On New Year’s Eve, a group of migrants crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into Maverick County and surrendered to Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard soldiers patrolling the border.
Among them was Pedro Luis Salazar-Cuervo, a 28-year-old from Venezuela with no known criminal record, who was accused by state police of being in the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang because they found a photo of him on a phone posing with another man with tattoos, also accused of being a gang member, according to his lawyers. By mid-March, he had been deported by federal immigration authorities to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, along with more than 230 others that President Donald Trump called “the worst of the worst.”
