Jesús Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker, says he was en route to work at a construction site on the morning of April 9 when a group of immigration agents and state and federal police officers stopped his car in a rural area near Bryan—an event that led to him being arrested, publicly accused of membership in a transnational prison gang, and deported.
According to a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) arrest report, the officers were with DPS, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Escalona Mújicas told the Texas Observer that one of the agents said he had an outstanding deportation order, a claim he disputed by saying he had temporary permission to be here and a pending asylum case. (ICE, via a spokesperson, maintains that he “had no immigration benefits that prevented his arrest and removal.”) But the details of any immigration case of his didn’t seem to matter. In an interview, Escalona Mújicas said he was told he’d been targeted under an 18th-century law being revived by the Trump Administration—the Alien Enemies Act. Agents then took him to a gas station parking lot where he was accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization.
That same day, ICE issued a press release announcing Escalona Mújicas’s arrest and calling him a “documented Tren de Aragua gang member,” accompanied by a photo of him wearing a camouflage John Deere sweatshirt, silver handcuffs, and a wide-eyed expression.
