‘He’s just… gone’: Deliveryman picked up by ICE ‘fell off the face of the Earth’

Imagine if your partner didn’t come home from work one day. They don’t answer your increasingly frantic calls, and none of their friends and family had seen them. Days later, and after much digging, you discover they’d been snatched by the government and deported, but nobody knows where they are, when they arrived, or even they’re still alive.

This is the nightmarish limbo the family of Venezuelan immigrant Ricardo Prada Vasquez is currently living in. In late January, Prada was working as a delivery driver in Detroit and picked up a McDonald’s meal. While delivering that he took a wrong turn, accidentally ending up on the Ambassador Bridge to Canada.

NEW from @nytimes.com: A bone-chilling account. A Venezuelan man detained alongside the 238 sent to El Salvador on March 15 seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. His name isn't among the names of those sent to CECOT that day and no one spotted him among those men. He's just… gone.

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) April 22, 2025 at 2:13 PM

After pulling a U-turn, he returned to the border moments later and was put in immediate detention, then tossed into a Texas prison to await what he assumed would be deportation to Venezuela. That was the last anyone ever heard of him, as the same night, the Trump administration defied a court order to fly three planeloads of migrants to the now-notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador.

This happening would be bad enough, but Prada wasn’t on the list of the 238 people on board, wasn’t photographed or captured on video entering the facility, and nobody has heard a word from him since.

His mother, Maria Alejandra Vega, describes her life since his disappearance as “sheer agony”, saying it’s like her son “fell off the face of the Earth”. Unlike other high-profile CECOT removals, there’s no evidence that Prada ever made it to the prison, leaving many fearing the worst.

Non-profit organization Together and Free has been doing its best to connect deportees scooped up by ICE with their families, a difficult job in the best of times. In Prada’s case, they’ve queried ICE databases, made inquiries at the Texas detention center, tried to wring information from the ICE field office, and obtained inmate lists at the destination jails – and turned up nothing. Executive director Michelle Brane says they’re out of options: “In this case, we’re stumped”.

So where the heck is he? ICE claims he was deported, but they have no idea where to or what happened next. Now his mother fears that her son might be dead. After all, if he didn’t make it to the prison, there are no signs of life, and no officials can give any further information, what other conclusion is there? As Ms. Vega puts it: “We have done everything we can to find him. If he’s in prison we want to know. We want to know if he’s alive.”