As Abrego Garcia's case, and the Trump administration's repeated baseless lies that he was a "convicted" gang member, have garnered national attention, other stories of people being wrongly swept up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in recent weeks have also been reported—and in the case of Gutiérrez, the ICE agents who arrested the 19-year-old apparently knew that he shouldn't be detained.
As Documentedreported on Wednesday, Gutiérrez's father Wilmer learned on February 24 that his son had been detained by ICE. His nephew Luis, who lived with the father and son in a Bronx apartment, told him that he'd witnessed the arrest:
When his son was on his way back, just steps from his home, ICE agents stopped him. "The officers grabbed him and two other boys right at the entrance to our building. One said, 'No, he's not the one,' like they were looking for someone else. But the other said, 'Take him anyway.'"
With ICE acting on the Trump administration's orders under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to fast-track the expulsion of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—and suspending constitutional due process rights—agents have reportedly detained many of the 238 people they recently arrested based solely on the fact that they had tattoos.
In Gutiérrez's case, the Venezuelan asylum-seeker had none, and had no criminal record either in his home country or the United States.
"I feel like my son was kidnapped," Wilmer Gutiérrez told Documented. "I've spent countless hours searching for him, going from one precinct to another, speaking with numerous people who kept referring me elsewhere. Yet, after all this, no one has given me any information or provided a single document about his case."
Wilmer and Merwil Gutiérrez arrived in the U.S. in 2023; Wilmer had worked at Venezuela's state-owned oil and gas company before starting a cellphone repair business. The father and son, along with Luis, traveled to the U.S. on foot through the Darién jungle in the hopes of earning more money. They applied for an appointment to seek humanitarian parole through the CBP One app that was dismantled after President Donald Trump took office in January, and were sent to various shelters before arriving in New York City, where they found jobs at a warehouse and began waiting for their asylum status to be formalized, with authorities giving them a court date for February 2027.
Their life was disrupted, said William Parra, an attorney representing Gutiérrez, when "Merwil was detained for hanging out with friends and was at the wrong place at the wrong time."
"ICE was not looking for him, nor is there any evidence whatsoever that Merwil was in any gang," Parra told Documented.
Wilmer last spoke to his son on March 14, when police allowed Gutiérrez to make a brief phone call. At the time Gutiérrez was being held in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania and had been told he would be sent to a facility in Texas before being deported back to Venezuela. Instead, he was one of hundreds of people sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) opened by Salvadoran President Nayim Bukele—who this week appeared at the Oval Office and scoffed at the suggestion that he would release a detainee who had been sent to CECOT in error.
As The New York Timesreported Tuesday, Gutiérrez, Abrego Garcia, and Andry José Hernandez—a hair stylist who has denied any gang affiliation after being sent to El Salvador by ICE—are likely just a few of potentially dozens of people whom the Trump administration has imprisoned despite their lack of a criminal history or conviction.
The Times ran the names of the 238 Venezuelan men sent to CECOT through three U.S. public records databases; ran background checks in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile; interviewed family members and experts on Tren de Aragua; and examined court documents.
The investigation found that at least 32 of the men "have faced serious criminal accusations or convictions in the United States or abroad, including a man accused of participating in an assault in Chicago, another convicted of trying to smuggle arms out of the United States, and others accused of theft, strangulation, domestic battery, or harboring undocumented immigrants."
Out of the 206 other men, two dozen "had been accused or found guilty of lower-level offenses in the United States or elsewhere, including trespassing, speeding in a school zone, and driving an improperly registered vehicle," while the others had "no evidence of a criminal background, beyond offenses related to being unauthorized migrants."
As Van Hollen headed to El Salvador, journalist Ashton Pittman said the U.S. "should also be checking on the other hundreds of people who Trump's administration abducted and human trafficked to El Salvador without due process."
