Beyond the Border brings you human stories about the U.S. immigration system through original reporting from journalist Kate Morrissey and curated highlights from reporters across the country. The newsletter is sponsored by Capital & Main.
When Alicia Valentina Belloso found out that her father was getting deported to Venezuela from the United States, the 8-year-old could not hide her joy.
“My daddy is coming home soon,” she told everyone around her, including her teachers at school, according to her mother, Noemi Briceño.
But the family hasn’t heard from Alicia’s father, Alirio Guillermo Belloso Fuenmayor, since March 14, the day before deportation flights carried Venezuelans from the United States not to their home country but instead to El Salvador. There they were immediately incarcerated in one of the country’s notorious prisons.
Briceño said the family gathered at her husband’s mother’s house two days later to prepare for his arrival home. They were all excited to have him back, she said.
Then they heard the news of the flight to El Salvador. On television, they thought they saw someone who looked like Belloso Fuenmayor among the men being moved from the plane to the Salvadoran prison, Briceño said, but they decided it wasn’t him. They searched online for more images and, to their horror, confirmed that he was among the 238 sent there by the Trump administration despite a judge’s order to halt the deportations.
Briceño said she and the other family members began to cry.
“A thousand things went through my mind,” she said in Spanish. “The first thing, why him if he is a good person, and he has suffered so much?”
Belloso Fuenmayor’s mother, who has diabetes and hypertension, was so distraught that her blood pressure spiked, and she ended up in the hospital, Briceño said.
The Trump administration claimed that all of the Venezuelan men sent to El Salvador were part of a gang called Tren de Aragua. It said that ICE had deported the majority using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which President Donald Trump invoked in a March 15 proclamation.
But Briceño said that her husband was never part of any gang and that he had never committed a crime. She provided records from both the Venezuelan and U.S. governments indicating that he had no criminal history.
“They don’t give us a solution of what to do to get his freedom,” she said. “They should free him because he is innocent. The documents speak for themselves. He is innocent.”
She called her husband a family man.
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
Belloso Fuenmayor left Venezuela a couple of times to find work to support his family, according to his wife. He spent a few years in Peru, and, in September 2023, he came to the U.S. to earn enough money to fix the roof on the family house and buy school supplies for his daughter.
According to his immigration file provided by Briceño, Border Patrol agents with the El Paso Sector apprehended Belloso Fuenmayor after he crossed into the U.S. between ports of entry. The agents processed him and gave him a document indicating that he would have a court hearing in 2025.
But because a copy of the document that should have marked the beginning of his court case was never filed with the immigration court, a judge dismissed his case in January 2025, according to the immigration file.
Meanwhile, Belloso Fuenmayor went to live in Utah and sent money back to his family. He worked for DoorDash, Briceño said.
He achieved most of what he set out to do, she said. The family now has beds to sleep on instead of a mat on the floor. The only thing he didn’t manage to do, she said, was get the money together to buy a car for himself in Venezuela.
But, she said, he missed his family, and told her that life in the U.S. was difficult. He spent his free time on the phone with his wife and daughter, asking about the girl’s homework and watching movies together.
In December, he told her that he was saving up to come home.
“He said he couldn’t be there any longer, that his despair was so bad,” she said.
Then, in January, about 10 days after a judge dismissed his case, Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeted and arrested him, according to his immigration file. The agency sent him to a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, and opened a new case against him.
In February, an immigration judge ordered him deported.
“They told him that he had to wait for a flight to arrive,” Briceño recalled. “He was desperate. He’d never been in jail or anything. He said that sometimes he was afraid that they would hurt him. One outside hears many bad things about jails.”
Finally, Belloso Fuenmayor found out that ICE was ready to deport him. He called to tell his wife and daughter the good news, that he was coming home to Venezuela.
“I felt an immense joy inside,” Briceño said. “The last call that we had, we all said that we would never see him leave the country again because we missed him so much. And he said that he wasn’t thinking of leaving the country again because migrating is very hard.”
The next day, U.S. officials put him on a flight to El Salvador.
