ENEMIES OF THE STATE

Inside the Trump Administration's mass-deportation program.

- BY JONATHAN BLITZER

“It was a kidnapping,” Deicy Aldana said after her partner, Andrés Guillermo Morales Rolón, was sent to El Salvador.

The plane took off from Texas just before five-thirty on the evening of March 15th. By then, Yoderlyn Daviana Acosta Peña, a twenty-one-year-old from Caracas, had been wearing chains around her ankles and wrists for ten hours. Her skin was cut and irritated, and yet she felt relieved, even excited. Her boyfriend was sitting near the back of the aircraft. After six weeks in multiple immigration jails, she'd been told—along with the other passengers, including seven women and dozens of men, most of them Venezuelan—that they were finally being deported.

A year and a half earlier, Acosta Peña, the eldest of seven siblings, had left Venezuela with one of her brothers to earn money to send home to their family. The trip lasted four months and spanned seven countries. In Honduras, after sudden bouts of nausea, she learned that she was pregnant. When Acosta Peña and her brother turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents in Eagle Pass, Texas, she was entering her third trimester and determined to reach Chicago, a sanctuary city where, she'd learned from TikTok, she could get medical attention and start to look for work. The governor of Texas was sending migrants there on buses. Three days later, she had a bed in one of the city's shelters. At a nearby medical clinic, she miscarried.