On New Year’s Eve, a group of migrants crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into Maverick County and surrendered to Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard soldiers patrolling the border.
Among them was Pedro Luis Salazar-Cuervo, a 28-year-old from Venezuela with no known criminal record, who was accused by state police of being in the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang because they found a photo of him on a phone posing with another man with tattoos, also accused of being a gang member, according to his lawyers. By mid-March, he had been deported by federal immigration authorities to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, along with more than 230 others that President Donald Trump called “the worst of the worst.”
Salazar-Cuervo’s lawyers say Texas’ claim that he’s in a gang is “baseless” and that neither DPS nor state prosecutors have released any more evidence to prove any connection to Tren de Aragua. They want him sent back to the U.S. to face his state charges.
On Tuesday morning, a Texas judge agreed that he must be returned to stand trial in August for trespassing on private property, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. Texas authorities have used the charge to arrest thousands of migrants under the state’s border crackdown, Operation Lone Star, since Gov. Greg Abbott launched it in 2021 to deter people from crossing the border.
District Judge Maribel Flores ordered Maverick County prosecutors to request that the federal government try to get Salazar-Cuervo returned to Texas. It's unclear whether the federal government will take any action to bring him back.
The case of Salazar-Cuervo — which has not been previously reported — is the latest example of Texas and federal authorities labeling someone a gang member, with questionable evidence, as the Trump administration tries to deliver the mass deportations the president promised on the campaign trail.
In Hays County, a DPS-led raid in April resulted in the arrests of nearly four dozen people at what authorities labeled a gathering of Tren de Aragua members. But the agencies involved have yet to release evidence to support the charge beyond saying they had obtained intelligence following a criminal investigation. Guests at the party have disputed the assertion and said they were celebrating a pair of birthdays.
Elsewhere across the country, the Trump administration has leveled the accusation based on “gang identifiers” like Chicago Bulls jerseys and tattoos of clocks, stars and crowns — even as criminologists have widely and repeatedly debunked the connection between tattoos and Tren de Aragua membership.
The case of Salazar-Cuervo, however, appears to be among the first documented instances in which the claim originated with Texas police and led to the removal of an individual to a third-party country, another novel tactic used by the Trump administration that is being challenged in the courts.
“So little information is being shared and there’s this lack of transparency,” said Priscilla Olivarez, a senior policy attorney for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which is not involved in the case but has studied Operation Lone Star. “These types of stories shock the conscience, as they should, when we see individuals’ due process rights so blatantly violated.”
Days after the arrests that included Salazar-Cuervo, Abbott issued a press release touting the capture of four “vicious” members of Tren de Aragua, which he and Trump have both designated as a terrorist organization.
The governor, whose office did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment, said at the time that their membership to the gang had been confirmed through interviews, tattoos and social media that the troopers searched on the individual’s phones.
But Salazar-Cuervo doesn’t have tattoos, his lawyers said in court filings, which is backed up by his jail booking sheet.
After crossing the border, DPS troopers questioned Salazar-Cuervo about having tattoos.
He showed officers he had none.
“Texas helped the federal government send someone to a foreign torture prison for terrorists simply because he traveled with someone with tattoos,” Salazar-Cuervo’s lawyers wrote in one filing. “To facilitate a speedy trial for a defendant in federal custody, a state must move for an order that requests that the federal government transfer the accused back into state custody.”
DPS did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment.
The first time Salazar-Cuervo — a father of three who helped build his local church — left Venezuela was in November when he decided to try migrating to the United States, his lawyers said in court records. He figured he could try to find a job to help pay for a surgery his mother needed. In Venezuela, he worked with artisans to make sombreros, according to his sister.
It took him about a month to get to the U.S.-Mexico border. Now his family is “desperate to talk to him, to hear his voice,” his sister said in court documents. Meanwhile his kids just “want to know that he’s still alive.”
He is now in the same prison where the Trump administration sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a construction worker from Maryland, who garnered national attention when authorities in March arrested and accused him of being a member of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang — also designated as a terrorist organization by Trump — and shipped him to the country he had fled as a teen due to threats from violent street gangs.
The Trump administration admitted Abrego Garcia’s deportation was in error because of a previous order from an immigration judge that barred his removal to his native country, where the judge found he would likely face persecution from the gangs he had fled.
But despite the admission, the Trump administration initially refused to facilitate his return as courts ordered it to do for weeks. Instead, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment this month accusing Abrego Garcia of human smuggling, and sent El Salvador an arrest warrant for his return. He was returned to face the federal charges.
To Salazar-Cuervo’s lawyers, that is evidence that the government can return their client to answer to his charges in Texas.
Assistant Maverick County Attorney Luis Gurrola-Villarreal disagreed. He unsuccessfully argued to the judge on Tuesday that the onus to appear in court was on Salazar-Cuervo, who was not present at his virtual hearing. The men sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador have largely been incommunicado.
Doug Keller, one of the defense lawyers, said that if someone charged with a state crime is in federal custody, the state has an obligation to make an effort to bring them to court for trial.
“That's the state's obligation, not the defendant's obligation,” Keller said.
Flores, the judge, agreed.
“The court does order the state to make the request,” she said. “The state will have no obligation, of course, to make certain that the federal government complies with the request.”
Salazar-Cuervo’s sister tuned into the virtual proceedings streamed on YouTube, standing in front of a brick wall in a pink blouse. She denied in a previous court declaration that her brother was a member of any gang, according to court documents.
His sister noted in the declaration that Tren de Aragua does not even operate in their tiny Venezuelan town.
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