Watch: Gay Venezuelan Man Swept Up, Sent to Notorious El Salvador Prison 'Without Due Process'

Andrys, a 23-year-old gay Venezuelan man who had come to the U.S. seeking asylum got no trial and wasn't even charged with a crime before being snatched up and sent to a prison in El Salvador. His tattoos were enough to seal his fate, according to his lawyer.

Andrys' lawyer, "Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder and president of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, painted a harrowing picture while recounting how her client was 'disappeared' during an appearance on 'The Rachel Maddow Show' on Thursday," Huffpost recounted.

The account relayed that Andrys – his last name has not been released due to concerns for his safety – "was detained after immigration officials decided his tattoos could be a sign of gang affiliation" – ink that Toczylowski said carry no such significance, but were "normal tattoos that you would see on anybody at a coffee shop anywhere in the United States or Venezuela."

"Though Andrys was scheduled to appear in U.S. immigration court last week, he was forcibly removed from the country last weekend despite a judge's order to keep him and over 250 other men on U.S. soil until further legal review."

Andrys is hardly the only young man of Venezuelan origin to be swept up in the current administration's full-steam-ahead efforts to eject immigrants and send them to the El Salvadoran prison, which has a reputation for brutal conditions. Another is Franco José Caraballo Tiapa, a young father of two who had the name of his four-year-old daughter tattooed on his chest. Despite having no criminal record, UK newspaper the Guardian noted, Tiapa "was detained by US immigration officials in Dallas last month," and those officials "appear to have taken those tattoos as proof that he was a member of Venezuela's most notorious gang, Tren de Aragua" – all without any explanation as to "how agents reached that conclusion."

Tren de Aragua is a gang that the president has falsely claimed "took over" the city of Aurora in Colorado. (The gang made a base of operations out of several apartment complexes, NBC News reported, that had been so severely neglected they presented conditions that NBC likened to a "slum," but they hardly took over the entire city.)

NBC News noted that "evidence of their involvement is tenuous in some of the most violent and high-profile cases that Trump and his supporters attribute to the gang. This has prompted advocates to suggest the specter of violence is being used as a pretext for violating civil rights."

To lend force to the program of sweeping up and deporting people to the El Salvadoran prison, the president recently invoked a centuries-old law – the seldom-used Alien Enemies Act – against the gang, which is thought to have between 2,500 and 5,000 members scattered between Venezuela, the U.S., and half a dozen other countries.

It's not just tattooed "men of military age" being swept up. Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian actor and business consultant, was arrested and detained for two weeks when she crossed into the U.S. to apply for a TN visa – a legal document available to Mexican and Canadian citizens for certain kinds of employment in the U.S. that Mooney had been granted in the past without difficulty. Mooney was detained for two weeks and has written a harrowing account of her time in custody despite – as CBS News reported – having "her visa paperwork and a job offer from a company in the U.S." with her at the time she was placed under arrest.

The issue of due process looms large in such cases. Huffpost noted that "[t]hough Andrys was scheduled to appear in U.S. immigration court last week, he was forcibly removed from the country last weekend despite a judge's order to keep him and over 250 other men on U.S. soil until further legal review."

The White House ignored that order, and two planes full of deportees arrived in El Salvador, where, HuffPost detailed, "President Nayib Bukele appeared to celebrate the arrival of the deportees as he posted a video of shackled men being boarded off a place and processed for detention to his social media."

Bukele's government has reason to celebrate: They take such deportees "in exchange for $6 million a year, paid for by American tax dollars," Huffpost noted.

Bukele captioned the post with the mocking message, "Oopsie... Too late," with reference to the order, which was issued by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.

Meanwhile, Andrys' current condition remains unknown. "Toczylowski said she has grave concerns about Andrys' safety at Cecot, a 40,000-capacity prison complex where people are often held without a trial or release date and kept in brutally spartan living conditions," Huffpost reported.

The U.S. government has denied it has any responsibility to keep family members or legal counsel in contact with Toczylowski's client.

"They will not facilitate communication with our client, because he has, in their words, been removed," the lawyer told Maddow. Her own word for the young man's imprisonment is somewhat harsher: Toczylowski has said that Andrys was "disappeared," a word that recalls more than one thousand people who were swept up and never seen again during the reign of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Watch Toczylowski's remarks to Maddow below.