A lawyer for one of the Venezuelan immigrants sent from the US to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador has accused the Trump administration of waging a “sickening” campaign of psychological warfare against asylum seekers and migrants.
“In my 15 years of representing people in removal proceedings in the United States, this is the most shocking thing that I’ve ever seen happen to one of our clients,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, a California-based lawyer for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) group.
ImmDef represents one of the more than 200 Venezuelan citizens who were flown to El Salvador on Saturday as part of Donald Trump’s highly controversial immigration crackdown. Some of them subsequently appeared in a cinematic three-minute propaganda video shared by the Central American country’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, having their heads shaved or being manhandled by guards.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused the deported detainees – who now face at least a year inside the Salvadorian jail – of being “heinous monsters” who were part of “one of the most violent and ruthless terrorist gangs on planet Earth” – the Venezuelan crime group Tren de Aragua. Leavitt claimed their “extraction” and removal to El Salvador meant they would “no longer be able to pose any threat to the American People”.
But Toczylowski rejected that portrayal of her client, calling claims that he was involved in the gang “completely baseless”. In fact, she said he was an LGBTQ+ artist who had fled political persecution in an increasingly repressive Venezuela and crossed into the US from the Mexican border city of Tijuana last year. There, he passed a “credible fear interview” used by asylum officers to determine whether asylum seekers have reasonable grounds to request protection in the US.
The mega prison in San Salvador where deportees from the US were taken. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Colleagues who had spent time with the Venezuelan man in detention described him as “a very sweet [and] normal guy” with no criminal history. Toczylowski said he appeared to have been wrongly identified as a gang member by immigration enforcement officials as a result of “some benign tattoos that are not gang related”.
“We’re all in just absolute shock that this has happened,” Toczylowski said. “We feel like if it could happen to him, who’s next? And that’s really frightening.”
Toczylowski declined to name her client or give further details of his life out of fears for his safety. But the families of other Venezuelans transported from the US to El Salvador have begun speaking out to challenge the Trump administration’s portrayal of their loved ones as terrorists and gangsters.
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“My brother doesn’t belong to any criminal group, has no criminal history or record in any country and they have unjustly sent him to El Salvador simply because of his tattoos,” the brother of 24-year-old of Francisco Javier García Casique wrote on Instagram.
Toczylowski said she believed the decision to send detainees to El Salvador was “part of the Trump administration’s psychological warfare against asylum seekers and migrants”.
“I think it’s designed to deter people from seeking protection in the United States. I think it’s designed to be part of their effort to end asylum in the United States. And I think that they find due process and people’s ability to exercise their constitutional rights inconvenient for their plans. And so they are doing everything they can – whether it means breaking the law or not – to further their political goals here.
“Unfortunately,” Toczylowski added, “clients like our client are intended collateral damage in that pursuit.”
