venezuelan migrants that the Trump administration sent to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba this February.
Donald Trump: “We have, uh, 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”
Ariel Goodman: Juan is not his real name. We’re protecting his identity for security reasons. He’s a 30-year-old construction worker and a father of four. That photo, the one we described at the top, would eventually be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as proof that Juan was connected to Tren de Aragua; ‘tren’ means train in Spanish. In reality. Juan says he took that photo to mark a memory with his family and that train car it’s an antique commemorating an old Colombian rail line built in the 1920s. But this accusation that Juan was a member of Tren de Aragua would ultimately place him in the crosshairs of the newly elected Trump administration determined to fulfill its campaign promise of waging an all-out war on immigrants.
Ariel Goodman: Trump frequently spoke about Tren de Aragua on the campaign trail, often repeating false claims that the gang had taken control of neighborhoods in Colorado.
Donald Trump: “As we speak, heavily armed Venezuelan gangs are taking over entire apartment buildings and complexes in Aurora, Colorado. Terrorizing the residents.”
Ariel Goodman: On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order designating the gang as a quote, ‘foreign terrorist organization.’
Ariel Goodman: We got a hold of Juan in Venezuela, where he was deported in February.
Ariel Goodman: “¿Me escuchas?”
Juan: “Sí, la escucho muy bien”
Ariel Goodman: When we spoke to him, he had just visited Maracay, the city where he was born and raised.
Juan: “Se sintió bien estar dentro del pueblo, su tradición y toda su cultura ahí. Pero no es lo mismo.”
Ariel Goodman: He tells me that it felt good to be back home and to see his children for the first time in years, but he says nothing is the same.
Ariel Goodman: Maracay is the capital state of Aragua. It’s called Ciudad Jardín because of its abundance of gardens. Aragua is where Tren de Aragua originated in a prison in 2014 and got its name. It’s also where Juan has always dreamed of returning to.
Juan: “En realidad, en verdad mi sueño siempre fue estar en mi país. Yo quería tener mi casa, solamente había alquilado toda la vida y no quería estar pagando alquiler toda la vida.”
Ariel Goodman: Juan says that his biggest dream was to own a house in Maracay, that he could hand down to his children. But at 22 years old, Juan was unable to find work in his home country. So he joined the millions of Venezuelans, one in every four, who have left their country over the past seven years.
Ariel Goodman: In 2017, Juan moved to Ecuador with his wife and four children.
Ariel Goodman: They lived there for six years while Juan worked in construction. But when COVID-19 hit in 2020, Ecuador became an early epicenter.
News tape: “In Latin America, Ecuador is seeing one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks with possibly thousands dead.”
Ariel Goodman: More than half a million people lost their full-time jobs that year in Ecuador and life there became untenable for many foreigners such as Juan.
Juan: “Muy difícil, muy difícil estar en Ecuador en ese tiempo porque también los ecuatorianos sacaban a los venezolanos de los alquileres y si no tenían para pagar los sacaban con todas sus cosas para afuera”
Ariel Goodman: He remembers seeing Venezuelans like himself kicked out of the places they were renting because they could no longer afford them. Their belongings tossed on the street. That’s when he decided to seek opportunities somewhere else. This time north of Venezuela in the United States. First, he traveled through Colombia where he took the photo in front of that old train car.
Ariel Goodman: Then to the Darién Jungle, the infamously dangerous stretch of rainforest that straddles the border of Colombia and Panama.
Juan: “Yo duré seis días en la selva sin comer, es selva viva, usted está ahí todo asustado, corriendo rápido para que no lo dejen los guías, sino te pierdes.”
Ariel Goodman: I went six days without eating, he says. Most of the time, I was running to keep up with the guides.
Ariel Goodman: Juan’s journey continued for over a year. He ran out of money in Costa Rica and stayed there working in construction for a year and a half. He rode on top of train cars with migrants from all over south and Central America. Ran from immigration officials, walked through forests at night.
