"No place for migrants": Advocates fear expelled Venezuelans "already being tortured" in El Salvador

Amid the public outcry over the Trump administration's decision to deport more than 250 Venezuelan immigrants over the weekend, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele posted a harrowing video on social media of the detainees' arrival at his country's Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison in the town of Tecoluca that holds thousands of gang members — and is known among human rights advocates for its sprawling list of alleged human rights violations. Those advocates fear those expelled from the United States without due process are facing those abuses right now. 

"I strongly, strongly fear that they're already being tortured, being mistreated, being screamed at, being forced to perform forced labor, being poorly fed or underfed," said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America. 

The nearly three-minute clip shared by Bukele, edited with dramatic music, shows law enforcement officers nearly dragging the shackled men from the planes, gripping them by their arms and the backs of their heads as they march them to waiting buses. An officer jerks one person's head back to display their face to the low-lying camera before the video clips to the buses; an aerial view shows the motorcade transporting these detainees making its way down a winding road to the maximum security facility. Upon their arrival, the migrants are pulled from the buses and their heads are shaved. From there, officers jostle them through the prison to the holding cell, where they file in one-by-one with their heads down.  

The roughly 260 Venezuelan immigrants flown to El Salvador earlier this month will be imprisoned at the CECOT mega-prison for at least one year, Bukele said. In exchange, the Trump administration has paid the El Salvador government $6 million to house them. Though the Trump administration has accused the detainees of being associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — and used the allegation to justify their expulsions — family members of some of the men have spoken out to reject those claims. Sworn declarations filed in federal court Wednesday also protest the claims against some detainees, stating that benign tattoos were misconstrued as evidence of gang affiliation.

Human rights experts told Salon that the maltreatment of the Venezuelans captured in the clip is par for the course for prisoners held at CECOT. Though the exact circumstances of the detainees are unknown, the Salvadoran prison system's documented history of inhumane conditions and guards' torture and abuse of prisoners suggests the migrants will face the same fate — if they haven't already, they said.

Given the breadth of human rights violations alleged to have occurred in the prison, Isacson told Salon that the Salvadoran government should not be receiving payments, citing U.S. law that bars sending money to foreign security force units that grossly violate human rights. 

Government officials' acceptance and endorsement of Bukele's "authoritarianism" and approach to handling the deportees is a "stunning" indicator of how the Trump administration sees human rights, he added.

CECOT cells can hold 65 to 70 people, with prisoners spending nearly 24 hours a day inside of them, prohibited from contact with the outside world except for legal counsel they access virtually, according to the BBC. They sleep on metal bunks with only a sheet to cover themselves, and each cell has just two water basins for bathing or washing and two toilets with no privacy. Temperatures in the prison can reach more than 95 degrees under the sweltering Salvadoran heat; the facility has no windows, fans or air conditioning. Salvadoran authorities told CNN in September that CECOT's prisoners will never be released. 

Bukele has made the imprisonment of El Salvador's convicted gang members in CECOT something of a spectacle as he's cracked down on rampant gang violence in the Central American nation since his election in 2019. He declared a state of emergency in early 2022 and carried out mass arrests of suspected gang members, lowering the country's homicide rate, which was once the world's highest. Videos and images much like Sunday's depicting manhandled prisoners progressing through the prison system have been shared on his social media ever since. 

The World Prison Brief, a UK-based global database on prisons, counts 24 facilities in El Salvador, with a total capacity of 67,289 inmates. The country's prison population has far surpassed that baseline in the past four years, with the number of inmates increasing by nearly 200% between 2020 and 2024 to 109,519. That value is up from just 7,754 inmates in 2000, putting the nation's prison occupancy rate at just under 163%

Bukele's crackdown has also come at a cost, including a number of human rights violations against the country's prison population. Based on interviews with former prisoners, Human Rights Watch documented instances of torture, extreme overcrowding, ill-treatment, malnutrition, and denial of access to adequate medical care on top of the government's flouting of their due process rights, according to Juanita Goebertus, director of the group's Americas division.

"The criminal system in El Salvador is no place for migrants," she told Salon in a phone interview. "It honestly is a place that dehumanizes, that operates under the premise that people being sent there have less rights, and that's that's just how it's addressed by the government itself."

Local human rights groups have reported that at least 349 people have died in El Salvador's prisons since Bukele began his "war on gangs." An early 2024 report from human rights group Cristosal found that, of the 261 deaths it had recorded at the time, 88 "may have been the result of a criminal act," 87 were due to illness and 14 appeared to result from "acts of violence," while the remaining 72 had no immediately identifiable cause. 

Complicating matters further is that El Salvador's prison system seriously lacks transparency around its inner workings  — a preexisting issue made worse under Bukele's government, which has repeatedly denied accusations of torture.

"It's likely that, given how widespread throughout the Salvador criminal justice system these violations are, the kinds of suffering that we have documented in our jails would be similar to the conditions faced at CECOT," Goebertus said.

Over the three years of Bukele's "state of exception," no adults have been convicted of gang activity, and many have been imprisoned without "enough evidence" or coming before a judge, she added. The HRW has documented, however, hundreds of assertions from former prisoners who denied gang affiliations and instead said they were incarcerated after they facing "potentially forced recruitment" into gangs or and displacement.

"It's a system of mass incarceration without access to justice," added Goebertus, who filed a declaration in federal court Wednesday challenging the U.S. transfer of immigrants to the country.

Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights for Amnesty USA, argued that these Venezuelan detainees' removals to El Salvador are "part of the strategy," where the Trump administration has shipped them to the Central American country precisely because it knows "the conditions of these prisons are terrible and deadly and cruel."

"Really, I think the goal is for this administration to disappear these people into a black hole where they may not be heard from again," she told Salon in a phone interview. 

The Trump administration removed the immigrants, who were already in detention, from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows for their expulsion from the country without a hearing, over suspicions that they have ties to the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. Counsel for a handful of those migrants, none of whom have been proven to have gang ties in court, accused the Trump administration of violating a federal judge's order blocking the deportations. The administration has denied wrongdoing and President Donald Trump, alongside several allied officials, has called for that judge to be impeached.

In a statement released Sunday, the White House defended the expulsions and doubled down on its accusations that the detainees were associated with Tren de Aragua.

"Thanks to the great work of the Department of State, these heinous monsters were extracted and removed to El Salvador where they will no longer be able to pose any threat to the American People," Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. "President Trump will always put the safety of the American People first — and he will never allow foreign terrorist enemies to operate on American soil and endanger our people. They will be found, restrained and removed — and their networks will be destroyed."

But these expulsions actually represent a "total destruction" of the principles of the nation's legal system by treating people as though they're guilty "before they have even thought of a crime, Fischer argued.

By removing them from the country under the Alien Enemies Act, The Trump administration flouted these immigrants' rights to go before a judge and have their cases heard before receiving an official removal order, she said.

A number of the immigration attorneys who filed declarations in federal court stated that their clients did not have prior criminal convictions, were in the middle of immigration proceedings and did not have formal removal orders. Many of those lawyers are unsure of their clients' whereabouts but suspect they may have been removed to El Salvador. 

"What we know to be true is that many, many, many people on these flights had immigration relief. They had scheduled court hearings. They had no gang affiliation, no criminal record, no legal reason for them to be removed from the country, and yet it was done anyway in the night," Fischer said.

Their treatment, she added, "should make all of us scared that if this administration is successful in disappearing these people into a country in another prison, then that can implicate the rights of all of us."