Briceño said she is worried about whether the prison is feeding her husband adequately and how the guards are treating him. Since that country’s suspension of civil rights through a policy known as the “state of exception” in 2022, officials have locked up thousands accused of being affiliated with gangs, often with little to no evidence. Some have died, and human rights observers are concerned about claims of torture and starvation.
Briceño said she doesn’t know anyone in El Salvador who can help her, but she’s trying to tell the world through journalists that her husband is a good man, that he’s not a gangster.
All she wants is for Belloso Fuenmayor to come home.
She said that without him, the house feels empty.
“He filled the house with happiness,” she said. “He is a very joyful man — but the situation of the country obligated him to leave.”
She still hasn’t been able to find the words to tell her daughter what happened. The girl asks her often when daddy is coming home.
Targeting Attorneys
After 10 p.m. on Friday, Trump issued a memo instructing the Justice Department to take action against immigration attorneys and law firms that it believes are coaching clients through fraudulent asylum claims, according to Migrant Insider. (I remember often receiving emails about immigration policy changes after business hours on Friday during the first Trump administration.)
Immigration attorneys reacted quickly to the news.
“There is a reason that President Trump is afraid of the lawyers. He knows that lawyers are critical to upholding a society built on the rule of law and that our job is to hold elected officials accountable to the Constitution,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, president and CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “President Trump has long found due process and fundamental fairness inconvenient to his plans for mass deportations and chaos at our borders.”
Other Stories to Watch
ICE sent an MS-13 leader to El Salvador along with the Venezuelans who were deported there just over a week ago, according to Salvadoran outlet El Faro. Under the Biden administration, officials had worked to get custody of César Antonio López Larios, but now the Justice Department has waived his indictment.
For Capital & Main, I wrote about a group of Venezuelan men who have alleged on a video recorded by a family member that guards at a Texas immigration detention facility beat them.
ICE recently made an arrest at a San Diego homeless shelter, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune, raising questions about whether the officers had the kind of warrant necessary to require shelter staff to let them in.
The Colorado Sun reported that a federal judge in Colorado ordered that Jeanette Vizguerra, an activist who lived in a church for several years during the first Trump administration to avoid deportation, cannot be deported now without further proceedings after ICE recently arrested her.
The Department of Homeland Security on Friday closed its Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, according to Migrant Insider. The office has been responsible for investigating complaints about the treatment of people in immigration custody, among other civil rights issues.
More cases of border officials detaining European and Canadian travelers under questionable circumstances have come to light in the past two weeks, including a German man who was in the United States on a fiancé visa, according to the Associated Press. A fiancé visa, or K-1 visa, allows someone engaged to a U.S. citizen to enter the country to get married within 90 days after arriving. Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian woman taken into custody at the San Diego border, shared her experiences in a first person narrative for The Guardian.
Indian outlet The Wire reported that Indian migrants sent to Costa Rica by the Trump administration are surviving on bread twice a day inside a government facility and that they were asked to purchase their own tickets for flights back to India. The New York Times spoke with migrants similarly sent to Panama after that country’s government, under pressure, allowed the group to leave its custody and move freely in the country on temporary permits. They said they had expressed fear of returning to their countries after they crossed into the U.S., but they were not given the opportunity to ask for asylum.
The Navy deployed the USS Spruance to assist in monitoring maritime crossings at the western end of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the U.S. Northern Command.
For American Anthropologist, a professor at California State University, San Marcos, shared her experiences volunteering at a San Diego migrant shelter that closed recently due to lack of arrivals under border policy changes from the Trump administration. FEMA recently launched an investigation into organizations that received federal money to shelter migrants who were released from custody after crossing the border, according to the Associated Press. The agency is accusing the organizations of human smuggling.
The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General released a record showing that investigators from its Dallas field office had substantiated allegations that an immigration judge made inappropriate comments in his courtroom, including disparaging remarks based on sexual orientation. The judge’s name is withheld in the document.
The Trump administration on Friday for a second time moved to stop lawyers from representing children who came to the United States without parents or guardians, the Associated Press reported.
For Voice of San Diego, I rode along with a community group that patrols neighborhoods watching for ICE activity. We talked about what residents can look for to determine whether a vehicle might belong to the agency.
