Wednesday, April 02, 2025
Eric Adams’s Charges Were Dropped, but His Re-Election Chances Remain Dim - The New York Times
Charges Dropped Against Adams, but Re-Election Chances Remain Dim
"Even with the dismissal of a five-count federal corruption indictment, Mayor Eric Adams faces an uncertain future.
Mayor Eric Adams got his best case scenario on Wednesday, when Judge Dale E. Ho dismissed his federal corruption indictment.
In the stroke of a pen, the prospect of a trial-turned-media circus had been eliminated, along with the prospect of prison time. And because the indictment was dismissed with prejudice, prosecutors can no longer revisit the charges after the November mayoral election.
But that does not mean Mr. Adams’s path to winning a second term this year will be any easier.
In the roughly six months since a grand jury indicted him, Mr. Adams has seen his fund-raising crater and a platoon of contenders join the Democratic primary, including several who are well-positioned to win the support of Black voters outside Manhattan who make up Mr. Adams’s base.
Despite the headwinds and the absence of a discernible campaign infrastructure, Mr. Adams insists that he is still running for a second term. He has also left open the door to running as an independent, possibly forgoing a bruising Democratic primary battle in June and enabling him to build up and conserve his campaign funds for the general election.
And even though his case has been dismissed, how it played out did him no favors with voters. Mr. Adams has had to watch as the Trump administration’s effort to quash his case devolved into a sordid soap opera, with respected federal prosecutors in Manhattan forfeiting their jobs rather than carry out orders that they considered corrupt.
Mr. Adams, the outgoing interim U.S. attorney argued, had effectively offered to exchange his freedom from prosecution for his help administering the president’s deportation agenda.
Although the mayor routinely denies this, the judge overseeing the case, Judge Ho, wrote in his ruling: “Everything here smacks of a bargain: Dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
Mr. Adams has also had to witness his case mushroom into a national symbol of President Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department, with several officials at the agency in Washington also choosing to resign rather than move to dismiss his charges.
The spectacle of it all has perhaps irreparably damaged Mr. Adams’s standing with New Yorkers, most of whom are not particularly fond of Mr. Trump.
“You can’t un-ring the bell,” said Basil Smikle, the former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party. “Any concerns that voters had about Eric Adams being able to serve the city with the investigation continuing and a potential trial only get amplified by their dismissal.”
Mr. Adams has steadily lost the confidence of New York City’s voters. In December 2023, well before he was indicted, only 28 percent of them approved of his job performance. At the time, it was the lowest approval rating for any New York City mayor in the nearly 30 years that Quinnipiac University has polled New York City voters.
After Mr. Adams’s indictment in September, he fell below his own polling nadir: Only 20 percent of New York City voters approved of his job performance, according to a poll Quinnipiac released last month.
“Eric Adams is politically toast,” said David Schwartz, who worked as the Jewish community outreach coordinator for Andrew Yang, a 2021 mayoral candidate. He added that the dismissal of charges “doesn’t matter” at this point.
If Mr. Adams stays in the Democratic primary, the city’s ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference, may benefit him.
If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who ranked that eliminated candidate first, now give their votes to the candidate they ranked second. The process repeats itself until there are only two candidates left. The candidate with the most votes then wins.
“The mayor could go across the city and say: ‘Look, I know you may be looking at someone else. Vote me No. 2,’” Mr. Smikle said. “If he can rake up enough No. 2s, it actually may be helpful to him.”
He could be, Mr. Smikle continued, “the common backup” for candidates as varied as the former comptroller Scott Stringer, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, or State Senator Zellnor Myrie.
And much as voters may be willing to overlook the sexual harassment allegations that prompted Mr. Cuomo to resign from the governorship in 2021, some may also be willing to overlook Mr. Adams’s scandal-ridden tenure. They may be susceptible to the candidates’ shared argument, one also voiced by Mr. Trump, that they were victims of a politicized justice system.
“There are a lot of voters that have a real distrust in the criminal justice system,” Mr. Smikle said. “That explains partly some of Trump’s support among Black and brown voters.”
And Mr. Adams may be able to frame Judge Ho’s dismissal as evidence that the charges were weak, a contention that some voters may already believe.
“I don’t think the political winds necessarily favor Eric Adams, but he’s not dead politically,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University.
“He is wounded, he is definitely behind the eight ball, he is in a less-than-ideal position as an incumbent. But in a ranked-choice, low-voting, low-information election” nearly three months from now, she continued, “I would not discount him completely.”
The Untold Story of Benzodiazepine Dependency | The Epoch Times
The Untold Story of Benzodiazepine Dependency
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"As a freshly minted physician’s assistant, Nicole Lamberson was nervous to start seeing patients, struggling with residual stress from her studies, anxiety, and a lack of confidence. A colleague prescribed her Xanax (alprazolam).
The pills worked like a charm for the first couple of weeks, but then they lost their power.
What started as a simple prescription spiraled into a medical nightmare that nearly claimed her life–and revealed a little-known truth about one of America’s most commonly prescribed classes of drugs.
Across the United States, over 30 million adults take benzodiazepines, medications like Xanax, Klonopin (clonazepam), and Ativan (lorazepam). Most believe, as Lamberson did, that following their doctor’s orders keeps them safe.
Yet a growing body of evidence suggests these medications can create devastating physical dependence, even when taken exactly as prescribed, leaving patients trapped between the terror of continuing and the danger of stopping. In 2019, approximately 92 million prescriptions for benzodiazepines were dispensed to outpatients in the United States. About half of the patients took these medications for two months or more. Long-term use typically refers to taking them regularly for more than a few weeks.
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Benzodiazepine-related problems are often mistaken for addiction. However, dependence is neurological in nature and happens even when patients take the medication as prescribed.
Many people who experience benzodiazepine withdrawal say they had no idea what was happening to them.
Director and producer Holly Hardman experienced this firsthand. In the mid-1990s, her gynecologist prescribed her 0.5 to 1 milligram of Klonopin (clonazepam), which she took a few times a week for more than 15 years. She stopped once while preparing for a documentary film festival.