“Se volvió loco”
Ariel Goodman: He finally made it to the United States in May of last year. Friends and family here instructed him to do as they had done: turn himself over to immigration authorities, where he would be processed and then let free, while his asylum case was determined. And in El Paso, Texas, Juan did just as he was told, he felt happy.
Ariel Goodman: He had made it across.
Juan: “Ahí ya estaba feliz, porque había cruzado pero no, comenzó mi infierno”
Ariel Goodman: But I was wrong, he says. That was where my nightmare began. Juan says that the ICE officials asked him questions about his entire life.
Juan: “Todo el día preguntándote de tu casa, del origen, sobre los tatuajes”
Ariel Goodman: They went through his phone and found that picture of him in front of the train, which he says they used to connect him to Tren de Aragua. That and a tattoo of three stars he has on his right arm, which they claimed was also proof that he had ties to the gang. According to experts, though, Tren de Aragua doesn’t use tattoos as a signifier of membership.
Ariel Goodman: Juan says he got that tattoo when he was 16 years old because it looked like a tattoo that one of his favorite reggaeton artists, Farruco, had. According to U.S. court records. Juan has no criminal history here other than improper entry into the country. He also provided a Venezuelan government document to Latino USA declaring that he has no criminal history in his country of origin.
Juan: “No tengo por qué ocultar de dónde soy pues, a pesar de que somos humildes, pobres por decir.”
Ariel Goodman: The poverty. I come from poverty, he says, but I have nothing to hide. Juan was charged with a legal entry and eventually sent to a detention center in El Paso where he stayed for several months. There he says that every day, everyone in his cell block would gather around a television to watch the news. It was how they stayed connected to the outside world.
News tape: “It is now official. CNN projects that Donald Trump has been elected president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris, and making a political comeback, unlike any in modern American politics.”
Ariel Goodman: When the new president began threatening to send the so-called worst criminal migrants to Guantánamo Bay, fear and rumors started to spread amongst the detainees. And one night.
Juan: “Empezaron a llamar nombre por nombre, tal persona, tal persona, llamaron a 10, todos asustados.”
Ariel Goodman: One by one, they called 10 people by name. He says, the next day he would find out in the news what had happened to them.
Ariel Goodman: “The Department of Homeland Security has released the first images of detained migrants arriving at Guantánamo Bay. The 10 people on the flight from El Paso, Texas, are suspected members of a Venezuelan gang.
News tape: “The Trump administration has said the high-security prison facility used to hold Al-Qaeda detainees will now also be used for so-called hardened criminals who do not have proper documentation.”
Ariel Goodman: Juan immediately recognized the people in those images. They were the young Venezuelan men who had been taken from the detention center the previous night.
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Juan: “‘Los primeros 10 más peligrosos que llegaron a Guantánamo,’ salió en las noticias, y eran los compañeros de nosotros. Desde ahí comenzó el trauma.”
Ariel Goodman: That’s when the trauma started, he says. The images showed the migrants shackled from head to toe boarding massive military aircraft surrounded by heavily armed guards headed to Guantánamo Bay. And just a few days later this time, by the cover of Night, Juan’s name was also called.
Juan: “Es un sentimiento que usted tiene de miedo, de película, cuando ves esos militares que tratan como si fuera terrorista en verdad. Tenía esposas en las piernas, en las manos, en la cintura.”
He described it as a horror movie. He says that he and around 15 other migrants were treated like terrorists. They were shackled from the legs, hands and waist. He estimates that he was on the plane for eight hours, flanked by soldiers with rifles. When they landed, they were ushered and then shackled again into seats on a bus with black plastic covering the windows.
Juan: “En la mente de nosotros es que estamos secuestrados.”
Ariel Goodman: It felt like a kidnapping, he says. He says they were told that they were going to Miami, but instead, they were taken to Guantánamo Bay.
