On his 27th birthday, a Venezuelan barber with a pending immigration case and no deportation order was arrested, lied to, and flown to El Salvador’s most feared prison — in direct violation of a federal court order. Now he’s suing.
The Day Everything Changed
March 13, 2025 was Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel’s 27th birthday. He was on his way to work at a barbershop in Irving, Texas, when ICE officers stopped him in the parking garage of his apartment complex. He showed them everything: documentation of his active immigration case, a hearing scheduled for April 2028, and his application for Temporary Protected Status. The officers weren’t interested. They looked at his tattoos — his mother’s name, his daughter’s name, a barbershop, a tiger — and told him the ink identified him as a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization.
He wasn’t a member. He had never been. It didn’t matter.
Two days later, shackled and handcuffed, Leon Rengel was loaded onto a charter plane. Officers told him he was going to Venezuela. When the plane landed and the window covers came off, he was in San Salvador, El Salvador. He would spend the next four months inside CECOT — the Terrorism Confinement Center — one of the most brutal prisons in the Western Hemisphere.
On March 24, 2026, Leon Rengel filed a federal lawsuit against the United States. He is the first of the more than 200 Venezuelan men deported to CECOT to do so. He is seeking at least $1.3 million in damages.
Who Is Leon Rengel?
Leon Rengel entered the United States legally in June 2023, using CBP One — a Biden-era program for asylum seekers that allowed people to schedule an official appointment at a port of entry. He underwent screenings, provided biometrics, and was released with a court date. He built a life in Texas, working as a barber.
He was arrested once in the U.S. — during a traffic stop in which drug paraphernalia was found in a car he says was not his. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a small fine. Beyond that, he has no criminal history. Department of Justice records reviewed by CBS News confirm there was no deportation order for Leon Rengel at the time of his arrest. His immigration hearing was scheduled for April 2028.
He was deported anyway.
The evidence used to label him a gang member? A tattoo of a lion holding a hair clipper — his professional symbol as a barber. DHS continues to maintain he is a Tren de Aragua associate. When asked by CBS News for evidence supporting that claim, the agency declined to provide any, saying doing so would “undermine” national security.
A Court Order Defied in Real Time
What makes this case more than the story of one man is the premeditation the lawsuit describes.
According to whistleblower testimony submitted to the U.S. Senate, on the evening of March 14, 2025 — the day before the deportation flights — top Department of Justice officials held a meeting to plan the operation. Then-Principal Assistant Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove reportedly told the assembled DOJ lawyers that planes needed to take off that weekend regardless of any legal obstacles. If a court issued a blocking order? The instruction, according to the testimony, was effectively to ignore it.
Here is what happened next, as laid out in the 44-page complaint:
On the afternoon of March 15, Judge James Boasberg of the D.C. District Court began hearing an emergency motion to halt the flights. During a break in that very hearing — at 5:26 and 5:45 p.m. — the first two GlobalX charter planes took off from Harlingen, Texas. A third departed at 7:37 p.m.
By 6:46 p.m., a DOJ attorney had emailed DHS with the substance of Judge Boasberg’s order: stop the removals and return anyone already in the air. Two minutes later, he followed up, stating the judge had “specifically ordered us to not remove anyone in the class, and to return anyone in the air.”
The first plane didn’t land in El Salvador until 11:10 p.m. — more than four hours after the order was issued. The passengers were not deplaned for hours after that.
The complaint alleges that during those critical hours, senior White House officials demanded the planes keep flying, and that legal counsel advised DHS to proceed in defiance of the court order. One DOJ attorney, listening to a colleague make statements to Judge Boasberg, texted: “Oh shit. That was just not true.” And: “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know.” Judge Boasberg subsequently found the government’s conduct demonstrated “willful disregard” of his order — sufficient to establish probable cause of criminal contempt.
Four Months Inside CECOT
The lawsuit describes what awaited Leon Rengel and the other men in detail that is difficult to read.
When the plane landed, Salvadoran officials boarded and began beating detainees who protested — they had been told they were going to Venezuela, not El Salvador. Leon Rengel watched fellow detainees thrown down the airplane stairs. Inside CECOT, the prison director greeted the Venezuelan men by saying: “The infamous Tren de Aragua… welcome to hell.” Guards told them they would be imprisoned for a minimum of ninety years.
Nearly twenty men were held in a cell approximately ten feet square, cleaned once a week. Lights never turned off. They slept on bare metal slats stacked four high. To pass the time, inmates made dice out of soap and tortillas and used toilet paper to play games. Leon Rengel was denied medication for his gastritis. When restraints injured his left hand — an injury that has still not healed — he was refused medical care. Guards took detainees to areas of the prison without cameras to beat them without a video record.
