Sign up for The Agenda — Them's news and politics newsletter, delivered to your inbox every Thursday.
One of the private prison employees who helped send gay asylum seeker Andry Hernandez Romero to an El Salvador detention facility is a former Milwaukee police officer who was fired for driving into a house while intoxicated, according to a new investigative report this week by USA Today.
Hernandez, a 31-year-old gay man and makeup artist from Venezuela who sought asylum in the U.S., was detained and flown to El Salvador last month during raids that targeted hundreds of immigrants and at least one U.S. citizen, flouting a federal judge’s order. Romero’s attorney Lindsay Toczylowski said this week that her client “disappeared” one day last month when he was scheduled for an asylum hearing, and that she has “grave concerns” for his safety.
Authorities say they targeted Hernandez in part due to his two tattoos of crowns (labeled “mom” and “dad” respectively), which they have claimed are icons of the Venezuelan “Tren de Aragua” gang. But as USA Today reported on Thursday, one of the sources of that claim is Charles Cross, Jr., a discredited former Milwaukee police sergeant who was fired in 2012 after a string of offenses related to alcohol abuse.
In 2007, Cross was convicted on a misdemeanor charge of criminal damage to property after he “kicked in the door of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and threatened to kill himself,” paying a $500 fine, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in 2012. The court also dropped a charge of domestic violence-related disorderly conduct after Cross sought treatment for alcohol abuse, and although Cross was fired for the incident, he was rehired by the city’s civilian Fire and Police Commission, per the Journal Sentinel.
But two years later, Cross was suspended again after he slapped a woman while drunk, according to local FOX affiliate WITI. The last straw came in 2012, when Cross — who was already under investigation at the time for inflating his overtime hours — drove his car into the front of a house while intoxicated at more than twice the legal blood alcohol limit, appearing to believe he was on the highway. Cross was placed on the Milwaukee County Brady List, a record of police officers deemed by prosecutors to not be credible.
That didn’t stop Cross from becoming an employee of CoreCivic, a large private prison contractor that operates facilities for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). As USA Today found, Cross is listed as “Investigator” on forms that declared Hernandez a Tren de Aragua member. A document dated December 10, 2024, a rubric listing possible factors to indicate gang affiliation, scored Romero at just five points out of a possible 47, solely because of his “mom” and “dad” crown tattoos. “The crown has been found to be an identifier for a Tren de Aragua gang member,” claims the document, which was marked “confirmed by” Cross. In fact, not only were Hernandez’s tattoos clearly labeled for his parents, they also had significance for the annual Three Kings Day festivals in Hernandez’s Venezuelan hometown of Capacho, as 60 Minutes reported earlier this week. Hernandez was transferred to a Texas federal detention center several weeks later, per court documents reviewed by USA Today. The company said in a statement to USA Today that the decision to deport any person rests with ICE. Them has reached out to CoreCivic for comment.
For years, CoreCivic has operated some of the most notorious prisons in the ICE system, which have proven especially dangerous for trans asylum seekers and immigrants. In 2018, after Honduran trans asylum seeker Roxsana Hernandez died in a CoreCivic detention center in Cibola, New Mexico, the company was accused of deleting video footage of Hernandez’s final days in prison (although the company claimed that their system had automatically deleted the footage instead). Hernandez’s family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against CoreCivic and four other prison contractors, saying she was beaten and abused in the Cibola prison before dying of complications from AIDS. Another trans woman, Maura Martinez, was held by ICE for two years in another infamous CoreCivic-run prison — Otay Mesa Detention Center in California, the same facility named on the ICE rubric that classed Andry Hernandez as a gang member.
“People are being rendered to a torture prison on the basis of these flimsy and inaccurate determinations,” Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, told USA Today this week. “Using private prison contractors to make those determinations is just another level of recklessness.”
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.
