Even as the Administration refuses to reveal the names of those it has deported under the Alien Enemies Act, a network of lawyers and advocates is fighting to keep their cases alive.

Pedro Escobar Blanco, one of two hundred and thirty-eight Venezuelans deported by the Trump Administration to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador on March 15th, never met the lawyer who is representing him in U.S. immigration court. They haven’t spoken by phone or texted or communicated through an intermediary. He almost certainly isn’t aware that he’s being represented at all. Yet, a month after he entered Salvadoran custody, an immigration judge in Southern California held a hearing on his asylum case. Escobar Blanco wasn’t in attendance—no one has seen or heard from him since he was sent to El Salvador—and the judge, citing his absence, ordered him removed from the country.

Judges regularly issue deportation orders in absentia for people who are on what’s called the non-detained docket. These individuals have already been released from detention on the condition that they later appear in immigration court. However, if a person is in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as Escobar Blanco had been since October, 2024, he cannot possibly show up for a court date unless the government lets him. The judge’s logic—penalizing him for not being there—made little sense. It also meant that he would be barred from entering the U.S. for the next ten years. “I objected,” Andreana Sarkis, Escobar Blanco’s lawyer, said in a subsequent declaration. “His ‘failure to appear’ was through no fault of his own, but rather through ice’s failure to produce him.”

The government had deported Escobar Blanco on the basis of a proclamation that Donald Trump had signed in secret, on March 14th. Escobar Blanco was accused of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the government claimed that, in effect, it didn’t need to present the actual evidence against him. Sarkis could only surmise that the allegations were related to his tattoos, which included a nautical star on each shoulder, and the names of his parents and his two children, who are ten and thirteen.

The majority of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador had pending cases in U.S. immigration courts. In the weeks since their disappearance, lawyers across the country have mobilized to represent as many of them as possible. The work mainly consisted of showing up to hearings in their place and explaining to judges where their clients are. To date, the Trump Administration has refused to share the names of the men it has sent to El Salvador. The current list, which is the result of reporting by CBS news and whose accuracy the government still won’t confirm, is incomplete.

“Ghosts” is how one attorney involved in the advocacy effort described her clients. By such standards, Escobar Blanco is considered lucky: a lawyer was at least available to appear on his behalf in immigration court (many of the men lack even that), and the judge issued an order that can theoretically be challenged (other outcomes can be harder to contest). Sarkis, who in six years of practicing law has never before represented a client with whom she couldn’t speak, took on Escobar Blanco’s case two days before the hearing. When Escobar Blanco entered the country, in July, 2024, he did so exactly as the U.S. government had instructed, scheduling an appointment with border authorities. In his case, this led him to wait in Mexico for ten months before he was finally interviewed, screened, and eventually allowed in. He seems to have been apprehended in a worksite raid near San Diego last October; it isn’t fully clear why he wouldn’t have had work papers at the time. “What’s so shocking to me is that I’m seeing no criminal history, no affiliation with any criminal organization,” Sarkis said. “He did everything he was supposed to.”

At the center of the initiative to organize legal representation for the Venezuelans is Michelle Brané, an attorney and longtime immigrants’-rights advocate who helped lead the effort to locate the families separated at the border during the first Trump Administration. When Joe Biden entered the White House and promised to reunite them, Brané joined the Department of Homeland Security, as the executive director of the Family Reunification Task Force. Now she works at Together and Free, a nonprofit that describes its mission as providing “emergency and ongoing support to asylum seeking families impacted by federal immigration policies.”

In February, before the Alien Enemies Act went into effect, Brané and her colleagues were trying to identify a group of nearly two hundred Venezuelans whom the Trump Administration had sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The White House had described the men, without evidence, as criminals and threats to public security, and held many of them in the same units once reserved for alleged Al Qaeda terrorists. Brané, who’d begun hearing from the detainees’ family members, connected them to litigators at the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit.

The A.C.L.U. sued the Trump Administration again on March 15th, hours after the President invoked the Alien Enemies Act. A federal judge promptly ordered the government to halt the first deportation flights and to turn around any aircraft that had already left Texas, where the detainees were being held. The Administration ignored the order, and three planes full of men landed in San Salvador in the hours that followed. Early the next morning, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, posted videos of them being marched into a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center. “The calls came in immediately,” Brané told me. “The first few cases were primarily people who saw a video and said, ‘My brother or my son was in there.’ Then we started to hear from people who hadn’t seen their family member in a video, but the pattern fit.”

