A Venezuelan man who spent four months locked inside El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison is now taking the United States government to court — and he wants $1.3 million for what he says was a nightmare built on a lie.
Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel, 27, was swept up in the Trump administration’s sweeping March 2025 deportation operation targeting alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. He was one of more than 250 Venezuelans removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime statute last dusted off during World War II — and transferred to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT. Rengel says he’s not a gang member. The evidence against him, he contends, was his tattoos.
Seized From a Parking Lot
It started, by all accounts, without warning. ICE agents seized Rengel from a parking lot, accused him of gang affiliation based on his tattoos, and placed him on a flight to El Salvador — a country he has no ties to — without a trial, a hearing, or any meaningful chance to contest the accusation. He was an asylum-seeker. He never got to make his case.
Inside CECOT, conditions were as grim as the facility’s reputation suggests. Rengel was beaten, held in severely overcrowded cells, denied medication, and cut off entirely from contact with his family. Four months. No answers. No end in sight — until he was eventually released.
The Legal Fight Begins
Now, the Democracy Defenders Fund and LULAC have filed an administrative claim on Rengel’s behalf under the Federal Tort Claims Act, alleging wrongful arrest, unlawful detention, and transfer to a facility where he suffered abuse and inhumane treatment. It’s a prerequisite step before a formal lawsuit can be filed against the U.S. government, and it puts the Department of Homeland Security on notice. “Mr. Rengel’s loved ones were cut off from contact, left with no answers, and forced to endure months of fear, confusion, and heartbreak,” said Juan Proaño, Chief Executive Officer of LULAC.
The claim seeks $1.3 million in damages. But for Rengel, it’s not purely about the money. He has been clear about what he actually wants: to clear his name.
A Broader Legal Battle
Rengel’s case doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify these deportations has been deeply contested in federal court. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled that the Venezuelan nationals deported under the act were entitled to due process — and noted pointedly that many among the deported group appeared to lack any real gang connections whatsoever. That’s not a minor footnote. That’s the crux of the constitutional question hanging over the entire operation.
Still, legal victories on paper don’t undo four months in CECOT. And some of those deported may not even try to come back. “My sense is that there may be some who will think it’s too dangerous to come back here and risk being sent to CECOT again,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told the court — a sobering observation that speaks to something larger than any single lawsuit.
What Comes Next
Rengel is among the first of the deported Venezuelans to formally pursue legal action against the U.S. government, but he’s unlikely to be the last. The complaint signals a wave of accountability litigation that could force courts — and the public — to reckon seriously with what was done in the name of immigration enforcement, and to whom.
How many others were sent away on similarly thin pretexts? That question doesn’t have a clean answer yet. But Rengel’s case, built on the allegation that a man’s ink was treated as a conviction, may be the one that forces someone to answer it.
He spent four months in a prison in a country not his own, accused of belonging to a gang he says he never joined, stripped of the asylum process he came here to access. Now he’s asking a federal bureaucracy to acknowledge that. Whether it will is another matter entirely — but the fact that he’s asking at all, after everything, says something.
