On Tuesday, after this story published, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said 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 Prada’s case suggests a new level of disarray in the immigration system, as officials face pressure to rapidly fulfil President Donald 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 practising and teaching immigration law,” Cornell Law School immigration scholar Stephen Yale-Loehr said.
“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.”
The fate of the people sent to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Centre outside San Salvador, El Salvador, as it now appears Prada was, has been the subject of an intense legal battle. A federal judge declared the deportations illegal because the men were not afforded due process, and they were ordered returned to the United States. The order has not been fulfilled.
On Saturday, the Supreme Court temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting another group of Venezuelans under the same wartime law that it had invoked when it transferred migrants to El Salvador last month.
Alleged Venezuelan gang members deported from the US arrive at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre on March 16.Credit: El Salvador Presidential Press Office via AP
Yet Prada’s family had no ability to go to court: his name did not appear on the list of people on the flights, nor did it appear anywhere else in the US government’s record-keeping system for immigrants who have been detained or deported. Venezuelan authorities also could not find any information about him, according to his family.
The New York Times reviewed immigration court records and traced Prada’s arrest and transfer to a detention facility in Michigan, as well as his deportation order. He no longer appeared on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainee locator, and his family and friends were searching urgently for answers.
ICE officials did not respond to queries from the Times about Prada’s case over the past three days. But on Tuesday, after this story published, McLaughlin said officials conducted an investigation after Prada’s attempt to re-enter the US in Michigan in January.
“Further investigation resulted in Prada being designated a public safety threat as a confirmed member of Tren de Aragua,” a Venezuelan street gang, “and in violation of his conditions of admission,” she said.
A prison guard transfers deportees from the US, alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Centre in Tecoluca, El Salvador.Credit: AP
She did not say why he did not appear on the list of those deported to El Salvador or on any other publicly available records.
Michelle Brané, executive director of Together and Free, a nonprofit that assists families of deportees, and who had been trying to locate Prada, said allegations of gang membership had never come up during her group’s inquiries, and that, in fact, Prada’s Social Security card and government-issued work permit had arrived in the mail on Monday.
Prada is among tens of thousands of Venezuelans who migrated to the US in recent years as their country descended into crisis under the government of Nicolás Maduro.
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Despite having a few years of college, he did not see a future in Venezuela, his brother Hugo said. Another brother moved to Chile; a sister settled in Peru. Ricardo, the youngest of the four, migrated to Colombia around 2019 and worked as a private security guard.
He and his former partner, Maria Alejandra Vega, had a son, Alessandro, who is now aged four. Mother and child returned to Venezuela in 2022, after the couple broke up. Prada supported his son and spoke with him regularly, according to Vega.
In 2024, Prada set out for the US over land.
He was admitted at a port of entry on November 29, 2024, after waiting in Mexico to obtain an appointment through an app, CBP One, which the Biden administration had encouraged migrants to use in order to reduce chaotic crossings at the southern border, and was allowed to stay in the US while his case was considered.
Prada joined Javier in Chicago, where he remained for a little over a month until he decided to move to Detroit, according to his friend.
On January 15, in broad daylight, Prada found himself on the Ambassador Bridge, on a one-way road that connects Michigan to Ontario. About 1pm, he sent Javier a text with a pin of his location. “Look where I am,” he said in the text shared with the Times. He added an emoji of a shocked face.
When Javier next heard from his friend, Prada was at the Calhoun County Correctional Centre in western Michigan. Using the CBP One app had allowed him to enter the country once, but he did not have permission to enter a second time and was subject to mandatory detention.
The friends stayed in touch, with Javier depositing money into Prada’s account so he could make calls. An immigration judge granted a postponement on February 3, after Prada had requested more time to find legal representation. He failed to secure a lawyer, Javier said, and was ordered to be deported on February 27. He was transferred to an ICE facility in Ohio and then to the El Valle Detention Facility in South Texas.
He managed to call his child, Alessandro, in the early weeks of detention, Vega said. “Ricardo sounded defeated, sad,” she recalled.
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On March 15, Prada phoned Javier and told him that it appeared that repatriations to Venezuela were imminent and that he might be included.
“I told him, ‘Tranquilo, everything will be OK,’” Javier recalled. “I thought, He’ll be home soon.”
That evening, federal authorities transferred three planes carrying migrants to El Salvador, with Trump administration officials claiming the men were members of Tren de Aragua.
A Times investigation found little evidence of any criminal history – or any association with the gang – for most of the men.
Prada had tattoos, but he was not a gang member, according to his family and friends. They assumed he had been deported to one of several countries where Venezuelan immigrants had been sent in recent months, including Costa Rica, Mexico and Honduras. (Venezuela had not been accepting deportation flights.)
But days went by, and no one heard from Prada.
When a list of people who had been sent to the prison in El Salvador surfaced, they thought he might be on it. But he was not. (The Times and other news organisations obtained the list of immigrants who were on the flights to El Salvador, though that list was never officially published.)
“He fell off the face of the earth,” Vega said. “It was sheer agony.”
Brané said her staff searched the publicly accessible ICE database, contacted the detention facility in Texas, checked with the relevant ICE field office and headquarters and scoured inmate lists at jails.
“A lot of people have reached out to us, and we have been able to figure out where their family members are,” Brané said. Prada’s case was different, she said – there was simply no record.
Levey said that he, too, had repeatedly tried to obtain information from ICE. Eventually, he said, an officer told him that Prada had been deported but refused to share further details.
Vega, told that Prada appeared to be in El Salvador, expressed frustration at the government’s claim that he had been involved in a criminal gang.
“How can they leave us in the dark for so long and then accuse him of something without proof?” she said. “God knows he doesn’t belong to any gang.”
