“We’re All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This”

Do you want government to run efficiently, or do you want government to get rid of brown people?

Frengel Reyes Mota was supposed to be dealing with his ongoing asylum case as he fought for his chance to stay in the United States. Suddenly, he instead found himself locked up in a mega prison thousands of miles away.

“He’s in the torture prison in El Salvador,” Mark Prada, Reyes Mota’s lawyer, told Immigration Judge Jorge Pereira during a hearing on Monday at the Krome Detention Center in western Miami-Dade County. The hearing had been scheduled before Reyes Mota was sent out of the country.

He’s here on a visa from Venezuela. Everybody in Venezuela is a gang member.

Reyes Mota is among the hundreds of Venezuelans that the Trump administration deported earlier this month through the use of extraordinary wartime powers based on a 1798 law. The administration sent them to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, claiming they are members of the notorious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

But the 24-year-old father does not have a criminal record in Venezuela. His U.S. immigration detention records are riddled with mistakes, raising questions about how reliable they are. He does not have tattoos and his family members deny he has any gang ties.

See? And the paperwork was probably put in Signal and automatically deleted. Seems there might be something wrong with Signal.

We are facing a novel and extremely concerning situation where people’s immigration court proceedings are still pending but they are being disappeared from the United States without any lawful removal order,” said Prada. “This is an affront to the rule of law.”

I still say removal to El Salvador is not coincidental.

The U.S. government claims on Reyes Mota’s I-213 form, a document the Department of Homeland Security uses to support that someone is deportable, that he “may be a Tren de Aragua associate.” But in those same documents, the government says he has no criminal records or immigration history in the United States. The government also uses someone else’s last name in several parts of the document, identifies him with female pronouns, and uses two different unique identification numbers that immigration authorities use to keep track of individuals, raising questions about the reliability of Trump officials’ accusations against him.

After Prada pointed out the mistakes and argued there is no evidence Reyes Mota was a Tren de Aragua member, the judge asked whether the government had made a mistake. Lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security said this was not a hearing to analyze evidence but that they would look into it. However, there are no more hearings for the foreseeable future.

No word on whether the guy in the hot dog suit was sitting at the government counsel’s table.