Two months after his release from one of the world’s most notorious prisons, Andry José Hernández Romero is back in the hometown where he became a makeup artist 12 years ago. He’s beginning to return to the types of jobs that launched his career: weddings, quinceañeras and local festivals. But things are different.
He panics at the sound of keys jangling, or the sight of a police officer with handcuffs. He has trouble sleeping, traumatised by the memories of the 125 days he spent in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, the conditions of which have been condemned by Human Rights Watch, the UN Human Rights High Commissioner and Amnesty International. Romero and 251 other Venezuelan nationals were sent to CECOT by the Trump administration last March.
“Right now, we are battling with ourselves. We are battling with the psychological pressure and the traumas that in one way or another we are carrying from that prison,” he told The Business of Beauty.
Photos of Romero from his career posing with beauty queens and makeup brushes became some of the most visible evidence publicised by human rights advocates to demonstrate that this was not the group of hardened criminals with gang affiliations that the Trump administration claimed. Romero’s story was told in a New Yorker article in January, and spread throughout the world. At The Business of Beauty Global Forum in June, Lindsay Toczylowski, president and co-founder at the California-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, spoke of the horrors Romero faced at CECOT.
“We were desperately looking for Andry,” said Toczylowski, whose firm was representing Romero in his asylum case when he was deported. She recounted that he did not show up to his scheduled court hearing on Mar. 13 and disappeared from the ICE detainee locator. “I watched the planes take off as I was listening to a court hearing in DC hoping it would be stopped.” She did not know whether he was alive until his release over a month later.
Now, as he rebuilds his life, he’s free to share his story himself.
A Career Interrupted
Growing up in the town of Capacho Viejo, Romero was a member of a theatre troupe. A friend taught him makeup and hairstyling, and he started working with brides and beauty queens, creating gowns for competitions and designing costumes for his local Catholic Three Kings festival. The festival inspired a set of crown wrist tattoos that would become more consequential in his life than he could ever imagine.
He moved to Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas, doing makeup for film productions, commercials, the Miss Venezuela pageant — a cultural institution — and magazines, landing a job as the makeup artist for news anchors at a state-run TV station in 2023.
“I always say that doing makeup is like a career in medicine,” he said. “You have to be constantly innovating, you have to be staying up-to-date, because a new trend comes out every day.”
But in Venezuela, political repression and violence meant that keeping up with trends was the least of his worries. While he declined to talk politics, Toczylowski previously said that he faced harassment for being gay, and was stalked and even assaulted by his boss for not posting propaganda on his social media.
He decided to join the estimated 836,000 people seeking asylum from Venezuela in 2024, according to UN data. He gave his makeup kit to a friend, keeping as many beauty products as he could carry with him across seven countries on foot, including 97 kilometres of Central American jungle. The dangerous trip was one of constant anxiety with threats, fear of kidnapping and extortion.
But arriving at the US border was just the start of his troubles. Romero used the CBP One app, operated by the US Customs and Border Patrol, to book what is known as a “credible fear” interview to determine asylum eligibility. While he passed the interview in August 2024, he was still thrown into detention. His clothing, phone, jewelry and the makeup and skincare products were confiscated. Officers claimed his crown tattoos constituted “reasonable suspicion” that he was a member of the Tren de Aragua criminal organisation.
“The mental shock of seeing myself dressed in orange like a criminal, surrounded by people who had come from some federal prison for some kind of crime, was very strong,” he said of the San Diego detention. “I’d never set foot in a jail.”
After three months, the Immigrant Defenders Law Center took up his case pro bono. He considered giving up and requesting deportation, but his lawyer advised him that he had a strong case. He decided to stick it out, with no way of knowing what the incoming administration had in store.
A Forced Disappearance
For the months Romero was confined at CECOT with no outside contact, the sparse details of his transfer to El Salvador were only available through his lawyers and family.
Now able to share his experience, he said that he was transferred to Laredo, Texas. All he was told was that his scheduled March 13 hearing for his asylum case had been postponed before being loaded on a plane.
The detainees’ arrival to CECOT was documented in shocking images, showing guards marching them into the prison in shackles with heads pushed down. A photo of Romero by photojournalist Philip Holsinger showed guards shaving his head while he cried, pleading that he was a stylist, and asking for his mother. Shown across international media including 60 Minutes, it sparked a global outcry, as lawyers, activists and human rights groups called for the release of him and other detainees such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia. UN experts decried “arbitrary deportation decisions,” according to a statement. Even Joe Rogan, a supporter of US president Trump, said on his podcast that what happened to Romero was “horrific.”
According to Romero, the conditions within CECOT were every bit as cruel as El Salvador president Nayib Bukele has bragged about.
“I couldn’t even describe it — it was like hell,” Romero said. “We never saw natural light.” Crammed in barracks of hundreds of people with zero privacy, he remembers a constant sewage smell. The treatment by the guards was equally horrific, with frequent beatings.
“If we were asleep, they fought and hit us; if we were awake, they fought and hit us,” he said. He was also sexually assaulted by guards, he told reporters when he first arrived in Venezuela; he no longer talks about it in interviews. Guards told the inmates that they would be imprisoned for 20 years. “They said, ‘If you hang yourself, we’ll easily make a report, put it in your file, and bury you in a mass grave. Your family isn’t going to claim you. Your government isn’t going to claim you. You’re already forgotten here.’”
A Dream Deferred
Following a prisoner swap negotiation between Venezuela and El Salvador brokered by the US, Romero and the inmates were told it was time to get on another plane. Once again, they had no idea where they were being taken.
They arrived at a military base. An officer greeted them, calling them chamos, a term for “guys” in the Venezuelan dialect. It was the first sign they were headed home.
“As we say here in Venezuela, our souls returned to our bodies,” he said. “These were not the plans that we had, but we were going to be with our families and that was already a huge win.”
Now, he’s in therapy and doing makeup again, taking a course and learning about trends that he’s missed out on. His friend has returned his depleted makeup kit, and family and local events he’s worked on included the wedding of a friend who was incarcerated with him.
“I didn’t know what to do, having just been in prison. My fear was, did I forget how to put on makeup?” he said.
Had he entered a US that lived up to its lofty promises of being a bastion of democracy and freedom, Romero could have been doing makeup on Southern Californian news anchors. What could have come of his lost year will never be known.
But now, Romero has taken on an additional purpose: speaking up about what happened to him. His lawyers are looking into legal recourse, and he’s featured in a documentary and a book in the works.
“I’ve been able to show the world that I’m not a gang member, that I’m a makeup artist,” he said. Despite the cruelty he’s faced, seeing how many people fought for his release has maintained his faith in humanity.
“I know that in Venezuela, in Chile, Peru, the United States, there are good people and there are bad people,” he continued. “There are people who will understand the situations that can happen to our fellow human beings.”
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