Inside One Venezuelan’s Last-Minute Escape From a Flight to CECOT

The way attorney Jamie Diez describes it, visiting the El Valle Detention Center was usually straightforward. After making the 50-minute drive from Brownsville, he told TPM, he would usually stroll in unannounced. Officials would, after a wait, bring Diez, an immigration attorney, whichever client he was seeing that day. He was so used to El Valle that, on March 15, he showed up wearing shorts. 

But when Diez arrived at the rural Texas immigration detention center that day, he instead encountered an overwhelming show of force. On that day, he was denied entry, he told TPM. There were law enforcement officers in riot gear. A helicopter flew above. Detainees were being rushed onto buses. 

Diez had become a witness to the Trump administration’s secretive operation to remove more than 100 Venezuelans to an El Salvador detention camp under the Alien Enemies Act, the 18th-century wartime power whose invocation Trump premised on the absurdity of a Venezuela-backed invasion of the United States. On that day, Diez’s client, undocumented Venezuelan Zacarias Matos, was slated for removal to El Salvador under the Act, his attorneys say. Diez told TPM he had traveled to the detention center after filing a habeas corpus petition seeking to block his client’s removal, and was checking to make sure he was still there. 

Diez didn’t know it at the time, but he had stumbled into the all-out campaign by the Trump administration to shield its Alien Enemies Act removal operation from scrutiny by the courts. Had the removal process involved any kind of notice to those removed or their attorneys, judges could examine how the government was deciding who belonged to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, the government contends, would qualify them for removal to El Salvador as an alien enemy. Scrutiny could prompt judges to intervene, potentially imposing significant delays on the effort or shutting it down entirely. After a federal judge, later on March 15, ordered a halt to the effort, the President and senior administration officials argued directly that the government should be able to remove people from the country — potentially for indefinite imprisonment in an El Salvador detention center — without due process. 

But on that Saturday, Diez and other attorneys on Matos’ case quietly managed to interrupt the administration’s plans for their client. After an official at the jail told him that Matos was “still here,” Diez informed the chambers of federal district court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a Trump appointee who had received the habeas case, that Matos was “still there,” the attorney told TPM. Within an hour, Judge Rodriguez issued an order blocking Matos’ removal. ICE officers complied with the order. Matos later told his lawyer that he had already been seated on an aircraft in Harlingen, Texas — the airport from which three planes would soon depart, carrying more than 200 migrants to CECOT, the El Salvador detention center. Officers removed Matos before the plane took off, Diez said.

The episode demonstrates that even in the final hours of the operation to remove Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, the administration was fully capable of complying with detailed court orders. It also serves as a reminder of how little the government has revealed about its removals to El Salvador. Matos’ attorneys have pieced together that he was likely designated under the AEA from other claims the government has made in his immigration case, and from the fact that ICE attempted to send him to El Salvador without any removal order as he was still seeking asylum. The government said that it had evidence that he was a member of Tren de Aragua, but refused to back up that claim when confronted about it in court. 

Since then, the government has acted with haste to find another way to remove Matos that did not require it to deem him an alien enemy. In the week after he dodged removal to CECOT, DHS managed to bring an end to Matos’ immigration court case. He was quickly scheduled for a credible fear interview, necessary for an asylum claim, and promptly was denied. Now, less than two months after March 15, he’s scheduled for removal. 

ICE did not return TPM’s request for comment. 

Getting off the plane

Diez emphasized to TPM that, on March 15, he was unaware of the broader drama unfolding around the removals. He showed up at El Valle simply to help his client, and was surprised by the hubbub.

Matos’ case is relatively typical of the Venezuelans who were sent to CECOT on March 15. He entered the United States in December 2023 with his daughter, seeking political asylum from Venezuela. He was initially released as his case progressed through immigration court. Matos, however, had a few brushes with the law. In May 2024, El Paso police accused Matos of throwing a Glock handgun out of a car during a traffic stop. He was released, and later failed to appear for his arraignment, police said. He was detained in October 2024 on misdemeanor charges that were later dropped. He hasn’t left detention since; ICE held Matos in El Paso, where his immigration case was proceeding, until March 9. It was around then that his relatives got word he was being transferred to another detention facility; ICE’s tracker showed that he was moved to El Valle that day. 

From there, he experienced what many other Alien Enemies deportees did. On March 14, after President Trump signed the Alien Enemies proclamation but before it was publicly revealed, ICE officials told Matos that he was about to be removed by plane to Venezuela or Mexico, according to a declaration filed by his attorneys in his habeas case. That plane never departed, but it was enough to tip off Matos’ family and an attorney working on his case that he was in danger of imminent deportation. 

By that point, rumors were circulating that Trump was on the verge of invoking the 18th-century measure. Diez found out about the case via an attorney group chat he was in, and filed a habeas petition, seeking a restraining order blocking Matos’ removal, late on the night of March 14. 

The next morning, Diez told TPM, he left home in Brownsville, heading for El Valle to verify that Matos had not yet been deported. There, after being denied entry, he spoke outside the entrance with a jail official who at first told him to call a 1-800 number to verify Matos’ location. 

“I said, ‘every time you call a 1-800 number, you don’t go anywhere,’” Diez recalled. “So he said, ‘well, let me see if I can help you.’”

The man checked and told Diez that Matos was “still here,” Diez said. Diez felt that “still” was significant — it confirmed that Matos had not yet been removed. It was also a sign that that could soon change. 

