Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias’ investigative feature revealed how the Trump administration sent 10 Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador based on flimsy allegations of gang membership that relied primarily on innocuous tattoos. Published in the days after the US government dispatched—in defiance of a court order—more than 230 Venezuelans to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), this investigation was the first comprehensive effort by a US newsroom to identify several of the men expelled from the United States under the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and to gather substantial evidence that disproved the administration’s claims that they were members of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization.
One of the men at the center of this investigation is Neri Alvarado Borges, a 25-year-old baker whose story was first reported in-depth by Mother Jones and has since become emblematic of the callousness of the administration’s summary deportations via the wartime statute. In February, Alvarado was picked up by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outside his apartment in Dallas. An officer later told him he had been targeted because of his tattoos, which include a colorful autism awareness ribbon for his 15-year-old brother Neryelson, who has autism. The investigation revealed that even one of ICE’s own agents concluded that Alvarado had nothing to do with Tren de Aragua. Nevertheless, on March 15 the agency put him on a plane to El Salvador. No one has heard from him since.
Alvarado wasn’t the only one. In extensive interviews, relatives, friends, and lawyers of the 10 men said their loved ones had tattoos that they feared had been the reason they were trapped in a foreign prison, despite the fact that most experts dismiss tattoos as a sign of affiliation to Tren de Aragua. In many cases, the family members recognized their husbands, brothers, and sons through their tattoos—a rose, a clock, a hummingbird—in photos and videos shared by the Salvadoran government of the men arriving at CECOT and having their heads shaved. Their accounts suggest Trump administration officials actively sought out Venezuelan men with tattoos and then swiftly removed them without due process to El Salvador. As the ACLU’s lead counsel Lee Gelernt put it, “We’re looking at people now who may be in a Salvadoran prison the rest of their lives.”
Lanard and Dias teamed up to report this timely investigation immediately after news of the flights to El Salvador broke. In the absence of any official information about who the men sent to CECOT were, they scoured Spanish-language reports from Venezuelan and social media platforms for possible leads and built their own dataset based on interviews with dozens of people across several countries. The original story’s publication was then followed by a Reveal podcast segment and two additional articles highlighting the cases of other Venezuelan men whose imminent removal from a detention center in Texas, likely to El Salvador, was stopped at the last minute by the Supreme Court.
