Earlier this month, President Donald Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to deport 238 Venezuelans from the United States—sending them not to their home country, but to a prison in El Salvador notorious for its harsh conditions.
The administration accuses them of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, but some of them deny the allegations, with witnesses and experts to back them up. When they arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, they were shackled and led to their crowded cells. None of them had received a deportation hearing. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act,” US Judge Patricia Millett, who is hearing a case about their removal, said on Monday.
The Terrorism Confinement Center, also known as CECOT, is the biggest prison in Latin America. Juanita Goebertus, who leads Human Rights Watch’s America’s division, recently testified to a US court about the dismal conditions there. “We are terribly concerned,” she told me.
At CECOT, according to CNN journalists who had a rare look inside, men are held 23.5 hours a day in cells containing about 80 inmates each, with no programs for rehabilitation. The lights are on 24/7, unless you’re in solitary confinement, where it’s pitch black. The Salvadoran government says that no prisoner who enters the prison will ever leave.
US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is visiting El Salvador on Wednesday to tour the prison and meet with President Nayib Bukele; his administration received $6 million from the US government to house the Venezuelan immigrants, who now face tough circumstances on several levels. For one, El Salvador is in a state of emergency, so “you don’t have due process laws,” Goebertus said. I spoke with her late last week to understand more about these unprecedented deportations.
How unusual is this situation, where the United States has sent hundreds of immigrants without a hearing to a country where they’re not from?
It’s highly unusual. In principle, the US can establish agreements with what US law calls “safe third countries.” For example there’s been an agreement with Canada: The general premise is that even if a person has an asylum claim that the US has to respond to, the US is sending that person to a place where that person will still be able to file that claim. So it’s legal. During the first Trump administration, there were agreements signed with El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. However, those agreements were disbanded by the Biden administration.
The reason this [deportation to El Salvador] is so strange and unprecedented is that we have no evidence that new third-country agreements have been signed, neither with El Salvador nor with Costa Rica or Panama, the other two countries that are now receiving deportees from other nationalities under the Trump administration. About 300 people were deported to Panama—people from Iran, Afghanistan, China, Russia, several places in Africa like Cameroon. Some were sent back to their countries by Panama, and some of them remain with temporary status in Panama for 90 days. In Costa Rica, there’s 200 people, 80 are children, and they’re still detained at an immigration center.
As for how unprecedented it is: El Salvador is unlike Costa Rica and Panama, which have operating legal systems with judicial independence. In El Salvador, because of the state of emergency, you don’t have due process laws. This is certainly in violation of being a “safe third country.” This is not a system that will protect asylum claims.
[Editor’s note: In 2022, Bukele declared a state of emergency to tackle gang violence. In doing so, he suspended constitutional rights in El Salvador, including the right to an attorney. Since then, about 87,000 people have been arrested across the country, more than 1 percent of the population.]
How concerned are you for these Venezuelans?
We are terribly concerned, first because of the violation of migration procedures in the US. Second because these people have been deported under a claim that they’re criminals, without any evidence. There’s been extensive reporting that several of the people deported had no criminal activity. We are starting to document cases, and in several of them we’ve been able to establish no membership in Tren de Aragua.
“El Salvador is a place where the jail system is severely violating the human rights of inmates.”
Thirdly, we’re concerned because El Salvador is a place where the jail system is severely violating the human rights of inmates. This is very clear to the US administration, and yet they are deciding to send people.
Tell me about CECOT.
We haven’t been able to enter CECOT: As far as we know, no human rights association has been allowed inside.
CECOT has been described by the Salvadoran government as a place to confine leaders of gangs. As far as we have been able to document, nobody who has entered has been able to leave. It was first announced to have a capacity of 20,000 detainees, but then the Salvadoran government later reported it had a 40,000-person capacity. We have never been able to document that it created any infrastructure change to double its capacity.
There’s been a problem of overcrowding in El Salvador prisons historically, so building new spaces would be desirable. This jail, however, has been used by the Bukele regime to promote his propaganda. All those images of supposed gang members with their tattoos, coming in stripped? They’re taken at CECOT.
How do conditions there compare with conditions in US detention facilities?
Since Human Rights Watch has not been able to enter CECOT, what we have been able to describe are the conditions in other [Salvadoran] prisons. In the three years of the state of emergency, 350 people have died in custody without any explanation or any investigation of the Salvadoran government. These are places in which we’ve documented torture, lack of access to medication, lack of access to adequate food. We’ve documented the extensive restrictions on due process, the fact that people are held without being seen by a judge, without evaluating evidence, without warrants, without the presence of a lawyer, without being able to contact family. There are hearings of 500 people at the same time. People have in many cases been imprisoned for over a year without legal recourse.
What hope do the deported Venezuelans have of getting out? Do they have any recourse?
In the El Salvador judicial system, no, I don’t see any legal recourse. In the US? Yes. There are proceedings, including in the District of Columbia, that could potentially order these people returned to the US. Courts could potentially order access to CECOT to their lawyers and their partners to be able to verify the conditions in which these people are being held.
[Editor’s note: On Monday, lawyers hired by the Venezuelan government presented a habeas corpus lawsuit to El Salvador’s Supreme Court on behalf of 30 Venezuelans. It’s unclear what relief they might get: The judges hearing the case are reportedly allies of President Bukele.]
What’s the relationship between President Bukele and President Trump, or do you know how they struck this deal?
There’s a clear public ideological affiliation that goes back to Bukele going to some of the CPAC meetings [at the annual gathering of US conservatives]. That could explain in part why this agreement is taking place.
The US government has assumed some Venezuelans are connected to the Tren de Aragua gang because of their tattoos. What do you think about this?
First, from experts on Tren de Aragua, it’s very clear that there’s a complete lack of investigation on behalf of the US authorities, because Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to identify its members.
But in all the interviews we’ve made so far with families, the issue of tattoos is a recurrent element. There is a pattern of stigmatizing people because of the tattoos, regardless of the meaning of the specific tattoo. From what has already been public in some judicial proceedings in the US, tattoos that might refer to very different things are interpreted as a way of identifying gang membership. There are even in problems of US officials not understanding Spanish and what the tattoo says in Spanish.
To what extent is Tren de Aragua actually a threat in the United States?
With the Alien Enemies Act, the US is trying to refer to an invasion or a situation of armed conflict, which does not apply to the circumstance. It’s not true today and it was certainly not true a couple years ago when the amount of migrants reaching the southern border was much higher, amid a humanitarian crisis associated with the Venezuelan regime, which is a dictatorship and has had more than 7 million people displaced out of the country. That’s the reason for the migration: people trying to rebuild their lives and the future for their kids. It’s not an invasion, and certainly not a military invasion.
“With the Alien Enemies Act, the US is trying to refer to an invasion or a situation of armed conflict, which does not apply to the circumstance.”
The Trump administration has very specifically tried to depict all Venezuelans as criminals and members of Tren de Aragua. Which is very far from reality. When there have been members of Tren de Aragua who commit crimes, what needs to happen is effective prosecution of gang members, particularly concentrated on their leaders, making sure there is a serious and effective investigation into their money laundering and armed trafficking schemes, into their recruitment mechanisms in different places of the region. None of that is happening, and none of that will be able to happen while portraying general Venezuelans as members of Tren de Aragua and deporting them to places like El Salvador.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
