SAN SALVADOR  — One is a former professional soccer player who, according to his lawyer, fled Venezuela after being tortured by the country’s authoritarian government.

The other, also from Venezuela, is a onetime shoe salesman and social media influencer who documented his journey from South America on TikTok.

Both were apparently among thousands of political asylum aspirants who entered the United States from Mexico legally via an immigration process scrapped by the Trump administration.

Both were detained, one in California, and deported. Now they are imprisoned in El Salvador, according to their families, who have been left in the dark about their fates in a penal system widely condemned for human rights abuses.

“This has been a torture for us, an injustice,” said Antonia Cristina Barrios de Reyes, mother of Jerce Egbunik Reyes Barrios, 36, the former professional goalkeeper. “My son is not a criminal.”

The social media influencer is Nolberto Rafael Aguilar Rodríguez, 32. He initially fled to Colombia, Venezuela’s western neighbor, out of desperation, said his sister, Jennifer Aguilar.

“We’re campesinos, we come from the fields,” she said. “We left Venezuela because we were starving.”

Reyes Barrios and Aguilar were among 261 people — the vast majority Venezuelans — expelled to El Salvador last week after the Trump administration alleged that most were affiliated with the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua gang, which President Trump has declared a terrorist group.

The evidence of gang membership cited by the government is typically flimsy to nonexistent, defense lawyers allege, and largely based on tattoos and social media postings.

Experts say the administration’s outsourcing of detained migrants to a nation with an infamously repressive prison system has no precedent.

In El Salvador, “the United States now has a tropical gulag,” said Regina Bateson, a political scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “The notion that the U.S. government is paying millions of dollars to another government to violate these people’s rights is horrifying.”

The El Salvador operation is part of a deal between the Trump administration and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Advocates have filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act — a statute from 1798 previously only invoked during wartime — to expel most of the alleged Venezuelan gang members.

On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., vowed to “get to the bottom” of whether the Trump administration defied his order to hold off on the deportations while lawsuits challenging the expulsions played out in court.

Many relatives of the deportees deny their kin have gang ties or a criminal record, saying they were simply searching for better lives or escaping persecution in their turbulent homeland, part of the exodus that has seen millions flee Venezuela.

“We have no idea what’s going to happen to Jerce,” said Jair Barrios, uncle of the soccer player. “We understand and respect the laws of each country; but at the same time, we ask that, please, let justice be done and truly innocent people be released.”

Reyes Barrios was detained at the Otay Mesa border post in California in September, according to a statement from his attorney, Linette Tobin, when he appeared for his appointment under the Biden administration program known as CBP One, which facilitated U.S. entry for prospective asylum applicants and others.

According to Tobin, he was mistakenly accused of Tren de Aragua affiliation based on an arm tattoo and a social media post in which he made a hand gesture that U.S. authorities called a gang sign.

The tattoo — a crown atop a soccer ball, with a rosary and the word “Díos” — is actually an homage to his favorite team, Real Madrid, Tobin wrote. The hand gesture is a popular sign language rendering of “I Love You,” the lawyer added.

Reyes Barrios participated in antigovernment demonstrations in Venezuela in February and March 2024, Tobin wrote, and was subsequently arrested and tortured, enduring electric shocks and suffocation. After his release, he fled for the United States and registered for CBP One while in Mexico.

Tobin portrayed Reyes Barrios as a law-abiding person who had never been charged with a crime and wrote that he had “a steady employment record as a soccer player, as well as a soccer coach for children and youth.”

Once in custody in California, Tobin wrote, Reyes Barrios applied for political asylum and other relief. A hearing had been set for April 17 at immigration court in Otay Mesa.

Reyes Barrios was deported to El Salvador on March 15.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, defended the government action.

Reyes Barrios was “not only in the United States illegally,” McLaughlin wrote on X, “but he has tattoos that are consistent with those indicating TdA [Tren de Aragua] membership. His own social media indicates he is a member of the vicious TdA gang.”

She added that “DHS intelligence assessments go beyond a single tattoo and we are confident in our findings.”

Reyes Barrios is a “respected person” in Venezuela, said his wife, Mariyen Araujo Sandoval, who has remained in Mexico with two of the couple’s four children.

“It’s unjust to criminalize someone because of a tattoo,” said Araujo, 32. She said she recognized her husband in the online videos of Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador.

Now dashed, she said, is her family’s dream of a reunion in the United States. She now hopes for a reunion in Venezuela — if her husband can ever get out of El Salvador.