Diez informed the court. Soon after, Judge Rodriguez issued a restraining order blocking ICE from removing Matos from El Valle or the surrounding Texas counties. 

“His removal would moot the Court’s consideration of Zacarias Matos’s claims, including whether the Court possesses subject matter jurisdiction to adjudicate those claims,” Judge Rodriguez ruled. 

By that point, the Alien Enemies Act removal operation was well underway. Hundreds of miles away, Chief Judge James Boasberg for the District of Columbia was preparing to hold a hearing in a class-action suit brought by the ACLU seeking a nationwide injunction blocking the removals. As Boasberg began to suspect that the Trump administration was trying to fly people out of the country before he could issue a ruling, he gave an extraordinary order from the bench: the planes were to return to the United States. 

They did not do that. Instead, they continued on to El Salvador. 

But in Harlingen, Texas, ICE complied with Judge Rodriguez’s order. 

Per Diez, Matos later told him that he had made it to Harlingen airport and was aboard a plane when ICE officials pulled him off. He recalled being sent back to El Valle with more than a dozen others from the airport; ICE officials told him he was “lucky,” Diez said. 

After informing the court that Matos had not yet been removed from the country, Diez stood outside El Valle and saw a bus driving by, with a helicopter flying low overhead. He recorded it via video; UCLA Law Professor Ahilan Arulanantham, co-counsel on the case, posted it on Bluesky that afternoon. 

“I didn’t record it because I knew what was really going on — I recorded so that I could show to the people that I was working with on the case, ‘I’m here and this is what’s going on,’” Diez recalled. “I didn’t have anything else to do. I was waiting for the court.”

Did the government decide Matos was no longer an alien enemy?

Matos had no valid removal order on March 15; his abortive removal could only have happened if ICE designated him an alien enemy as a member of Tren de Aragua, Ahilan Arulanantham, the UCLA law professor on the case, told TPM. 

After the planes left and a national scandal erupted over the Trump administration’s El Salvador removals and potential defiance of Boasberg’s order, ICE began to try to find other ways to rush Matos out of the country. 

The speed may have been prompted by the prospect of a habeas case that could test the administration’s claims. In the case, Matos’ lawyers sought information from the government about how it came to determine that their client was a member of Tren de Aragua. The lawyers also began to claim that removal to CECOT was itself a form of unlawful detention. 

These arguments prompted some revealing responses from the government.

In a lengthy filing, the government said that Matos’ “criminal background, admissions, associations, and TdA-related tattoos clearly mark him as a member of TdA and therefore an alien enemy subject to removal under the Proclamation.”

But it declined to pursue its claim that Matos was a TdA member to its logical conclusion: removing him under the Alien Enemies Act. Instead, the government said that it no longer viewed him as an alien enemy. ICE Assistant Field Office Director Carlos Cisneros said in a declaration that after the Supreme Court mandated that the government give all alien enemy deportees the chance to ask for and receive habeas review before removal, Matos was not deemed an alien enemy “under the current notice process.” 

The government did not address why it attempted to remove Matos on March 15. Instead, it argued that none of these potentially damaging questions around how and why it sought to remove Matos absent a lawful order to do so were relevant: the government had found a new way to deport him. 

On March 24, court filings show, the government moved to dismiss Matos’ asylum case, seeking expedited removal instead. On the same day, Matos had a bond hearing scheduled. Two days later, an immigration court judge granted the government’s motion, ending the case.  

Unlike expedited removal, which can take place per the order of a rank-and-file DHS agent, immigration court proceedings require the order of an immigration judge to allow the government to deport. 

Rushing out

After the immigration court case ended, attorneys for Matos said that the government began to try to remove him from the country as quickly as possible. 

Matos sat for a credible fear interview in support of a last-ditch attempt to save his asylum claim. That was denied, opening Matos up to immediate expulsion under expedited removal. An immigration judge affirmed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ decision on April 19, clearing a final hurdle for the removal order to go into effect.  

Jorge Dominguez, an immigration attorney representing Matos, said in a declaration that he never received a copy of the government’s March 24 motion to dismiss, that the immigration court dismissed the case without giving him an opportunity to respond, and that ICE never called him as a subsequent credible fear interview took place. 

“This is one more example of the admin’s disdain and contempt for due process,” David Leopold, an immigration attorney not involved in the case, told TPM after reading Dominguez’s declaration and other filings in the matter. 

ICE didn’t reply to questions about the matter from TPM. In court filings, officials portrayed Matos’ removal proceedings as standard. 

For the government, the removal order ICE issued is further proof: there’s no longer any “need for the government to rely on AEA authority” to deport Matos, Department of Justice attorneys wrote in a brief. 

From March 24, when the government moved to dismiss his case, to April 14, when it denied his credible fear interview, a little less than four weeks passed. 

“It just seems like all of that would’ve been unnecessary if they could just remove him under the AEA,” Arulanantham told TPM, adding that they had been “trying desperately to find some other way to deport him without having to defend it on AEA grounds.”

Rodriguez, the judge overseeing Matos’ case, ruled in a separate class action brought by the ACLU last week that Trump’s invocation of the AEA was illegal. It mooted continuing elements of Matos’ case, including attempts by lawyers to uncover how the government came to accuse him of belonging to Tren de Aragua. 

In May, Matos and the government settled, bringing an end to the kafkaesque episode. Arulanantham told TPM in an email that, after, the government continued to argue that it could remove Matos to El Salvador. The settlement agreement blocks that. The government can now remove him, provided one criterion: that Matos be returned home to Venezuela.