New details have been revealed about a gay Venezuelan asylum seeker who was recently deported to an El Salvadorian torture facility for allegedly having tattoos affiliated with a terrorist group. The man was among 260 Venezuelans accused by the presidential administration of being members of Tren de Aragua, a terrorist group, though Venezuela’s interior minister has said that none of the deportees are members of the group.

“These are not the tattoos of somebody who is involved with gangs,” said the deported gay man’s lawyer, Lindsay Toczylowski, the founder and president of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, in a recent interview with lesbian MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. “These are normal tattoos that you would see on anybody at a coffee shop anywhere in the United States or in Venezuela.”

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Toczylowski told Maddow that the deported man is a young professional makeup artist who came to the U.S. seeking protection from anti-gay persecution in his home country.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed to Toczylowski that the man was among the large group recently deported to El Salvador. The judge in his case asked ICE lawyers how he was deported without any official order for his removal provided by the federal government. The ICE attorney said, “I don’t know.” ICE has told Toczylowski that they will neither facilitate communication with her client nor make him available for any future court proceedings, effectively denying him any avenue for legal relief.

“We’re pursuing all avenues because our client’s life is at risk, we’re concerned for his safety, and the fact that he was forcibly taken from the United States with no due process, it’s something that really shocks the conscience,” Toczylowski told Maddow.

Trump illegally deporting migrants without due process

The president has recently revoked the legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who were granted asylum in the U.S. by former President Joe Biden under a program to help them flee countries with war or political instability, The Guardian reported.

These individuals are now likely be targeted for mass deportation under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law used to deport foreign hostile agents from the U.S. during times of declared conflict without any court hearings. Congress is the only governmental body that can legally declare that the U.S. is in an active conflict, and it has not yet done so in this instance. As such, the revocation of their asylum has already been challenged in federal courts.

The legal challenge to Trump’s deportations is being heard by U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, who said that, even though they’re undocumented immigrants, the deported individuals are still “entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether” they can be deported under the Act. Boasberg has said that the president denied the deportees constitutionally required court hearings before deporting them to a detention center known for torturing its detainees. The president has repeatedly defied the judge’s orders to explain the reasoning behind the deportations.

Boasberg’s conclusion comes directly from the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment which says, “No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The amendment applies to all people, not just documented U.S. citizens. Some Republicans have argued that the amendment shouldn’t apply to people accused of terrorism.

The current administration violated Boasberg’s order to turn around any flights taking deportees to El Salvador. Boasberg has given the administration until tomorrow to explain its reasoning after administration lawyers refused to do so repeatedly for the last two weeks. Until then, the administration says it is allowed to continue deporting people without any court hearings, as allowed under the aforementioned act.

The gay man was likely sent to a “filthy and disease-ridden” torture facility

In an essay for Time magazine, photojournalist Philip Holsinger said that upon exiting the deportation plane, the transported Venezuelans faced “an ocean of soldiers and police, an entire army assembled to apprehend them.”

Twenty-two buses took the deportees to the Terrorism Confinement Center, an overcrowded “filthy and disease-ridden” prison known for torturing its inmates and denying them access to adequate healthcare and food, according to Human Rights Watch. The prison denies inmates any contact with family members or lawyers, only lets some inmates out of their cells for 30 minutes a day, and keeps some detainees in the complete dark in solitary confinement.

Holsinger wrote that as the deported men were forced into the prison, “One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.'”

“Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove,” the journalist added. “[Guards] descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.”

The men were then stripped naked, their clothes and freshly shaved hair both thrown into the same garbage bag. They were then thrown into cold cells, 80 men to a single cell “with steel planks for bunks, no mats, no sheets, no pillow.”

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