Arturo and Frizgeralth, convicted for being Venezuelans: Trump takes another step in his racist drift

Dart Martins, a Peruvian reggaeton artist in a hurry to record his song TXTEO, can’t believe he has to delay it because SuarezVzla isn’t there. They’ve been making music together for a long time. Last time they were on a stage was at the Urban Fresh Festival in Santiago, Chile, in front of a young, loud audience. A video captures the memory of that April night: Dart Martins at the front of the stage, singing; SuarezVzla in the back, the audience in front, doing perreo. Earlier this year, when SuarezVzla had already left Chile to settle in the United States, they exchanged a few messages. Donald Trump had not yet returned to the White House.

“How’s it going in the United States?” Martins, 30, asked in one of his messages. “I heard Trump is deporting all the illegal immigrants.”

SuarezVzla — the stage name of Arturo Suárez-Trejo, 33 — told him it was true, that they were going to deport many illegal migrants, but that everything was fine with him. He had left his native Venezuela in 2018 and had settled in Chile. There he made music, friends and fans. On September 2, 2024, around 1 p.m., he entered the United States after presenting himself at the San Ysidro border crossing in California. He had benefited from the CBP One program, the application created by the Joe Biden administration and dismantled by the Republican administration on its first day in office, which has allowed legal entry into the country to some 900,000 immigrants.

Suárez wanted to improve his musical technique and return to Chile with his wife. He had the protection of a parole program and a hearing scheduled for April 2 of this year. He won’t be able to go: he now finds himself in El Salvador. He met the same fate as the 238 Venezuelans who were taken there last week in a dystopian story: expelled from the United States under a two-century-old law in violation of a court order and taken to a maximum-security prison for terrorists built by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

On February 8, Suárez was recording a video clip at a home in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lived. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrived and arrested the entire group of people. They first held him at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia. They then transferred him to the Valle Detention Center in Texas. At one point, he told his family he was being deported to Venezuela.

“We thought this was going to happen, they were going to deport him to Caracas,” says his brother, Nelson Suárez-Trejo, 35, who describes Suárez as a noble man, a lover of music and poetry, who has never thrown a punch beyond his kickboxing practices.

Days after Suárez’s last call, the nightmare began. The images of the inmates, shaved, handcuffed, and sent on three flights to El Salvador as alleged members of the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua, were shocking. They zoomed in on one and there was no doubt: it was Suárez.

“We knew it because of the tattoos he has and his physical features,” his brother says.

No one has provided any information or warning to the family. Confirmation didn’t come until Thursday, when CBS News published an internal U.S. government list of the names of the 238 Venezuelans who were sent to the Central American country, despite a judge’s order preventing the deportation. The name Arturo Suárez-Trejo appears on the list. To this day, the family remains unaware of what will happen to him.

“We haven’t received any response from the Salvadoran government. We don’t even know what charges he faces. He had no criminal record,” his brother says.

Suárez’s family, friends, and fans have been circulating documents on social media confirming that he has no criminal record in any of the countries where he has lived. Dozens of people have shared his photos, his videos perched on a stage, and his love songs. They have united to demand justice for someone they describe as “a fundamental pillar of Santiago’s emerging cultural scene.” Suárez “is an artist, not a criminal,” they assert.

“He doesn’t deserve to have his life ended, to have his name tarnished,” his brother insists. “I don’t understand how they can cut short the dreams of someone who came to this country to dream big and who didn’t enter illegally. We’re affected; we’re not Tren de Aragua, we’re not even from Aragua.”

Nelson would also like to know “how he is, how they are treating him” in prison. It’s the same question being asked by Nathali, Sánchez’s wife, who has been struggling with so much concern for almost a week. “In the Texas prison, he was coughing blood and had a fever. I’m afraid it could get worse,” says the 27-year-old, who cares for their daughter, a baby born just three months ago. “I won’t rest until I see him free, until I see him with his daughter.”

Following a wave of condemnation over the deportation of dozens of men considered criminals to El Salvador, U.S. authorities have acknowledged that not all of them are members of the aforementioned gang and that some do not even have a criminal record in the United States. Several officials told CBS News that 137 of the Venezuelan men sent to the Salvadoran mega-prison were treated as “enemy aliens,” but that 101 were deported “under ordinary immigration procedures.” Organizations such as the United Nations have focused on the way these migrants are being treated. Its Secretary-General, António Guterres, called for respect for “due process, their fundamental rights, and their most basic dignity.”

Now, Suárez’s brother, Nelson, is the one who will have to take care of the baby and his wife, who remain in Chile. “She doesn’t have the means to work three months after giving birth. She’s alone, and now I, as his brother, have to take care of them.” But the thing is, Nelson is also afraid to go out on the streets. He’s an Amazon delivery driver; he has to work. His papers are in order, but nothing guarantees that the same thing that happened to Suárez won’t happen to him. “I’m also terrified of being stopped. I have my TPS, my court date, and my license, all in order, but who knows. I walk the streets in fear because I also have tattoos, but I don’t belong to any gang; all I’ve done my whole life is work.”

The party that wasn’t in Venezuela

At the Cornejo Pulgar home, high in the Antímano neighborhood in western Caracas, blue and yellow balloons were placed a week ago. This was how they were planning to welcome Frizgeralth De Jesús, 25, the youngest of the children who would be returning to the country, the only one who still has a huge baby portrait hanging in the living room. The deportation was the best news for his family, after the young man had spent eight months in a detention center in Texas. At home, they were happy, his older brother Carlos says from Caracas. They were planning to go greet him at the airport that Saturday, after he told them he was happy and about to board the plane home.

Last year, Frizgeralth had made a long journey through the Darien Gap. He waited for his appointment to apply for temporary residence through the now-defunct CBP One application, a benefit that Venezuelans had until last year. His deadline was June 19, 2024. Meanwhile, he was making plans to open a store in the United States to sell the streetwear brand he started in Venezuela. “He was going to look for something better,” says Carlos. That something ended up being a prison as soon as he crossed into the United States. He was with three friends, another one of his brothers, and his brother’s girlfriend. They were headed to Tennessee, where another of his sisters has lived for seven years. Venezuelans have been migrating en masse for a decade now. Now, almost all of them have a place to call home.

Frizgeralth was the only one of his group who wasn’t allowed to enter. The tattoos on his neck, chest, abdomen, arms, and legs became the unwritten reason that led to his being declared a suspect when he tried to enter the country in June 2024. He had been in custody ever since. Now he’s also gone missing. His family hasn’t seen him in the videos Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele released celebrating the agreement with the United States to provide jailer services. But they deduced he’s in that group. Now, his name on the published list confirms it.

During his eight months in prison, Frizgeralth spoke mostly with his sister, who lives a 12-hour drive from where he was detained. In a message she still has, the young man told her: “I never imagined being in prison just for getting tattoos.” Tattoos are part of the style he identifies with, that urban, very hip-hop, very American fashion that led him to start his own clothing brand and for which he was ultimately arrested. “This is mental torture every day,” he wrote in another message.

His sister has considered buying a ticket from Tennessee to El Salvador, not knowing if she’ll be able to see him. Carlos also tried to find information at the march that Nicolás Maduro’s government organized this week in solidarity with their families. The head of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, compared U.S. immigration policy to the Nazi persecution of Jews sent to concentration camps during World War II, and promised to do whatever was necessary to bring them to Venezuela. But Carlos found no answers about his brother. “The truth is, I spent the entire march crying.”

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