Escobar Blanco’s wife, children, and sister fell into the latter camp: none of them had spotted him in any of the footage. His sister Mariela, who lives in Venezuela, told me that she and Escobar Blanco had spoken nearly every day since he left for the U.S. The only time they lost touch had been when he was travelling through the Darién Gap, a treacherous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama. One night in early March she received a call from him. “I don’t understand anything, Mari,” he said. He’d just been transferred from California to Texas, and he told her that the government was planning to deport him and a group of other men to Venezuela because “they were related to the Tren de Aragua gang.” He and his sister are from the state of La Guaira, on the northern coast of Venezuela. “We didn’t have the remotest idea of who these people really were,” she told me, of the gang. A few days later, she stopped hearing from her brother altogether.

On the night of March 14th, a friend that Escobar Blanco had made while in custody called her with an update. The detainees were about to board a plane at the airport—bound for Venezuela, they were told—when ice officers led them back to the detention center because of bad weather. “He’s still in line because they have to re-register us to bring us back inside,” the friend told her. “There are a lot of us, so it’ll probably take a while. But they told us that any moment, between Sunday and Monday, we’ll be in Venezuela.” Mariela told me, “They didn’t arrive, and the rumors began about the flights to El Salvador. I said to myself, ‘Wow, my brother has to be there because where else is he? Why isn’t he in touch with us?’ ”

Brané and her team began compiling lists based on the calls they received. This was almost exactly how her work had begun during the family-separation crisis in 2018. Then, as now, the government didn’t have a credible or comprehensive account of who it had swept up while executing its plans. In 2018, the cause was a mix of incompetence, negligence, and a general lack of political will; this time, it appears to be more calculated. “All of this is about power,” Brané said. “It’s about showing they don’t have to play the game.”

Brané and the other advocates at her organization began building out detailed profiles of about fifty names on their list. They obtained copies of the men’s Venezuelan I.D.s, spoke to their family members, conducted background checks in Venezuela, coördinated with gang experts and investigative journalists, and searched an Interpol database. They also conducted research in Chile, Colombia, and Peru, where some of the men had lived or travelled before reaching the U.S.

The men were initially detained for a range of different reasons. Some were picked up during traffic stops; others had been apprehended as “collaterals” when ice had been looking for someone else. The overwhelming majority of the men that Brané and her team looked into had no criminal records. In many instances, the advocates and researchers turned up minor or ambiguous infractions. Two men had once been accused of robbery in a Venezuelan news article, but were apparently never charged. One teen-ager had a marijuana charge in Chile. There were a few exceptions: two men had records of domestic violence, and someone else had been arrested in an alleged hit-and-run incident. One case involved a man in New York who had been charged with the possession of a firearm, but the charge was dropped. “He was held at Rikers Island and handed over to ice, thanks to the new position of the New York Mayor,” Brané said.

The advocates kept spreadsheets with basic information about each individual and the date and time of any upcoming court hearing. The idea was to try to keep cases open for as long as possible, then to get them formally paused. But at the hearings, the lawyers were frequently stunned by how government attorneys described the whereabouts of the men in question.

On March 19th, Monique Sherman, a managing attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, attended a proceeding at an ice detention center in Aurora, Colorado, for a man named Jefferson Laya Freites, whose case was eventually dismissed. “The judge called his name and he didn’t walk forward, because he wasn’t there,” she told me. Sherman told the judge that Laya Freites’s wife had recognized him in a video from the Salvadoran prison. But when the judge asked the D.H.S. attorney to respond, according to a report in USA Today, she said only that Laya Freites had been released to “local authorities.” Sherman told me, “D.H.S. said three times that he was in local-law-enforcement custody. I said I was in touch with the man’s wife. She’s desperate to be in touch with him. If he’s in law-enforcement custody, can the government tell us where he is? The D.H.S. attorney said that, for privacy reasons, she couldn’t.”

Margaret Cargioli, of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, was representing Miguel Rojas-Mendoza, who had Temporary Protected Status when he was deported to El Salvador. His mother told me that she had called him after Trump won the election last year, and begged him to be careful. He was living in Louisiana at the time. “Don’t worry, mama,” he replied. “I’ll be fine. I have T.P.S.” Local police records from January and February indicate that he had been arrested for driving with an expired license plate and without a proper license. When Cargioli got Rojas-Mendoza’s file, the day before a virtual hearing, on April 8th, she hadn’t yet seen photos of him. After the judge appeared, another box popped up on her computer screen showing a room at the Winn Correctional Center, in Louisiana, where Rojas-Mendoza had been held before his transfer to Texas, the previous month. “I see a man, a little distant from the screen, sitting at a table,” Cargioli said. “Next to him was a detention officer. He was holding a piece of paper.” For a fleeting moment, Cargioli thought the advocates might have made a mistake; her new client appeared to be in the U.S. Then the detention officer said, “Oh, no. This is the wrong person.” The screen in Louisiana clicked off. During the hearing, Cargioli asked the D.H.S. lawyer where Rojas-Mendoza was. “I don’t have any information,” the lawyer replied.

