It was March 13 when Nedizon Alejandro Leon Rengel called his brother Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel to wish him a happy birthday.
Alejandro never heard back from him. Federal agents detained Adrián on his way to his job at a Dallas barbershop.
For the next five weeks, Alejandro has searched for Adrián, trying to learn where he was: deported to another country? Held in an immigration facility in the United States?
He and Adrián’s live-in girlfriend called Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas, getting shifted from office to office with different responses.
Sometimes they were told Adrián was still in detention. Another time they were told that he had been deported back to “his country of origin,” El Salvador, even though Adrián is Venezuelan. (Alejandro provided NBC News with audio recordings of the calls.)
Their mother went to a detention center in Caracas, Venezuela, where deportees are held when they arrive from the United States, Alejandro said, but she was told no one by her son’s name was there.
They enlisted the help of advocacy groups. Cristosal, a nonprofit organization in El Salvador working with families of presumed deportees to get answers from the U.S. and Salvadoran governments, had no answers. Same with the League of United Latin American Citizens, known as LULAC.
Alejandro’s 6-year-old niece asked him almost every day: When will her dad call her?
“For 40 days, his family has been waiting to hear his fate,” LULAC CEO Juan Proaño said.
Finally, on Tuesday, an answer. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed to NBC News that Adrián had, in fact, been deported — to El Salvador.
We need to stop using language like “deported” in these cases.
That man was kidnapped and put into an out-of-country concentration camp.
This is blatant Nazism. Let’s call a spade a spade.
Yep. He was also human trafficked and exiled!
He was sent to a gulag. The media needs to start calling it that.
No, in gulag you work. CECOT is a death camp.
Starting to look like The Farm is Auschwitz. CECOT is Dachau.
Absolutely right!
Let the shitting on his character begin. “Did the evil bastard do cocaine?” as the Republican looks up with white powder clinging to his nose. We are in an evil time and I hate knowing what it feels like to be a non-Nazi in Nazi Germany.
So if they try to pull you over, the best solution is to shoot first and ask questions later. You’ll die in El Salvador anyway, so you may as well take out some fake feds
