MIAMI (AP) — Franco Caraballo called his wife Friday night, crying and panicked. Hours earlier, the 26-year-old barber and dozens of other Venezuelan migrants at a federal detention facility in Texas were dressed in white clothes, handcuffed and taken onto a plane. He had no idea where he was going.

Twenty-four hours later, Caraballo’s name disappeared from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online detainee locator.

On Monday, his wife, Johanny Sánchez, learned Caraballo was among more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants flown over the weekend to El Salvador, where they are in a maximum-security prison after being accused by the Trump administration of belonging to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.

Sánchez insists her husband isn’t a gang member. She struggles even to find logic in the accusation.

The weekend flights

Flights by U.S. immigration authorities set off a frantic scramble among terrified families after hundreds of immigrants vanished from ICE’s online locator.

Some turned up at that massive El Salvador prison, where visitors, recreation and education are not allowed. The U.S. has paid El Salvador’s government $6 million to hold immigrants, many of them Venezuelan, whose government rarely accepts deportees from the U.S.

But many families have no idea where to find their loved ones. El Salvador has no online database to look up inmates, and families there often struggle to get information.

“I don’t know anything about my son,” said Xiomara Vizcaya, a 46-year-old Venezuelan.

Ali David Navas Vizcaya had been in U.S. detention since early 2024, when he was stopped at a U.S.-Mexico border crossing where he had an appointment to talk to immigration officers. He called her late Friday and said he thought he was being deported to Venezuela or Mexico.

“He told me, ‘Finally, we’re going to be together, and this nightmare is going to be over,’” Vizcaya said in telephone interview from her home in the northern Venezuela city of Barquisimeto.

His name is no longer in ICE’s system. She said he has no criminal record and suspects he may have been mistakenly identified as a Tren de Aragua member because of several tattoos.

“He left for the American dream, to be able to help me financially, but he never had the chance to get out” of prison, she said.

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left their homeland since 2013, when its oil-dependent economy collapsed. Most initially went to other Latin American countries but more headed to the U.S. after COVID-19 restrictions lifted during the Biden administration.

An 18th century law

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced he had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the U.S. to deport noncitizens without any legal recourse, including rights to appear before an immigration or federal court judge.

Many conservatives have cheered the deportations and the Trump administration for taking a hard stance on immigration.

The administration says it is using the wartime Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Tren de Aragua members, saying the gang was invading the U.S., though it has not provided any evidence to back up gang-membership claims.

U.S. officials acknowledged in a court filing Monday that many people sent to El Salvador do not have criminal records, though they insisted all are suspected gang members.

“The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” said a sworn declaration in the filing, adding that along with their suspected gang membership “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.”

ICE regional supervisor Robert Cerna said in an affidavit that agents did not rely on “tattoos alone” to identify potential members.

“We followed the law”

On Feb. 3, Caraballo went to an ICE office in Dallas office for one of his regular mandatory check-ins with agents handling his asylum request.

He was “apprehended and released” after illegally crossing the southern U.S. border in October 2023, according to Department of Homeland Security documents provided by his wife. The documents said he was a “member/active” of Tren de Aragua, but offered no evidence to support that.

What gang member, his wife asked, would walk into a federal law enforcement office during a Trump administration crackdown that has left immigrants across the country terrified?

“We followed the law like we were told to. We never missed any” meetings with authorities, said Sánchez, who remains in the U.S. trying to secure her husband’s release. Sánchez said her husband, whom she married in 2024 in Texas, has had no run-ins with the law in the U.S. She also showed The Associated Press a Venezuelan document showing he has a clean criminal record there.

Sánchez believes he was wrongly accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua because of a clock-shaped tattoo marking his daughter’s birthday.

“He has lots of tattoos, but that’s not a reason to discriminate against him,” she said.

Sánchez said she and her husband left Venezuela with barely $200 and spent three months sleeping in plazas, eating out of trash cans and relying on fellow migrants’ goodwill as they journeyed north.

She thought the sacrifice would be worth it. Her husband had been working as a barber since the age of 13 and was hopeful he could find a new start in the U.S., escaping poverty wages and Nicolas Maduro’s ironfisted rule in Venezuela.

Venezuela responds

The Venezuelan government has called the flights “kidnappings.” It urged its citizens living in the U.S. to return home and vowed get others back from El Salvador. But with diplomatic ties long broken between Venezuela and El Salvador, the prisoners have few advocates.

The U.S. deportations exacerbate Venezuela’s immigration crisis by turning “migrants into geopolitical pawns,” said Oscar Murillo, head of the Venezuelan human rights group Provea. “There is a lack of transparency on the part of the U.S. and El Salvador regarding the status of deported individuals and the crimes for which they are being prosecuted.”

Sánchez is among those who believes the American dream has turned ugly. She wants to leave the U.S. once she finds her husband.

“We fled Venezuela for a better future. We never imagined things would be worse.”

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Associated Press journalists Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, and Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed to this report.