You’re just a commodity in Trump’s marketplace of horrific ideas.
Sure, criminal informants are seldom the trustworthiest of people, what with their stay-out-of-jail free cards being reliant on their steady production of evidence against other people. But the government does make promises to criminal informants that it’s expected to keep, not only to fulfill its legal obligations but to prevent informants from being, you know, beaten, tortured, and killed by those they associate with and rat on.
But when it’s time to eject as many people with brown skin as possible, all bets are off. If you’re a government informant, maybe it’s time to renege on your own obligations before the government gets you killed. When the Trump government sought to deport hundreds of [checks notes] Venezuelans to El Salvador’s torture prison, “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele had a favor to ask of his own: the return of nine MS-13 gang members.
Here’s the latest bit of callous evil perpetrated by some of the most banally malignant people to ever hold office, as reported by the Washington Post:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation. But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.
To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.
Quite the quid pro quo, stripping people of the protection and safety they’d been guaranteed for the sole purpose of getting the green light for mass deportations of Venezuelan migrants. Well, the sole purpose on the Trump side of the equation. On the other side, there was a benefit beyond a little more burnishing of Bukele’s “tough on crime” reputation.
It was also a key step in hindering an ongoing U.S. investigation into his government’s relationship with MS-13, a gang famous for displays of excessive violence in the United States and elsewhere.
Basically, the State Department and the Trump administration offered up these gang members as literal human sacrifices in order to pursue its mass deportation program. Nothing greases the wheels like blood, I guess, and this administration’s collective hands have been covered with the substance since Trump’s inauguration.
And, as is always the case when authoritarians engage in human trafficking to further their bigoted ideals, the government spokespeople are there to remind everyone that the ends justify the means:
“The Trump Administration’s results speak for themselves,” said Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman. “Hardened TdA gang members are back in Venezuela … MS-13 gang members are being prosecuted in the U.S. and El Salvador. And Americans are safer as a result of these incredible efforts.”
Neat. I supposed just summarily executing anyone suspected of drug trafficking would probably put a dent in drug trafficking but that’s the sort of thing we just don’t…. hang on a second. I’m sorry. I’m now being told this is exactly the sort of thing we do, for the first time in our government’s history. My mistake.
At least 32 people have been killed in U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats. The Trump administration has said the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, arguing that the narcotics they smuggle kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, constituting an “armed attack.”
“When they’re loaded up with drugs, they’re fair game, and every one of those ships were,” President Trump told reporters last week.
Yep. And we’ll never know whether or not these claims have any basis in fact because all of the evidence has been drone-striked to the bottom of the ocean. Instead, we’re just expected to accept the new normal that moves extrajudicial drone strikes from areas of international conflict and into any body of water that might contain boats with Latin/South American citizens in them.
Of course, shitting on informants probably doesn’t even raise red flags in the DEA, ATF, CIA, FBI, or any other agency that used to be primarily concerned with actual criminal cases. Most of those resources are now being spent on pursuing people only suspected of civil violations of immigration law. If you’re from anywhere south of our border, you’re nothing more than meat puppets for a tyrant and his enablers.
The man who never expected to be the public face of the Trump administration’s shotgun approach to deportation is, yet again, being given a set of untenable options and expected to pick one of them. And when he refused to accept the bad choice they gave him, they arrested him this morning at his mandated ICE check-in and announced they’re just going to send him to Uganda.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was originally swept up by ICE and sent to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison, despite have a clear court order that he could not be deported to El Salvador.
Garcia is from El Salvador. Although he’d clearly like to remain in the States with his family, if he had to be removed from the US, he’d prefer to be sent to nearby Costa Rica, which has promised to grant him status, rather than left to rot in a prison overseen by the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” (or an American prison on totally trumped up charges that don’t pass the laugh test).
Garcia has been yanked around by the Trump administration, which has vehemently refused to take even the smallest loss in the War on asylum seekers, even if doing so might have resulted in larger wins later. This yanking around extended to a federal court, where DOJ prosecutors and DHS legal advisors repeatedly tested the patience of multiple presiding judges.