It is possible that, in the days after the first three planes of deportees left for El Salvador, some government lawyers didn’t know where the men in their cases were. ice has a detainee locator that shows only where someone is being held in the U.S.; once that person is deported he no longer appears in the system. After news organizations such as CBS started publishing lists of names, however, the government appeared to take a more deliberate stance. By the end of March, Sherman told me, D.H.S. lawyers were using a “canned” phrase about the men “not being here” and asking to hold cases “in abeyance.” They rarely elaborated or departed from the script.

In the last several weeks, government lawyers may have developed a new strategy—to persuade judges to dismiss cases. “It’s sneaky and it’s wicked,” Ann García, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Project, told me. “The D.H.S. attorney is saying either ‘We no longer want to pursue this case for deportation and we’re exercising our prosecutorial discretion to withdraw the charges here’ or ‘We request dismissal of the case because the immigrant is no longer in the United States,’ which is ridiculous because ice disappeared the person.” In the case of a removal order, like the one Escobar Blanco received, there is a legal path within the immigration system to file a motion to reopen the case. Dismissals essentially remove cases from the immigration courts. You can technically appeal a dismissal, but, as García said, “it’s unlikely the current immigration appellate body would review that decision fairly.” Without a removal order, she went on, “a federal court of appeals is unlikely to have jurisdiction.”

On April 7th, the Supreme Court delivered a mild rebuke to the President. Those who were charged as “alien enemies,” the Justices found, still had to be notified before they were deported. But the Justices didn’t specify what such a notice was supposed to include, or how men in custody, with limited access to lawyers, could actually respond. A few weeks later, after a federal judge in the southern district of Texas issued a temporary restraining order against the government, preventing it from deporting more Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, the Administration moved one group of detainees to a facility in the northern district of Texas. ice then distributed notices to them in English, hours before trying to take them to an airport. The notices provided no information about what the prisoners could do to see or to dispute the evidence against them.

At this point, the Supreme Court intervened to halt the deportations. By then, some three hundred people had already been sent to El Salvador, including seventeen more men deported on March 30th, ten others deported in mid-April, and a Salvadoran father of three named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been deported, on March 15th, by mistake. His case prompted a separate lawsuit that also reached the Supreme Court; in a nine-to-zero decision, the Justices ordered the Administration to “facilitate” his return to the U.S.

In the past few weeks, Brané and her colleagues have been learning about new, previously unreported instances of people sent to El Salvador. Late last month, the Times published a story about Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a thirty-two-year-old food-delivery worker living in Michigan who was sent to El Salvador on March 15th. He hadn’t appeared on the CBS list, flight manifests, or government accounts of recent transfers made from immigration custody. Neither had Neiyerver Adrian Leon Rengel, a Venezuelan living in Texas, whose disappearance was confirmed by reporting in the Miami Herald. As Brané put it, “Who knows how many more there are?”

Like Brané, Ann García has spent the last seven years trying to find all the families who were separated at the border during the first Trump Administration. “I still can’t tell you how many families were separated,” she told me. “One of the scary parts of the current situation is that the government won’t tell us anything.” At a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, a journalist asked Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, if he had spoken to the Salvadoran government about returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S. “I would never tell you that,” he answered. “And you know who else I’d never tell? A judge.”

The Supreme Court never addressed what the men sent to El Salvador in March can do now. The A.C.L.U. has recently filed another brief in federal court, in Washington, D.C., to persuade a judge to order their return. In the court filing, the A.C.L.U. cites the Supreme Court’s instruction from the Abrego García case. “Family members of those in [El Salvador] maintain that they have no connection at all to TdA,” the lawyers wrote, referring to Tren de Aragua. “These errors are particularly devastating because many class members came to the United States precisely because of arbitrary arrests and detentions by their government, and have strong claims for relief under our immigration laws.”

Mariela, the sister of Pedro Escobar Blanco, told me that, long before her brother’s sudden deportation to El Salvador, he was in a state of shock. When he was first apprehended, last year, he couldn’t understand why the ice officers who arrived at his worksite acted as if they were staging a Special Forces operation. “I thought it was a prank,” he told her at the time. “They arrived like they were looking for some criminal who was highly dangerous. They shouted at us to get on the ground, not to move. It almost seemed like a candid camera would pop out.” One day, about four months later, while he was still in ice custody, he told his sister, “I’m just going to tell them to deport me because I can’t be a prisoner any longer. I’m not doing anything for my children or for you. I’m not even doing anything for myself. I’d prefer just to be sent back.”