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“On the fourth day after stopping, I started experiencing frightening symptoms. I felt like I should go to an emergency room,” Hardman said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
A quick Google search led her to a Wikipedia page alerting readers to the dangers of benzodiazepines.
“I rushed to my bathroom cabinet and took a 1 mg Klonopin tablet, then continued a deep dive into a shocking world of suffering, medical ignorance, and big pharma malfeasance,” she added.
“Benzodiazepines act on the GABA-A receptors in the brain. Gamma-aminobutyric acid is a chemical messenger that helps reduce feelings of anxiety and stress. The binding to these sites depresses and slows down our nervous system. In return, our brain signals to counteract the drug and produces less GABA on its own,” Witt-Doerring said.
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Nicole Cain, a clinical psychologist and naturopathic doctor specializing in benzodiazepine withdrawal, describes this process of receptor desensitization in detail in her book “Panic Proof.” She emphasizes that dependence “can occur in as little as two weeks of benzo use.” “Benzo belly” refers to gastrointestinal symptoms many people experience during benzodiazepine withdrawal, including abdominal pain, nausea, appetite changes, and diarrhea or constipation. Good nutrition plays a key role in the taper process.
Cain says that increased intake of probiotics, fiber, and appropriate herbal and natural supplements can alleviate the symptoms. She knows this after conquering her own crisis.
Running a private practice, and treating patients with anxiety, Cain found herself “caught in a panic-anxiety loop,” she told The Epoch Times in an email.
“At my lowest point, I had lost significant weight, my menstrual cycle stopped, I couldn’t sleep, and I experienced involuntary muscle movements,” Cain added. She tried numerous alternative treatments, but after all those failed, she turned to prescription medication. Diazepam provided the most relief. However, her medical training pushed her to find a deeper solution.
Cain successfully tapered off benzodiazepines over 18 months–10 years ago. Since then, she has supported thousands of patients, emphasizing the importance of treating not just the symptoms but also the underlying cause of anxiety. Interdose withdrawal—withdrawal symptoms that occur between doses—and the loss of drug effectiveness often lead to misdiagnosis and additional prescriptions. Patients find themselves on cocktails of drugs, as was the case with Lamberson, whose side effects—insomnia, irritability, and increased anxiety—were mistaken for mental health issues.
Cain recalls a patient who was prescribed one benzodiazepine (Zoloft) by her primary care physician and another (Lexapro) by her psychiatrist. “This combination is contraindicated and can potentially lead to serious issues such as serotonin syndrome,” she said, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and clear communication across specialties to ensure patient safety.
In total, nearly 56 percent of the nursing home patients used benzodiazepines, with 28 percent in amounts higher than recommended for geriatric populations. Overall, 75 percent took benzodiazepines long-term. Problems surrounding benzodiazepine use are an ethical dilemma, Cain said. The main problem is in the current medical system, which is not designed to “consistently prioritize patient safety and well-being,” she told The Epoch Times. “Should we limit access to these medications, which can be life-saving in some cases (like mine), because doctors may lack adequate knowledge to manage the associated risks?”
Many medical professionals graduate from top programs without training in benzodiazepine tapering, she noted. Cain calls for enhanced education, increased resources, and the development of “comprehensive protocols for prescribing and tapering” for medical professionals and patients. Practitioners should know the difference between short-acting and longer-acting benzodiazepines and their effects, she added.
Witt-Doerring agrees that patient-centered care is lacking.
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“I noticed that there was a problem of how we prescribed psychiatric care medications when the treatment of patients started looking like a conveyer-belt,” Witt-Doerring said in a phone interview with The Epoch Times.
Witt-Doerring sees a positive shift in the declining numbers of new benzodiazepine prescriptions nationally since 2019.
“However, that doesn’t help the fact that hundreds of thousands of patients have taken them for decades and that there is no official guidance on how to get these people off these medications.” A “patient-guided” taper refers to a process in which a physician closely monitors a patient’s symptoms and gradually decreases the medication in small increments. This tapering process can take months or even years.
However, this poses another problem for physicians and patients—some benzodiazepines only come in pill form and cannot be broken into small enough pieces to regulate an appropriate taper.
“We often taper patients with liquid formulations. Tablets don’t allow people to safely come off the medication,” Witt-Doerring said. However, compounding pharmacies are rare, and custom preparations can be costly.
Additional Resources
- ASAM Guidelines: The American Society of Addiction Medicine’s Benzodiazepine Tapering Guidelines provide evidence-based tapering protocols that patients can share with their health care providers.
- Benzodiazepine Information Coalition (BIC): Highlights the importance of peer support and offers a comprehensive list of national and international support services, including social media support groups and tapering coaches.
- The Alliance for Benzodiazepine Best Practices: An Oregon-based nonprofit that provides educational resources for both providers and patients.
- The Inner Compass Initiative: Explores psychiatric medications, including benzodiazepines, and founded “The Withdrawal Project,“ which amplifies personal experiences and shares practical strategies for coping with withdrawal symptoms.
- The Ashton Manual: Published by Newcastle University in the UK, this comprehensive guide explains how benzodiazepines work and how to withdraw safely. A PDF version of the manual is available through BIC.
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It took Holly Hardman 22 months to free herself from what she calls the “Benzo Beast.” She still manages lingering effects but sees light at the end of the tunnel. “Good things are happening. More doctors are listening to updated information about benzodiazepines,” said Hardman, adding that “As Prescribed” is now supported by clinicians researching benzodiazepine withdrawal and what many refer to as Benzodiazepine-Induced Neurological Dysfunction (BIND).
Cain advises patients to find a health care provider who views anxiety as more than a condition to be managed indefinitely.
“Remember, hope is a key part of the healing process. Don’t let anyone, institution or individual, take that away from you.”
N.Y. Lawmakers Fight Trump With a Proposal Targeting Elon Musk - The New York Times
Inside Elite Law Firms, Protests and Quitting After Trump Deals
"The discontent does not appear to be resonating with leaders at Paul Weiss and Skadden, but it could hamstring their recruitment efforts.
Ever since the elite law firms Paul Weiss and Skadden reached deals with President Trump to scuttle executive orders that could have crippled their businesses, the firms’ top partners have closed ranks in support of the agreements.
