Rights groups sue to free Venezuelans deported from the US and held in El Salvador
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — International human rights organizations on Friday filed a lawsuit with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking that the commission order El Salvador's government to release Venezuelans deported from the United States and held in a maximum-security prison .
In March, the U.S. government deported more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants alleged to have ties to the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador, paying the Salvadoran government to imprison them.
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Mercedes Yamarte's three sons fled Venezuela for a better life in the United States. Now one languishes in a Salvadoran jail, another "self-deported" to Mexico, and a third lives in hiding -- terrified US agents will crash the door at any moment. At her zinc-roofed home in a poor Maracaibo neighborhood, 46-year-old Mercedes blinks back tears as she thinks about her family split asunder by US President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. "I wish I could go to sleep, wake up, and this never happened," she says, as rain drums down and lightning flashes overhead. In their homeland, her boys were held back by decades of political and economic tumult that have already prompted an estimated eight million Venezuelans to emigrate. But in leaving, all three brothers became ensnared by politics once more, and by a US president determined to bolt the door of a nation once proud of its migrant roots. 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