Francisco Javier Garcia Casique, one of the hundreds of Venezuelans deported by the Donald Trump administration over the weekend, has no criminal record in either the United States or his country of origin, his family has insisted.
Casique, 24, was reportedly among the 238 people believed to have connections with the notorious Tren de Aragua criminal gang that were taken to El Salvador as part of an agreement between Trump and the country’s president Nayib Bukele on Saturday.
The deportees were removed despite U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg disputing the invocation of the wartime Alien Enemies Act 1798 as the basis for the administration’s actions and ordering that the planes delivering them be turned around.
Francisco Javier Garcia Casique (Sebastian Garcia Casique/Instagram)
On Monday, Judge Boasberg demanded answers as to why the flights had gone ahead in defiance of his order while Trump’s allies, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and his White House advisers Alina Habba and Stephen Miller hit the airwaves to rebuke the justice for overstepping his authority in challenging an executive order from the president.
Trump himself angrily lashed out at Boasberg on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday morning, calling him a “radical left lunatic” and demanding his impeachment.
While the legal battle rumbles on, Casique, a barber by trade, finds himself incarcerated in the maximum security CECOT mega-prison in Central America with no record of his case visible on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) website, according to his distraught mother Mirelis Casique, who says his rights are being violated.
Ms Casique, who has taken to TikTok to draw attention to her son’s plight, told The New York Times she had recognized him by his tattoos, his ears and his general stature in news photographs of the newly-arrived inmates and said she felt “broken at the injustice” of what had taken place.
She explained that her son had entered the United States in December 2023 seeking asylum, having previously spent six years in Peru cutting hair and shaving customers to support the family – a skill he taught himself by watching YouTube videos, his brother Sebastian told El Estimulo.
Prison guards transfer deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on Sunday March 16 2025 (El Salvador Presidential Press Office/AP)
He had injured himself falling from a train in Mexico before being detained by immigration officers at the U.S. southern border, Ms Casique said, with the officers concerned enough by his tattoos – which actually read “peace” and listed the names of his grandmother, mother and sisters – to detain him for two months in a detention center in Dallas, Texas, while they investigated possible gang connections.
He was subsequently released by a Texas judge last April on the condition that he wore an electronic bracelet to monitor his movements before he could be repatriated to Venezuela, she said, only for ICE to arrest him again on February 6 this year.
“I told him to follow the country’s rules, that he wasn’t a criminal, and at most, they would deport him,” his mother said.
“But I was very naive – I thought the laws would protect him.”
In a subsequent interview with Spanish language news channel NTN24, Ms Casique repeated that her son’s only offense was entering the United States without the proper documentation.
“My son isn’t a criminal who should have been sent to El Salvador,” she maintained.