But there is discontent among the vast army of lawyers who may not have much sway in decision-making at the two firms but who do much of the work: their associates.
Some of these young lawyers are saying both privately and openly that their leaders betrayed their firms’ principles with deals that could undermine a commitment to provide free legal work to public interest groups and causes at odds with the White House.
In recent days, associates at Paul Weiss and Skadden have written emails to their leadership in protest, and a few have quit their jobs.
One Skadden associate who resigned is Thomas Sipp.
A Columbia Law School graduate, Mr. Sipp, 27, said in an interview that he had been attracted to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom because of its “pay and prestige,” but also because of the firm’s “commitment to pro bono work.” On Monday, he wrote an email to his colleagues about why he was leaving after less than two years.
“I am sure some of you will question my decision and chalk it up to me being a young attorney too eager to throw his career away,” he wrote. “I am sure there will also be those of you who will think of me as naïve.”
But he added: “Skadden is on the wrong side of history. I could no longer stay knowing that someday I would have to explain why I stayed.”
So far, it does not appear that the associates’ complaints are resonating with their firms’ leadership.
The decision-making at many large firms is controlled by a small group of partners who are annually paid as much as $20 million each because of their relationships with lucrative corporate clients. At large firms, starting associates tend to make more than $220,000 a year plus a bonus.
At Paul Weiss, the top partners have argued that their deal with Mr. Trump was necessary to keep the firm afloat. The executive order, they said, would have prevented the firm from representing clients before the federal government could have cost partners and associates their jobs.
Skadden appears to have taken steps to prevent the internal dissent from spreading. Mr. Sipp and another associate there, Brenna Frey, who quit on Friday, said they had been blocked from announcing their resignations widely on Skadden’s email channels.
Two other associates said Skadden’s email system had not allowed them to send messages about their concerns about the deal to broad groups of lawyers. Those associates spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still work at Skadden.
The lawyers had often used internal group email lists to circulate questions, such as asking about colleagues’ experiences with judges or mediators.
Skadden declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Paul Weiss did not respond to a request for comment.
Objections to the deals could have other implications for the firms as they try to retain talented associates and recruit new ones from top law schools. On Monday, a student-run group at Georgetown University’s law school sent a letter to Skadden saying it would not participate in a recruiting event the next day at the firm’s Washington office.
The letter, from several of the more than 150 members of the Georgetown Energy Law Group, said the organization had decided not to participate in response to Skadden’s “pre-emptive acquiescence to pressure from the Trump administration.”
At Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a group of 43 associates emailed Brad Karp, the firm’s longtime chairman, in the days after the deal last month, asking for a staff meeting with senior leadership to address concerns about the “firm’s commitment to longstanding principles,” according to a copy of the note reviewed by The New York Times.
Some of the most vocal protests are coming from former Paul Weiss lawyers.
Elizabeth J. Grossman, a former Paul Weiss associate who is executive director of Common Cause Illinois, said she had chosen the firm after law school because of its commitment to democracy defense, among other issues.
“Paul Weiss recruited on the basis that they were different,” she said.
Ms. Grossman, who helped organize an open letter to Mr. Karp that called the decision to settle “cowardly,” said she was still fielding calls from lawyers interested in signing the letter.
Last month, one former Paul Weiss associate even organized a virtual shiva — the weeklong mourning period in Jewish tradition — where lawyers could gather to commiserate.
The deals focused heavily on Paul Weiss’s and Skadden’s pro bono programs, in which young lawyers provide many hours of free legal services to nonprofit groups that are often at odds with Mr. Trump’s policies. The deals require that the firms’ lawyers devote substantial work hours to causes favored by Mr. Trump.
Even before the president issued the executive orders, Paul Weiss had begun to take down some references to its public interest work that conflicted with the administration.
Last month, Paul Weiss removed a web page that had highlighted its “leadership in a court-ordered effort to find parents deported by the Trump administration and to reunify families.” Visitors to the page now get an error message, as do users looking for any mention of Paul Weiss’s pro bono work on behalf of L.G.B.T.Q. people.
Mr. Karp has long been a supporter of Democrats and their causes; he positioned Paul Weiss as a bulwark against many of the policies that the party objected to during the first Trump administration.
Other large law firms, like WilmerHale and Jenner & Block, have opted to go to court to fight Mr. Trump’s executive orders targeting them.
But Mr. Karp sought to strike a deal with the White House only hours after Paul Weiss was hit with an order, two people briefed on the matter said. He was prepared to offer pro bono work on causes supported by Mr. Trump, including helping the administration launch a sovereign wealth fund, one of the two people and another who was briefed on the matter said.
After meeting with Mr. Trump, Mr. Karp and a lawyer he had hired in Washington to deal with the executive order, Bill Burck, engaged in a back-and-forth with Mr. Trump’s advisers over the wording of the agreement.
Mr. Trump’s team wanted Paul Weiss to agree to not engage in “weaponization” of the law or “diversity, equity and inclusion” in hiring, two of the people briefed on the matter said.
Mr. Karp won the battle over the word “weaponization,” which was not mentioned in the version of the deal published on the White House website. But a general prohibition on policies that promote D.E.I. in the firm’s hiring did appear.
The agreement “will have no effect on our work and our shared culture and values,” Mr. Karp said in an email to his firm. “The core of who we are and what we stand for is and will remain unchanged.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research
Jessica Silver-Greenberg is a Times investigative reporter writing about big business with a focus on health care. She has been a reporter for more than a decade. More about Jessica Silver-Greenberg
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations."
‘Big Psychological Boost’ for Democrats in String of Elections - The New York Times
‘Big Psychological Boost’ for Democrats in String of Elections
"The party’s position remains dire. But a judicial victory in Wisconsin and closer-than-expected losses in Florida suggest a once-demoralized Democratic base is animated again.
news analysis
Democrats this week achieved their biggest gains to date in the second Trump era, winning a fiercely contested State Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, while also landing relatively strong showings despite losing two Florida special elections.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s a start.
The results on Tuesday do not erase the long list of harsh realities for Democrats, who remain locked out of power in President Trump’s Washington and severely limited in their efforts to constrain him.
