United States: Venezuelan immigrant Ricardo Prada, symbol of “enforced disappearances”

In late January, Ricardo Prada accepted an order while working as a home delivery driver in Michigan. But he accidentally crossed the Ambassador Bridge, which separates Detroit, in the United States, from Windsor, in Canada. “A common mistake,” even for residents of this border region, “that proved fatal,” according to The New York Times .

Arrested while trying to cross back into the United States, he was detained for months before “simply disappearing,” according to Javier, one of his friends, interviewed by the American daily. No official comment was made on him until a series of reports forced Tricia McLaughlin, the spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, to acknowledge that he had been sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, like dozens of other migrants.

Since March 15, 2025, as part of the tightening of immigration policy ordered by Donald Trump, the United States has expelled at least 252 Venezuelans to the imposing anti-terrorism center built in El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele to detain members of the Maras gang, despite opposition from the American justice system.

It took lists leaking to the press and Bukele proposing to his counterpart Nicolás Maduro to exchange these 252 men for Venezuelan political prisoners so that families could verify that their loved ones were locked up there, recalls Efecto Cocuyo . “A common situation in countries governed by Bukele and Maduro,” laments this Venezuelan media outlet.

The case of Ricardo Prada "raises fears that the number of immigrants expelled to El Salvador is higher than previously thought," says the New York Times, which believes that Trump's demand for results, determined to expel migrants accused of belonging to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, could increase the number of "blunders" by American authorities.

Because nothing—beyond being tattooed—suggests that Prada, the father of a four-year-old, is part of the Tren de Aragua. Like many of his compatriots, he likely fled the deep economic crisis that has gripped his country for a decade, first passing through Colombia, before landing in the United States in 2024, where he was granted safe conduct by the Joe Biden administration at the age of 32, while waiting for immigration authorities to decide on his case.

With Trump's United States and Maduro's Venezuela having no diplomatic relations, migrants from the South American country are being sent to third countries. And, although the Venezuelan foreign ministry has denounced their confinement in Salvadoran prisons (where they are shaved, chained, and locked up en masse) as "crimes against humanity," it has done little more, the online newspaper Tal Cual reports .

Interviewed by El País América , Juan Pappier, deputy director of the Americas division of the NGO Human Rights Watch, who has also been following the case, deplores the fact that these expulsions not only violate due process, "but that they are forced disappearances."