The last time that Wilmer Gutièrrez had heard from his son, he was in an immigration detention center in Texas, not far from the border with Mexico. The phone call was brief and urgent.
“Pay attention,” his son, Merwil Gutièrrez, said from the facility, his second stop after being arrested in front of his Bronx apartment building. “They are going to take us out again.”
Then, he was gone. It was the middle of March. For more than four months, his father would know little about his son’s fate.
Mr. Gutièrrez, who had come to New York from Venezuela with his father two years ago seeking asylum, had become one of an increasing number of immigrants taken into custody by federal authorities, their whereabouts unknown or unclear to their families.
It turned out that he had been sent to a notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where he remained for months. Then in July, his relatives received another phone call. This time, they learned that Mr. Gutièrrez, who is 20, was bound for Venezuela, one of more than 200 men who were returned to their homeland in exchange for the release of 10 Americans from Venezuelan custody.
On July 19, at the airport in Caracas, glass doors slid open, and one by one, the formerly incarcerated Venezuelans, many wearing white polo shirts and jeans, walked through. Mr. Gutièrrez emerged, arms open, and his sister leaped toward him.
“God is great,” the sister, Wisleydy Gutièrrez, said in a social media post.
Mr. Gutièrrez’s case illustrates the fraught, frenzied nature of some of the apprehensions undertaken during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which has unfolded amid a national debate about who should be targeted for deportation and who should get to stay in the United States.
Some cases, including those of a Maryland father named Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and a makeup artist named Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, received prominent press coverage.
But many others, like Mr. Gutièrrez’s, are playing out beyond the national spotlight, in a nation divided over the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. As the president’s dragnet sweeps up thousands of people, family members have been left behind in the shadows, hoping for a reunion.
Mr. Gutièrrez and his father arrived in the United States in 2023 after reaching the border with Mexico, where they used a Biden-era mobile app to start the process of applying for asylum and were put on a bus to New York City.
They lived quietly in the Bronx, his family said, and Mr. Gutièrrez worked an overnight shift sorting packages near Kennedy Airport. They were continuing the often yearslong effort to obtain asylum and remained without legal status.
On Feb. 24, when he was returning to his apartment building, law enforcement officials descended. They accused Mr. Gutièrrez of gun crimes and arrested him, though there is no indication charges against him were ultimately pursued.
As with many other immigrants detained by the Trump administration, the details of Mr. Gutièrrez’s case, some of which were first reported by the news site Documented, remain murky.
On that February day, his cousin Luis Acosta heard a commotion outside of their apartment building and poked his head out of a third-floor window. He said he saw Mr. Gutièrrez talking to two men outside when officers with “N.Y.P.D.” and “F.B.I.” emblazoned on their clothing swarmed the building.
The agents asked Mr. Gutièrrez which of the men standing outside the building was named Angel. He did not answer the question and instead gave them his own name, Mr. Acosta said. Even though Mr. Gutièrrez was not the man they were looking for, an agent said to take him anyway, Mr. Acosta recalled. With that, Mr. Gutièrrez was handcuffed, pushed into a car and driven away.
Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary with the Department of Homeland Security, said that F.B.I. agents and city police officers had arrested Mr. Gutièrrez on several gun charges, which she said made him a candidate for deportation. The department issued a news release enumerating the charges.
But there is no evidence that authorities in New York sought to follow through on those charges. The Police Department has repeatedly said that there are “no arrests on file” for Mr. Gutièrrez, and no cases connected to him appear in state or federal databases.
A law enforcement official familiar with the circumstances of the arrest who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said that the charges against Mr. Gutièrrez had not been pursued because of insufficient evidence.
Mr. Gutièrrez’s father and cousin spent days searching for him at police precincts and courthouses in the Bronx. No one knew where he was. Mr. Acosta said it was not until he entered his cousin’s name into a locator operated online by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that they realized he had been detained in Pennsylvania at a processing center. He had been sent there the day after he was arrested and turned over to ICE.
Then, on March 15, Wilmer Gutièrrez’s phone rang. He heard his son’s voice.
“He was desperate because he had been arrested and locked up without having ever committed a crime,” the father said. “Then he tells me the problem we have right now is that we are Venezuelans, and they want to deport us.”
From Pennsylvania, Merwil Gutièrrez was transferred to the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville, Texas.
And then, he was gone, his record erased from the ICE database.
His father said that after he got the phone call, he searched for reports of immigrant flights landing in Venezuela, to no avail.
His worry turned to despair a day later when news broke that the Trump administration had sent three planes carrying 238 Venezuelan migrants to the prison in El Salvador, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
Then, CBS News published the names of Venezuelan men on those flights. There, in bold, black letters, appeared the name “Merwil Gutièrrez Flores.”
It was not until The New York Times began investigating Mr. Gutièrrez’s case that federal immigration officials confirmed that he was taken to CECOT.
Darling Restrepo, one of Mr. Gutierrez’s lawyers, said that she could not understand how Mr. Gutièrrez had been sent to El Salvador based on charges that were never pursued.
“He was just wiped off and disappeared from his building,” she said. “It’s just wrong.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly defended its decision to send hundreds of Venezuelan men to CECOT, claiming that many had ties to or tattoos associated with the street gang Tren de Aragua. Mr. Gutièrrez has no tattoos, according to a federal immigration document and to his family and lawyers, who insist he has never belonged to a gang.
Two years have passed since Wilmer Gutièrrez and his son fled Venezuela, where the economy had cratered. They trekked across Colombian mountaintops and wide swaths of the Darién Gap until they reached Mexico.
There, they entered the United States with the assistance of the mobile app, CBP One, which the Biden administration used to allow people to enter the country legally and begin the lengthy process of claiming asylum. The Trump administration has since called the app unlawful and terminated its use.
Father and son put themselves to work in hopes of earning enough money to return to Venezuela in a couple of years.
At the end of long shifts, they would retreat to an apartment where they lived with about six other men, sleeping in bunk beds.
Since February, Wilmer Gutièrrez had stared at his son’s bed wondering if he would ever see him resting there again.
Then came a call last month from his daughter, who told him the United States was devising a prisoner swap and her brother was being freed from CECOT.
The next day, Merwil Gutièrrez boarded a plane to Venezuela. Thousands of miles away, his father waited, calling his relatives there for updates and praying.
Several days later, his phone rang once more. It was his son, speaking through tears as he described his time in the penitentiary in El Salvador. Now, he was back in Venezuela, living with his family.
“He tells me that he was asking God every day for him to give strength to us family members,” Wilmer Gutièrrez said, “and to give him strength to continue standing.”
Shayla Colon is a reporter covering New York City and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
The post ICE Deported Him. His Father Heard Nothing for Months. Then, a Call. appeared first on New York Times.