Their party’s popularity is at a generational low, activists are furious with their leaders, and, as Democrats have learned the hard way, victories in obscure and off-year races do not always translate into national success.
But winning is better than losing, and Democrats have indeed been doing some significant winning.
At minimum, the Wisconsin results are a stinging rebuke to Elon Musk, the billionaire and top Trump adviser who spent millions in Wisconsin in support of the conservative candidate. The outcomes made clear that a once-demoralized Democratic base is animated again, on the same night that Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey delighted the party by completing the longest Senate speech on record, a 25-hour tirade and cri de coeur against the president and his administration.
And a substantial victory for the liberal candidate in Wisconsin — a state Mr. Trump won in November, where races are often nail-biters — instantly reverberated nationally.
“When Democrats are outperforming or winning, it’s a big psychological boost in a time when Democrats are feeling pretty low,” said John Anzalone, a veteran Democratic pollster, noting that Tuesday’s results would be closely watched in Virginia, home to a marquee governor’s race later this year.
“They’re going to be dealing with the political environment that Trump has created, which is not good right now for Republicans,” he added.
Democrats recently flipped Republican-held state legislative seats in special elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania. In Louisiana on Saturday, voters rejected four proposed constitutional amendments backed by the Republican governor, Jeff Landry.
Last week Mr. Trump announced he was withdrawing his appointment of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York as his United Nations ambassador, saying the move was partly done to avoid a special election for her seat, which she had won by 24 percentage points in November.
And on Tuesday, House contests in Florida helped explain that Republican uneasiness.
In the state’s conservative Sixth District, State Senator Randy Fine, a Republican, had won by 14 percentage points as of early Wednesday. In November, when turnout was much higher, then-Representative Michael Waltz — now the embattled national security adviser — won the same seat by more than 30 points.
And in the First District, a Democratic House candidate appeared to have won a county that Mr. Trump had carried last fall by 19 percentage points, though she lost the seat overall.
The results were striking.
But the bigger question is whether there is a real backlash brewing beyond the highly engaged, highly motivated and in many cases highly educated voters who reliably turn out for Democrats in races big and small — but who are not numerous enough to win a national election, as November’s results showed.
“What this election is about is turnout, and so while Democrats are a very small percentage of this area, they’re really, really, really mad,” Mr. Fine of Florida said in an interview on Tuesday morning.
His campaign, he said, had “to try to create the same level of intensity there than what Democrats are feeling. But if you survey everybody, I think they’re where they were in November.”
Democrats, however, are betting that broader momentum is building, as the Trump administration, led by Mr. Musk, moves to gut the federal government, slashing programs and creating chaos that Americans across the political spectrum are experiencing and feeling personally.
“They are watching how Donald Trump is empowering a billionaire who is unelected to cut their veterans’ services programs, and yet their representatives, these Republican congressional members, aren’t showing up,” said Sarah Godlewski, the Wisconsin secretary of state. “So they’re like, I can make my voice heard in this Supreme Court election.”
In Wisconsin, the race effectively became a referendum on Mr. Musk, who spent heavily and campaigned for the conservative judicial candidate, Brad Schimel, who lost to the liberal candidate, Susan Crawford.
“We didn’t want to go looking for a fight with the richest man in the world, but when the fight comes to you, you don’t back down. That’s also a big lesson,” said Patrick Guarasci, a senior adviser to Ms. Crawford’s campaign. “People need to hear that. There’s so much wilting going on around the country and I think Susan has shown people that you can stand up and fight back and win.”
Democrats are taking the outcome as evidence of the unpopularity of Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Musk’s platform, and a sign that their Musk-focused message is effective.
“The amount of money there for a Supreme Court race there was astounding, and the fact that people spoke loudly — this wasn’t a close race,” said Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington, who chairs the House Democratic campaign arm. For Republicans, she went on, “The Trump-Musk agenda is a liability for them. They’re hurting the American people, and people across the country are speaking out.”
How Mr. Musk may respond and proceed is uncertain. And of course, in a political environment in which upheavals seem to come every hour, it is far too early to know what the voter mood on Tuesday will mean for the next round of national elections in which Democrats could reclaim some power: the midterms.
“It’s indisputably good for Democrats to win special elections, and those results are clear indicators, they’re like the barometric pressure in a midterm environment,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who led the House Democratic campaign arm roughly a decade ago. “They are not necessarily dispositive.”
Still, such outcomes can be meaningful for fund-raising and momentum. And sometimes they are harbingers of where the national environment is headed.
In 2017, Jon Ossoff, now a Georgia senator, ultimately lost what was then the most expensive House race ever. But he established himself as a powerhouse fund-raiser and his race was an early signifier of rising Democratic energy.
A year later, the Democrat Conor Lamb won a stunning upset in a special House election in Pennsylvania, a moment that Republicans later saw as the beginning of the end of their House majority in 2018.
“The anxiety and concern on our side is very real, and people are looking for ways to translate that into action,” Mr. Lamb said in an interview this week. “The potential for a strong 2026 is there to be actualized, but it still has to be organized and channeled in the right direction. We can’t take it for granted.”
Mr. Anzalone, the pollster, noted that Democrats had become skilled at capitalizing on frustration.
But that, he said, is no substitution for an affirmative, economic-focused message and other efforts to connect with working-class voters.
“Anytime that we’ve been winning is because they’ve been losing,” he said. “Republicans screwing up is not a Democratic strategy.”
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Madison, Wis., Emily Cochrane from Daytona Beach, Fla., and Dan Simmons from Milwaukee."
Tuesday, April 01, 2025
The Makeup Artist Donald Trump Deported Under the Alien Enemies Act | The New Yorker
The Makeup Artist Donald Trump Deported Under the Alien Enemies Act
"The President has invoked the law to send Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador without due process—and, in many cases, under false pretenses.
Illustration by Anuj Shrestha
Throughout the fall and winter, Alexis Romero de Hernández struggled to accept a grim new routine. She lived in a small town in central Venezuela called Capacho, with her husband and the younger of her two sons. Her eldest, a thirty-one-year-old makeup artist named Andry José Hernández Romero, was being held in an immigration jail in San Diego. He called her every few days, usually late in the afternoon, to reassure her that he was safe. The calls would last about a minute. Alexis had to put money on his calling card to keep them coming. “Mama, relax,” Andry would tell her. “I’m fine. They’re treating us well. What’s bad is that we’re stuck here.”
