Deported and Disappeared: Caraballo's Nightmare Is Just the Beginning

Franco Caraballo Tiapa was gay, Venezuelan, and seeking asylum.

Now, he’s disappeared into one of the world’s most notorious prisons.

No trial. No hearing. No crime.

Just a U.S. government willing to vanish people into foreign black sites to look tough on immigration.

Caraballo’s Only Crime? Existing.

In February 2025, Caraballo went to a routine ICE check-in in Texas. He had no criminal record, no gang affiliations, and no deportation order. He was seeking protection. Instead, ICE detained him on the spot—and days later, without notifying his lawyers, he was shipped off to El Salvador, a country he’s never lived in, under a Trump executive order branding him a supposed gang member 1.

He’s now imprisoned in El Salvador’s “mega-prison”—a concrete hellhole where there’s no visitation, no recreation, and no due process 2.

The Salvadoran government won’t release him.

He’ll likely never get out.

And Caraballo is not alone.

The El Salvador Pipeline

Trump’s new immigration order allows ICE to deport immigrants—not just to their home countries—but to any nation willing to take them. El Salvador said “yes,” in exchange for U.S. aid and political clout. So ICE has started disappearing Venezuelans, Guatemalans, and others into Bukele’s prison archipelago 3.

Some were picked up at check-ins. Others had asylum claims pending. Many weren’t even convicted of immigration violations—civil infractions, not crimes. But that didn’t matter. They were shoved into planes, sent to a nation they’ve never lived in, and locked in cells with actual gang members and cartel convicts 4.

This is not enforcement. It’s outsourcing tyranny.

Caraballo Was Never a Gang Member

Caraballo’s lawyers provided documentation to CBS and TIME proving he had no criminal background—only asylum paperwork, a clean record, and testimony that he feared persecution in Venezuela for being gay 1. They filed an emergency appeal. ICE ignored it.

Days later, Caraballo vanished.

No phone call. No warning. No court.

Reich’s Warning: This Will Happen to Americans

Let’s pause and read the full post from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. It’s already happening to non-citizens.

But don’t kid yourself—it doesn’t stop there.

This same playbook is already being tested on green card holders, visa holders, and legal residents. No judge. No trial. Just accusations and a plane to nowhere.

How long until “enemy of the state” means you?

This Isn’t Immigration Enforcement. It’s State Terror.

This is Franco’s Spain. This is Pinochet’s Chile. Only now, it’s wrapped in stars and stripes.

Under Francisco Franco, dissenters were labeled enemies of the state. People vanished in the night, tortured in secret police basements, or dumped in mass graves. Being gay, being leftist, being inconvenient—any of it could earn you a death sentence.

Under Augusto Pinochet in Chile, thousands were kidnapped by the military and secret police. They were tortured in soccer stadiums, thrown from helicopters, or locked in camps in the desert. Their crime? Disagreeing with the regime.

In both regimes, there was no trial. No evidence. Just the state declaring you a threat—and making you disappear.

Now we’re watching the United States follow that script, line by line.

ICE doesn’t have to prove anything anymore. All it takes is a label—”gang member,” “national security threat,” “foreign policy risk.”

No trial. No appeal. Just deportation to a prison where people die from dehydration, violence, and neglect.

Caraballo might die there.

For being gay.

For crossing a border.

For trusting a country that told him it was safe.

Wake the Hell Up

Francisco Franco’s Spain left over 100,000 people disappeared—many still in unmarked graves. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile tortured at least 28,000 people and executed over 3,000 political opponents. These regimes didn’t start with mass graves. They started with bureaucracy. With legal loopholes. With euphemisms like “national security” and “foreign interference.”

Survivors from Pinochet’s torture chambers told the UN they were stripped, electrocuted, raped, and forced to watch loved ones be mutilated—all without charges, without evidence, without hope. One survivor of Chile’s National Stadium, which was turned into a torture site, told investigators: “The screaming never stopped. We all knew whose turn it was next by the silence that followed.”

Declassified CIA memos from the 1970s openly discuss backing Pinochet’s rise and the repression that followed. One reads: “Control must be reasserted before liberalization.” Another chilling line: “Disappearance is often more efficient than arrest.” 5

Sound familiar?

The U.S. has not built its own death camps—yet. But it has found partners who already have.

El Salvador’s mega-prison is functionally a foreign gulag—run by an authoritarian regime willing to play jailer for a price.

Caraballo is the canary in the coal mine. If we let this stand, if we normalize state disappearance in the name of national security, it won’t stop at immigrants.

It never does.

The Trump administration is not reforming immigration. It’s weaponizing it.

This is what authoritarianism looks like in practice—disappearing the vulnerable in the name of national security.