Deportation foes find a story to tell with 'Andrys'

Abstract legal and procedural questions don’t move public sentiment. Stories of individuals do.

What did more to turn American voters so sharply against the postpandemic wave of immigration, crime statistics or the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley?

Now, as the Trump administration finds itself locked in a legal battle over broad powers the president has claimed to get those migrants out of the country, its foes are looking for their own story to tell.

You may have heard about Jerce Reyes Barrios, the 36-year-old former soccer coach, who claims he fled Venezuela’s police state after being targeted for protesting the government in Caracas. What immigration officials say is a gang tattoo Barrios’s lawyer says is a sign of his support for the Spanish soccer team Real Madrid.

In our sports-obsessed society, the overlap between soccer fandom and foreign policy has produced quite a bit of attention for the case.

Now, gay rights activists are rallying to the cause of a man they’re calling by his first name, Andrys, whose lawyers say is a 23-year-old makeup artist who came to the U.S. from Venezuela seeking asylum last year, but was detained upon arrival because immigration officials determined his tattoos linked him to the notorious Tren de Aragua gang.

According to the legal aid attorney who has been handling his case, Andrys was among the 250 or so men shipped off last week to a prison camp in El Salvador, where tens of thousands of gang members have been treated like prisoners of war as that country does battle with drug cartels and rampant street violence. America is paying El Salvador to take our prisoners because Venezuela was, until this week, refusing to accept its people deported from the United States.

Now, Andrys could be both a gay man and a gang member — a makeup artist and a killer. It’s 2025, after all, and we don’t need to limit our conceptions of individuals based on stereotypes. If NoHo Hank taught us anything, it should be that. Or, maybe Andrys and his family are simply lying about his sexual identity or background in “the arts” to try to avoid deportation and now to get out of a place that sounds like hell on Earth.

But it is at least possible that this young man was wrongfully classified as a desperado and then herded off to a country that he may never have visited before and put in a prison where inmates are shackled, heads shaved, and transported with sacks over their heads.

The thing is, we can’t know for sure unless there is a hearing in which the government and the accused were both free to present evidence. We can’t have that, though, because it seems that Andrys was shipped off to El Salvador just before his hearing was scheduled. And when a judge ordered the prison flights grounded until hearings could be held, the government ignored the ruling. Now we can’t find out more about the case, because the government has declared Andrys to be an enemy combatant in an undeclared war and is refusing to provide the court with information about the detainees or the flights on the grounds of national security.

It may be that if Andrys’s timing had been just a little different, or if the U.S. and Venezuela had made a deportation deal two weeks sooner, he might have been shipped back to his family in Caracas instead of being frog-marched into a concentration camp. But, again, who knows? Not the judge and certainly not the rest of us.

You may say that Andrys is part of the “little bit of disturbance” that President Trump has warned of as he puts his policies in place. You can’t make a "golden age" omelet without breaking a few eggs. You may even say that Andrys’s story, tragic as its sounds, may turn out to be a good thing because it will deter others from following in his footsteps. Rough justice is cruel in the short term but kind in the long run.

Those are not unreasonable points of view, especially if one subscribes to the idea that mass migration from Latin America is, as Trump holds, “an invasion” and that we are in a war with the gangs of that region. But what you can’t reasonably say is that this is any kind of a sustainable approach.

Andrys is not an American, so he doesn’t enjoy the rights of American citizenship. And the U.S. government absolutely has the authority to send asylum-seekers back to their country of origin. It would even be reasonable to hold a person who attempted to enter our country lawfully, as Andrys’s lawyers say he did, should be detained if there is some suspicion that the attempted entry was in service of criminal activity.

But if what the administration did was to ship off an asylum-seeker to a prison in a third country without a hearing or any legal finding of criminal conduct, then it has a big problem. And if that asylum-seeker is part of one of the most effective and noisy communities of activists in our society — the gay rights movement — it’s an even bigger problem.

If Anwar al-Awlaki, a man with ties to terrorists killed in a drone strike, was once a good enough subject for a huge fight over due process, one imagines a gay makeup artist in a puffer vest would do just fine for those purposes this time.

When border czar Tom Homan was asked about the case this week, he reverted to the personal story that had been so important in creating the narrative that got Trump elected again: “Due process? Where was Laken Riley’s due process?”

That’s probably good enough to keep lots of folks in the Republican core on the side of rough justice. But it won’t be enough to make the story of Andrys go away. In politics, the personal is potent.

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