Mother details ‘nightmare' after Trump sends son to El Salvador mega-prison where he's being held incommunicado

Independent

4 hours ago

The last time Ydalis Chirinos Polanco heard from her 25-year-old son was on March 15, when he called her from the El Valle immigration detention center in Texas. He thought he was coming home to Venezuela.
Instead, that same day, he was put on a plane to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, a maximum-security facility for terrorists and gang members where he has been held incommunicado ever since.
'He left Venezuela for a better future and it turned into a nightmare,' Chirinos Polanco said through a translator in an interview with The Independent from her home in Valencia, Venezuela.
She used to speak daily with her son. She hasn't heard from him in over 85 days.
Being sent away so soon wasn't what Ysqueibel Peñaloza had hoped for when he arrived in the U.S. last September, passing legally through California's San Ysidro border crossing, after barely surviving a journey through the Darien Gap in the Panamanian jungle.
The plan was to earn money to send back home, and he joined a friend in Raleigh, North Carolina. He found work as a gardener and Uber driver, according to his family and lawyer. (Uber said it did not have a record of Peñaloza working for the company.)
Since he was a teenager, Peñaloza, who a past employer from Chile described as 'honorable and hardworking' in a support video, had worked to pay for his younger sister's education. His wages in America allowed him to send enough money back home to fund a semester of her training to be a physical therapist.
The 25-year-old's temporary stint in the U.S. was cut short in February, when immigration agents detained him and his friend Arturo Suarez, a Venezuelan singer who uses the stage name Suarez Vzla, as they filmed a music video.
Peñaloza had entered the U.S. legally, using the CBP One app, which allowed him to remain in the country temporarily as he awaited an April court date. But he and Suarez were among the more than 100 Venezuelans that the administration eventually accused of being members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, using the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily deport the men from the U.S. without letting them challenge their removals in court.
Peñaloza's mother said her son has never had anything to do with a gang, and was too committed to his work to ever get into trouble.
The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, told The Independent that Peñaloza was arrested during an operation 'targeting a known Tren de Aragua gang member,' which netted multiple arrests and a firearm. He was then 'confirmed to be' a member of the gang on March 15 — the same day Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act and the removal flights departed to El Salvador.
The department declined to share the basis of this conclusion.
'We are confident in our law enforcement's intelligence, and we aren't going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one,' Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a statement to The Independent. 'That would be insane.'
Chirinos Polanco only found out her son had been sent to CECOT when she spotted him in the slickly produced propaganda videos of the men being manhandled and shaved by prison guards at the facility in El Salvador, thanks to an olive branch tattoo on his right knee. He resurfaced again in May, in the background of a visit to the prison by Matt Gaetz, the former Trump administration attorney general nominee, who is now a host at OAN.
In the prison, which has a $6 million deal with the U.S., Chirinos Polanco said she saw her son waving to the camera in what she interpreted as a hand signal for help. Around him, inmates jeered at Gaetz and cried 'Freedom!' in Spanish at the passing camera crew.
'He doesn't know that his family is fighting for him to get out,' Peñaloza's mother said, through tears.
Chirinos Polanco worries about her son's state of mind inside CECOT, which was designed to house terrorists and is home to scores of admitted gang members that Salvadoran officials openly say will likely never be released.
Prior to being sent to CECOT, the quiet 25-year-old told his mother he would sit and cry to himself for hours in immigration detention. She says she can only imagine what it's like now, since 'they have terrorized him in El Salvador.'
The circumstances of his arrest — a sudden sweep of an immigrant who entered the U.S. legally, before a court process could play out, with little publicly presented evidence of gang membership, and baffled family members — have been common among the Venezuelans sent to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act.
U.S. immigration officials have insisted they conducted a rigorous vetting process to find the men's gang and other criminal affiliations.