After weeks of claiming it was impossible to retrieve Garcia from the Salvadoran hellhole the administration had sent him to, Garcia was suddenly returned to the United States. While that may have been good news, the rest of it wasn’t. The government still wanted to make Garcia pay for refusing to accept his unlawful punishment silently. It threw the book at him upon his return, claiming Garcia was nothing more than a human trafficker — something it based solely on a 2022 traffic stop where Garcia wasn’t even cited, much less arrested for any criminal activity whatsoever. Two separate courts found the entire claim by the US government preposterous and ordered him released from jail.
The federal government is trying to force Kilmar Abrego Garcia to accept a guilty plea or face deportation to Uganda, his attorneys claimed in a filing on Saturday.
The Salvadoran man, who was wrongly deported in March before being brought back to the United States to face human smuggling charges, was released from criminal custody in Tennessee and sent back to Maryland on Friday.
After Abrego Garcia declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to the human smuggling charges, his attorneys say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed them that he could be deported to Uganda and ordered him to report to their office in Baltimore on Monday.
This is just more pure cruelty from a president who’s made that his presidential brand. Costa Rica would be the obvious choice when the only other option is Uganda, one of the poorest nations in the world. But Costa Rica is only an option if Garcia pleads guilty to fake charges and serves time in prison. If he wants to remain a “free” man, he must subject himself to being involuntarily displaced yet again, unceremoniously deposited in one of the worst places this cruel and unusual administration can think to send him.
The DOJ, of course, refuses to address the allegations made by Abrego Garcia’s lawyers. Instead, its statement says nothing about the pressure it’s applying. Nor does it explain why the government has decided on Uganda as the final destination for Garcia should he refuse to give it the guilty plea it sorely needs to justify its heinous actions after the fact. And rather than actually dealing with this appropriately, they just decided to arrest him and announce the plan to send him to Uganda. It’s pretty clear that the choice of Uganda is about further punishing Garcia for existing and trying to exercise his own rights.
This came a few hours after Abrego Garcia filed a lawsuit to try to block ICE from doing this.
All of this is so blatantly obvious retaliation for making the Trump administration look bad. They wanted quiet acquiescence as they illegally human trafficked hundreds of people to a foreign gulag, and now they’re taking it out on one guy for daring to ask to have his basic rights respected. It’s a sad show from a pathetic Trump administration that is simply unable to handle anyone pointing out their mistakes.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.
Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.
Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.
Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.
“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.
These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”
Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.
Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.
Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.
Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.
He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.
For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.
“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”
To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.
Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.
When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.
He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.
“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”
The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.
Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.
“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.
Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.
They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”
The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.
Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”
Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”
Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.
The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.
Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. … Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”
Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”
Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.
About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.
Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.
This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.
Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.
Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”
In a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.
The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.
Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”
During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”
That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.
As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.
Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”
But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.
He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.
In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.
Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.
More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.
He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.
That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.
I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.
Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.
I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.
As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.
The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.
We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.
On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.
From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.
Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”
The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.
We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”
While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.
Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that’s my priority.”
It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.
Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.
Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.
We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.
President Trump wanted a war on Latin Americans and found an obliging partner in El Salvador, currently headed by President Nayib Bukele. Bukele has managed to bring down El Salvador’s homicide rate since he became president, but it’s more due to routine rights violations than any social programs Bukele managed to squeeze in between sieges of major cities. (Then there’s the fact that Bukele did the Donald Trump thing and fired prosecutors and investigators digging into allegations of corruption…)
President Bukele is tough on crime (that doesn’t directly serve his purposes), which is probably why Trump likes him so much and asked him to serve as a primary offloading ramp for the migrants Trump and his administration hate with a passion that’s only surpassed by their ineptitude.
Consequently, plenty of people wrongfully (or ignorantly) determined to be “foreign gang members” by the Trump administration and its extremely happy (to the point of near-orgasm) private prison contractors have been sent to what’s commonly known as CECOT in El Salvador.
CECOT stands for “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo,” which — as any person with a half-assed grasp on Spanish could guess — would indicate it’s a maximum security prison meant to hold convicted terrorists. But it’s obviously not limited to terrorists. As of this time last year, the prison held more than 14,000 inmates. Those numbers have swelled now that the Leader of the Free World is sending as many Latino-looking people as possible to CECOT, utilizing a super-charged ICE (and super-charged funding) and an extremely dangerous, dubious invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.
