Why the men who were sent to El Salvador's mega-prison may never make it out

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21-03-2025

Hundreds of Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador from the United States in recent days could face long or indefinite detention in a prison system rife with human rights abuses, according to attorneys and experts on the region.
Their families and lawyers fear there will be no recourse for them to return to the United States for scheduled immigration hearings or even return to their native Venezuela — all while those who spoke to NBC News continue to insist their loved ones and clients have no criminal histories or gang ties.
The Trump administration has said those who were sent to El Salvador had ties to the Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua.
'We have no idea if there is any legal process by which we can challenge this, either in El Salvador or the United States,' said Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney who represents a Venezuelan man in his early 30s who was seeking asylum from persecution for being gay and for his political activism against Nicolás Maduro's government. 'This is the grossest human rights violation I have seen.'
She and other attorneys said they have been completely unable to reach their clients and fear they have disappeared into a prison system notorious for mass detentions, abuse and a lack of due process.
Toczylowski said that her client is not a gang member and that he was deported without her knowledge, adding that days later, she was told he had been sent to El Salvador. She now fears he faces indefinite detention in "a potentially extremely dangerous situation."
Toczylowski, who is the CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a law firm that works with immigrants, asked that her client not be named out of concern for his safety. He is scheduled to have a hearing next month in his ongoing immigration case to remain in the United States and has no criminal history, she said.
The Trump administration over the weekend invoked the rarely used Alien Enemies Act from 1798, which allows the president to deport noncitizens during wartime. It announced that it had removed hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants it alleged were members of a gang, flying them from the United States to El Salvador, where they were taken to a notorious megaprison.
According to the Salvadoran government, the immigrants were sent to a megaprison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, for a one-year term that is 'renewable.' The Trump administration has said it would pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison about 300 people it alleged were members of the Tren de Aragua gang for one year.
The White House said in a statement Tuesday that it was 'confident in DHS intelligence assessments on these gang affiliations and criminality,' referring to the Department of Homeland Security, adding that the Venezuelan immigrants who were removed had final orders of deportation. The Trump administration has not released evidence that those sent to El Salvador have criminal histories or gang ties.
Some families and attorneys strongly deny that the Venezuelan immigrants are connected to Tren de Aragua. They say their family members have been falsely accused and targeted because of their tattoos.
Toczylowski said she has been unable to reach her client. She said Immigration and Customs Enforcement told her this week it would not facilitate communication between her and her client, nor would it facilitate his return to the United States for his ongoing asylum case.
ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment about those claims and whether it was helping facilitate communication or assistance for anyone sent to El Salvador who had open immigration cases and thus did not have final orders of deportation.
The exact conditions for those imprisoned in CECOT are widely unknown, as human rights groups are not permitted into it and the media is rarely granted access.
Last year, CNN reported during a visit to CECOT that cells appeared built to hold roughly 80 inmates and that men were held there for 23.5 hours a day. CNN added that the cells had tiered metal bunks with no sheets, pillows or mattresses, as well as open toilets and plastic buckets for washing.
Human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented extreme crowding, torture and other issues at the prison and others in the country.
The groups have documented years of human rights abuses in the Salvadoran prison system, as well as indefinite detention without access to due process. In recent years, President Nayib Bukele has used emergency powers to suspend certain fundamental rights and allow the arrests of tens of thousands of people suspected to be members of street gangs. More than 80,000 people have been arrested since the order.
Last year, the human rights organization Cristosal reported that at least 261 people have died in Salvadoran prisons since 2022.
Bukele has bragged about his country's system of mass incarceration. "World's highest incarceration rate / safest country in the Western Hemisphere It's not rocket science," he wrote on X in February 2024.
Juanita Goebertus Estrada, the director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, said, 'We can very firmly say that the Salvadoran prison system is no place for migrants.' The organization, which has been doing field work in El Salvador for years, published two recent reports on prison conditions there.
'We've documented cases of torture, of ill treatment, of malnutrition, of lack of access to medical services,' she said. 'We have documented very severe cases of restriction to due process. In CECOT in particular, people that have gone in have not come out.'
Bukele and his administration have promised to make sure anyone who enters CECOT would never return to their communities.
The experts and lawyers say they are gravely concerned that the immigrants will be denied due process, both in terms of how they were removed from the United States and in their ongoing immigration cases in the United States, and about their fates as they remain in El Salvador.
Ana María Méndez Dardón, the director for Central America at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that 'the judiciary system in El Salvador has collapsed' and that it lacks the independence to even properly deal with the issues facing the country's own citizens, let alone due process concerns for the Venezuelan immigrants recently sent to El Salvador.
'For Bukele, justice means just mass incarceration,' she said.
Goebertus said that because there was no judicial independence in the country and because of the state of emergency, 'these people have no recourse in El Salvador.'
Martin Rosenow, an immigration attorney in Miami, said he believes that a Venezuelan asylum-seeker he represents was quietly removed from the United States and is now most likely in the Salvadoran prison system.
'We have not been able to find him anywhere. All signs indicate that he's there at the CECOT prison. We have no access to him, and we don't know what's going on,' he said.
Franco Jose Caraballo Tiapa, 26, a barber and father of two, was in the United States seeking asylum because of political persecution and has no criminal history, Rosenow said. Caraballo Tiapa had been released into the United States with his wife before he was detained after an immigration appointment in February.
Then, on Friday night, he called his wife crying and desperate, saying he was going to be deported, Rosenow said. Rosenow said Caraballo Tiapa's name disappeared from the list of ICE detainees, which would happen only if his client was released from detention or deported.
The Trump administration has yet to tell Rosenow where his client is or the circumstances around what happened to him.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Caraballo Tiapa's case and whether he was deported and sent to El Salvador.
'My hope rests exclusively on our judicial power to have the enforcement arm of bringing these people back — and I don't even know if that's possible,' Rosenow said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com