Trump admin “disappeared” a gay stylist for propaganda. He hasn’t been heard from since

He wept and prayed as the guard shaved his head calling for his mother and proclaiming his innocence Just a inadequate months earlier Andry Jos Hern ndez Romero had applied for asylum citing the conditions he faced as a gay man and political dissident in Venezuela a country that the U S governing body and its allies all deem to be an authoritarian repressive threat to its own citizens But now he was just a warm body to be paraded before the cameras just content to be clicked or scrolled past on someone s phone To his family Andry was an actor hair stylist and loving son his dedication to mom and dad tattooed on his arms To the Trump administration he was an object that could be used in an ongoing callous propaganda campaign his brutalization serving as an advertisement for the president s war on immigration His very devotion to his family was used against him his tattoos reinterpreted as evidence of loyalty to a gang Tren de Aragua that does not use tattoos to signify membership Related This is going to be normal Soldiers descend on US cities The stated objective per the Department of Homeland Shield is for the -year-old asylum-seeker to spend the rest of his life behind bars in a fortress-prison the Terrorism Confinement Center or CECOT where inmates packed in cages are subject to beatings severe deprivation inadequate nutrition and psychological torture according to the only detainee ever known to have escaped its confines He would tell me that he s going to help us and that he would make his dream come true to have his own salon Andry s mother Alexis Romero disclosed in a up-to-date interview And they thwarted all of that They stepped on him ran him over perfectly shut down his dream Now what is my boy going to do Melissa Shepard legal services director at Immigrant Defenders Law Center reported Salon that her organization began representing Andry on a pro bono basis in December At the time he was being held at the Otay Mesa Detention Center a privately-run prison along the U S -Mexico perimeter He had applied for asylum the right way by scheduling an appointment and presenting himself at a port of entry and yet was languishing behind bars In March seemingly out of nowhere it got so much worse We say disappeared disappeared to El Salvador because that s essentially what it is Shepard commented in an interview No one has spoken to Andry since March not his family not his legal club In the four months since he was labeled a criminal and sentenced to de facto life in prison without charge or trial or indeed anything approaching due process the only evidence that he is in El Salvador are the images of him being abused the day that he arrived The U S cabinet has refused to release the names of the people it sent to CECOT claiming they are now wards of El Salvador even after it begrudgingly had Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the U S for a face-saving prosecution in turn El Salvador has insisted the Venezuelans we know were sent to CECOT are indeed the responsibility of the Trump administration We need your help to stay independent Subscribe currently to help Salon s progressive journalism We have not been able to speak with him or essentially just have any communication with him and that has been troubling And indeed the only way that we definitively know that he was sent to the prison in El Salvador was because of the Time photographer who was there when the men first arrived Shepard commented Still to this day the administration has not provided any concrete evidence as to why he was specifically taken she disclosed adding I think unfortunately he ostensibly just fit the profile of a young Venezuelan man who had particular tattoos that they could use for this essentially mass propaganda If Andry has not been heard or seen in over four months how then do we know that he s even still alive We don t At a congressional hearing in May Rep Robert Garcia D-Calif pressed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for a sign of life Would you commit to just letting his mother know as a mother to mother if Andry is alive Garcia solicited Noem who had flown to El Salvador to pose for a photo in front of caged men at CECOT professed ignorance I don t know the specifics of this individual event and forswore responsibility This individual is in El Salvador so take it up with them Garcia now the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee then took the matter up with Secretary of State Marco Rubio In a June letter Garcia joined by four dozen other Democrats required for U S diplomats to conduct a wellness check on Mr Hernandez Romero noting that his own mother and father do not know whether their son is even alive and healthy because of the actions of the United States regime Garcia s office recounted Salon that it has received no updates A spokesperson for the State Department also declined to say whether Andry is alive and well As a general matter we do not comment on congressional correspondence or on private diplomatic discussions and have nothing further to share at this time Start your day with essential news from Salon Sign up for our free morning newsletter Crash Syllabus What else can you call it On March Andry Jos Hern ndez Romero was disappeared by the U S establishment which is content by its own avowals to see him die in a foreign prison even as it refuses to confirm that he is there or not dead already For immigrants especially the worst-case scenario is not a hypothetical In a Sisyphean effort to roll back decades of demographic change and make America whiter again the present administration has turned the dull machinery of mass deportation against innocent men women and children and sought to make the very act of seeking asylum a crime punishable by torture if not death Imitations of CECOT are now being constructed in the U S itself Republicans in Congress now allotting more money to a deportation machine a lawless regime at its helm than the greater part countries spend on their entire military with heavily armed soldiers in the streets of American cities helping masked agents whisk away thousands of people every week a few never heard from again That the purpose is crude manufacturing B-roll of maltreated foreigners for right-wing media should not distract from the enormous evil that is here in the current era threatening the rights of all Donald Trump has exploited a deep sickness in American society where ennui is now being treated and white racial resentment fed with the spectacle of mass dehumanization It is happening here already just six months into the second time around and it will metastasize before it ever contracts What we re seeing now is just a cruel cruel agenda being carried out Shepard revealed and I think it is much bigger than just trying to remove or deter people from coming to the United States Read more about mass deportations Trump is not invincible Democrats immigrants and the politics of due process DHS detains grad trainee who advocated for Palestine and the humanity of all people Why not tyranny JD Vance says he s fine with the inevitable errors of abandoning due process The post Trump admin disappeared a gay stylist for propaganda He hasn t been heard from since appeared first on Salon com