A judge in San Diego dismissed Andry Hernández Romero’s asylum case this week, a move that immigration attorneys say will likely make it even harder to ensure the gay Venezuelan makeup artist’s return to the U.S. from El Salvador.

Hernández Romero was among more than 200 Venezuelan men that the Trump administration deported to the notorious Salvadoran supermax prison CECOT in March. With little evidence other than their tattoos, the administration claimed that all the men were members of a Venezuelan gang that it had designated an “international terrorist organization,” invoking special wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act to deport them without due process.

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As NBC News notes, prior to his deportation to El Salvador, Hernández Romero, who had no criminal history, had been pursuing an asylum claim from a detention center in San Diego. The 32-year-old entered the U.S. legally last year, fleeing anti-gay persecution in his home country. According to his lawyer, Lindsay Toczylowski, the U.S. government had found the threats against Hernández Romero “credible” and indicated that “he had a real probability of winning an asylum claim.”

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Lawyers for the men deported to CECOT last month, including Toczylowski, the executive director of nonprofit Immigrant Defenders Law Center, have continued to plead their clients’ immigration cases, despite being denied any communication with them.

“We don’t want these cases dismissed, because that pulls them out of the court process entirely,” Michelle Brané, executive director of nonprofit Together and Free, told NBC News.

But in recent weeks, immigration judges across the country have reportedly dismissed at least 14 of those cases, including Hernández Romero’s.

“It seems the government’s intention in dismissing these cases across the country is to complete the disappearance of people to El Salvador, to end their legal proceedings, and to act as though they weren’t here seeking asylum in the first place,” Toczylowski told NBC News. “They’re dismissing this proceeding that exists in the United States while providing absolutely no information on how we can communicate with our clients and under what legal authority they’re being held at U.S. government expense in El Salvador.”

In an Immigrant Defenders Law Center press release Thursday, Toczylowski blasted the Department of Homeland Security for “doing everything it can to erase the fact that Andry came to the United States seeking asylum and he was denied due process as required by our Constitution.”

“We should all be incredibly alarmed at what has happened in Andry’s case,” Toczylowski continued. “The idea that the government can disappear you because of your tattoos, and never even give you a day in court, should send a chill down the spine of every American. If this can happen to Andry, it can happen to any one of us.”

Immigrant Defenders Law Center said it would appeal the judge’s ruling in Hernández Romero’s case to the Board of Immigration Appeals. It also noted that Hernández Romero is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Democracy Forward, and the ACLU of D.C. in March challenging the current administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to carry out mass deportations and seeking the return of all the men deported to CECOT without due process.

As NBC News notes, legal analysts have suggested that the administration’s refusal to comply with Judge James Boasberg’s March 15 order to return the flights carrying the deportees to El Salvador has brought the U.S. to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

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