He wept and prayed as the guard shaved his head, calling for his mother and proclaiming his innocence. Just a few months earlier, Andry José Hernández Romero had applied for asylum, citing the conditions he faced as a gay man and political dissident in Venezuela, a country that the U.S. government and its allies all deem to be an authoritarian, repressive threat to its own citizens. But now he was just a warm body to be paraded before the cameras — just content to be clicked or scrolled past on someone’s phone.
To his family, Andry was an actor, hair stylist and loving son, his dedication to mom and dad tattooed on his arms. To the Trump administration, he was an object that could be used in an ongoing, callous propaganda campaign, his brutalization serving as an advertisement for the president’s war on immigration. His very devotion to his family was used against him, his tattoos reinterpreted as evidence of loyalty to a gang, Tren de Aragua, that does not use tattoos to signify membership.
The stated objective, per the Department of Homeland Security, is for the 32-year-old asylum-seeker to spend the rest of his life behind bars in a fortress-prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where inmates packed in cages are subject to “beatings, severe deprivation, inadequate nutrition and psychological torture,” according to the only detainee ever known to have escaped its confines.
“He would tell me … that he’s going to help us and that he would make his dream come true to have his own salon,” Andry’s mother, Alexis Romero, said in a recent interview. “And they thwarted all of that. They stepped on him, ran him over, completely shut down his dream. Now what is my boy going to do?”
Melissa Shepard, legal services director at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told Salon that her organization began representing Andry on a pro bono basis in December 2024. At the time he was being held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a privately-run prison along the U.S.-Mexico border. He had applied for asylum the right way — by scheduling an appointment and presenting himself at a port of entry — and yet was languishing behind bars. In March 2025, seemingly out of nowhere, it got so much worse.
“We say ‘disappeared’ — ‘disappeared to El Salvador,’ because that’s essentially what it is,” Shepard said in an interview. No one has spoken to Andry since March 14; not his family, not his legal team. In the four months since he was labeled a criminal and sentenced to de facto life in prison, without charge or trial or indeed anything approaching due process, the only evidence that he is in El Salvador are the images of him being abused the day that he arrived. The U.S. government has refused to release the names of the people it sent to CECOT, claiming they are now wards of El Salvador, even after it begrudgingly had Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the U.S. for a face-saving prosecution; in turn, El Salvador has insisted the 238 Venezuelans we know were sent to CECOT are indeed the responsibility of the Trump administration.
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“We have not been able to speak with him or essentially just have any communication with him, and that has been troubling. And actually the only way that we definitively know that he was sent to the prison in El Salvador was because of the Time photographer who was there when the men first arrived,” Shepard said. “Still, to this day, the government has not provided any concrete evidence as to why he was specifically taken,” she said, adding: “I think, unfortunately, he probably just fit the profile of a young Venezuelan man who had some tattoos that they could use for this, essentially, mass propaganda.”
If Andry has not been heard or seen in over four months, how then do we know that he’s even still alive? We don’t.
At a congressional hearing in May, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., pressed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for a sign of life. “Would you commit to just letting his mother know, as a mother to mother, if Andry is alive?” Garcia asked. Noem, who had flown to El Salvador to pose for a photo in front of caged men at CECOT, professed ignorance (“I don’t know the specifics of this individual case”) and forswore responsibility (“This individual is in El Salvador,” so take it up with them).
Garcia, now the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, then took the matter up with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In a June 9 letter, Garcia, joined by four dozen other Democrats, asked for U.S. diplomats to “conduct a wellness check on Mr. Hernandez Romero,” noting that his own mother and father do not know “whether their son is even alive and healthy because of the actions of the United States government.”
Garcia’s office told Salon that it has received no updates. A spokesperson for the State Department also declined to say whether Andry is alive and well: “As a general matter, we do not comment on congressional correspondence or on private diplomatic discussions, and have nothing further to share at this time.”
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What else can you call it? On March 14, 2025, Andry José Hernández Romero was disappeared by the U.S. government, which is content — by its own avowals — to see him die in a foreign prison, even as it refuses to confirm that he is there or not dead already.
For immigrants, especially, the worst-case scenario is not a hypothetical: In a Sisyphean effort to roll back decades of demographic change and make America whiter again, the present administration has turned the dull machinery of mass deportation against innocent men, women and children, and sought to make the very act of seeking asylum a crime punishable by torture, if not death. Imitations of CECOT are now being constructed in the U.S. itself, Republicans in Congress now allotting more money to a deportation machine, a lawless regime at its helm, than most countries spend on their entire military, with heavily armed soldiers in the streets of American cities helping masked agents whisk away thousands of people every week, some never heard from again.
That the purpose is crude — manufacturing B-roll of maltreated foreigners for right-wing media — should not distract from the enormous evil that is here, today, threatening the rights of all. Donald Trump has exploited a deep sickness in American society, where ennui is now being treated, and white racial resentment fed, with the spectacle of mass dehumanization. It is happening here already, just six months into the second time around, and it will metastasize before it ever contracts.
“What we’re seeing now is just a cruel, cruel agenda being carried out,” Shepard said, “[and] I think it is much bigger than just trying to remove or deter people from coming to the United States.”