Internally, though, the Trump administration knew that just six of the 238 Venezuelans known to have been sent to CECOT had been convicted of violent crimes, while over half had no criminal record or pending charges at all outside of immigration violations, according to government data obtained by a coalition of U.S. and Venezuelan news outlets. (The government insisted, in response to the reporting, that the men in the data are 'actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don't have a rap sheet in the U.S.')
Further confounding scrutiny, the government has not publicly released a list of those it sent to the prison, and has shared little public evidence of the men's alleged gang ties.
As The Independent has reported, the federal government appears to have instead largely based its gang determinations on tattoos many of the men had, even though family members, tattoo artists who made the images, and experts on Venezuelan gangs say the tattoos don't symbolize membership in Tren de Aragua.
The Department of Homeland Security told The Independent that 'its intelligence assessments go well beyond just gang affiliate tattoos and social media.'
The entire process amounts to an egregious violation of due process, according to Margaret Cargioli, directing attorney for policy and advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, an advocacy group representing eight of the men inside CECOT, even though it can't communicate with them.
'What has been one of the most astonishing things is the utter disregard of human beings' due process and their human rights, due to being sent to a place where it was known they would be excommunicated from their families, attorneys, and loved ones, as well as have no access to justice,' Cargioli told The Independent. She said the government did not, and still hasn't, presented 'any evidence' in immigration court that Peñaloza was a gang member before sending him to CECOT.
DHS Assistant Secretary McLaughlin added in her statement that the administration has a 'stringent law enforcement assessment in place that abides by due process under the US Constitution.'
'There IS due process for these terrorists who all have final deportation orders,' she wrote.
Those challenging the Alien Enemies Act removals argue the men were removed without any meaningful notice, chance to challenge their status, or decision on final removal orders from an immigration judge, the typical deportation process.
When asked, the White House did not answer specific questions about the evidence against Peñaloza or criticisms of the removal process to CECOT.
'President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public,' White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement to The Independent. 'CECOT is one of the most secure facilities in the world and there is no better place for the sick criminals we are deporting from the United States.'
Faced with this immigration black hole, mothers like Chirinos Polanco have taken on the role of activists. They have staged protests in Caracas, kept in touch with each other during regular meetings and calls, and shared money to support those who depended on their now-detained relatives for remittances.
During the interview, Chirinos Polanco, in between sharing family photos, was preparing for a sit-in in front of a United Nations office in Caracas, the kind of demonstration staged by countless women living under repressive regimes in Latin America on behalf of their disappeared loved ones — only this time, the protest is directed at the world's most powerful democracy.
Chirinos Polanco said the detentions weigh heavily on the families that they left behind.
Her father can't bear to look at pictures of Peñaloza. One of the women she was in touch with, the grandmother of a man in CECOT, recently died of a heart attack in Perú, which her family attributes to the disappearances, Chirinos Polanco said.
U.S. courts may offer these families a last chance to connect with their loved ones.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May that the administration didn't give the alleged Tren de Aragua members the proper chance to contest their removals, and on Wednesday, a federal judge gave the government a week to explain how it would 'facilitate' giving these 137 men a chance at appeal.
Such an unlikely reversal has some precedent.
After months of public pressure, and a Supreme Court ruling that the U.S. must aid in his return, the U.S. retook custody of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant it admitted it had mistakenly sent to CECOT despite a court order barring his removal to El Salvador.
The U.S. initially claimed it didn't have the power or the need to seek Garcia's return, though the government appears to have changed course, and the man now reportedly faces a federal grand jury indictment in the U.S. for allegedly illegally transporting undocumented immigrants.
Chirinos Polanco hopes, with the world watching, the U.S. will finally give a fair hearing to the remaining men inside CECOT.
'We all should have the right to defend ourselves and be heard,' she said. 'Those Venezuelans who were sent to CECOT, they were silenced completely.'
Until that silence is broken, Chirinos Polanco barely sleeps and often wakes up early. She's waiting for a phone call from her son that might never come.