A Venezuelan immigrant named Ricardo Prada Vásquez, who as of early 2025 was working as a delivery driver in Detroit, was detained and deported by the Trump administration earlier this year, but friends and family have not heard or seen him since March 15, according to Tuesday reporting from The New York Times. Observers say the case raises concerns that other immigrants in the United States may have suffered the same fate.
"How many Ricardos are lost within our broken system?" wrote the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit that advances immigrant rights, in response to the story. Ben Levey, a staff attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center, which attempted to locate Prada, said that "Ricardo's story by itself is incredibly tragic—and we don't know how many Ricardos there are," according to the Times.
Prada, who entered the United States in November 2024 after waiting in Mexico to obtain an appointment via the CBP One app, was taken into custody by U.S. officials in January after he accidentally crossed into Canada via the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit while making a delivery and attempted to re-enter the country.
Prada communicated to a friend from detention on March 15, letting the friend know that he was among several detainees housed in Texas who were expected to be sent to Venezuela.
Later that day, the Trump administration sent over 200 migrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador after invoking a little used wartime authority—a move that has kicked off a fierce legal battle and even precipitated what some have deemed a constitutional crisis.
But Prada is not on a list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador on March 15 (that list was not officially published, but it was obtained by multiple news outlets, including the Times).
Prada has also not been identified in pictures taken at the prison, as other detainees have, such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the Maryland man who federal officials have said was wrongly sent to El Salvador on March 15.
Prada's family thought he may have been deported to a different country that has received Venezuelans immigrants in recent months, like Costa Rica, but they have not heard from him.
"He fell off the face of the earth," Prada's mother told the Times. "It was sheer agony."
"He has simply disappeared," said a friend of Prada's who resides in Chicago and was the last person Prada had contact with.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School interviewed by the Times, said that the case "shocks the conscience."
"I have not heard of a disappearance like this in my 40-plus years of practicing and teaching immigration law," he said. "This case represents a black hole where due process no longer exists."
"He's just... gone," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, of the reporting, which he called "a bone-chilling account."
According to the Times, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did confirm that Prada had been deported but did not disclose where he had been deported.
