In late January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan immigrant working in a delivery job in Detroit, picked up an order at a McDonald’s. He was heading to the address when he erroneously turned onto the Ambassador Bridge, which leads to Canada. It is a common mistake even for those who live in the Michigan border city. But for Mr. Prada, 32, it proved fateful.
The U.S. authorities took Mr. Prada into custody when he attempted to re-enter the country; he was put in detention and ordered deported. On March 15, he told a friend in Chicago that he was among a number of detainees housed in Texas who expected to be repatriated to Venezuela.
That evening, the Trump administration flew three planes carrying Venezuelan >migrants from the Texas facility to El Salvador, where they have been ever since, locked up in a maximum-security prison and denied contact with the outside world.
But Mr. Prada has not been heard from or seen. He is not on a list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador that day. He does not appear in the photos and videos released by the authorities of shackled men with shaved heads.
...
On Tuesday, after the story published, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that Mr. Prada had been sent to El Salvador on March 15.
The failure to list his deportation and location on any publicly accessible records may have been a simple oversight, but the matter continues to raise alarm among immigrant advocates and legal scholars, who say Mr. Prada’s case suggests a new level of disarray in the immigration system, as officials face pressure to rapidly fulfill President Trump’s pledge of mass deportations. While hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been deported under various administrations in recent years, it is extraordinarily unusual for them to disappear without a legal record.
“I have not heard of a disappearance like this in my 40-plus years of practicing and teaching immigration law,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.
“It’s unconscionable that it took a New York Times article and more than one month before the government indicated where and why he was deported,” Mr. Yale-Loehr said.
Archived at https://archive.is/Lhy3D
Related, "He disappeared after detention. Now ICE is silent on the fate of Venezuelan man" (arc)
Either solitary confinement or they outright killed him.