Once Angie Gonzalez started to hear rumors that her husband might finally leave CECOT this week, she stopped being able to sleep. She got out of bed at 4 a.m. on Friday morning and has spent the day glued to a computer screen, watching online plane trackers, following the news on social media, and waiting for the chance to speak to him again.
Gonzalez’s husband, Jesús Alberto Ríos Andrade, was one of 238 Venezuelans that the Trump administration summarily sent to the notorious El Salvador prison in March under the Alien Enemies Act.
It’s been a hard road, full of guilt, shame, and worry, Gonzalez told TPM. In a phone interview Friday, she said that the stress of the past few months has taken a toll: she’s broken out in rashes all over her body. She sometimes forgets to eat, and for months stopped taking work as a truck driver. When she watched El Salvador’s propaganda videos of the Alien Enemies Act detainees being marched off planes, she felt her throat constrict.
“My heart hurts, my stomach hurts, my head hurts. I can barely see,” Gonzalez said of the news that CECOT detainees would be repatriated to Venezuela, as first reported by Reuters and Bloomberg earlier Friday and announced by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele this afternoon. “It’s a lot of happiness, frustration, relief.”
As of Friday, her husband appears to be on his way out of El Salvador’s notorious detention camp. An attorney for another Venezuelan CECOT detainee sent there under the Alien Enemies Act told TPM on Friday that he expects all the Venezuelans in the prison to be repatriated by the weekend. Secretary of State (and many other things) Marco Rubio said on X that the U.S. would receive detainees from Venezuela as part of a deal; Bukele said that Venezuelans held in CECOT would be repatriated.
For the families of those detained, it’s an incredible relief. Gloria Browning Vaamondes-Barrios last spoke to her husband Miguel on March 14. The next day, the Trump administration loaded him onto a flight in South Texas which took off for El Salvador even as a judge prepared to hold a hearing over whether the operation was legal.
“I’m just so happy right now,” Vaamondes-Barrios told TPM. “I’m just gonna tell him that I’ve been fighting for him and there wasn’t one minute that I wasn’t thinking about him and fighting for him.”
‘Disrespected as an American’
For the past few months, I’ve been reporting on elements of the Alien Enemies Act removals. It remains one of the most authoritarian moves the Trump administration has made: it used a wartime power, last invoked during World War II — in part to remove Nazis (they received hearings) — to send immigrants in the U.S. to a foreign prison. When confronted in court, federal officials dissembled, flouted court orders, and claimed that there was nothing they could do: the Venezuelans were beyond American control.
When I got word this week that there might be an exchange, I reached out to attorneys for those removed, and to their U.S. citizen family members, some of whom I had already spoken with in recent months. None of them had heard from U.S. officials; one attorney, in touch with the U.N. and Venezuelan officials, had received a heads up about the exchange.
I called Gonzalez, the El Paso truck driver, on Friday morning as reports of the exchange began to emerge.
Gonzalez might not be what you expect from someone who married an undocumented immigrant. She voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020; on Friday, she told TPM that she liked the president because she saw him as “my grandpa that I never had.” His hard line on illegal immigration also appealed to Gonzalez, a second-generation immigrant. “I felt like I was being disrespected as an American,” she said.
Gonzalez has what you might describe as an instinctive distrust of institutions. She declined to vote for Trump in 2024 because she suspected there was more to the Pennsylvania assassination attempt than the official story: “I didn’t fall for that,” she said. In a conversation with me last month, she described meeting her husband, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, after finding him emerge with a group of people from an “incognito building.”
“Turns out that it was where the federal government was bringing in the immigrants,” she said, adding that it happened under Biden.
Gonzalez gave the man, Ríos Andrade, a ride to church, she said. They fell in love, and married in September 2024. They were applying for citizenship-through-marriage when, on February 1, Ríos Andrade was detained by immigration officials.
After Ríos Andrade was sent to CECOT, Gonzalez threw herself into activism. She found other relatives of detainees on Facebook; on TikTok and Instagram videos about the operation, she would leave comments identifying herself and telling her story.
For Gonzalez, the experience prompted reflection. She doesn’t hate Trump, and it hasn’t turned her into a Democrat, she said. If anything, it’s deepened her lack of trust in everything around her.
“I don’t want to hate my country because I love it,” she said, adding: “I see a lot of the truth behind everything now, even in the past, with all these months of suffering. I’ve done so much research and I see how evil this country is, really — all I see is evil. And it’s sad that I’m part of it.”
What’s coming next
Although Trump officials would surely love for this to be the end of the legal saga around the CECOT renditions, it will almost certainly continue. For one thing, to detain and remove them to CECOT, the government painted all those deported as being involved with a violent Venezuelan gang. Those allegations were quickly shown to be baseless. The lack of due process mean that many of those removed were seeking asylum when the Trump administration removed them, claiming fear of persecution by the Venezuelan government. Now, having been freed from CECOT, these former detainees will find themselves back in the country they had fled claiming fear of political repression.
Both Gonzalez and Vaamondes-Barrios suggested that some of the families of those removed are considering other means of accountability, including additional legal action. They may still try to gain citizenship for their removed husbands via marriage.
It’s a deeply complicated and confusing situation for those it’s touched. The government did not afford the minimal protections that it must, by law, provide to people it seeks to deport. It’s left them wondering what they could have done differently, and if they misjudged the country in which they were trying to build a home with their husbands. Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s testimony about having suffered psychological and physical torture while in CECOT looms in the background.
That confusion came out when I asked Gonzalez what she’ll say to her husband once they talk. She started sobbing, and said that she wanted to apologize to him for telling him that “he was safe here” and for “everything he had to go through,” and because “he knew that I supported Trump at one point.”
“Nobody should be feeling or going through what we went through,” she said.
