Her Husband Is Trapped in a Salvadoran Prison. She Has No Idea How to Get Him Back.

Courtesy Luz Zambrano

On February 7, Luz Zambrano gave birth to her second child, Alana Samantha. She hadn’t expected to do so without her husband, Julio Zambrano Perez, by her side. But Luz went into labor only days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Zambrano Perez, during a routine check-in appointment. Weeks later, the Trump administration sent him, along with 237 other Venezuelan men, to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Luz has been left lost and confused.

“We don’t even know what to do,” Luz tells me. “We don’t understand what they are going to do with him. Nobody answers. Not here, not in Venezuela, not anywhere.” 

Zambrano Perez’s family says ICE misidentified him as a gang member because of two tattoos he has: one of a rose and another of a crown. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.) Now, his fate is uncertain. In the aftermath of his disappearance to a foreign country, the asylum-seeking family—who was building their lives in a suburb of North Carolina—has been abruptly torn apart, perhaps indefinitely. As we speak on the phone, I can hear her infant’s cries in the background. Luz tells me she just went to the hospital. Her two-month-old baby has the flu.

In mid-March, President Donald Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to detain and remove, without due process, Venezuelans accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. The administration then swiftly flew three planes to El Salvador, prompting a judicial clash with a federal judge who temporarily halted the deportations over whether the White House disobeyed a court order to return on-air flights to the United States. (On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can resume removals under the Act.)

As our reporting revealed, many of the men dispatched to El Salvador without any notice appear to have been plucked by the US government because of their tattoos—despite the fact that they had no proven ties to the group. An analysis by CBS News failed to find criminal records for 179—or 75 percent—of the Venezuelans. One man whose loved ones we spoke with, Neri Alvarado Borges, has an autism awareness tattoo for his 15-year-old brother. Another is a makeup artist whose tattoos on his wrists depict a crown and the words “Mom” and “Dad’ in English. 

The Trump White House has admitted in court filings to have wrongfully sent another man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador even though he had been granted protection from deportation to his native country by an immigration judge. Still, the administration claims US courts can’t compel them to bring the Maryland father of three back to the United States. During a district court hearing last week, a Justice Department attorney, who has since been placed on leave, acknowledged Abrego Garcia shouldn’t have been removed, saying the government’s “absence of evidence speaks for itself.” 

Federal judge Paula Xinis agreed. “That silence is telling,” she wrote in a 22-page decision. “As Defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador—let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere.” She required Abrego Garcia be brought back to the United States by Monday night; the administration appealed, asking the Supreme Court to pause the order mandating his return. On Monday, Chief John Justice Roberts granted the government’s request while the court considered arguments in the case.

That wasn’t the only victory the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration. On Monday evening, the justices decided in a 5-4 ruling to lift the lower court’s temporary restraining order blocking the summary deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. All the justices agreed, however, that those subject to the proclamation invoking the wartime statute are “entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”

Some of the men the Trump administration disappeared to El Salvador on March 15th had pending asylum cases in the United States. That means there’s a possibility they could have eventually been allowed to stay in the country had they not been denied the opportunity to make their case in front of an immigration judge. Instead, they’re stuck in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, without access to lawyers or their families. 

“We don’t know how he is,” Zambrano Perez’s sister Anaurys Orlimar told Mother jones. “If he’s eating, how he’s doing physically or mentally. We don’t know anything about our brother.” She says their mother cries every day. “They took them there for no reason—purely for politics,” Anaurys adds. “That’s why they took those people there unjustly. And that’s what makes me the most angry.”

Zambrano Perez’s family left Venezuela in 2018 amidst the country’s economic collapse and worsening violence. Initially, they lived in Peru. Their first daughter was born there. They had a small plot of land and Zambrano Perez worked in construction. But they were being targeted for extortion. In early 2023, the family decided to move to Chile, where they stayed for eight months before heading north. They crossed several countries and the jungle between Colombia and Panama until they reached Mexico.

