In late January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan immigrant working in a delivery job in Detroit, picked up an order at a McDonald’s. He was heading to the address when he erroneously turned onto the Ambassador Bridge, which leads to Canada. It is a common mistake even for those who live in the Michigan border city. But for Prada, 32, it proved fateful.

U.S. authorities took Prada into custody when he attempted to reenter the country; he was put in detention and ordered deported. On March 15, he told a friend in Chicago that he was among a number of detainees housed in Texas who expected to be repatriated to Venezuela.

That evening, the Trump administration flew three planes carrying Venezuelan migrants from the Texas facility to El Salvador, where they have been ever since, locked up in a maximum-security prison and denied contact with the outside world.

But Prada has not been heard from or seen. He is not on a list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador that day. He does not appear in the photos and videos released by authorities of shackled men with shaved heads.

“He has simply disappeared,” said Javier, a friend in Chicago, the last person with whom Prada had contact. The friend spoke about Prada on condition that he be identified only by his middle name, out of fear that he too could be targeted by immigration authorities.

Prada’s brother, Hugo Prada, who is living in Venezuela, has also been trying to learn what happened. “We know nothing, nothing,” he said.

How many deported?

Ricardo Prada’s disappearance has created concerns that more immigrants have been deported to El Salvador than previously known. It also raises the question of whether some deportees may have been sent to other countries with no record of it. U.S. authorities confirmed that he was removed from the United States. But to where?

“Ricardo’s story by itself is incredibly tragic — and we don’t know how many Ricardos there are,” said Ben Levey, a staff attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center who tried to locate Prada. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ultimately confirmed to Levey that Prada had been deported but did not divulge his destination.

On Tuesday, after this story was published, online Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said Prada had been sent to El Salvador on March 15.

The failure to list his deportation and location on any publicly accessible records may have been a simple oversight, but the matter continues to raise alarm among immigrant advocates and legal scholars, who say Prada’s case suggests a new level of disarray in the immigration system, as officials face pressure to rapidly fulfill President Donald Trump’s pledge of mass deportations. While hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been deported under various administrations in recent years, it is extraordinarily unusual for them to disappear without a legal record.

“I have not heard of a disappearance like this in my 40-plus years of practicing and teaching immigration law,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.

“It’s unconscionable that it took a New York Times article and more than one month before the government indicated where and why he was deported,” Yale-Loehr said.

The New York Times reviewed immigration court records and traced Prada’s arrest and transfer to a detention facility in Michigan, as well as his deportation order. He no longer appeared on the ICE detainee locator, and his family and friends were searching urgently for answers.

Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to queries from the Times about Prada’s case over the past three days. But Tuesday, after this story published, McLaughlin said officials conducted an investigation after he attempted to reenter the United States in Michigan.

“Further investigation resulted in Prada being designated a public safety threat as a confirmed member of Tren de Aragua,” a Venezuelan street gang, “and in violation of his conditions of admission,” she said.

She did not say why he did not appear on the list of those deported to El Salvador or on any other publicly available records.

Michelle Brané, executive director of Together and Free, a nonprofit that assists families of deportees, and who had been trying to locate Prada, said allegations of gang membership had never come up during her group’s inquiries, and that, in fact, Prada’s Social Security card and government-issued work permit had arrived in the mail Monday.

Prada’s story

Prada was among tens of thousands of Venezuelans who migrated to the United States in recent years as their country descended into crisis under the government of Nicolás Maduro.

Despite having a few years of college, he did not see a future in Venezuela, his brother Hugo said. Another brother moved to Chile; a sister settled in Peru. Ricardo, the youngest of the four, migrated to Colombia around 2019 and worked as a private security guard.

He and his former partner, Maria Alejandra Vega, had a son, Alessandro, who is now 4. Mother and child returned to Venezuela in 2022, after the couple broke up. Prada supported his son and spoke with him regularly, according to Vega.

In 2024, Prada set out for the United States over land.

He was admitted at a port of entry Nov. 29, 2024, after waiting in Mexico to obtain an appointment through an app, CBP One, which the Biden administration had encouraged migrants to use in order to reduce chaotic crossings at the southern border, and was allowed to stay in the United States while his case was considered.

Prada joined Javier in Chicago, where he remained for a little over a month until he decided to move to Detroit, according to his friend.

On Jan. 15, in broad daylight, Prada found himself on the Ambassador Bridge, on a one-way road that connects Michigan to Ontario. At about 1 p.m., he sent Javier a text with a pin of his location. “Look where I am,” he said in the text shared with the Times. He added an emoji of a shocked face.

When Javier next heard from his friend, Prada was at the Calhoun County Correctional Center in western Michigan. Using the CBP One app had allowed him to enter the country once, but he did not have permission to enter a second time and was subject to mandatory detention.