CECOT has been a human rights hellhole for years. Before Trump’s subversion of the State Department with the installation of bootlicker/doormat Marco Rubio as the nominal Head of State, it had this to say about El Salvador and its most notorious prison, a report that notably follows President Bukele’s elevation to the top spot in El Salvador’s government:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, forced disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including censorship and threats to enforce criminal laws to limit expression; serious government corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for gender-based violence; significant barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services; and crimes involving violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.
Given that, there’s no reason to disbelieve the personal accounts of the extremely small number of people who managed to secure their release from this third-party hellhole, one that now currently serves as the destination of choice for ICE-enabled deportations. Yes, the “Land of the Free” is aiding and abetting extrajudicial deportations that subject people only suspected of violating US civil law to all of this:
Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.
Humiliation and dehumanization at scale… followed by more of the same once they arrived at CECOT:
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar.
And that’s just the stuff El Salvador government employees did to these detainees. And somehow, these prison guards managed to seem more threatening and violent than the thousands of alleged “terrorists” and MS-13 gang members these deportees were forced to share space with.
Of course, the DHS could not possibly give less of a fuck about what happens to brown people targeted by this administration’s racist policies. Instead, the diarrheatic mouthpiece of the DHS, Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, insists this is nothing more than another Trump administration success story every American should be proud to post to their own X accounts, like the DHS does when it wants to go full Lebensraum:
Asked to respond to some of the allegations in the accounts, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. had deported “nearly 300 Tren de Aragua and MS-13 terrorists” to CECOT, “where they no longer pose a threat to the American people.”
“Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
To be sure, the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about crime victims. That’s why it has pardoned pro-Trump criminals and enabled multiple states to force victims of incest and rape to bring the offspring of their assailants to term. That’s why it has cut social services funding, even though it’s been demonstrated time and time again that a social safety net does more to reduce crime than throwing more money at cops. And that’s why ICE has just seen its funding quadrupled, despite most Americans (including Trump voters) actually being opposed to this regime’s mass deportation programs.
One direct quote from a victim of the bigoted evil now d/b/a “Donald Trump 2024-???” sums it up for all of us, even those lucky enough to be the fortunate(?) sons of the United States of America:
“This is hell,” Suárez recalled the prison director saying, “and you’re never going to get out.”
That’s the reality here on the home front. This administration has undone so much good and instituted so much evil (all the while being directly or indirectly supported by the top court in the land) that any successor to the Resolute Desk is going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy undoing this damage before they can even get to the very important business of improving life for all Americans, not just the white guys with bad hairdos, nonexistent jawlines, and the insane belief that the problem with America is its intricate blend of nationalities, rather than the extremely shitty people that inevitably manage to stumble into positions of power.
For months, the DOJ has insisted to US courts that it has no jurisdiction over the people it rendered to Salvadoran detention facilities. But when the UN came asking, El Salvador told a very different story: these detainees are “exclusively” under US jurisdiction and legal responsibility.
The contradiction is so blatant it’s almost insulting to the intelligence of the courts that have been hearing these cases. But then again, this is the same administration that thinks you can just lie your way out of human trafficking charges, so maybe insulting judicial intelligence is the whole point.
In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the US accidentally shipped to El Salvador despite a court order saying he could not be sent there, when a judge ordered the US to get him back, the DOJ insisted that it was out of their hands.
It is my understanding based on official reporting from our Embassy in San Salvador that Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. He is alive and secure in that facility.He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.
Earlier, they had also insisted to a court that the US had absolutely no jurisdiction over the people they had renditioned to a Salvadoran concentration camp:
Plaintiffs admit—as they must—that the United States does not have custody over Abrego Garcia. They acknowledge that there may be “difficult questions of redressability” in this case, reflecting their recognition that Defendants do not have “the power to produce” Abrego Garcia from CECOT in El Salvador.
