In the days before ICE agents arrested 22-year-old Ángel Blanco Marin, he was visiting his friend Fabian Olmos in New Jersey. The two singers had grown up with each other in Venezuela, and now in Olmos’ garage, they began rehearsing a song, and filming a music video.
Angel left Olmos’ that day, and headed back to the Bronx, where he worked delivering food for UberEats.
Two days later, on February 24 close to midnight, he went to hang outside an apartment building in the Bronx with two other friends.
That night would soon take a turn. As Documented previously reported, ICE agents arrested 19-year-old Merwil Gutiérrez that night and allegedly deported him to El Salvador’s megaprison, CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo). His story, as told by his father, Wilmer Gutiérrez, caught the attention of members of Congress as well as international media.
What we didn’t know then, was who Merwil was with: 23-year-old Joen Suarez Fuentes, and 22-year old Ángel Marin who, like him, had come from Venezuela with a dream to better his life.
Neither of the two have a criminal record in Venezuela.
According to witnesses at the scene, who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, about two dozen ICE agents arrived at the building’s entrance in about 10 vehicles. The agents then acted in quick succession, arresting the three young men and placing them in different cars.
Ángel, Fuentes, and Merwil ended up at the police station that night, unaware of exactly why they were being detained. In the days following, all three were taken across the country to detention centers in Philadelphia and Texas, ultimately reaching their believed final destination: El Salvador’s Terrorist Confinement Center.
From El Bronx to El Salvador
When Ángel was arrested, his friend Olmos was one of the first people he called. Olmos still can’t believe that his friend Ángel could be one of the 238 inmates for whom Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is charging $20,000 a year per head to incarcerate, as reported by the Associated Press.
They had known each other since they were children, and both arrived in the United States in 2022: Olmos with a visa and Ángel crossing the border from Mexico.
“It feels horrible. I never thought he would end up in that place,” Olmos, 21, told Documented in Spanish. “Ángel is not just any friend; he’s someone I’ve known since I was a kid. He was the closest thing to family I had here.”
Ángel told Olmos that on the day of the arrest, officers drove him through Fordham Street, a street lined with street vendors, jewelry stores and pharmacies, before they arrived at a nearby police station. Days later, he was transferred to Pennsylvania. Then to the Valle Detention Facility in Texas.
In his phone calls with Olmos, almost always around midnight, Ángel usually didn’t talk much about life in detention for fear of being overheard. “He would call me to motivate me [to continue making music] so I wouldn’t stop,” Olmos said, admitting he still could not make sense of Ángel’s arrest. “Someone who is in a gang would not be working with a delivery bike [for UberEats] in the Bronx.”
Most of the deportees “have no criminal record”
Ángel arrived in New York City three years ago, after a nearly two-month journey through Central America. Once at the southern border, he turned himself in to immigration authorities. As he was a minor at the time, he was sent to a shelter in New York. Months later, the first room Ángel was able to afford in the city was a room he rented with Olmos in the Bronx, after reuniting in the city. But the time came when, according to Olmos, “things got tough.”
They both lost their jobs and went to live, along with their friend Fuentes, under a tent in a neighborhood park. (Fuentes’ family declined to talk to Documented.) To bathe, they went to a nearby gym. To eat, they scrounged whatever food they could. After almost two months, little by little, they managed to get off the streets. But neither forgets the time when they slept cramped together in an outdoor park.
On March 13, almost two weeks after his arrest, Ángel called another of his friends while he was in prison, 21-year-old Venezuelan Silvery López, with whom he had also spoken to every day since he was detained.
Night after night, he told her about his days and how he was paid about $4 an hour to work cleaning around the prison.
Also Read: Merwil Gutiérrez’s Deportation Ignites Political Firestorm Among NY Elected Officials
But this call sounded different. He asked López to immediately get in touch with his father to tell him he was being deported the next day to Venezuela. Ángel’s 58-year-old father, who shares the same name — Ángel Blanco — answered López’s call from his home in Venezuela, where he lives with his wife and youngest son and works for the Ministry of Health.
When López told Ángel his son would be deported, he began preparing for his arrival. He couldn’t deny that he was happy, he told Documented via phone call, even though he knew it would be difficult for Ángel to be sent back to Venezuela. “I was happy because he was coming,” he said. “I painted his room. I fixed it up for when he arrives. I bought him balloons.”
The next day, his father got up early, got dressed, and traveled to the Simón Bolívar International Airport, in the state of La Guaira, where flights with deportees from the United States were expected to arrive. He waited several hours. Ángel did not arrive. His father asked about his son. Nobody knew anything. He looked at the boards with the flight announcements. No information. “I stayed until the afternoon and asked everywhere, but my son never arrived,” he said, who noted that his son did not have a lawyer.
