Maikel Ramirez Forcibly Disappeared via ICE Custody
Maikel has Disappeared Into The Web of ICE Custody
On a Friday afternoon in March 2025, Maikel Enrique Moreno Ramírez called his father from a detention facility in Texas. He was happy, he said. Relief had finally come. U.S. authorities had told him that deportations back to Venezuela had been approved. He would be going home.
It was the last time his family heard his voice.
Maikel never landed in Venezuela. Instead, according to evidence gathered by human rights organizations, the 20-year-old barber from Maracaibo was transferred to CECOT — El Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo — a maximum-security mega-prison in El Salvador that has become synonymous with enforced disappearance, indefinite detention without trial, and documented human rights abuses. He was one of at least 252 young Venezuelan men sent there by the United States government in a legally and morally contested operation that has sparked international outcry and multiple ongoing legal challenges.
“My son has no tattoos, my son has no earrings, my son has none of those things, my son is not a criminal. He is not part of any gang, he’s not part of Tren de Aragua.” — Joana Ramírez, Maikel’s mother
Maikel’s story is not unique — but it is a window into a machinery of disappearance that has swallowed hundreds of young men whose only documented crime, in many cases, was crossing a border without authorization.
THE AMERICAN DREAM, INTERRUPTED
Venezuela’s economic and political collapse has driven millions from the country over the past decade. Maracaibo, Maikel’s home city in the oil-rich Zulia state, was once one of Venezuela’s most prosperous urban centers. Today it is a city hollowed out by blackouts, hyperinflation, and the departure of a generation of young people who see no future there.
Maikel came to the United States for “the American dream,” his mother Joana Ramírez said in a video posted to social media after her son’s disappearance — a video that went viral across the Venezuelan diaspora. He was not fleeing gang violence. He was not a criminal. He was a barber, a young man with a trade and a dream, who made the same journey that millions before him had made, through Central America and across the southern U.S. border.
After entering the country, Maikel did what immigration attorneys advise undocumented migrants to do: he complied with the system. He attended a scheduled immigration check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Las Vegas in September 2024. At that check-in, he was arrested.
By October 2024, Joana Ramírez had been informed by U.S. authorities that her son could be released on bond — but only if his family could pay $8,000. For a family in Venezuela, a country where the average monthly salary barely exceeds $20, that sum was an insurmountable barrier. Maikel remained in detention.
PRESSURE TO SIGN, PRESSURE TO CONFESS
What followed Maikel’s arrest fits a pattern that Human Rights Watch researchers have documented across dozens of cases: the systematic pressure on Venezuelan detainees to sign documents identifying themselves as members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational Venezuelan criminal organization that the Trump administration has designated a terrorist group and used as the legal and rhetorical justification for the mass deportations.
According to Maikel’s father, U.S. authorities “kept pressuring him to sign a document stating he was a member of the criminal group, and that by signing it, he would be deported to Venezuela.” Maikel understood, from the government-provided translators, that the document identified him as a Tren de Aragua member. He refused to sign.
“They kept pressuring him to sign a document stating he was a member of the criminal group, and that by signing it, he would be deported to Venezuela.” — Maikel’s father, as reported to Human Rights Watch
This detail is significant. The Trump administration’s legal basis for the CECOT transfers rests substantially on the claim that those transferred were Tren de Aragua members, relying on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime statute invoked to classify Venezuelan migrants as enemy combatants. If the government was attempting to coerce detainees into signing confessions of gang membership as a condition of deportation, it would raise serious questions about the evidentiary basis upon which hundreds of men were ultimately sent to a Salvadoran prison.
Maikel, by his family’s account, never signed.
THREE FACILITIES, DETERIORATING CONDITIONS
From Las Vegas, Maikel was transferred across the U.S. immigration detention system — a labyrinthine network of federal facilities, county jails, and private detention centers that holds hundreds of thousands of people at any given time. By the time of his last contact with his family, he had been held in at least three separate facilities, the final one in Texas.
Inside the Texas facility, Maikel and a group of fellow detainees made a video in which they gave testimony about the conditions they were experiencing and the mistreatment they alleged. The existence of this video — a desperate act of documentation by men who had no lawyers, no advocates, and no clear legal status — speaks to the fear that had taken hold. These were men who understood that something was wrong, that the rules they had been told governed their situation were not being followed, and who were trying to leave a record.
Access to legal counsel in immigration detention is not guaranteed. Unlike criminal defendants, civil immigration detainees have no right to a government-appointed attorney. Many detainees from Venezuela, particularly those from working-class backgrounds with no financial resources, navigated the entire system without a lawyer.
CECOT: THE PRISON AT THE END OF THE WORLD
El Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo was inaugurated in February 2023 by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as the centerpiece of his war on gangs. With a capacity of roughly 40,000 inmates, it is one of the largest prisons in the Western Hemisphere. Its design — concentric rings of cells, no natural light, permanent artificial illumination, no family visits, no legal access — is intended to be total. It is a place from which, by design, nothing is supposed to emerge.
Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, a regional human rights organization that has documented conditions inside CECOT and in El Salvador’s detention system broadly, has described what awaits those transferred there.
“There’s an implicit cruelty and dehumanization in the treatment of the prisoners. They leave the lights on 24 hours a day. The overcrowding is excessive. Families and lawyers do not have access to the prisoners. They’re entirely cut off.” — Noah Bullock, Cristosal
Human rights organizations have documented deaths in custody at CECOT and at other Salvadoran detention facilities used during Bukele’s state of exception. Inmates have died from apparent medical neglect, from documented abuse, and under circumstances that Salvadoran authorities have declined to fully explain. There is no independent monitoring of the facility. There are no public records of who is held there or under what legal authority.