This also led to the hilariously stupid exchange between President Donald Trump and Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele when they met, where they each pretended it was a ridiculous question to even contemplate bringing Abrego back to the US. This was all, quite obviously, a lie. The US was paying the Salvadoran government millions of dollars to house these men and the contract between the two countries even notes that the US gets to decide the prisoner’s “disposition.” You know, like you do when you have absolutely no control over something.
But now, in a different case about these rendition flights, the lawyers have turned up a fascinating document which they’ve shared with the court. It was a response from the Salvadoran government to an inquiry about these trafficked detainees from the United Nations. And, when confronted by the UN, El Salvador immediately threw the US under the bus, saying that the detainees are fully under the jurisdiction of the United States.
The Salvadoran State emphatically states that its authorities have not arrested, detained, or transferred the persons referred to in the communications of the Working Group. The actions of the State of El Salvador have been limited to the implementation of a bilateral cooperation mechanism with another State, through which it has facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure for the custody of persons detained within the scope of the justice system and law enforcement of that other State. In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters. In this regard, the actions attributable to the Salvadoran State are limited to its sovereignty and territorial jurisdiction, and therefore it cannot be held responsible for the failure to observe the principle of non-refoulement with respect to the persons mentioned.
Read that again: “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities”—meaning the United States. This is the same El Salvador that Trump and Bukele pretended had no ability to coordinate with the US on these detainees’ fate.
Even more damning: the lawyers note that the DOJ was aware of this document and failed to provide it to the lawyers for the people being trafficked, despite being required to during discovery:
This information came to Petitioners’ attention within the last week, when counsel for Petitioners obtained the Spanish-language report from one of the families. Although the United States was aware of this document (as evinced by the fact that it was copied on the reports for all four cases), it was neither provided to Petitioners (even though it is clearly encompassed in Petitioners’ Requests for Production) nor provided to the Court. Ex. 2 (Petitioners’ Requests for Production, May 19, 2025) (RFP No. 1, requesting “ALL DOCUMENTS memorializing, documenting, or describing the arrangements between the UNITED STATES and EL SALVADOR concerning the detention of alleged Tren de Aragua Members in El Salvador”).
This isn’t just a discovery violation—it’s active concealment of evidence that directly contradicts the DOJ’s core legal argument. The DOJ had in its possession a document showing that El Salvador considers the US to have “exclusive” jurisdiction over these detainees, while simultaneously telling US courts that the US has no jurisdiction at all.
This all matters quite a bit because the law here says that whoever has “constructive custody” of the individuals can be forced to produce the body. And here El Salvador has admitted to the UN (and the US) that it believes the US has “exclusive… jurisdiction and legal responsibility” for these men.
Yes, obviously a lot of this has been transparent lies and game-playing by both the US and El Salvador. The press conference with Trump and Bukele proved that: They were going to play “not it” and pretend that there was nothing that could be done to facilitate anything even as they sat next to each other talking freely—and even as both governments knew that El Salvador had already told the UN that the US has exclusive jurisdiction. So you may argue this is not that big a deal, because it only confirms what everyone already suspected: that of course the US has control over these people, even as its leaders pretend otherwise.
But it could matter quite a bit to the courts. Not only does it reveal that the US courts absolutely do have jurisdiction over the cases of the people renditioned to this Salvadoran hellhole, but also that the DOJ actively concealed evidence while lying about this very issue in court. Even as the courts continue to display a ridiculous level of deference to the DOJ, we’ve already seen some signs that various courts’ patience is wearing thin.
This kind of outright deception—lying to courts about who has custody of these men while hiding evidence that contradicts your core legal argument—seems like yet another pivotal moment in making more and more of the judiciary realize that the Trump regime is not engaging in good faith in court and has no compunction about flat out lying to avoid taking responsibility for any of its myriad fuckups. Turns out that authoritarian regimes engaged in an immoral and despicable campaign of human trafficking might not be the most trustworthy in court. Who knew?
For now, though, the lawyers are alerting the court and suggesting they may need more discovery to get to the bottom of this. But the bigger question is whether the courts will finally start treating this administration’s word with the skepticism it deserves.
