The Trump administration announced Sunday it would invoke the wartime Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants. Almost immediately after the move was declared, immigration advocates and attorneys took to social media to tell the stories of some of these deportees.
Following the administration's move, Lindsay Toczylowski, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), a non-profit social justice law firm, took to X to detail the story of one of their clients, a Venezuelan migrant who was detained by ICE under the Alien Enemies Act, alleging his tattoos are gang related.
"Our client worked in the arts in Venezuela. He is LGBTQ. His tattoos are benign. But ICE submitted photos of his tattoos as evidence he is Tren de Aragua," Toczylowski wrote, in reference to the gang which the Trump administration is seeking to crack down on. "His @ImmDef attorney planned to present evidence he is not. But never got the chance because our client has disappeared."
"We last spoke to our client on Thursday before he was supposed to have a hearing in immigration court, but ICE didn't bring him. The [government attorney] had no info about why he was not there. The Judge reset the hearing for Monday. We have been trying to contact our client ever since," Toczylowski wrote.
Returning to X to shine a light on what the Alien Enemies Act looks like IRL. Our @ImmDef client fled Venezuela last year & came to US to seek asylum. He has a strong claim. He was detained at entry because ICE alleged his tattoos are gang related. They are absolutely not. 🧵
— L-Toczylowski.bsky.social (@L_Toczylowski) March 16, 2025
Under the Act, which is meant to be invoked during wartime only, the federal government has the authority to allow non-citizens to be deported without being given the opportunity to go before an immigration or federal court judge.
The invocation is not entirely a surprise, as the president had repeatedly anticipated during his campaign that he would declare extraordinary powers to confront illegal immigration and laid additional groundwork in a slew of executive orders on Jan. 20, The Associated Press reports.
Nevertheless, the move has been met with controversy, as 300 Venezuelan men were quickly taken from the U.S. to El Salvador, where they will be jailed in the country's infamous CECOT prison.
Though the administration argued the move would affect Tren de Aragua members, Toczylowski claims the group's client, who was not named in the series of X posts, has no connection to the transnational gang, and came into the U.S. seeking asylum. It is not clear how the government determined the 300 men they would deport.
"Our client came to the U.S. seeking protection but has spent months in ICE prisons, been falsely accused of being a gang member and today he has been forcibly transferred, we believe, to El Salvador. We are horrified tonight thinking what might happen to him now," the lawyer wrote.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele shared a video on social media showing the prisoners arriving at the airport, surrounded by heavily armed, camouflage-clad men. Bukele said they were taken to a "Terrorism Confinement Center," where the video showed that masked officers then forced the men to their knees, shaved their heads and marched them in white shirts and shorts into a cell block. Bukele said the inmates would go into forced labor for at least a year, possibly more, and that the "United States will pay a very low fee for them."
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