Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel, 13.03.2025. Wrongfully arrested and deported – Irving (TX)

Leon joined the United States in June 2023 on a request with the CBP One app, used by the Joe Biden government to manage migrant appointments on the Mexican border. He had applied for legal status under the Temporary Protection Status program, and his application was still in the process when he was arrested. Since then, the Trump administration has ended the program for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, and its government has repurposed the CBP One app to allow a process of self-deportation.

ICE agents took Leon into custody on March 13 in the parking lot of his apartment in Irving, Texas, wrongly claiming his tattoos reflected an affiliation with Tren de Aragua, according to his claim. He had entered the U.S. in 2023. He worked as a barber and was scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in 2028.

Homeland Security said in an email that Leon was a “confirmed associate” of the Tren de Aragua gang — though it did not specify how it reached that conclusion — who had entered the country illegally. It called his claims a fake “sob story.”

“President Trump and Secretary Noem will not allow foreign terrorist enemies to operate in our country and endanger Americans,” the email said. It added, “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

A federal judge ruled in June that the Trump administration must give some of the migrants sent to the prison in El Salvador a chance to challenge their deportations. U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg said the people hadn’t been able to formally contest the removals or allegations that they were members of Tren de Aragua. He ordered the administration to work toward giving them a way to file those challenges. The judge wrote that “significant evidence” had surfaced indicating that many of the migrants were not connected to the gang “and thus were languishing in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”

At El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, Leon said guards hit him with fists and batons and, on one occasion, viciously beat him after taking him to an area of the prison without cameras. Leon spent four months at the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, where he said he was beaten and abused.

When Leon was sent to El Salvador, his family failed to locate him for more than a month, his brother David said in an interview from his Chicago home. Leon‘s foreign identification number disappeared from the website used to track detainees in the U.S. immigration system. Neither his brother nor Leos girlfriend could get answers from federal immigration agencies about his whereabouts.

Finally, his family learned that he was being held in the CECOT of El Salvador. According to his complaint, the guards routinely assaulted detainees in an area without cameras so as not to leave digital evidence of the abuses. In the document, Leon said officers used fists and batons to beat him in the chest and stomach, and forced him to see how they brutally abused other prisoners.

His complaint describes the terrible conditions at CECOT. He says he was being held with nearly 20 other Venezuelan detainees in a cell about 9.2 meters per side, which was only cleaned once a week. Men were rarely allowed to go abroad, had no access to medication and were not allowed to exercise or talk to their relatives or lawyers, the complaint said.

When Leon complained about his gastritis, he said he was only given water. To pass the time, the inmates made dice with soap and tortillas and used toilet paper to play the Park, a board game.

“Anything could lead to beatings, If we played, they beat us up. If we talked, they beat us, if we laughed, they beat us up. If we took a bath, they beat us.

To every migrant who is still in the United States, be whoever you are or from any country that comes, I want you to achieve your goals, focus on working for your family, and that overnight you don’t take everything away from you.“

He recalled that he only had contact with someone from abroad once during his stay, with the Red Cross, who visited him for 30 minutes on June 12.

Leon  has now met with his daughter, Isabela. In the interview, he said he had no plans to return to the United States, but that he would go ahead with his legal process in the hope of preventing other migrants from suffering the same treatment he received.