Luz says they had no money to stay in Mexico, so in late November 2023 they surrendered to US border patrol in Matamoros. Zambrano Perez was given a notice to appear before an immigration judge on February 24, 2027, in North Carolina. The family relocated to Davidson, just north of Charlotte, where Zambrano Perez’s sister lives. They applied for asylum last May with the help of a paralegal and Zambrano Perez obtained a work permit. As the breadwinner, he worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant and at a hotel. Their first daughter enrolled in a bilingual preschool.

The family says Zambrano Perez has no criminal history in the United States or elsewhere. (All Mother Jones found were two citations for driving without a license and insurance and having an expired license plate. Luz and Anaurys explained that the man who sold Zambrano Perez a car failed to notify him that the license plates had been surrendered.)

In the early hours of January 29, 2025, the famly went to a regular check-in appointment with ICE in Charlotte. Luz, who was pregnant at the time, says when an officer called Zambrano Perez’s name, they didn’t suspect anything because he had never had issues before. But, then the office started asking him if he was involved with any criminal group and inquiring about his clothing and tattoos. Zambrano Perez has a tattoo on his hand of a crown with his name on it that he got when he was 15 years old. He has another tattoo of a rose. 

Three hours went by, Luz says, and then the officer came back and told her they were going to keep her husband detained for investigation. They suspected he was part of a gang. She protested, saying all he did was go from home to work and back. Luz says they took Zambrano Perez’s work authorization and some immigration documents and told her to go home. ICE then transferred Zambrano Perez to the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia.

Luz and his family gathered letters from community members vouching for his character. “Julio Zambrano Perez exemplifies what America represents,” the director of his daughter’s preschool wrote, “working hard, planning for the future, raising the next generation of responsible citizens.” But at an immigration bond hearing on February 26, he was denied release. A couple of weeks later, ICE moved Zambrano Perez to the El Valle Detention Facility, located near an airport in Harlingen, Texas where deportation flights depart from. 

On Friday, March 14, Zambrano Perez called Luz. “I think they’re going to take us to Venezuela,” he said. He phoned later that evening to say the plane couldn’t take off because of turbulence. The next day, he was in touch in the morning to say they were going to depart. He has not called again.

“We even called and told my mother to go to Caracas to receive my brother,” Anaurys tells me. “We were all left waiting.” No planes arrived in Venezuela.

The family scrambled to find Zambrano Perez. Anaurys says she was frantically searching the news and social media for any information. They also reached out to Ernesto Castañeda, who had appeared live on the Colombian news network NTN24 to provide commentary on the news that the Trump administration was sending planeloads of Venezuelans to El Salvador, to ask for any information about Zambrano Perez’s whereabouts. (Castañeda, the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies Sociology at American University, tried to look up his information on ICE’s online detainee locator, but he was no longer in the system.)

When the family called the last detention center he had been at in Texas, they were told he was no longer in the United States. “The only thing is that he has tattoos and that he was born in the state of Aragua,” Castañeda says. “But it’s ridiculous to say that everybody from the state of Aragua is a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.”

Although Tren de Arangua has its roots in a prison in the northern state of Aragua, experts say tattoos are not a marker of affiliation with the group. “It’s unfortunate that they that ICE officials made those very distorted and quick assumptions,” Castañeda says. (ICE and DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Zambrano Perez’s relatives feared he might have been sent to El Salvador. Then on March 20, CBS News published a list from an internal US government showing the names of the 238 men who had been sent to CECOT. He was among them. Unlike other families, they haven’t been able to confirm his detention through photos or videos. On the Justice Department’s website, his case still appears as pending and he has an upcoming court hearing on May 13.

“Frankly, it was a forced disappearance,” says Zambrano Perez’s other sister Beymar, who came with him to the United States. “He disappeared overnight, just like that, without a trace.” At one point in our conversation, one of the sisters describes Zambrano Perez’s personality—kind, hardworking—in the past tense, and the other jumps in to correct her, “he is kind and hardworking.”

For Luz, it’s been hard to get by without her husband. Her oldest daughter Danna Lucia, who is turning four soon, asks for her father daily. She wonders why he doesn’t come see her, if he doesn’t love her anymore. For now, Luz tells her he’s at work but that he’ll come back. “Every day you get up and think about what is going to happen,” she says.