Juan: “Yo en 15 días que estuve ahí me despertaba todos los días, todos los días con ganas de verdad de morirme porque eso es una tortura que es peor que te golpeen.”
Ariel Goodman: Juan describes the 15 days that followed as torture.
He wasn’t given any information about what was happening or if he would ever leave, it was a hopelessness, he says, that made him want to die.
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Ariel Goodman: Lawsuits against the Trump administration that have since been filed by civil rights groups include testimonies from some of the Venezuelan detainees in Guantánamo. They detail instances of physical abuse, invasive strip searches, lack of medical care, and no access to legal counsel.
Juan: “Es un cuartico, dos metros de largo por un metro de ancho, más pequeño que un baño. Nosotros duramos sin colchón ahí.”
Ariel Goodman: Estimates that his cell, which in place of a mattress, had a piece of plastic, was seven by five feet. The size of a small bathroom with a tiny latrine.
Juan: “Yo pateaba esa puerta como un niño, la pateaba, la pateaba porque me sentía ahogado, me asfixiaba ahí te sientas de allá pa’ ca caminas de un ladito a otro.”
Ariel Goodman: He passed the days screaming, pacing his cell, kicking the door, and banging his head on the wall. He says he felt like he was drowning. He told us that sometimes guards would come in and chain his body to a restraint chair for hours. A U.S. colonel recently admitted to the New York Times that in one single day, prison staff strapped six of the Venezuelan migrants to restraint chairs after they attempted suicide.
Juan: “No sabes si es de día, si es de noche.”
Ariel Goodman: You couldn’t tell day from night, Juan explains.
Juan spoke of extreme cold and extreme heat. He says he was barely fed and felt hungry every day.
Juan: “Tú estás ahí muerto, es como si a usted la agarraran y le tiraran tierra encima pero usted está vivo, te lo juro que sientes eso.”
Ariel Goodman: I swear, he says, it feels like you’ve been buried and that they’ve thrown the dirt on top of you, but you’re still alive.
The desperation was so deep that one day, he chewed on his own tongue repeatedly in the hopes that he would bleed to death.
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Ariel Goodman: Soon before they were released, Juan says that he and the other migrants attempted to wage a hunger strike, which they organized by yelling to one another through the cell walls. Juan stopped what little betting he had into the latrine to flood his cell. Refused food and continued to spend his days kicking the door of his cell and yelling, hoping that it would call attention to his case or bring him answers.
On February 21st, all 177 Venezuelan men who were detained at Guantánamo Bay, the first, but not the last migrant sent there by the Trump administration, were deported back to Venezuela. In this video, the men, the youngest of which was 19-years-old, are dismounting a plane surrounded by Venezuelan officials.
Some smile, one throws his hands up in the air and looks at the sky. Appearing to thank God.
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Ariel Goodman: While the Trump administration first accused the group of being the quote ‘worst of the worst,’ it later admitted in court filings that close to 30% of the detainees did not have criminal records other than unauthorized entry into the United States, and that they were considered quote ‘low threat, illegal aliens.’ When Juan arrived in Venezuela, he says that he was 10 pounds lighter. He had no money or clothes other than the ones that he was wearing.
Now he’s slowly trying to piece his life back together. He wants to work on what he does best: construction, but he says that the pay is so low in Venezuela that he practically would be doing it for free. Instead, he’s considering selling bananas to help pay the bills.
Juan tries to fill his days with his family, but at night he says he can’t sleep unless he takes pills. Once, he dreamed of making it to the U.S., now the memories of it manifests as nightmares.
Juan: “La noche es donde viene el verdadero terror. Caes como en un bucle, empiezo a pensar en lo mismo que ya viví y no lo puedo bloquear.”
Ariel Goodman: At night is when the real terror comes. He says I fall into a loop remembering what I lived through. It’s something I can’t let go of.
