 |
| The number of people deported to El Salvador from the U.S. nearly doubled in the first months of 2026, according to official figures, coming as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has positioned himself as an ally willing to help the Trump administration accelerate deportations, a central priority. —NBC, May 14, 2026 |
I
never ran with them.
Never wore the ink, flashed the signs,
never whispered the names in the dark.
But
here, names do not matter.
Here, I am Tren de Aragua.
I am what they say I am.
They
came at dawn,
boots on stairs, fists on doors,
faces like chiseled ice when they took me—
no trial, no questions.
A
plane filled with men, young and old,
some killers, thieves, rapists,
but some like me, descent hombres—
wrong
place, wrong time,
wrong side of the administration’s priorities.
An old law book dusted off:
The
Alien Enemies Act of 1798,
shoved into the asshole-mouth
that
spews hate without discretion,
sees an enemy in every shadow,
hugs the flag and says,
“this is how we take our country back.”
The
judge says, “this is not the way,”
insists laws must live in the present,
that due process and justice must
precede punishment.
The right calls the judge a traitor,
questions the authority of the courts,
defies his judgement,
calls for his robes,
his
job, his head.
“Why do they love criminals?”
the foxes scream on TV,
“Why do they want Venezuelan gangs
running the streets in America?”
as though they don’t understand or care
about rights or laws.
Never a whisper for the ones like me,
the ones who swept floors, carried bricks,
worked
fields, who built and provided for this country,
sent money home so a sister could eat.
Now I sit in a Salvadorian prison
on
ice-cold stone,
back against the wall, breath slow,
my name already dissolving.
Tren
de Aragua was born in a prison,
and here, they still reign.
They control the water, the food,
who wakes up and who does not.
They are hermandad,
but I am no brother to them.
They smell it, this fear on me,
this foreignness, this lack of appropriate ink.
A
blade scrapes concrete—
someone sharpening the night.
Eyes flick my way.
They know I do not belong.
That
might save me.
That might kill me.
Author’s Note: This poem is rooted in the real-world deportations of March 2025, when the United States invoked a 1798 wartime law to transfer hundreds of Venezuelan deportees directly to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Investigative news reports documented that some laborers with no demonstrated gang ties were mistakenly swept up in the raids. The speaker in “Their Gang” is a fictional composite. The poem steps away from the headlines to imagine the visceral terror of an ordinary civilian suddenly stripped of due process and left to survive in a violent foreign prison dominated by gangs.
More than 100 of Eric D. Goldman's poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines. His poetry collection Faraway Tables (Yorkshire Publishing, 2023) was an Amazon #1 Bestseller in Poetry. In addition to poetry, hundreds of his short stories, articles, and travel stories have been published in magazines and journals, and he's the author of seven books, most of them fiction.