The U.S. homeland security secretary on Wednesday refused to confirm whether a gay makeup artist disappeared by the Trump administration to an infamous Salvadoran prison two months ago was even alive.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the man, Andry Hernández Romero, was simply not her problem. Hernández Romero is the one of hundreds of people banished by the United States to the notorious prison camp without charge or trial.
“This individual is in El Salvador, and the appeal would be best made to the president, and to the government, of El Salvador,” Noem told Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) during a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Garcia kept pushing, asking Noem to request a “proof-of-life” for Hernández Romero from the government of El Salvador.
“This is not under my jurisdiction,” Noem said.
Despite Noem’s prevaricating, the administration has every ability to check on its detainees in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, as President Donald Trump has admitted. The administration made a multimillion-dollar deal with El Salvador to house detainees, and Noem herself has called the foreign prison “one of the tools in our toolkit” — belying any claim that U.S. detainees, once on Salvadoran soil, are no longer subject to U.S. detention.
An ongoing legal battle centers on this concept, known as “constructive custody”: The Trump administration considers the detainees to be in El Salvador’s custody; lawyers advocating for the U.S. detainees’ rights say they’re owed their day in U.S. court.
Hernández Romero is one of the more noted detainees shipped by the Trump administration to CECOT, partly because a photojournalist in El Salvador, Philip Holsinger, identified him specifically, crying and shouting “I’m innocent” and “I’m gay” as CECOT guards shaved his head.
Pursuing an asylum claim in the United States, Hernández Romero made an appointment to enter the country on the app formerly known as CBP One. He passed a credible fear interview, which should have allowed him to stay in the United States as his asylum case proceeded. (People who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization still have the right to claim asylum, but both former President Joe Biden and Trump have undermined this right.)
Still, Hernández Romero was detained once he arrived in the country, and never left detention. Instead, he was accused of being a gang member by the administration, seemingly due to his tattoos, and the assessment of a disgraced former police officer working for a U.S. private prison company.
“He’s not in a gang. He’s a makeup artist who worked at Miss Venezuela,” his attorney, Lindsay Toczylowski, told The Advocate last month. “His social media is full of beauty queens. The only crowns he touches are made of rhinestones.”
Alongside at least 287 others, Hernández Romero was disappeared by the administration to CECOT, where he has been out of touch from his family and lawyers for two months.
Noem’s acknowledgement that “this individual is in El Salvador” is more than most U.S. CECOT detainees get — for hundreds of people expelled to the prison camp from the United States, neither the U.S. nor Salvadoran governments have even acknowledged their detention, in what many consider to be “enforced disappearances” under international law.