Maria Hinojosa: Juan was deported to his home country of Venezuela in February and just weeks later, over 200 Venezuelans under similar circumstances were sent from the U.S. to another infamous prison, this time in El Salvador. When we come back, we dive into the new phase of Trump’s war on immigrants. That’s coming up.
Stay with us, ¡No te vayas!
Hey, we’re back. And before the break, we heard the story of Juan, a Venezuelan immigrant who spent 15 days in Guantánamo after the Trump administration accused him of being a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But now Trump is taking his war on immigrants to another level. Just a couple of weeks ago, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It’s a wartime law.
Ramzi Kassem: “This Alien Enemies Act has only been invoked three times. Most recently during World War II, when it was used to put Japanese immigrants in internment camps.”
Maria Hinojosa: By claiming that Tren de Aragua is conducting quote ‘irregular warfare in the United States,’ the Trump administration is using the act to deport migrants who it claims have ties to the gang, all of this without due process.
And in March, it deported more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s infamous mega prison CECOT.
To better understand all of this, we’re gonna speak to Ramzi Kassem. He’s a professor of law at the City University of New York. Professor Kassem has represented detainees at Guantánamo Bay over the last 20 years.
He’s also one of the lead lawyers defending Mahmoud Khalil.
News tape: “ICE agents detained a leader of the Gaza Solidarity encampment at Columbia University. Mahmoud Khalil is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent who’s a green card holder and a lawful permanent resident of the United States immigration officials told Khalil’s lawyer his green card is being revoked.
Maria Hinojosa: Professor Ramzi Kassem welcome to Latino USA.
Ramzi Kassem: Thank you so much for having me, Maria.
Maria Hinojosa: So Ramzi we’re looking today at Trump’s move to incarcerate migrants abroad. First in Guantánamo, now in El Salvador. And we’re gonna get into that in a moment. But to start off, can you connect the dots for us? How is the Trump administration’s detention of your client Mahmoud Khalil connected to the administration’s move to incarcerate migrants as civil rights groups like yours are arguing in these unlawful ways.
Ramzi Kassem: One way to connect the dots, Maria, is to point out that when this Trump administration decides to fly migrants, who it claims without much support are affiliated with gangs to Guantánamo, and when it also makes a move on someone like Mahmoud Khalil who his only offense as far as anybody can see is that he has said things that the government happens to disagree with in support of Palestinian lives and rights and freedom, the through line between those two actions is that these are essentially communications efforts. So when it comes to leveraging the horrible symbolism of Guantánamo, the intended message is ‘we are doing the most hard-nosed thing to quash migrants and migration. We are sending them to Guantánamo.’
And so that’s a politically valuable message that comforts the Trump administration’s political base here in the United States and the administration also intends to deter migrants from coming to the United States again by leveraging and mobilizing the horrific symbolic weight of Guantánamo and all the associations with torture, with indefinite incarceration, without fair process, without trial, without conviction for decades on end.
And once again, the people who are being brought to Guantánamo are brown and Black folks. That was the case with the nearly 800 Muslim prisoners who were incarcerated there since 9/11. And that’s the case today with the Latinx migrants whom the administration claims are gang affiliated again, without much support, much like previous administrations claim that the Muslim men at Guantánamo were affiliated with terrorist groups.
And with Mr. Khalil the message is taking the harshest possible measures by targeting a green card holder in New York City with no criminal convictions, and it also wants to send a message to protestors that their speech will not be tolerated and it will be punished.
They wanna silence folks who stand up in support of Palestinians and who stand up against genocide, and that has already backfired, frankly, I mean, you’ve seen, Maria, the thousands of people who have taken to the streets in solidarity with him and solidarity with the Palestinian people, and also to stand up for rights in this country to speak up.
Maria Hinojosa: You know what’s incredible, Ramzi, is that when we first reached out to you to talk about Guantánamo, you told me that your last client had just been released from Guantánamo earlier this year, and all of a sudden, you find yourself now having to talk about Guantánamo again. So you did represent men on Guantánamo as a result of George W. Bush’s post 9/11 quote-unquote, ‘War on Terror.’
