Marco Rubio Reveals What Will Happen To Venezuelans Deported To El Salvador Who Turn Out To Not Be Gang Members

Over the weekend, the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, which facilitated their transfer to the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) facility built by Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele.

U.S. officials said deportees are criminals and members of the Venezuelan-born Tren de Aragua gang, but the families of some of those taken to El Salvador claim their loved ones don't have any ties with organized crime.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said law enforcement spent weeks drafting the list of deportees, claiming all were gang members. However, should that not end up being the case and in the event they somehow made a mistake, it is ultimately irrelevant as deportees were already living illegally in the U.S., he added.

"Now, assuming — let's just assume, and I'm not saying this is the case, because I think there's high fidelity and confidence that in fact that's exactly what every single one of them was. But if one of them turns out not to be, then they're just illegally in our country, and the Salvadorans can then deport them to Venezuela, but they weren't supposed to be in our country to begin with," Rubio said in an interview with Fox News Radio.

Rubio added that guards at the Guantanamo detention center where some Venezuelans were taken described deportees as "the worst people they had ever interacted with," saying they are responsible for "kidnappings, rapes, extortion and murders."

Venezuelan deportees are struggling to get in contact with their families. As Reuters reported, advocates have launched a WhatsApp helpline for people searching for family members

"It's extremely disturbing that hundreds of people were flown on U.S. government planes to El Salvador and we still have no information on who they are, their attorneys were not notified and families are left excruciatingly in the dark," Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told Reuters.

Similarly, immigration attorney John R. De La Vega has repeatedly questioned the accuracy of the list drafted by U.S. officials. He advised people to avoid getting any tattoos that are commonly linked to the gang, saying "they could be the only factor the government uses to label you as a [Tren de Aragua] member."

That was allegedly the case for Solanyer Sarabia's brother, who told his sister on March 14 that he was being deported to Venezuela. She told Reuters that an ICE officer told her her brother had been detained because of a tattoo that linked him to the Tren de Aragua gang, although Sarabia claims the tattoo was just a random rose his brother had gotten at a tattoo parlor in Dallas.

"He thought it looked cool, looked nice, it didn't have any other significance," she said.