In Capacho, Andry was a member of a local theatre troupe, and he acted in an annual church procession during the Epiphany, which, in the Spanish-speaking world, is known as El Día de los Reyes Magos, or Three Kings Day. He loved to draw, and had a penchant for bringing aesthetic flourishes to every corner of his life. When he worked as a hotel receptionist for a time, he created balloon decorations in the lobby; at home, he designed costumes and clothes. He made friends easily but, Alexis said, didn’t drink or stay out late. Andry is “very, very humble and very, very open,” she told me, by phone. “He’s comfortable being alone. He cooks for me and helps clean. He’s a homebody.”
In 2023, Andry took a job at a state-run television station in Caracas, the country’s capital. It was an ideal job—he was responsible for prepping the show’s anchors and guests for the screen, and his family, who have a shop that sells glass for mirrors and tables, needed the money. But he was gay and skeptical of the country’s authoritarian regime, which made him a target for abuse. The year he spent in Caracas, Alexis told me, was one of “persecution and discrimination. People in high places always discriminate against those who are lower down. They humiliated him.” At night, after work, he was often followed home and harassed by armed vigilantes aligned with the government; on one occasion, his boss at the station slapped him in front of his co-workers.
When Andry told his parents that he’d decided to leave Venezuela, in late May of 2024, they begged him to stay. “At least see how things go with the elections,” Alexis told him, referring to the country’s Presidential race that August. “His father talked to him, too. But there was no way to convince him not to go.” Andry’s decision initially seemed prescient: the current President, Nicolás Maduro, who appeared to have lost the vote by an overwhelming margin, declared himself the winner. Andry was one of roughly seven hundred and sixty thousand Venezuelans who travelled to the United States during the Biden Administration, traversing an infamously dangerous jungle known as the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama. “He made the journey,” Alexis said. “He wanted to change his life, to reach his potential, and to help us here.”
The first time Andry tried to enter the U.S., he was arrested and sent to Tabasco, Mexico, where a friend helped him download a government app that allowed migrants to make appointments at ports of entry. The system, known as CBP One, was the Biden Administration’s attempt to create a more orderly process for people to enter the country. Part of the premise was to incentivize migrants to come “the right way,” though it often took months for slots to open up. On the morning of August 29th, a U.S. official interviewed Andry at the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego. Andry had no criminal record, and the exchange seemed straightforward.
“Did you claim asylum while in Mexico?” the official asked.
“I didn’t know I could do that,” he replied.
Andry eventually passed his preliminary asylum screening. Officials determined that he demonstrated a “credible fear” of persecution in his home country. But during a physical exam, they had fixated on his tattoos. A snake extending from a bouquet of flowers covers his left forearm and biceps. On each of his wrists is a crown, with the words “Mom” and “Dad” inked next to them in English. The photographs in his file show a thin man, slight of build, with a youthful face and dark hair; there are rings under his eyes, and he is standing before the government photographer without a shirt.
Andry José Hernández Romero.Photograph courtesy Lindsay Toczylowski
Andry denied belonging to any gang. The agent, who asked him about the tattoos, described his “demeanor during interview” as “uncooperative.” A note was added to his file: “Upon conducting a review of detainee Hernandez’s tattoos it was found that detainee Hernandez has a crown on each one of his wrist. The crown has been found to be an identifier for a Tren de Aragua gang member.” These crowns, according to the government, were “determining factors to conclude reasonable suspicion.”
Often, asylum seekers who pass their initial screening are released with a future court date, but Andry remained in custody, apparently because of the government’s suspicions about his tattoos. In December, three months into his detention, he met Paulina Reyes, a lawyer from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a legal-advocacy organization, who agreed to represent him on a pro-bono basis. Reyes filed an asylum application on Andry’s behalf. They spoke regularly, both in person and on the phone, while waiting for a court appearance scheduled for March 13th.
About a week before the hearing, Andry and a number of other Venezuelans in San Diego were transferred to a facility in South Texas. Reyes, whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had neglected to inform, found this out when Andry called her from Texas. That was the last time the two of them spoke. During his March 13th hearing, in San Diego, Reyes thought he might appear on video. When he did not, the proceedings were postponed until March 17th. Reyes wasn’t able to speak with him, so she didn’t realize that, on Friday, March 14th, he’d managed to make one last phone call to his mother. He told her he was fine, but that the government was about to transfer him again. He had no information about his destination.
When Andry failed to appear at his second hearing, the immigration judge wanted to know why the government wasn’t making him available. “He was removed to El Salvador,” the ICE lawyer replied. “We just found out today.” This surprised the judge, who was there to determine whether or not Andry should be deported. “How can he be removed to El Salvador,” the judge asked, “if there’s no removal order?”
On March 14th, Donald Trump had signed a proclamation declaring that his Administration would begin using vastly expanded Presidential powers under the Alien Enemies Act—a law from 1798 that had previously been invoked just three times, supplying the rationale for the U.S. government to target British nationals during the War of 1812, to intern Germans during the First World War, and to intern Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants during the Second. The law allows the President to detain and deport immigrants living lawfully in the U.S. if they are from countries considered “enemies” of the government. In this case, Trump claimed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, operating “in conjunction” with elements of the Maduro government, had “infiltrated the United States” and was “conducting irregular warfare.”
The White House didn’t make the proclamation public for another day. In the meantime, the government was secretly putting Venezuelans who were in federal custody on planes, readying them for deportation. Andry was one of them; there were two hundred and thirty-seven others who, like him, were accused of belonging to the gang. The vast majority were involved in pending immigration cases but were not given an opportunity to contest the alleged evidence against them. A high-ranking ICE official later acknowledged that many of these men had no criminal records in the U.S. but insisted that the absence of such a history “actually highlights the risk they pose.”
