When ICE agents stopped Merwil Gutiérrez outside his apartment building in the Bronx on February 24, they immediately realized that Merwil was not their intended target.
One said, "He’s not the one."
The other said, "Take him anyway."
Merwil is 19 years old, the same age as Barron Trump.
Until February, Merwil was—like NYU student Barron—living legally in NYC. The Gutiérrez family had successfully opened an asylum case after arriving at Ciudad de Juárez, a town in Mexico near the U.S. border in 2023.
But unlike the President's son, Gutiérrez is now imprisoned in El Salvador’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
As Documented reported, Merwil Gutiérrez "had no criminal record, neither in Venezuela nor the U.S., nor did he have any tattoos — one of the features that the U.S. police used to link them to the Tren de Aragua gang. But none of that stopped him from being arrested. "
“I feel like my son was kidnapped,” says his father Wilmer Gutiérrez.
ICE Took His Son From Their Bronx Home. Now His Son Is In Bukele’s Mega-prison In El Salvador
Merwil Gutiérrez had no criminal record when ICE agents detained the 19-year-old outside his home. Now his father, Wilmer, is still searching for answers.
Paz Radovic
Team Trump has made dozens of deportation "mistakes"
Merwil Gutiérrez is just one of dozens of people the Trump administration has deported to El Salvador without due process and often in error.
A recent analysis by 60 Minutes found that 75% of those sent to CECOT had no criminal record:
Among them: a makeup artist, a soccer player and a food delivery driver, being held in a place so harsh that El Salvador's justice minister once said the only way out is in a coffin.
The most famous case—that of Kilmar Ábrego García—has not only reached the Supreme Court. It has already brought us to a constitutional crisis after Trump—and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele—openly mocked the 9-0 SCOTUS ruling ordering the administration to "facilitate" Garcia's return.
On Wednesday April 16, Maryland’s Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen flew to El Salvador but the government there denied his request to visit his illegally detained constituent Kilmar Ábrego García.
Other Trump administration deportation "mistakes" include gay barber and makeup artist Andry José Hernández Romero who, as Philip Holsinger reported for TIME:
Sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, 'I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.' I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster."
Andry does have a crown tattooed on each of his wrists. His family says the tattoos were a symbol of his beloved Three Kings festival.
In March, Andry's attorney told Rachel Maddow: “these are not the tattoos of somebody who is involved with gangs. These are normal tattoos that you would see on anybody at a coffee shop anywhere in the United States or Venezuela.”
Reporting for TIME, Holsinger documented the arrival of 261 men forcibly disappeared by the US government as they flew into El Salvador and were transported to CECOT:
Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them... After being shaved, the detainees were stripped naked. More of them began to whimper; the hard faces I saw on the plane had evaporated.
"I watched them become ghosts," he wrote.
Team Trump is also "disappearing" students
Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was seized by masked thugs in Massachusetts. Mahmoud Khalil was arrested outside Columbia University in NYC. Both were shipped to Louisiana to appear before MAGA-friendly judges.
They are among nearly a dozen students and faculty members at colleges across the country are known to have been detained by federal agents amid the Trump administration’s recent crackdown.
In recent weeks, nearly 300 students have also had their visas revoked.
Says U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal:
The Trump administration is out of control with indiscriminate, and often illegal actions, in the name of so-called immigration enforcement. They have been disappearing people from their homes in the middle of the night, kidnapping people in the middle of the street, deporting individuals to prison camps, and flagrantly violating people’s human, civil, and due process rights.
Jayapal slams Trump officials—including JD Vance—for spreading lies about those being disappeared.
She also notes that the US is now paying El Salvador millions of taxpayer dollars to illegally imprison people in violation of their fundamental rights.
Even "privileged" Brits and Canadians are no longer safe
Canadian actress and entrepreneur Jasmine Mooney was recently detained by ICE for 12 days while attempting to renew her work visa.
She spoke about the ordeal with Amanpour and Co, describing how she was arrested after legally presenting herself at a U.S. immigration office for a visa renewal.
Despite being placed in a unit for detainees with zero criminal records, Mooney and her fellow inmates endured harsh conditions. During the ordeal she was transferred her from one prison to another, a process that entailed having chains wrapped around her waist, along with handcuffs on her hands that were attached to her waist, plus handcuffs on her feet.
All because she applied for a visa.
Mooney's release from custody came the day after she was able to reach a Canadian friend who took her story to the media.
The women with whom she was sharing cells were not so lucky.
"I am 100% privileged," she said. "That was something that really, really came to me when I was in there and that is why I've been so vocal about this story. This isn't my story. This is thousands and thousands of women that are placed in these systems that do not have my privilege."
British cartoonist R.E. “Becky” Burke faced a similar ordeal after being detained by ICE in Tacoma, Washington. She was sent home in chains after 19 days.
Some ordeals were briefer.
After three members of legendary punk rock band UK Subs were denied entry, detained, and then deported from the US in March, bassist Alvin Gibbs responded in true punk fashion: “I’m kind of proud of myself for being thrown out of America at the age of 67.”
US citizens are next on Team Trump's list
Trump is openly salivating at the prospect of sending "homegrowns"—US citizens—to prison in El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center and throwing away the key.
Eager to please her boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi is already telling Fox News she's looking forward to sending Americans who commit "heinous crimes" to rot in CECOT.
Will these Americans also be kidnapped off the streets and denied due process?
Will "administrative errors" continue to get made?
According to military courts, "kidnapping is one of the most heinous offenses known to law."
It's a crime that Bondi herself—along with other leaders in the Trump administration—are committing in broad daylight.
If the courts can't stop them, as the Supreme Court itself noted in the case of Gompers v. Buck’s Stove & Range Co. in 1911: "What the Constitution now fittingly calls the ‘judicial power of the United States’ would be a mere mockery.”
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