Such additional discovery may be particularly important because this new evidence contradicts the underlying custody conclusion in the Kozak Declaration of May 9, 2025, which is dated after El Salvador’s responses to the UN and after Petitioners sought habeas review (the date habeas attaches). Decl. of Michael G. Kozak, ECF No. 125 ¶ 9 (“It was and remains my understanding that the detention and ultimate disposition of those detained in CECOT and other Salvadoran detention facilities are matters within the legal authority of El Salvador in accordance with its domestic and international legal obligations.”)
Sometime during these years under the Trump regime, the courts are going to need to internalize that Trump’s DOJ will tell straight up lies to get what it wants from the court. The sooner they learn that, the better.
People have referred to CECOT, the Salvadoran gulag, as “The Prison that Nobody Leaves.” That’s one reason (of many) that it was so concerning that the Trump regime was renditioning people there with no due process. Indeed, most had no criminal record at all. This is why there were concerns that it would, in fact, be impossible to ever get Kilmar Abrego Garcia (who goes by Kilmar Abrego) back: because El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele, would never let anyone out to say what they had seen.
Indeed it was surprising enough, when Senator Chris Van Hollen was finally able to meet with Abrego, that he was told that once the controversy over his detainment got enough attention, he had been moved to a different prison. It was even more surprising that the US did actually bring him back to the country, even though it was to face what appeared to be completely fabricated criminal charges.
Because, bringing him back—even to fight criminal charges—would allow him to do something like tell the world (and the courts) about the hellscape that is CECOT.
Plaintiff Abrego Garcia reports that he was subjected to severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.
The handoff from US to Salvadoran custody was seamless—and brutal:
Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was pushed toward a bus, forcibly seated, and fitted with a second set of chains and handcuffs. He was repeatedly struck by officers when he attempted to raise his head. He observed an ICE agent on the bus communicating with Salvadoran officials to confirm the identities of the Salvadoran nationals on board before the bus departed.
But the real horror began upon arrival:
Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body.
The psychological torture was as systematic as the physical:
In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.
Guards weaponized the prison’s gang population as a tool of terror:
While at CECOT, prison officials repeatedly told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that they would transfer him to the cells containing gang members who, they assured him, would “tear” him apart.
These weren’t idle threats:
Indeed, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia repeatedly observed prisoners in nearby cells who he understood to be gang members violently harm each other with no intervention from guards or personnel. Screams from nearby cells would similarly ring out throughout the night without any response from prison guards on personnel.
The physical toll was severe and immediate:
During his first two weeks at CECOT, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia suffered a significant deterioration in his physical condition and lost approximately 31 pounds (dropping from approximately 215 pounds to 184 pounds).
The complaint reveals that officials weren’t just torturing Abrego—they were actively trying to hide the evidence. This included staging photos to create a false narrative and, once the controversy grew, moving him to a different facility where he could be hidden from oversight.
The desperation to silence Abrego explains why the Trump administration is freeing actual criminals in exchange for their testimony against him—a remarkable admission that they’d rather have dangerous felons on the streets than let this witness speak freely.
Abrego’s testimony represents the first unfiltered account of conditions inside CECOT—and it’s damning. But this isn’t just about one man’s suffering. It’s about a deliberate policy of sending people, most without any criminal record, to a facility that operates as a torture chamber.
The Trump administration knew exactly what CECOT was when they started using it as a foreign rendition site. They knew people wouldn’t come back to tell their stories. They counted on the silence.
That silence has now been broken. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for turning torture into immigration policy.
The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump administration cobbled together to justify their illegal deportation of a man courts had barred the US from sending to El Salvador.
That should tell you everything about the quality of this “case.” But let’s walk through exactly how the DOJ manufactured criminal charges to cover up their own constitutional violation.
After months of claiming it was “impossible” to bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador — where they illegally shipped him, despite a court order, due to an “administrative error” — they have now brought him back.
For months they resisted doing so, as everyone realized it would mean admitting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration program made mistakes. So the administration pivoted: they fired the DOJ lawyer who had initially admitted that it was a mistake to deport him, and began claiming that Abrego Garcia was obviously a terrible criminal, a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and a “human trafficker.” The US government then began searching high and low for literally anything they could use to try to justify those claims about him, so they could falsely pretend that they were correct in shipping him out of the country.
