Venezuelan who had rare, major surgery was deported to El Salvador prison, and his family has no idea how he is

Even before her son was summarily locked up in a Salvadoran prison and cut off from contact with the outside world, Mariela Villamizar was worried about his health

Even before her son was summarily locked up in a Salvadoran prison and cut off from contact with the outside world, Mariela Villamizar was worried about his health.

Wladimir Vera Villamizar, a 33-year-old welder from western Venezuela, had recovered from a tuberculosis infection that left severe scarring in his right lung, according to his family and medical records reviewed by NBC News. His health was in decline when he arrived in the United States as an asylum-seeker last year and got progressively worse during the months he spent in immigration detention, his mother said.

In January, his family said, after Vera had been released with an ankle monitor, he was rushed to the E.R. According to medical records, he underwent an emergency right pneumonectomy — the total removal of his right lung.

“The operation took over five hours,” his mother told NBC News from her home in Venezuela. “God worked a miracle, and he came out OK, but the recovery was not what he expected.”

About two weeks after the surgery and days after President Donald Trump took office, Vera was detained once again, according to his family. After President Trump invoked emergency wartime powers in March to deport more than 200 Venezuelan men to the supermax prison in El Salvador known as the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT, Vera’s name turned up on a list of deportees leaked to CBS News.