El Salvador is a conspicuously punitive destination. The country’s President, Nayib Bukele, has suspended parts of the country’s constitution and, during the past three years, jailed more than eighty thousand alleged gang members without clear charges. In February, after a meeting in San Salvador with Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, Bukele offered to house immigrants who’d been arrested on American soil in his newly built prison, which is called the Terrorism Confinement Center. “We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” Bukele wrote on X. “The fee would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”
On the day that Trump signed the order, Lee Gelernt, a veteran litigator with the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in immigrants’ rights, was in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., arguing a case about another controversial decision recently made by the Administration. In February, the President had sent a hundred and seventy-eight Venezuelan men from U.S. detention to the military compound at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After the A.C.L.U. brought a legal challenge, the Department of Homeland Security deported the men to Venezuela, evidently to avoid a court fight over their access to legal representation. But the government said that it planned to send more migrants to Guantánamo. Gelernt was trying to insure that they’d have access to lawyers. In the hours before the hearing, he’d also been monitoring early news reports that the President was preparing to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport more Venezuelan migrants.
As soon as the hearing ended, Gelernt rushed back to his hotel, where he worked through the night with his A.C.L.U. colleagues to prepare an emergency lawsuit. The idea was to prevent the government from deporting anyone under the Alien Enemies Act while the case could be argued in court. “If people already had final orders of removal, the government doesn’t need the Alien Enemies Act,” Gelernt told me. “Using the Alien Enemies Act is all about short-circuiting the immigration process, not only to eliminate hearings in immigration court but to be able to send them wherever the government wants.”
Through a national network of immigration attorneys, the team identified five plaintiffs who fit the profile of those at the greatest risk of being summarily deported to El Salvador: they were Venezuelan men in federal custody who had open immigration cases and had recently been transferred to a detention facility in Texas. The lawyers took down affidavits from the plaintiffs’ immigration attorneys—the men themselves were unreachable—and crafted an argument to protect a wider class of migrants in custody. The A.C.L.U. filed its brief sometime after two in the morning on March 15th—a Saturday. Within hours, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., had issued a temporary restraining order to block the deportation of the five plaintiffs, who, it turned out, had already been taken to the airport. Four of them had to be pulled off the planes on the tarmac. The other passengers were left to wait on the aircraft for several hours more.
The judge, James Boasberg, a former prosecutor who’d been appointed to his current position by Barack Obama and to a prior judgeship by George W. Bush, scheduled a hearing on Zoom for five o’clock that afternoon. About an hour before it was set to begin, the White House announced its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. At the hearing, Boasberg asked the government lawyer, “Are imminent deportations and removals under this proclamation planned?” According to a transcript of the proceedings, the lawyer responded, “Your Honor, I don’t know the answer to that question.” Boasberg turned to Gelernt, who said, “I recognize it’s Saturday, but, on the other hand, the government appears to be moving planes very rapidly to El Salvador with hundreds of people. So we hope that, in the next five minutes, counsel for the government can get an answer to that.” Boasberg gave the government forty minutes.
During that time, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, two planes full of migrants left Texas for Honduras. Either the government lawyer was unaware of these departures or he feigned ignorance, because when Boasberg reconvened the hearing at six o’clock the attorney still couldn’t provide any information. “I am still trying to get additional details,” he said.
At a quarter to seven, Boasberg issued a ruling to extend his temporary restraining order to anyone in federal custody, which meant that, until further notice, the Trump Administration could deport people under federal immigration laws but not under the Alien Enemies Act. “Particularly given the plaintiff’s information unrebutted by the government that flights are actively departing and plan to depart, I do not believe that I am able to wait any longer,” Boasberg said. He instructed the government’s lawyer “that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.” He added, “However that’s accomplished . . . I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
The judge’s verbal order was entered into the written record at 7:26 P.M. Shortly after that, the two planes that had left Texas during the adjournment arrived in Honduras, and a third took off from Texas. Within a few hours, each of those planes departed Honduras for El Salvador: one at 11:39 P.M., another at 11:43 P.M., and the last at 12:39 A.M. Just before eight o’clock on the morning of March 16th, Bukele posted a New York Post article about Boasberg’s order, adding in a comment, “Oopsie . . . Too late.” Rubio retweeted Bukele’s sarcastic post. Bukele soon began releasing footage of Salvadoran soldiers swarming the migrants as they got off the planes. Videos showed the men looking stunned, as their heads were shaved and they were frog-marched into prison.
Several hours later, Nelson, a thirty-five-year-old from Venezuela, who works as a truck driver in North Carolina, spotted his younger brother, Arturo, in a photograph of the detained men dressed in prison whites and crouching in rows with their heads bowed. (Nelson’s last name has been withheld for his protection.) He couldn’t see Arturo’s face, but he didn’t have to: Nelson spotted a hummingbird tattoo on his neck. Beyond that, he told me, “We don’t have any signs that my brother’s even still alive.” Arturo’s case was first reported by Mother Jones, but Nelson and I met through another Venezuelan in the U.S., whose cousin had been deported. She was too scared to talk to a journalist. “We can’t give an interview because his life is at risk in Venezuela, and we’re in danger here,” she texted. “Este señor”—Trump—“is even threatening the lawyers who defend immigrants.”
Arturo is a singer who worked landscaping jobs in the U.S. He left Venezuela in 2016, living in Colombia and then Chile with his wife, who, three months ago, gave birth to their daughter. As part of his application for temporary protected status in the U.S., which would have theoretically shielded him from deportation and granted him work authorization, he was supposed to have an appointment with D.H.S. on February 12th to get fingerprinted. But, on February 8th, he was arrested at a house where he was shooting a music video. In Nelson’s telling, ICE officers turned up looking for someone else but took Arturo into custody as a “collateral arrest.”
The family didn’t have the money to retain a lawyer, and Nelson was told he couldn’t raise bond. Still, Nelson managed to secure documentation from each of the countries where his brother had lived, demonstrating that he didn’t have a criminal history. When I asked Nelson whether he thought Arturo’s tattoos were the reason for his deportation to El Salvador, he told me, “I imagine it has to be. He hasn’t even gotten a speeding ticket in the U.S., which is how they normally get Latinos. I just don’t even understand how there’s evidence to categorize him as a criminal.”
