The Silent Nightmare of One Man and the New Face of Trump’s Deportation Policy.
It happened again. Without warning. Without protocol. And, as a judge noted, without even the semblance of law. Late Friday night, Federal Judge Brian Murphy ordered the Trump administration to bring back a Guatemalan man it had deported to Mexico despite explicit legal protections. O.C.G., as he is identified in court documents, is gay – and had been granted protection from deportation to Guatemala by a U.S. immigration court. But that didn’t help him. He was still put on a bus, deported – not to his country of origin, but to Mexico, where he had previously been raped and held for ransom as an asylum seeker, according to his own testimony.
It is the kind of story that unfolds slowly – quietly, yet devastatingly. Not a high-profile case. No celebrity involved. Just a man who believed the law would protect him.
“No one has ever claimed that O.C.G. poses any kind of national security threat,” Murphy wrote in his ruling. “This case is not about legal technicalities – it is about the banal horror of putting a man on a bus and sending him back to a country where he was just raped and kidnapped.”
In all court records and media reports, he is referred to only by his initials. This serves to protect his identity, especially given the sensitive circumstances of his flight and the danger he faces because of his sexual orientation.
The decision was issued in the case of D.V.D. et al. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security et al., case number 1:25-cv-10676-BEM, before the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
The administration, represented by Tricia McLaughlin from the Department of Homeland Security, stated that O.C.G. was “illegally in the country” and that although he had been granted protection from removal to Guatemala, he was nevertheless transferred to Mexico – which, according to her, is a “safe third country.” She called Judge Murphy a “federal activist judge” and announced the administration’s intent to appeal. The man's return, she added, is “not the government's problem.”
But that is precisely the problem.
Murphy’s ruling adds to a growing list of federal court decisions challenging the Trump administration’s deportation practices. Just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court forced the government to retrieve wrongfully deported Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a notorious prison in El Salvador – despite repeated White House claims that “nothing could be done.” In Murphy’s words, the case of O.C.G. is almost simple: “He is not being held by a foreign government. The administration has not even claimed that facilitating his return would be costly or difficult.”
The Trump administration – increasingly immune to public pressure and legal arguments in its second term – refuses to take responsibility in this case as well. It invokes “state secrets” and “national security” when it comes to returns – even when a human life is demonstrably at risk.
O.C.G. has since gone into hiding in Guatemala. We have lost contact with him. Together with Asociación Lambda Guatemala – a leading human rights organization for LGBTQI+ protection – we are trying to find him, before it is too late.
The grand story of this era is not told in big speeches but in small acts of cruelty. A bus. An order. One human being too many, lost.
And a president who simply does not care.
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