In that stop, Abrego Garcia was driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland — construction workers, he said, being transported between job sites. The officers at the time found nothing worth charging. They didn’t even cite him for speeding.
Difficult to see that as evidence of anything horrible.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. And the Trump administration desperately needed something. So it appears the DOJ used that non-incident to secretly indict Abrego Garcia on two counts of “transporting” undocumented workers. That indictment was unsealed today, along with the announcement that Abrego Garcia was being brought back to the US to face those criminal charges.
Oh, so they could bring him back…
This proves that the administration has been lying, repeatedly, in claiming that they had no control over him and couldn’t bring him back.
Remember: Trump himself admitted multiple times that he could get Abrego Garcia back. Meanwhile, AG Pam Bondi was insisting in public that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even more definitive: “there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again.”
Kristi Noem less than a month ago: "There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."(No matter what happens, bringing him back to the US is a climbdown for the administration)
All proven false. Today, Bondi tried to claim this was different because they “presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant.” But that only proves the lie — there was never anything stopping them from making that request. They just chose not to, while claiming it was impossible.
El Salvador readily agreed to the request — exactly as everyone knew they would, despite Salvadoran President Bukele’s claims that it was “preposterous” to even think of returning him as he would have to “smuggle a terrorist” into the US.
Turns out all of that was theater.
We’ve seen this playbook trotted out multiple times: whenever someone is denied due process, we hear about how awful they are, how violent, how dangerous, as if that means they don’t deserve due process. But that’s garbage: everyone deserves due process, because without it, there’s simply no way to know for sure that they are all those things anyone is claiming.
The new criminal indictment
It’s now clear that the DOJ went on a fishing expedition to find anything they could possibly dig up to pin on Abrego Garcia. The evidence was so weak that, according to ABC News, the local DOJ prosecutor resigned rather than put his name on the filings:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
When experienced federal prosecutors walk away from cases because they believe they’re politically motivated, that tells you everything about the integrity of the charges.
But the DOJ pressed forward anyway, transforming a routine traffic stop into something much grander. In their detention motion, two years after police found nothing worth citing, the government now claims:
Over the past nine years, the defendant has played a significant role in an undocumented alien smuggling ring that has resulted in thousands of undocumented aliens being illegally transported into and throughout the United States, including members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha (“MS-13”), a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, as well as unaccompanied minor children
This represents a remarkable evolution in the government’s case. In 2022: not worth a speeding ticket. In 2025: international human trafficking kingpin.
At today’s press conference about this, Pam Bondi also appeared to accuse Abrego Garcia of being a “child-groomer” and a murderer. When reporters pointed out that the indictment says nothing about such things, she got angry, insisted he’s really bad, and then ended the press conference abruptly.
Everything is backwards
Here, the entire process has been backwards:
The Promise: Rigorous deportation processes targeting only dangerous criminals. Once deported, impossible to bring anyone back.
The Reality: They accidentally shipped someone with no criminal record to El Salvador against a court order barring him from being shipped there. Then, they were able to easily bring him back two and a half months later, as soon as they asked, but only after they scraped together a very weak looking indictment to try to turn him into a criminal.
That’s not protecting Americans from violent criminals. It’s turning people into criminals to justify a monumental fuckup and human rights violation.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.
The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.
President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst.” When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down. It said that its assessment of the deportees was based on a thorough vetting process that included looking at crimes committed both inside and outside the United States. But the government’s own data, which was obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of journalists from Venezuela, showed that officials knew that only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and that most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.
The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.
We conducted a case-by-case review of all the Venezuelan deportees. It’s possible there are crimes and other information in the deportees’ backgrounds that did not show up in our reporting or the internal government data, which includes only minimal details for nine of the men. There’s no single publicly available database for all crimes committed in the U.S., much less abroad. But everything we did find in public records contradicted the Trump administration’s assertions as well.
