MIAMI – Fifteen minutes after a charter plane cleared Ecuadorean airspace on the evening of August 28, President Daniel Noboa posted a photograph to his verified social media account. It showed his longtime political adversary José Serrano standing shackled between two United States immigration agents. Noboa included a message directed at former President Rafael Correa, who lives in exile in Belgium: “You’re next.”
The speed of what preceded that post was not incidental. It was the mechanism.
In under 23 hours, three Trump-appointed immigration judges had reversed a formal protection order that a Miami immigration judge granted Serrano months earlier under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Under ordinary circumstances, an appeal before the Board of Immigration Appeals takes months, sometimes more than a year. The Department of Homeland Security filed its appeal at 4:06 on the afternoon of August 27. By 3:12 the following afternoon, the panel had issued its reversal. Serrano was on a deportation flight within five hours of the ruling.
He is now held at El Encuentro prison, a facility built on the model of El Salvador’s CECOT megajail. His lawyers, in communications relayed through intermediaries, report that he has been subjected to strip searches, degrading treatment, and threats that photographs would be transmitted to Noboa’s office.
The Department of Homeland Security denied that politics played any role in Serrano’s removal. A Justice Department spokeswoman described the episode as part of an effort to restore “integrity to immigration adjudication.” Neither agency addressed how a review process that typically spans many months was compressed into a single afternoon.
Miami immigration judge Romy Lerner, a Biden appointee, had ruled in May that Serrano faced a credible and specific risk of torture if returned to Ecuador, granting a formal deferral of removal under the Convention Against Torture. The appellate reversal came so quickly that immigration practitioners who spoke to reporters say they could not identify a comparable precedent in a case of this category.
“We’ve never seen a turnaround like that in any case involving a Convention Against Torture claim,” said one attorney who has practiced before the board for 15 years, speaking on condition of anonymity because of pending cases before the same panel. “Cases like this take months, minimum. Sometimes considerably more than a year.”
That speed mattered because it outpaced the legal mechanisms that have repeatedly challenged the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. In September, a federal appeals court became the ninth consecutive court to rule against a Trump immigration detention policy as a violation of constitutional standards. In the Serrano case, the administration did not wait for those mechanisms to engage.
The timeline of events that preceded the case has drawn scrutiny from legal observers and human rights organisations. On July 31, before Serrano had been arrested, Noboa held a private meeting in Quito with Kristi Noem, then serving as DHS Secretary. No official readout of that meeting was ever published. Within roughly two weeks, Serrano was in ICE custody in Miami.
Noboa was elected in 2023 on a platform of confronting organized crime following the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. He has cultivated a close relationship with the Trump administration, and that relationship has produced tangible returns. The two countries are finalizing a new extradition cooperation framework, as Eastern Herald has reported, and the United States has provided broad security assistance for Noboa’s domestic enforcement operations.
Serrano served as Ecuador’s interior minister under Rafael Correa from 2012 to 2016 and later as president of the National Assembly. He became one of Noboa’s most visible domestic critics. Ecuadorean prosecutors placed Serrano among seven suspects linked to the 2023 Villavicencio killing, alleging he passed logistical information about the candidate’s security arrangements. Serrano has denied the allegations, and his attorneys have characterised the prosecution as politically driven. The Ecuadorean government disputes that characterisation.
Whatever the merits of those still-unresolved allegations, the question before the United States immigration court was not Serrano’s guilt but whether he faced a credible risk of torture if returned to Ecuador. A US judge had ruled he did. A panel reconstituted under the Trump administration ruled, in less than 24 hours, that he did not.
The case carries a pattern recognizable from elsewhere in the hemisphere. Earlier this year, as The Intercept reported, the Trump administration moved to arrest judges who blocked deportations it sought to accelerate. Colombian activist Beto Coral was also removed from the United States after Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally approved his detention; Coral had protested publicly against Colombia’s Trump-backed president. Federal courts have tried to check the administration’s reach, including a ruling that blocked deportations of students who criticised Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Judicial intervention has not consistently arrived in time.
The broader picture that the Serrano case illustrates is one that immigration lawyers have documented across dozens of proceedings: the use of American deportation infrastructure as a tool for allied governments, operating faster than courts can intervene. Whether other names appear on a list coordinated through the private diplomatic exchange that preceded Serrano’s arrest, neither the Trump administration nor the Ecuadorean government has been asked directly, and neither has volunteered an answer.
Noboa’s post remained live on his verified social media accounts. His warning to Correa in Brussels was explicit. What remains unresolved is whether the machinery demonstrated in the Serrano case will be used again, and for whom.