“I’m too scared to even try to go to the United States,” said Araujo, who noted that she also has a tattoo, of a rose. “I’d be afraid that they would separate me from my daughters and put me in jail.”

The Venezuelans dispatched to El Salvador have no legal recourse for appeal or release, attorneys say, and may face indefinite detention.

“There is, of course, no law, rule or judicial standard in El Salvador to outsource the prisons,” said José Marinero, a Salvadoran lawyer. “These people have … no conviction, no debt to the Salvadoran justice system.”

Their predicament, activists say, highlights the erosion of democracy across the region, as well as the dramatic crackdown on migration pushed by Washington.

“There’s no real safe haven left,” said Michael Ahn Paarlberg, a political scientist who studies Latin America at Virginia Commonwealth University.

An image provided by El Salvador’s presidential press office shows prison guards overseeing deportees at a facility in Tecoluca on March 16.

(Associated Press)

The Trump administration has acknowledged that many of those deported under the Alien Enemies Act have no criminal records in the United States. But the government says they may still pose a threat.

“We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua, which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who brokered the deal with Bukele, declared on X.

Critics say that Trump, like Bukele, invokes crime as an excuse for suspending civil liberties.

“They’re using these particularly vulnerable people as test cases,” said Paarlberg, who added that the message appears to be: “If we can deport people who don’t have criminal records, people who are fleeing a regime that pretty much everyone and the U.S. government agrees is authoritarian, then we can deport anyone.”

Bukele, a former advertising executive who labels himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” dispatched video crews to record the arrival of the Venezuelans, who were led off deportation planes in shackles and had their hair shorn.

“This is a performative act of cruelty … to scare people into not coming, to scare people who are here without papers, to scare people away from protesting,” Paarlberg said.

News of the deportations has sent relatives of the expelled Venezuelans poring over videos and social media posts in an effort to determine if their loved ones were among those flown to El Salvador.

A photo provided by El Salvador’s presidential press office shows prison guards transfering deportees from the U.S. to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca on March 16.

(Associated Press)

The names of the deported Venezuelans appeared on a list leaked to the media. Included was Aguilar, who garnered more than 40,000 followers as he documented his northbound trek from South America on TikTok. His feed included images from the treacherous Darien Gap, the dense jungle separating Colombia and Panama.

Jennifer Aguilar described her brother as a hard-working family man who fled Venezuela for Colombia in 2013. He has three children: an 11-year-old girl in Venezuela and a 4-year-old girl and boy, 2, in Colombia. Aguilar’s sister says he got his tattoo, of playing cards and dice, to cover up a scar on his forearm from an accident he had at age 16.

Nolberto Rafael Aguilar Rodríguez, 32, is one of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants detained in the U.S. and sent to El Salvador.

(Jennifer Aguilar)

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According to his sister, Aguilar made his way to Mexico and secured an appointment for U.S. entry via CBP One. On June 24, he posted a video of himself boarding a plane, apparently en route to the U.S.-Mexican border.

“Have faith in God,” he wrote in a caption. “Never put your head down. And trust yourself.”

Jennifer Aguilar said he got a job in a travel agency in the California border city of Calexico. For reasons that remain unclear, he was detained by U.S. immigration authorities late last year.

From Colombia, where she lives with her three daughters, Jennifer Aguilar has written about her brother’s plight on social media and sent messages to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and to Bukele, the Salvadoran leader.

Aguilar “has never been to prison in Venezuela or in Colombia,” she wrote to Bukele. “Believe me, if he was guilty I’d say: ‘Leave him there.’ Because we were taught to be honest and do good.”

Nolberto Rafael Aguilar Rodríguez chronicled his journey from South America to the United States on social media. He was deported and is now being held in El Salvador.

(Jennifer Aguilar)

“I’ve tried by all means … to be Rafael’s voice,” said the sister, adding that she doesn’t know anyone in El Salvador. “If I could be there, I would. I’m deeply sorry that I can’t.”

El Salvador has rounded up and imprisoned some 85,000 people — the equivalent of 1.5% of the nation’s population — since March 2022, when Bukele declared a state of emergency that effectively suspended constitutional due process rights. The Venezuelans were dispatched to the infamous Center for Terrorism Confinement, the centerpiece of Bukele’s mass incarceration agenda.

Times staff writers McDonnell and Linthicum reported from Mexico City while special correspondents Mery Mogollón and Nelson Rauda contributed, respectively, from Caracas, Venezuela, and San Salvador. Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed from Mexico City.