López called the Texas detention center to find out whether or not Ángel had finally been deported. “I asked for Ángel, I gave all his information, and they told me that yes, he was still detained there,” she said in Spanish. “I asked them if he was there, why didn’t he call, and the person who answered told me that maybe he didn’t have any money or was busy. I didn’t believe him; it seemed to me that they lied to me.”
Days later, Ángel’s family and friends would see on the news the same images that terrified the world: dozens of detainees, completely shaved, hands cuffed at CECOT after the agreement between Presidents Donald Trump and Bukele to send deported migrants to El Salvador. The Republican administration, circumventing a judge’s order that temporarily blocked deportation, relied on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which they had been using to justify expulsion of those they consider “enemies of the country.”
Neither Ángel’s father nor his friends saw him in the images disseminated, but they learned that Ángel had been deported to El Salvador after CBS News published a list with the names of 238 people sent there. That was the same way Wilmer Gutiérrez, Merwil’s father, learned that his son had been deported to the same Central American country.
“Ángel was tricked into going there,” said López. “They told him they were going to deport him to Venezuela, and it wasn’t so. Since then, I haven’t been able to hear from him.”
Also Read: ‘They Took Him Anyway’: Cousin Who Witnessed Arrest of Merwil Gutiérrez Speaks Out
To this day, the father has no explanation for the detention of his son, whom he describes as a “calm boy” who only wanted to sing, earn a little money, and eventually return to Venezuela. In the absence of information to the family, the father thinks that, although none of his son’s tattoos allude to the El Tren de Aragua gang, he was arrested because “he had tattoos,” which has been one of the main pretexts of the government to imprison alleged criminals.
One of the few times Ángel and his dad argued was when Ángel first got a tattoo.
“He never told me he was going to get a tattoo, that was a mark for life,” said his father. It’s a line written on his neck that reads ‘Valles represent,’ as the name of his hometown Valles del Tuy, a sort of permanent reminder of where he belongs. The rest of his tattoos, Ángel got from a tattoo artist he shared a rental with in the Bronx. On his neck, fingers and arm are tattoos of a spaceship, a small Donald Duck, a Chinese character, his mother’s name and that of Katherine, a friend.
Although the Trump administration has used tattoos to link migrants to El Tren de Aragua, Ángel’s father insists his son has no criminal record. Documented, who had access to the criminal records, was also able to verify that the young Venezuelan has no police record in Colombia or Venezuela, countries where he has lived.
However, that apparently was not enough to escape the “largest deportation” in U.S. history that President Trump wants to carry out. According to Juan Pappier, deputy director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, which is investigating the cases of the detainees in El Salvador, out of at least 50 cases evaluated, the majority “have no criminal record.” A CBS 60 investigation found that 75% of the 238 identified deported to CECOT have no criminal record in the United States or Venezuela, and some in other countries where they have lived, such as Colombia or Peru.
“There are a few with serious criminal records and many with very minor offenses such as crossing the border illegally,” Pappier explained in an interview. “There are many indications that these people are actually accused of being from El Tren de Aragua because of their tattoos, despite the fact that, according to experts, tattoos are not something that gang members use on a consistent basis.”
What HRW has been able to verify is the same thing that many claim to the U.S. government: the “violation of due process” by sending migrants to El Salvador without giving them the opportunity to appear before a judge or communicate with their lawyers or family members. The Supreme Court ruled that Venezuelans threatened with deportation must be given a measure of due process and the opportunity to challenge their removal from the U.S.
“We are facing forced disappearances, because not only have they been held incommunicado, but their families have been constantly prevented from having information about the whereabouts or fate of these people,” Pappier told Documented.
“They kidnapped our children from us to negotiate as if they were merchandise”
Ángel’s father has no doubt that this is a “kidnapping,” even more so when President Bukele proposed to President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in late April to exchange Venezuelan prisoners in CECOT for political prisoners in Venezuelan jails.
“They kidnapped our children from us to negotiate as if they were merchandise,” he said, also blaming the U.S. government for being “the main [party] responsible” for everything they are going through. “Every tear[drop], every sleepless day, all the mistreatment of our children, is the absolute responsibility of the United States,” he said.
The father’s life has changed since then. There are days when he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t feel like going to his job, he barely sleeps. “I cry from knowing that my son is in prison — in hell.”
There are days when Ángel’s father wonders if his son has eaten, if his son has bathed, just as he did when he was little. “I bathed him, dressed him, took him to baseball, to the theater, made him lunch,” he said.
He never wanted his son to leave Venezuela, but he understood when he did. There were days when they would stand in long lines in town to buy two pounds of rice. They barely had enough to eat. “The situation we had was challenging,” says the father. “When we were at home, Ángel wanted to eat all the rice by himself, and I would tell him it couldn’t be like that.”
So when he arrived in New York and started working, the father kept telling Ángel that it wasn’t money he wanted. “I would always tell him, ‘don’t send me money, send me peace of mind.’ ”
Now it is precisely that, peace of mind, that he lacks.
