In front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Friday, about 300 people gathered to demand the return of someone the U.S. government erased.
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
Andry Hernández Romero — a 31-year-old gay Venezuelan asylum-seeker, actor, and makeup artist — fled to the United States legally in 2024 to escape homophobic persecution. He passed a credible fear interview and was preparing for his asylum hearing. But before that hearing could take place, the Trump administration deported him under a 2025 executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act — a law from 1798 once used to imprison Japanese Americans during WWII.
Related: Rachel Maddow sees Americans’ active resistance as key to overcoming Donald Trump’s strongman game
Hernández Romero was sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, accused of gang affiliation based on two crown tattoos above the names of his mother and father. His attorneys say he had no criminal history. Immigration authorities never gave him a chance to respond.
He was last seen in chains, crying out, “I’m gay. I’m a stylist.” Since that day, there has been no proof of life.
“Andry is a son, a brother. He’s an actor, a makeup artist. He is a gay man who fled Venezuela because it was not safe for him to live as his authentic self,” Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, which is representing Hernández Romero, told the crowd. “He’s a dedicated member of a theater troupe that he has been in since he was seven years old… someone who put nothing but beauty and light into this world.”
Related: Jon Lovett and Tim Miller team up to ‘raise hell’ over gay asylum-seeker vanished to El Salvador by Trump
“We believe at this moment that he sits in a torture prison, a gulag in El Salvador,” she continued. “We say ‘believe’ because we have not had any proof of life for him since the day he was put on a U.S. government-funded plane, forcibly disappeared.”
HRC national press secretary Brandon Wolf, Immigrant Defenders Law Center executive director Lindsay Toczylowski, HRC senior VP Jonathan Lovitz and Crooked Media cofounder Jon Lovett speak at the U.S. Supreme Court.Christopher Wiggins for The Advocate
“Andry is not alone,” she added. “He is one of more than 235 men who were disappeared and rendered to CECOT with no due process. … Many of them, like Andry, were in the middle of their asylum cases. They were denied their day in court. In an attempt to erase their very existence, they were sent to suffer in a prison that officials in El Salvador have bragged that people only leave in a coffin.”
Jon Lovett, the Crooked Media cofounder and Pod Save America host, warned the crowd that the deportation program isn’t over — and its logic is meant to desensitize the public.
“They’re going to try to say it proves whatever bullshit they’ve been saying,” Lovett said, referring to the administration’s claim, despite an order from the U.S. Supreme Court to return them, that deportees were out of the federal government reach. On Friday, the administration returned Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. from El Salvador to face criminal charges that his attorney says are dubious.
Related: Gay asylum-seeker's lawyer worries for the makeup artist's safety in Salvadoran ‘hellhole’ prison
“What that tells us is two things. One, it means the pressure matters. They can pretend they’re immune to politics and democracy — they are not. That’s one. And two: they can send people back at any time they want. They can bring Andry back any time they fucking want," Lovett said.
He blasted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for refusing to confirm whether Hernández Romero is alive. “Kristi Noem, a mother, is asked to give proof of life. That’s it. Proof of life that Andry, this innocent person who’d only touched the immigration system because he followed the rules, is alive — and she wouldn’t do it.”
Gay California U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia pleaded with Noem during a recent House hearing, during which she refused to acknowledge the concern about Hernández Romero.
Sarah Longwell, the lesbian publisher of The Bulwark and a former longtime Republican political strategist, said the outrage many former conservatives feel over Hernández Romero’s disappearance is rooted in values their party abandoned.
“The Republican Party that we grew up in understood that immigrants added tremendous value to our country,” she said. “Ronald Reagan used to say … ‘if you had freedom in your heart and you wanted to follow our laws, anybody can come to America from anywhere and become an American.’”
Related: Kristi Noem won’t say if gay asylum-seeker deported to El Salvador’s ‘hellhole’ prison is still alive
“But the other thing we were raised on as young conservatives was fidelity to the Constitution,” she added. “It was a belief in the rule of law and due process and equal treatment. … And so what I want from us… is to remind Republicans that they’re Americans first … and that the values this country was founded on, they still have to abide by.”
Supporters gather at the U.S. Supreme Court in suport of the "Free Andry" movmement. Christopher Wiggins for The Advocate
“That’s what we do when we don’t forget about people like Andry,” Longwell said. “They know it’s wrong. And we should never let them forget what they’re doing.”
Tim Miller, her colleague at The Bulwark, issued a blunt indictment.
“We did this to Andry — not some crooked cop or some corporation or some foreign country. We did it,” he said. “And so it is up to us to get him back.”
He described scrolling through Hernández Romero’s Instagram. “It’s a fucking tough scroll, to be honest, thinking about this nightmare that we put him through. But there’s one caption that he wrote on one story. He said this: ‘Always give more than what’s expected of you because 80 percent of success is simply persistence. So, do not be afraid of failure. Be afraid of not trying.’”
“Donald Trump wants to dehumanize these folks,” Miller said. “He wants to say that they are vermin, that they’re thugs, that they’re bringing fentanyl into the country, and he wants people to not care about them … but he’s wrong about that.”
Related: Coalition of 52 Democrats push for proof of life for deported gay asylum-seeker Andry Hernández Romero
Longwell, Lovett, and Miller joined forces to host a joint The Bulwark and Crooked Media fundraising event and podcast taping on Friday evening at the Lincoln Theatre in D.C. to support the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in its fight for the rights of wrongfully deported Venezuelans, such as Hernández Romero.
Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat who was the first gay person of color elected to Congress, invoked his family’s own forced removal.
“The Alien Enemies Act was once used, along with other evil laws, to imprison my own parents and grandparents during World War II,” he said. “Their only crime being Japanese American. No charges, no trial, just locked up and stripped of their dignity. And the trauma didn’t end when the war did. It echoed through my family for generations.”
Related: Deported gay makeup artist cried for mother in prison, photojournalist says
“Now we see it happening again,” Takano said. “The same fear, the same injustice, repackaged and rebranded, but just as cruel.”
The Bulwark's Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell speak at the U.S. Supreme Court rally for Andry Romero.Christopher Wiggins for The Advocate
He called Hernández Romero’s deportation “scapegoating,” not safety. “Let’s be crystal clear,” he said. “We must repeal the Alien Enemies Act … because none of us gets to sit this out.”
Jonathan Lovitz, the Human Rights Campaign’s new senior vice president for campaigns and communications, delivered one of the rally’s most impassioned speeches — honoring Hernández Romero while indicting the system that disappeared him.
“He’s a vibrant soul who made the world beautiful just by being in it,” Lovitz said. “You heard that in 2024, he fled Venezuela — not for opportunity, not for handouts — for survival. He was beaten, he was abused, and he was targeted for being an outspoken gay man. That was his crime.”
Related: Gay Venezuelan asylum-seeker ‘disappeared’ to Salvadoran mega-prison under Trump order, Maddow reveals
Lovitz condemned the weaponization of bureaucracy: “No hearing, no justice — just vanished. That is cruelty. That is cowardice. And it is the product of a broken and weaponized system, one that treats human dignity like a paperwork error.”
“Our Constitution does not say due process only for citizens,” he added. “It does not say only for the lucky. And it certainly does not say only for the white, the straight, and the tattoo-free. It says that all people — all people — deserve justice.”
But in front of the court, the message was simpler: Bring Andry home.
“If Andry isn’t safe,” Lovitz said, “none of us are. Not immigrants, not asylum-seekers, not gay or trans people, not any of us.”
And as the chants of “Free Andry” swept through the crowd, Lovitz’s final words rang out:
“These colors don’t run.”