Other family members learned of their relatives’ deportations the same way that Nelson had—from the footage released by Bukele. As the Washington Post reported, Mervin Yamarte, a twenty-nine-year-old father from Maracaibo, who had worked as a roofer in Venezuela, had called his mother in mid-March saying he would see her soon: after being arrested, he and three of his friends from home, who were living together in Dallas, had agreed to sign deportation orders, expecting to be returned to Venezuela. When his mother recognized him in a video posted by Bukele, she told the Post, “I couldn’t speak.” The father of Carlos Daniel Terán, an eighteen-year-old Venezuelan who was first arrested in January, shared with NPR a series of text messages he had exchanged with his son on the eve of Carlos’s deportation. “With God’s help, we are leaving today,” Carlos had said, assuming that he was being deported home. “God bless you, son,” his father replied. A few days later, someone sent him a photo of his son in the Salvadoran prison. Other relatives panicked when they hadn’t heard from the men but could not find them in the U.S. government’s searchable database of people in immigration detention. The wife of Franco Caraballo, a twenty-six-year-old, told Reuters, “I’ve never seen him without hair, so I haven’t recognized him in the photos,” adding, “I just suspect he’s there because of the tattoos that he has and right now any Venezuelan man with tattoos is assumed to be a gang member.”
The Trump Administration has denied the Venezuelans a chance to respond to the government’s allegations of gang membership, but the most obvious through line, in each case, appears to be their tattoos. As part of the White House’s effort to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, ICE officers received a document called the “Alien Enemy Validation Guide,” which provided a point system based on different categories of incriminating behavior or associations. If an immigrant in custody scored six points or higher, according to the rubric, he “may be validated” as a gang member. Tattoos, which fall under the “Symbolism” category, constitute four points; social-media posts “displaying” gang symbols are two points. Using “open source material,” agents at the investigative arm of ICE compiled photos of tattoos considered suspicious: crowns, stars, the Michael Jordan Jumpman logo.
Jerce Reyes Barrios, a thirty-six-year-old soccer player and youth coach, fled Venezuela last year after marching in anti-government protests. His immigration file cites two grounds for suspicion: a gesture he made while posing for a photo that was posted to social media and a tattoo of a crown on top of a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios.” His lawyer, Linette Tobin, worked with his family to secure documents from the police in Venezuela to show that he hadn’t committed any crimes. They also tracked down Barrios’s tattoo artist. “He wanted a tattoo related to soccer,” the artist said in a legal declaration. “We searched on the internet and the ball with a crown caught our attention to represent the king of soccer, and he liked the idea.”
In the aftermath of the deportations, someone took photographs of Tobin’s court filing and posted them on social media, where they soon went viral. Critics of Trump shared them as evidence that innocent people were being sent to “rot in prison” in El Salvador, while the President’s defenders shared photos of Tobin, deriding the affidavit she gave as as a “hoax.” “I looked at my phone, and I saw the calls and the emails. I was seriously horrified,” she told me. Right-wing groups were singling her out for harassment, but she was more upset about her client, whose personal information was now being widely circulated.
Andrés Antillano, a criminology professor at the Central University of Venezuela, has spent much of his career studying Tren de Aragua. “This is the first time I’ve ever encountered any reference to the significance of tattoos,” he told me. He called the thinking “absurd” and “naïve.” Tattoos were typically associated with Central American gangs that built their identities around holding specific territory, he said, but “it’s been a long time since that sort of thing would apply to Tren de Aragua.” In fact, the guidance ICE provided to its officers for identifying members of Tren de Aragua seems to be based on the operations of the Salvadoran gang MS-13. It flags graffiti, hand signs, and tattoos—all hallmarks of MS-13, but “irrelevant” to how Tren de Aragua functions, Antillano said.
Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who’s reported extensively on criminal groups in Venezuela, published the definitive book on Tren de Aragua. “The truth is that a tattoo identifying Tren de Aragua does not exist,” she told me. “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.” In Rísquez’s view, tattoos are a completely unreliable indicator of someone’s criminal proclivities; rather, they reflect contemporary fashions and socioeconomic class. “Most young people in Latin America these days have tattoos,” she said. Often, they imitate those of celebrities: a watch in reference to the Argentinean soccer legend Lionel Messi, the phrase “real hasta la muerte,” in homage to the Puerto Rican singer Anuel AA. (Both of these symbols appear in the ICE documents.) Rísquez went on, “People get a tattoo because it means something particular to them.”
Andry’s tattoos have an immediate significance to the people in Capacho. For a hundred and eight years, the town has held a special festival for the celebration of Three Kings Day, replete with elaborate theatrical acts, sets, costumes, and casts of dozens. The holiday is observed widely across Venezuela (and indeed throughout much of the Christian world), but the production in Capacho is legendary in the country and has been awarded distinguished status as a national patrimonio, or heritage. “This work represents for the community of Capacho the greatest cultural expression of street theatre,” Jorge Cárdenas, a leader of the Foundation of Reyes Magos of Capacho, told me earlier this week. “To speak of Capacho is to speak of the Reyes Magos.”
Cárdenas has known Andry since he was a boy, when Andry participated in the festival’s program for children. When we spoke, Cárdenas described Andry’s contributions to local theatre, including all of his roles in the festival itself, before leaving me a series of messages brimming with literary and religious detail. Andry was one of the thirteen main actors in the show, a makeup stylist for the others, and the costume designer for nearly two dozen dancers. One of the principal symbols of Three Kings Day is a crown. “Andry is a great lover of the festival, and the two crowns on his wrists are a tribute to his passion for it,” Cárdenas said.
During the past week, several of Andry’s friends—some in the U.S., others in Venezuela—urged me to watch footage of Andry at the festival, which is on YouTube. There was something painfully desperate in their insistence, as if seeing images of Andry for myself would help correct an otherwise stunning cultural misunderstanding.
One morning, a childhood friend of Andry’s named Alejandro, who currently lives in the state of Georgia, where he works as a food deliveryman, spoke to me during his shift. Alejandro came to the U.S. at the end of 2023, shortly after the death of his father, who owned a bus company. He had spent a few years in Venezuela as a taxi driver but eventually abandoned the job because he had to pay too much of his meagre wages to local criminal groups as protection money, a tax known as a vacuna, or vaccine. The irony wasn’t lost on him that he was now living in a country where he could be accused of gangsterism. “They’re taking everyone now,” he told me. “It doesn’t matter if you have papers or not.” He lives in an apartment with his brother-in-law and two others from Capacho. One of them, in a nod to their home town, also has a tattoo of a crown.