He had no contact with his family, no access to a lawyer, for nearly ninety days. The Red Cross visited once — on June 12, 2025, for thirty minutes. That was the first time his family received any confirmation of where he was.
“There came a point when I thought about hanging myself with the sheet they gave us,” Leon Rengel told CBS News.
A Human Rights Watch investigation found that CECOT prisoners endured months of physical and psychological abuse, including cases of sexual assault, and determined that their treatment constituted “arbitrary detention” and “torture” under international law.
The Legal Arguments
Leon Rengel is suing under the Federal Tort Claims Act, bringing claims of negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, abuse of process, and false imprisonment.
But the complaint is building something larger than a damages claim. It assembles — from court findings, whistleblower testimony, Senate disclosures, and public statements by administration officials — a documented record of how the operation was designed and executed. It alleges that senior officials, from the President to the Secretary of Homeland Security to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, publicly demonized Venezuelan immigrants, invoked an 18th-century wartime law to bypass normal immigration procedures, brokered a deal with El Salvador to imprison Venezuelans in a facility the U.S. State Department itself had described as “harsh and life threatening,” and then fought to keep them there even after federal courts ruled the removals unlawful.
Federal judge Boasberg has since ruled that the United States retained “constructive custody” over the Venezuelan men during their imprisonment at CECOT — meaning the U.S. government was legally responsible for what happened to them there.
“This case reveals an illegal and morally bereft plan of action at the highest levels of our government to defy a federal court, strip a man of his rights, and hand him over to a foreign government for torture to prove a political point,” said retired Ambassador Norm Eisen, co-founder of the Democracy Defenders Fund, one of the organizations representing Leon Rengel.
Where He Is Now
Leon Rengel was released from CECOT in July 2025 as part of a prisoner exchange between El Salvador and Venezuela. He is back in Venezuela — not in the United States where he had built his life, and not by his own choice. He works at a grocery store. His left hand does not work the way it used to. He wakes up crying most nights.
He did everything right. He entered legally. He showed up for his appointments. He had a pending case and a future hearing date. He had documentation. He showed it to the officers who arrested him. None of it mattered.
What This Means for People With Pending Immigration Cases
Leon Rengel’s case is not an isolated incident — it is the most thoroughly documented example of a pattern that has affected hundreds of people and continues to cast fear over immigrant communities across the United States.
If you or someone you know has a pending immigration case, there are concrete steps that matter right now. Keep copies of every filing, every receipt, every notice — and make sure your family knows where those documents are, not just you. Make sure the people closest to you know who your attorney is and how to reach them. If you are detained, your family needs to be able to act immediately.
Know your rights. You have the right to see a judge. You have the right to contest your removal. You have the right not to be deported in violation of a court order. Those rights exist even when — especially when — the government acts as though they don’t.
Sources
- Jim Hacking, The Feds Said “F— You” to the Court. Then They Deported This Man to El Salvador Anyway, Substack, March 25, 2026.
- CBS News, Venezuelan Man Deported to CECOT Prison Sues U.S. for $1.3 Million, March 24, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cecot-prison-lawsuit-neiyerver-adrian-leon-rengel/
- Prism News, Venezuelan Man Deported to CECOT Prison Sues U.S. for $1.3 Million, March 24, 2026. https://www.prismnews.com
- Common Dreams, Venezuelan Sent to CECOT by Trump Seeks $1.3 Million in US Legal Fight, March 24, 2026. https://www.commondreams.org/news/cecot-donald-trump
- The New Republic, Venezuelan Man Sues U.S. Over “Total Hell” He Endured in CECOT Prison, March 24, 2026. https://newrepublic.com/post/208141/venezuelan-man-sues-us-deportation-cecot-prison
- Raw Story, Man Deported to Torture Prison Over Barber Tattoo Sues Trump Admin for $1.3M, March 24, 2026. https://www.rawstory.com/neiyerver-adrian-leon-rengel/
- Complaint, Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel v. United States of America, Case 1:26-cv-01008, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, filed March 24, 2026. https://assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/cms/prod_cms_alt/file/2026/03/24/cecot_lawsuit.pdf
- Human Rights Watch, El Salvador: Abuses at CECOT Prison, 2025. https://www.hrw.org
- Democracy Defenders Fund, statement by Ambassador Norman Eisen, March 24, 2026. https://www.democracydefenders.org
- League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), statement by CEO Juan Proaño, March 24, 2026. https://lulac.org
