Hernandez Romero's tattoos freaked out the gringo looms. "During a physical exam ... an officer flagged the crown tattoos he has on each wrist " one with the word "mom" and the other with the word "dad" " and he was sent to Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, run by the private prison company CoreCivic."

As NBC News has reported, Hernndez Romero's tattoos were inspired by his desire to honor his parents and his love of his town's annual Three Kings festival. "He would design and sew his own costumes, and he would do the makeup for all the women in the parade," a childhood friend told NBC, which noted that crown tattoos were a local trend. But two private contractors at Otay Mesa determined that the tattoos marked him as a gang member.

That was apparently enough to consign Hernndez Romero indefinitely to a black hole. (Later, USA Today would reveal that one of the two contractors was Charles Cross Jr., a "disgraced former Milwaukee cop with credibility issues" who'd been fired for driving his car into a home while drunk.) "The fact that that is the sole evidence that they have ever produced that landed Andry in that prison cell in El Salvador should shock the conscience of everyone," said his lawyer, Lindsay Toczylowski of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. "It's the reason that due process protections are so important. Because had that evidence gone before an impartial judge, and that was all they produced, and we were given an opportunity to refute it, it would have been so easy to do."