Trump’s Immigration Horror Stories Are Breaking Through. Here’s How.
Brocasters, sports YouTubers, and comedians take on the president’s El Salvador disappearances.
REGULAR READERS OF THIS NEWSLETTER are well aware of the ways President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda is hurting individuals, communities, and businesses. But not everyone is quite so clued in. Voters in one of the demographic groups key to Trump’s re-election—young men without a college degree, online but only marginally politically engaged—tend not to rely so much on conventional news sources. Trump’s sharp drop in the polls didn’t just happen because the New York Times and Washington Post published tough stories. It happened because the stories those outlets broke and reported started getting picked up by mainstream infotainment—including by one of the guys credited with helping Trump win back the White House: Joe Rogan.
At the end of March, Rogan hit Trump hard on the cruelty and lawlessness of his deportation policies. While discussing the case of Andry José Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist and hairdresser who has not been heard from since he was thrown into the Salvadoran CECOT prison almost two months ago, Rogan said it’s “horrific” that “people who aren’t criminals are getting lassoed up and deported.”
“This is kind of crazy that that could be possible,” Rogan said. “And that’s bad for the cause. The cause is: Let’s get the gang members out—everybody agrees—but let’s not let innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs.”
“This is a sports story.”
Rogan is not alone in the infotainment space in talking about the Trump administration’s abuse of innocent people.
Pablo Torre, formerly of ESPN and now host of the podcast and YouTube show Pablo Torre Finds Out, had journalist Paola Ramos on for a nearly hour-long episode last week titled “Trump Deported This Goalkeeper to a Terrorist Prison—for a Real Madrid Tattoo.”
The episode centered on the story of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a former professional soccer player in Venezuela, who marched against the Maduro regime, for which he was tortured with electric shocks and suffocation. After his release, he legally sought asylum in the United States. But the Trump administration used his tattoo of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball—inspired by his love of Real Madrid—as justification to label him a Tren de Aragua gang member and ship him off to a foreign gulag with no hearing.
“This is a sports story,” Torre told me when I asked why he chose to highlight Barrios’s case. “It just became very clear to me Jerce is the athlete this administration does not want you to know about.”
Barrios, an undersized goalkeeper, worked his way up from travel teams to the third division of a Venezuelan pro league. His breakthrough came in a tournament more than a decade ago. Staring down penalty kicks, his performance would decide not only the outcome of the game, but whether his team got promoted to a higher league. Thanks to a game-winning save, Barrios became a fan favorite, and he eventually made it up to the top league.
“If you just change the country from Venezuela to the United States, this is a sports movie,” Torre tells me.
I spend most of my time talking to activists, lawyers, scholars, businesspeople, and others who are fried and freaked out about the state of immigration in this country and the plight of immigrants. Talking to Torre—who spent decades in the (only sometimes) more glamorous world of sports reporting—was a rare opportunity for me to nerd out about sports.
Ramos, who has reported on immigrants and Latino communities in the United States for MSNBC, Telemundo, and Vice, had another good reason for seeking out Torre to collaborate on Barrios’s story: the chance to reach a new demographic. (“The supermajority of our audience is male,” Torre had told me earlier.)
“Most of the audience I’m talking to at MSNBC or Telemundo is familiar with that story, millennials or an older liberal crowd, or Latinos. But to be able to tell it to a male audience, that to me seemed new and important,” Ramos added. “To be able to get a male audience that is hyperfocused on sports and these male-dominant podcasts, there’s actually an entry point through sports to get them to humanize these people that may seem less familiar to them. It’s an audience I never get to tap into—to get a Real Madrid fan to suddenly see these migrants being hypercriminalized in a different light.”
Torre said his experiences writing for sports magazines taught him an important lesson about building narratives. People start reading a story because they’re a fan of the sport or team it’s about—but if they finish it, it’s because they were drawn in by what and who they’re reading about.
“What’s the human story here? What’s the surprise, the twist, the takeaways?” he asks himself. “The cheese to melt on the broccoli of whatever nutritional content is worth giving to people.”
He continued:
There’s absurdity in the basic premise that this administration is using sports as a way of disappearing people, whether through a tattoo homage to Real Madrid or Kilmar Abrego Garcia wearing a Chicago Bulls cap. As someone who sees sports as their thing, how are we okay with letting this administration co-opt our culture as sports fans to do horrific shit?
John Oliver Covers Deportations—and Andry
LAST SUNDAY, MAY 4, Lindsay Toczylowski was watching Last Week Tonight on HBO with her 10-year-old son. Toczylowski is Andry José Hernández Romero’s lawyer, and when John Oliver launched into a 25-minute jeremiad on Trump’s deportations, she hoped he would mention her client, whom she has not heard from for nearly two months. When he did, she and her son cheered.
Oliver methodically ticked through the infuriating details, noting that El Salvador’s justice and security minister bragged of its notorious prison: “No one who enters the CECOT will ever walk out. . . . They will only be able to leave in a coffin.”
Oliver repeated the story of the Time photographer who witnessed Andry having his head roughly shaved as he cried for his mother. As Toczylowski watched, she caught sight of herself; Oliver played clips of her conversation with 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega about Hernández Romero’s tattoos. Falsely described by administration officials as evidence of gang membership, they actually depict his parents’ names under crowns—because he considers them to be his “king and queen.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that Hernández Romero’s social media indicated that he was a gang member. The 60 Minutes team’s review of his posts turned up mostly glamour shots of him with makeup brushes.
“The only thing I’m actually confident he’s a genuine threat to,” Oliver quipped, “is unaccented cheekbones.”
Politically speaking, Oliver’s audience probably has more in common with the readership of the Times or the Post than it does with Rogan’s or Torre’s audience. But it still is the case of immigration horror stories breaking through in ways and mediums where they traditionally don’t.
The segment’s view count on YouTube is, as of this writing, nearing 4 million. And, as Toczylowski told me, every bit of attention helps. When people stop caring about what is happening, she said, Andry’s story will fade away—“and then he will fade away.”
“What we need is for people to really understand the tragic thing that has happened to him as a human being,” she said. “But also to understand what it means for our democracy when people’s constitutional rights are trampled. It’s why I was so happy to see it on Last Week Tonight. It shows how horrific it is, but also in the context of what is happening and where it might go.”
Hernández Romero’s story is not just about immigration, she said. It’s also “about Americans and what we will tolerate as a government.”
Torre said something similar about Barrios’s story:
“It’s the story of a soccer player who left one dictatorship, fled to America, only to suddenly discover America is one too—and they sent him to another dictatorship.”
It’s the arrogance that goes with the ignorance that makes things so shocking. They don’t care about cruelty; it’s all about the performance of power. All of Trump’s appointees follow their leader in not just breaking laws, but stomping on them, then claiming that they can do it because … Trump gave them the power to do whatever they want. The DOJ isn’t going to enforce the law or follow the Constitution, They are using all their energy to defend the criminal behavior. It’s up to all of us to keep these crimes in the public eye, support the lawyers, and not feel overwhelmed.
Excellent column. Let’s hope these stories keep breaking thru.