For families like Maikel’s, this opacity is the most agonizing part. They cannot confirm their sons are alive. They cannot send letters. They cannot speak to lawyers on their behalf. They can only wait, and post videos to social media, and hope that someone is listening.
THE LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL CONTROVERSY
The transfers to CECOT did not occur without legal challenge. Federal judges, including U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia, issued emergency orders attempting to halt the deportation flights while courts considered whether the Alien Enemies Act could legally be applied to the men being transferred. Those orders were, by the government’s own subsequent acknowledgment, not complied with. The administration claimed the planes were already in the air.
The Supreme Court has weighed in, in a divided and contested fashion, on various aspects of the emergency litigation. The core legal question — whether the president can invoke an 18th-century wartime statute to summarily remove men from the country without individual hearings, without judicial review, and without the due process protections that courts have held apply to all persons on U.S. soil — remains unresolved.
Civil liberties organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and others have argued that the program represents an unprecedented assault on due process and the rule of law. The administration has argued that its executive authority in matters of national security and immigration is plenary and not subject to judicial second-guessing.
What is not in dispute is the outcome for the 252 men transferred to CECOT: they are gone, they are unreachable, and they have been offered no meaningful opportunity to contest whether they belonged in a Salvadoran mega-prison in the first place.
A MOTHER’S TESTIMONY
In the weeks since Maikel’s disappearance, Joana Ramírez has become one of the most visible faces of the families left behind — not because she sought that role, but because she refused to be silent.
The video she posted is a document of maternal grief and indignation in equal measure. She is not asking for sympathy. She is making a claim: her son is not who the U.S. government says he is. He has no tattoos — a marker immigration authorities have cited in some cases as evidence of gang affiliation. He has no earrings. He is a barber. He came to work. He came to build a life.
“He is not part of Tren de Aragua,” she says, with the particular precision of a mother who understands that these words are not just grief but legal argument, rebuttal, testimony. She is speaking to the record, because she knows there may not be another opportunity to do so.
Human rights organizations have noted that many of the men transferred to CECOT share a similar profile: young, Venezuelan, from working-class backgrounds, often with tattoos that have been read as gang insignia but which may have entirely different meanings — religious symbols, memorial tributes to family members, fashionable art. In some cases, the government’s evidence of gang membership amounts to little more than the tattoo on a man’s skin.
Maikel, whose family says he had no tattoos at all, represents a further extreme: a man for whom even that thin evidentiary thread does not exist.
THE 252 AND WHAT THEY REPRESENT
Maikel Moreno Ramírez is one name among 252. But each of those 252 represents a family, a community, a set of relationships and histories and futures that have been severed by a decision made in Washington and executed in the air between Texas and El Salvador.
Human rights researchers have been attempting, under considerable difficulty, to document who those men are. The Venezuelan diaspora — spread across dozens of countries, connected by social media and shared hardship — has become an informal network of information, with families posting videos and sharing names and attempting to verify, through the fragmentary connections available to them, whether their sons or brothers or husbands are alive.
What emerges from this documentation effort is a portrait of men who were, overwhelmingly, economic migrants. Men who left Venezuela because there was nothing left for them there. Men who entered the U.S. immigration system, in many cases, not clandestinely but openly, presenting themselves to border officials and awaiting the outcome of asylum claims or immigration proceedings. Men who, in the government’s reclassification, became enemy combatants overnight.
The Trump administration has maintained that all 252 men are Tren de Aragua members whose removal protects American communities. It has offered no individual evidence in public for these claims. No hearings were held. No judge reviewed the individual files before the planes departed.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW
For Maikel’s family, and for the families of the other 251 men, the immediate question is survival. Are their sons alive? Are they receiving food, water, medical care? The answer, from the human rights organizations that have attempted to monitor CECOT, is that they do not know — because no one is allowed to find out.
Cristosal and other organizations have demanded access to the detainees. The Salvadoran government has declined. The U.S. government has expressed no public concern about the conditions its nationals face in the facility it is paying to house them. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has called for protective measures. Those calls have gone unanswered.
In U.S. courts, litigation continues. The question of whether any of the 252 men can be returned — or even whether they have the legal right to contest their removal from a country in which they were physically present — remains before judges who are themselves constrained by a political environment in which the administration has made clear it views judicial interference with its immigration enforcement as illegitimate.
The Alien Enemies Act litigation may eventually produce a ruling that the transfers were unlawful. That ruling, if it comes, will not automatically return Maikel Moreno Ramírez to his family. It will not undo the months he has spent in a prison designed to ensure that nothing, and no one, comes out.
THE RECORD
TheColdCases.com is continuing to document individual cases among the 252 men transferred to CECOT. We are collecting testimony from families, reviewing court filings, and tracking the legal proceedings that may ultimately determine whether any of these men can be returned or have their cases heard.
If you have information about Maikel Enrique Moreno Ramírez or any of the other individuals transferred to CECOT, contact our investigative team. If you are a family member of one of the 252, we want to hear your story.
The lights inside CECOT stay on 24 hours a day. The men inside cannot speak to lawyers, cannot receive family visits, cannot tell the world what is happening to them. The least we can do, from the outside, is keep their names alive.