This is your literally personification of a sudden turn of events. This Venezuelan immigrant, who is also a driver for Uber Eats, only made a mistake on road directions while delivering a McDonald’s meal to his customer in Detroit, but is now finding himself detained in… El Salvador.
According to Google, Detroit is over seven hours away from El Salvador via a flight, which is even a connecting flight. Those hours are outside the waiting times and processes at airports. You wouldn’t want to know the distance.
But he wasn’t detained in El Salvador because he found it hard to navigate to his customer’s address. After all, no delivery driver would ever get detained for this. He was arrested and imprisoned for being an illegal Venezuelan immigrant.
Here’s what happened
The 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, “accidentally” crossed the Canadian border in January while trying to deliver food to his customer. While he was attempting to re-enter the United States, he was reportedly detained by United States authorities.
“What we’re seeing is one wrong turn at the Detroit bridge – the Ambassador Bridge – can result in your loved one disappearing,” Christine Sauve, the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center’s communications coordinator, told the media. “And that shouldn’t be the case.”
For some time, he was detained in Texas, where he was expecting to be deported to Venezuela by mid-March. However, the bigger issue is this: no one can find him anywhere in the detention facility in El Salvador. That’s creepy.
After the Trump administration flew three planes with detainees inside from the Texas facility where Vásquez was initially detained to a high-security prison in the Latin country, interestingly, he “disappeared.”
Even his family and friends have not heard of him. They were uncertain of his whereabouts, and the media had no clues about whether his loved ones were just covering up for him.
Now, people are blaming the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which allegedly has disappeared the Uber Eats driver. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, claimed the agency admitted he was deported, but they wouldn’t disclose more information.
"All signs suggest he was sent to El Salvador, but his name does not appear on the list of Venezuelans deported there, and he wasn’t spotted [in a video],” Reichlin-Melnick stated.
Deeper discourse
For him, he believes there is “something terrifying about this,” and the plot could thicken and shock you before you even know it.
Is the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conniving with some parties? Are they under reservation, which is why they wouldn’t disclose much information?
“There is something terrifying about this, he continued. “The only thing [the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] will say is that the man was deported. But for all intents and purposes, it’s like he’s fallen off the face of the planet or dropped into some black hole. This isn’t how a government interested in [the rule] of law acts.”
Furthermore, what’s even more alarming is how the Department of Homeland Security confirmed the driver’s ties with the notorious Venezuelan gang, the Tren de Aragua.
The Tren de Aragua is a transnational criminal organization from Venezuela. Whoa. Yikes.
“Further investigation resulted in Prada being designated a public safety threat as a confirmed member of [Tren de Aragua] and in violation of his conditions of admission. Prada was apprehended and transferred to [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] Michigan for detention,” the authorities’ statement further noted.
What does this scoop imply? That you have to be careful before accepting drivers who will bring your orders to your doorstep.