In late January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan immigrant working in a delivery job in Detroit, picked up an order at a McDonald’s. He was heading to the address when he erroneously turned onto the Ambassador Bridge, which leads to Canada. It is a common mistake even for those who live in the Michigan border city. But for Mr. Prada, 32, it proved fateful.
The U.S. authorities took Mr. Prada into custody when he attempted to re-enter the country; he was put in detention and ordered deported. On March 15, he told a friend in Chicago that he was among a number of detainees housed in Texas who expected to be repatriated to Venezuela.
That evening, the Trump administration flew three planes carrying Venezuelan migrants from the Texas facility to El Salvador, where they have been ever since, locked up in a maximum-security prison and denied contact with the outside world.
But Mr. Prada has not been heard from or seen. He is not on the list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador that day. He does not appear in the photos and videos released by the authorities of shackled men with shaved heads.
“He has simply disappeared,” said Javier, a friend in Chicago, the last person with whom Mr. Prada had contact. The friend spoke about Mr. Prada on condition that he be identified only by his middle name, out of fear that he too could be targeted by the immigration authorities.
Mr. Prada’s brother, Hugo Prada, who is living in Venezuela, has also been trying to learn what happened. “We know nothing, nothing,” he said.
Mr. Prada’s disappearance has created concerns that more immigrants have been deported to El Salvador than previously known. It also raises the question of whether some deportees may have been sent to other countries with no record of it. The U.S. authorities have confirmed that he was removed from the United States. But to where?
“Ricardo’s story by itself is incredibly tragic — and we don’t know how many Ricardos there are,” said Ben Levey, a staff attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center who tried to locate Mr. Prada. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ultimately confirmed that he had been deported but did not divulge his destination.
The matter may be a simple oversight, but it has raised alarm among immigrant advocates and legal scholars, who say Mr. Prada’s case suggests a new level of disarray in the immigration system, as officials face pressure to rapidly fulfill President 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.
“This case shocks the conscience,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School. “I have not heard of a disappearance like this in my 40-plus years of practicing and teaching immigration law.”
He added, “This case represents a black hole where due process no longer exists.”
The fate of the people sent to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center outside San Salvador 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 that so far 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.
Yet Mr. Prada’s family has no ability to go to court: His name does not appear on the list of people on the flights, nor does it appear anywhere else in the U.S. government’s record-keeping system for immigrants who have been detained or deported. The Venezuelan authorities have also not found any information about him, according to his family.
ICE officials did not immediately respond to requests for information or comment on Mr. Prada’s case.
The New York Times has reviewed immigration court records and traced Mr. Prada’s arrest and transfer to a detention facility in Michigan, as well as his deportation order. He no longer appears on the ICE detainee locator.
Mr. Prada was among tens of thousands of Venezuelans who migrated to the United States in recent years as their country descended into crisis under the government of Nicolás Maduro.
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 gave birth to a son, Alessandro, who is now 4. Mother and child returned to Venezuela in 2022, after the couple broke up. Mr. Prada supported his son and spoke with him regularly, according to his mother, Maria Alejandra Vega.
In 2024, Mr. Prada set out for the United States over land.
He was admitted at a port of entry on Nov. 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 United States while his case was considered.
Mr. Prada joined Javier in Chicago, where he remained for about a little over a month until he decided to move to Detroit, according to his friend.
On Jan. 15, in broad daylight, Mr. Prada found himself on the Ambassador Bridge, on a one-way road that connects Michigan to Ontario. At about 1 p.m., 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, Mr. Prada was at the Calhoun County Correctional Center 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 Mr. Prada’s account so he could make calls. An immigration judge granted a postponement on Feb. 3, after Mr. Prada had requested more time to find legal representation. He failed to secure a lawyer, said Javier, and was ordered deported on Feb. 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, according to his mother. “Ricardo sounded defeated, sad,” she recalled.
On March 15, Mr. 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, the federal authorities transferred three planes carrying migrants to El Salvador, with Trump administration officials claiming that the men were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal gang.
A Times investigation found little evidence of any criminal history — or any association with the gang — for most of the men.
Mr. Prada had tattoos, but he was not a gang member, according to his family and friends. They assumed that 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 Mr. 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 New York Times and other news organizations 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,” said Ms. Vega. “It was sheer agony.”
Together and Free, a nonprofit that has been helping families of deportees, 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,” said Michelle Brané, executive director of the group. “In this case, we’re stumped.”
Mr. Levey said that he, too, had repeatedly tried to obtain information from ICE. Eventually, he said, an officer told him that Mr. Prada had been deported but refused to share further details, he said.
The Venezuelan authorities have not been able to help, Ms. Vega said.
“We have done everything to find him,” she said. “If he’s in prison, we want to know. We want to know if he is alive.”
Steven Rich contributed reporting.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
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