This Young Gay Man’s Disappearance Should Shake the LGBTQ+ Community

Can Andry Hernandez Romero Get Asylum?

The juxtaposition is morally excruciating for anyone with an iota of compassion. The very air in West Hollywood is electric with queer joy and the excitement of celebrating two major Pride events - WeHo Pride and LA Pride on Hollywood Boulevard -- both unabashedly covered by local legacy media. The broadcasts are a subliminal First Amendment protest to Donald Trump’s threatening anvil of retaliation against anything remotely promoting diversity and inclusion.

The broadcasts and celebrations are courageous for we know that while we rejoice, the wanna-be King is gleefully enforcing Project 2025 through a deluge of cruel Executive Orders demonizing and erasing anything DEI and LGBTQ+ and dispatching masked ICE agents to snatch anyone Trump’s White Supremacist terrorist administration tags for deportation.

Among those swept up in Trump’s frenetic crusade is Andry Hernandez Romero, a 32-year-old gay hair stylist and makeup artist who, in May 2024, fled harassment and threats of violence in Venezuela after speaking out against authoritarian dictator Nicolas Maduro.

After navigating the complex app designed to streamline the byzantine U.S. lawful entry process, last August Andry faced a U.S. border official in San Diego. With no criminal history, he demonstrated a “credible fear of persecution” in his home country and was allowed to proceed with his legal case for asylum.

Then so close to his dream of freedom, came that Trumpian twist. During a physical exam, officials fixated on Andry's tattoos of crowns with the words "Mom" and "Dad." The agent apparently assumed that Venezuelan gangs accept gays. Without fact-checking, he suspected Andry was affiliated with the notorious Tren de Aragua, which does not use crown tattoos for gang identification.

Andry landed in detention awaiting his asylum court date. But one week before the March 13 hearing in San Diego, without the due process where he could contest his suspected gang affiliation, Andry was abruptly transferred to a facility in South Texas, resulting in his absence in court. The hearing was postponed to March 17 when the immigration judge again asked where Andry was. "He was removed to El Salvador. We just found out today," the ICE lawyer replied. The judge questioned the legality of Andry’s deportation without a removal order.

On March 14, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act - a 1798 law used during a declared war - to target immigrants as government “enemies” who had “infiltrated” America. Secretly, ICE deported Andry and 137 other Venezuelans to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, with Trump paying dictator President Nayib Bukele to incarcerate the kidnapped immigrants.

The world watched as Andry and his shackled fellow prisoners were displayed on TV brutally forced off the plane and forced to kneel as agents roughly shaved their heads. TIME Magazine photographer Philip Holsinger reported that Andry was being slapped and cried for his mother, saying, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a stylist.”

Trump called the Venezuelans “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst,” claiming they were thoroughly vetted. But ProPublica reviewed each case of the Venezuelan deportees and reported that the Trump administration knew that “the vast majority” of the 138 Venezuelan immigrants ”had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.”

Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union’s lead attorney fighting the deportations, told ProPublica that the removals amounted to a “’blatant violation of the most fundamental due process principles” and subjected the deportees to life imprisonment.

On June 4, a federal judge agreed with the ACLU in their case with Democracy Forward -- J.G.G. v. Trump -- in which Andry is one of the lead plaintiffs.

“In a sweeping and at times outraged opinion, the judge, James E. Boasberg, compared the expelled men to characters in a Kafka novel. Judge Boasberg also asserted that they were likely to prevail in their claims that President Trump had treated them unfairly by deporting them without hearings to a brutal Salvadoran prison under the expansive powers of the wartime statute, known as the Alien Enemies Act,” the New York Times reported.

Trump officials, Boasberg wrote in his 69-page ruling, “spirited away planeloads of people before any such challenge could be made. And now, significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.”

“Such was the situation into which Frengel Reyes Mota, Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, and scores of other Venezuelan noncitizens say they were plunged on March 15, 2025. In the early morning hours, Venezuelans held by the Department of Homeland Security at El Valle Detention Facility in Texas were awakened from their cells, taken to a separate room, shackled, and informed that they were being transferred,” Boasberg wrote, detailing the horrific removal. “To where? That they were not told.”

The Trump Administration, Boasberg said, had a legal duty to give the deportees due process and must “right their legal wrongs.”

“Absent this relief,” the judge wrote, “the government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action.”

There have been numerous attempts to look for a humanitarian bone in the Trump administration’s body politic, most notably gay immigrant Rep. Robert Garcia’s heated exchange with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a May 14 congressional hearing. Garcia (D-Long Beach) went to El Salvador for a welfare check but was denied access to Andry.

“You and the president have the ability to check if Andry is alive and is not being harmed. Would you commit to at least asking El Salvador if he is alive?” Garcia asked Noem.

“This is a question that’s best asked to the president and government of El Salvador,” she replied.

On May 27, Immigration Judge Paula Dixon granted a DHS motion to dismiss asylum proceedings for Andry scheduled for the following day. NBC News reported that Andry’s dismissal order “allowed for the possibility that the case be reopened if Hernandez returns to the U.S.”

“As the son and grandson of Japanese Americans who were rounded up and forced into camps without due process, I know all too well that Andry is not the first person to be unjustly taken by the government,” says out Rep. Mark Takano (CA-39), Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus. “Every American should be alarmed by how openly the Trump Administration is taking people off the street and locking them away in a foreign prison without so much as a day in court—all because of their tattoos. This fight is not over yet, but every day it drags on puts Andry and others’ lives in danger. I stand with Andry, his family, his lawyers, and our Constitution in rebuking President Trump’s cruel and illegal attacks, and hope that justice is swiftly served.”

“We should all be incredibly alarmed at what has happened in Andry’s case. The idea that the government can disappear you because of your tattoos, and never even give you a day in court, should send a chill down the spine of every American. If this can happen to Andry, it can happen to any one of us,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, President of the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

“Andry’s life depends on us holding the Trump administration accountable for what they have done to him,” Toczylowski said in a press release. “We will continue to fight until Andry is safe and free.”

But there may be a big hitch. Andry’s friend and mother gave evidentiary statements in J.G.G. v. Trump saying Andry “was persecuted both for his sexual orientation and for his refusal to promote government propaganda” while working as a makeup artist at the TV network in Caracas, according to CNN.

Evidence of persecution based on sexual orientation qualifies for asylum. But Project 2025 demands the deletion of “the terms sexual orientation and gender identity….out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” Will Trump judges deny Andry’s case because it’s based in persecution for his sexual orientation?

Longtime activist Cleve Jones urges all LGBTQ+ people and allies to take action.

“We don't know if he's dead or alive,” Cleve says. “I look at [Andry] and he's like my little gay brother who is now in this terrible situation where he - if he is still alive - is probably being subjected to horrendous brutality on a daily basis.”

But Cleve is also angry at the lack of response to this urgently important case.

“If you want to be intersectional and not just quack about it, look at this case,” Cleve says. “This young man stands at the intersection of our fight for LGBT equality, for immigrant rights, and for due process under law….Everybody should be talking about Andry. Free Andry. Free Andry. It's so important!”

Please note: You can donate and buy “Asylum is a Human Right t-shirt to show support for Andry at PRIDE.