And back then the Bush administration justified their indefinite detention without due process and the human rights abuses that they endured by arguing that this was quote unquote, ‘a new kind of warfare with a new kind of enemy.’ And now Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act saying: ‘This is a time of war, describing an influx of migrants, and immigrants, and refugees as quote, an invasion. So what part of Trump’s actions are unprecedented and what part of them are actually part of a direct lineage to Bush-era policies?
Ramzi Kassem: The continuity is remarkable and everything from the visuals. When the first plane full of so-called War on Terror prisoners landed there, the U.S. Government had photographers there. These notorious, infamous pictures of Muslim, Black and brown men on their knees shackled. You know, their eyes are covered and they’re being photographed because the point was to message to the outside world that the United States was responding to 9/11 in the harshest possible way.
And so it’s the same now with the Venezuelan migrants. There were photographers on the tarmac as the men in jumpsuits and shackles were being taken aboard a plane that was gonna fly them to Guantánamo. It’s really just about the politics, the messaging, and the authority that they’re invoking it’s very similar to what they did after 9/11 when they claimed on all sorts of novel grounds that they had the authority to incarcerate anyone, including a U.S citizen as an enemy combatant, quote unquote without having to charge them, without having to try them, and without even having to abide by the Geneva conventions.
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Maria Hinojosa: What happened with El Salvador, right, is that the deportation planes to El Salvador were already in the air when a judge ordered that they return. The judge had issued a verbal order in time to stop those deportations, but the Trump administration did not comply with that order. So, Ramzi, what is your level of alarm about a president defying the American court system, and how much in danger are our checks and balances in terms of what upholds our democracy?
Ramzi Kassem: You know, I think that is certainly troubling that the administration was under an order not to do something, not to fly these men to El Salvador, and that it did it anyway. Now, one might say we are not yet in the worst possible place, in the sense that the Trump administration’s position is not that it openly defied a court order or disregarded.
It’s making arguments about why the right people were not aware of the judge’s order at the right time. They’re making those sorts of excuses and I only highlight that, not to excuse it, but just to distinguish it from where we might be headed, which is a place where the U.S. Government will just ignore or openly disregard a court order and say that it’s doing that.
And these are all steps towards sort of the open defiance and disregard of judicial authority that I’m talking about, they’re all flirtations with what we might be headed towards. Uh, and so it’s very important to take note of what’s happening and to push back.
Maria Hinojosa: Professor Ramzi Kaseem, thank you so much for taking the time out of your really busy schedule to speak to us here at Latino USA. We appreciate it.
Ramzi Kassem: Thank you so much, Maria, for your work and for this opportunity.
Maria Hinojosa: Don’t miss the rest of my conversation with Professor Ramsey Kasem dropping on Sunday. We go deeper into Mahmoud Khalil’s case and what it signals about the right to free speech and due process in the United States for all of us.
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Maria Hinojosa: Our episode was produced by Ariel Goodman and edited by Andrea López-Cruzado. Mixing and scoring by Stephanie Lebow and JJ Querubin.
The Latino USA team also includes Roxana Aguirre, Julia Caruso, Felicia Domínguez, Fernanda Echavarri, Jessica Ellis. Victoria Estrada, Dominique Hinestrosa, Reynaldo Leaños Jr, Luis Luna, Marta Martínez, Mónica Morales-García, Tasha Sandoval, Nour Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Peniley Ramírez, Marlon Bishop, Maria Garcia, and myself, our co-executive producers, and I’m your host, Maria Hinojosa.
Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I’ll see you on social media. Hasta la próxima.¡No te vayas! Ciao!
Stephanie Lebow: Latino USA is made possible in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide. And funding for Latino USA is Coverage of a Culture of Health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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