Judge Boasberg called a hearing on March 17th to determine whether the Trump Administration had deliberately flouted his earlier order. If so, it meant that the White House was choosing to ignore the Constitution’s foundational system of checks and balances—and challenging the judiciary to do something about it. By then, the Justice Department had unsuccessfully asked a higher court to remove Boasberg from the case. In the courtroom, Boasberg explained to the Administration’s lawyers that he wanted to “perform fact finding.” When did the planes leave for El Salvador? How many people were on each one? When were the migrants transferred into the custody of the Salvadoran authorities? “I’m not at liberty to disclose anything about any flights,” one of the Administration’s lawyers said. Trump’s legal team then struggled to explain why they couldn’t say more. “If you tell me it’s classified, then we will go down to a classified facility in this building, and you can give me that information then,” Boasberg said. “If what you are saying is that it’s classified and you can’t tell me, then you are going to need to make a good showing as to why that is.”
The government lawyer said that he could “consult with the clients on that, but we don’t believe it’s necessary.” Gelernt told the judge, “There’s been a lot of talk over the last seven weeks about constitutional crisis. People are throwing that term around. I think we are getting very close to it.”
Within a day, Trump began attacking Boasberg on Truth Social. “This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President,” he wrote. “I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” In response to the President, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare rebuke, saying, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
Soon, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s name began to appear on an increasingly aggressive series of filings. One of them called the judge’s requests for information “a picayune dispute over the micromanagement of immaterial factfinding.” The Administration claims that it did not violate the judge’s order, because two of the three deportation flights had already left the United States when Boasberg made his ruling. According to federal officials, the Venezuelans on the third plane weren’t removed solely on the basis of the Alien Enemies Act. But that assertion raises another question: if they were deported under regular immigration procedures, why would they be sent to El Salvador without prior warning? Early last week, the Justice Department invoked the “state-secrets privilege,” claiming that sharing even minimal details about the deportation flights “would pose reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs.”
Gelernt was the lead litigator in some of the highest-profile lawsuits of Trump’s first term, including successful challenges to the initial Muslim ban and the Administration’s family-separation policy. He pointed out that the last time Roberts rebuked the President was in 2018, when, in another case brought by Gelernt and the A.C.L.U., a federal judge blocked a Trump proclamation ending asylum at the border. Trump lambasted him as an “Obama judge.” The echoes were unmistakable, yet they also reinforced the fact that the Administration has only become more combative since Trump’s first term. “They’re much more intent on picking a fight with the federal judiciary,” Gelernt told me. “It appears to me that they think that’s a winning political issue for them.” He continued, “The stridency of their positions is what’s catching me, the unwillingness to give at all. What also seems clear is that the D.O.J. lawyers do not have authorization to make any concessions in court.”
On March 26th, a federal appeals court upheld Boasberg’s temporary restraining order. One of the judges, Patricia Millett, had expressed disbelief that Venezuelans were being sent to El Salvador without any notice or opportunity to mount a legal defense. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act,” she said. The Justice Department filed an emergency petition before the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, who has publicly called undocumented immigrants “dirtbags,” visited the Salvadoran facility. Standing in front of a cell crammed with prisoners who appeared to be Salvadorans, covered in MS-13 tattoos, she said, “This facility is one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
Andry’s American lawyers are caught in something of a paradox. They’re vocal about sharing the details of his disappearance, because, if he fades from the news, his situation may grow even more dire. Yet Andry is also an asylum seeker. Disclosing the full identity of someone fleeing persecution is inherently risky. One evening, while I was talking with one of his attorneys, Lindsay Toczylowski, the president of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, CBS News published the full listof the two hundred and thirty-eight Venezuelans deported to El Salvador. “I had spent nights looking at his Instagram pictures, thinking, How can something like this happen to him? ” she told me. “But at the same time I felt like we couldn’t share that information. When the list was published, it was inevitable that those pictures would be out there.”
Toczylowski and her colleagues had debated whether disclosing that Andry was gay would make him a target inside the Salvadoran prison. They decided it was pointless to try to hide it, and that maybe it would make the public more sympathetic to his case. Ordinarily, this would be a conversation they could have had with Andry. Under the circumstances, all they could do was discuss it with his mother. She told them, “Do absolutely everything you can to get him out of there.”
On March 21st, Time published a report, by Philip Holsinger, an American photojournalist, who gained access to the Salvadoran prison when the Venezuelans first arrived. In the story, he described someone roughly resembling Andry. “One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor,” Holsinger wrote. “He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ ” The description went on: he “began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer. . . . He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.”
On social media, people connected this account with the photos that Toczylowski had shared of Andry. Toczylowski told me that it seemed unlikely Andry would have described himself as a barber. But was it possible that, in addition to a gay makeup artist, the Trump Administration had just deported a gay hairdresser? One user on X posted a photo of Andry alongside a photo taken by Holsinger of a Venezuelan prisoner getting his head shaved. “The first photo is of a young Venezuelan named Andrys—a twenty-three-year-old gay makeup artist,” the person wrote. (Andry is thirty-one.) A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security quoted the post and responded, “No. DHS intelligence assessments go well beyond just gang affiliate tattoos. This man’s own social media indicates he is a member of Tren de Aragua.”
The residents of Capacho have been holding regular vigils for Andry, and they’ve recorded videos of spirited pleas to release him. Cárdenas, the head of the Three Kings festival, begged Bukele directly, calling Andry a “great talent of our town.” At the gatherings, many people turned out wearing costumes from the festival. Andry’s full name is ubiquitous in the Spanish-language coverage. Online, there are already dozens of photos, not just of him but of his old neighbors and friends filling the streets before the local church. In one of them, Andry’s mother and father are standing next to three men in festival garb, holding signs for Conscience, Justice, and Liberty. On each of their heads is a crown. ♦"