lots of us have had the same thoughts during our careers
Mass Deportations
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BREAKING: The innocent gay makeup artist who was infamously deported to an El Salvador prison by Donald Trump’s fascist regime breaks his silence to reveal horrific torture, sexual abuse, and food deprivation.
It’s so much worse than we feared but he also shared a ray of hope…
Andry Hernández Romero was imprisoned for 125 days at CECOT, the dystopian mega-prison in El Salvador where Trump has been disappearing people, but he is now home safe in his native Venezuela.
“It was an encounter with torture and death,” Hernández Romero told journalists at his family home.
He and other prisoners were regularly beaten and shot with rubber projectiles. They were locked in nightmarishly dark confines.
“Many of our fellows have wounds from the nightsticks; they have fractured ribs, fractured fingers and toes, marks from the handcuffs,” he said. “Others have marks on their chests, on their face ... from the projectiles.
Hernández Romero entered the United States legally, appeared at an appointment that the American government mandated, and passed an initial interview. Federal agents then falsely accused him of membership in the violent Tren de Aragua gang, absurdly citing his “mom” and “dad” tattoos as evidence for their smear. He has no criminal record but was unjustly expelled by Trump along with over 250 other Venezuelan men. The incredibly cruel federal action proves that MAGA never actually cared about deporting criminals and are in fact pursuing a soft ethnic cleansing agenda.
Hernández Romero originally fled Venezuela in 2024 to seek asylum in the United States because he was afraid he would be persecuted for his homosexuality and because he opposed his native country’s authoritarian government. He saw America as a beacon of hope in the world and was rewarded by Trump with racism, terror, and violence.
The Venezuelan attorney general has announced that his office will be launching an investigation into the reports that El Salvador tortured Venezuelan nationals.
“While we’re happy that he’s no longer in the torture prison, we are worried for his future,” said Melissa Shepherd, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, who is representing Hernández Romero and other deportation victims. “They were physically, verbally, and psychologically tortured.”
Lindsay Toczylowski, cofounder and CEO of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told The Advocate that what happened to Hernández Romero is “a really dark foreshadowing of where we’re going as a country if this is allowed to stand.”
“These are people who were sent with no due process to be tortured, only to then be used as political pawns in a prisoner release that none of us were privy to before it happened, that none of them consented to being a part of,” she added.
But Hernández Romero has not fallen totally into despair—
“It fills me with so much peace, so much comfort, so much tranquility that I was never alone, from day one,” he said. “There were many people who worried for me.”