ProPublica and the Tribune, along with Venezuelan media outlets Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) and Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), also obtained lists of alleged gang members that are kept by Venezuelan law enforcement officials and the international law enforcement agency Interpol. Those lists include some 1,400 names. None of the names of the 238 Venezuelan deportees matched those on the lists.
The hasty removal of the Venezuelans and their incarceration in a third country has made this one of the most consequential deportations in recent history. The court battles over whether Trump has the authority to expel immigrants without judicial review have the potential to upend how this country handles all immigrants living in the U.S., whether legally or illegally. Officials have suggested publicly that, to achieve the president’s goals of deporting millions of immigrants, the administration was considering suspending habeas corpus, the longstanding constitutional right allowing people to challenge their detention.
Hours before the immigrants were loaded onto airplanes in Texas for deportation, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that the Tren de Aragua prison gang had invaded the United States, aided by the Venezuelan government. It branded the gang a foreign terrorist organization and said that declaration gave the president the authority to expel its members and send them indefinitely to a foreign prison, where they have remained for more than two months with no ability to communicate with their families or lawyers.
Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal fight against the deportations, said the removals amounted to a “blatant violation of the most fundamental due process principles.” He said that under the law, an immigrant who has committed a crime can be prosecuted and removed, but “it does not mean they can be subjected to a potentially lifetime sentence in a foreign gulag.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to our findings that “ProPublica should be embarrassed that they are doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens who are a threat,” adding that “the American people strongly support” the president’s immigration agenda.
When asked about the differences between the administration’s public statements about the deportees and the way they are labeled in government data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin largely repeated previous public statements. She insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were dangerous, saying, “These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
As for the administration’s allegations that Tren de Aragua has attempted an invasion, an analysis by U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro and that reports suggesting otherwise were “not credible.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, fired the report’s authors after it became public. Her office, according to news reports, said Gabbard was trying to “end the weaponization and politicization” of the intelligence community.
Our investigation focused on the 238 Venezuelan men who were deported on March 15 to CECOT, the prison in El Salvador, and whose names were on a list first published by CBS News. The government has also sent several dozen other immigrants there, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who the government admitted was sent there in error. Courts have ruled that the administration should facilitate his return to the U.S.
We interviewed about 100 of the deportees’ relatives and their attorneys. Many of them had heard from their loved ones on the morning of March 15, when the men believed they were being sent back to Venezuela. They were happy because they would be back home with their families, who were eager to prepare their favorite meals and plan parties. Some of the relatives shared video messages with us and on social media that were recorded inside U.S. detention facilities. In those videos, the detainees said they were afraid that they might be sent to Guantanamo, a U.S. facility on Cuban soil where Washington has held and tortured detainees, including a number that it suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Trump administration had sent planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants there earlier this year.
They had no idea they were being sent to El Salvador.
Among them was 31-year-old Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, who left Venezuela and his job as a youth soccer coach last July. His sister, Leidys Trejo Solórzano, said he had a hard time supporting himself and his mother and that Venezuela’s crumbling economy made it hard for him to find a better paying job. Colmenares was detained at an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border in October because of his many tattoos, his sister said. Those tattoos include the names of relatives, a clock, an owl and a crown she said was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer club’s logo.
Colmenares was not flagged as having a criminal history in the DHS data we obtained. Nor did we find any U.S. or foreign convictions or charges in our review. Trejo said her brother stayed out of trouble and has no criminal record in Venezuela either. She described his expulsion as a U.S.-government-sponsored kidnapping.
“It’s been so difficult. Even talking about what happened is hard for me,” said Trejo, who has scoured the internet for videos and photos of her brother in the Salvadoran prison. “Many nights I can’t sleep because I’m so anxious.”
The internal government data shows that officials had labeled all but a handful of the men as members of Tren de Aragua but offered little information about how they came to that conclusion. Court filings and documents we obtained show the government has relied in part on social media posts, affiliations with known gang members and tattoos, including crowns, clocks, guns, grenades and Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman” logo. We found that at least 158 of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador have tattoos. But law enforcement sources in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said the agency is confident in its assessments of gang affiliation but would not provide additional information to support them.
John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, “for political reasons, I think the administration wants to characterize this as a grand effort that’s promoting public safety of the United States.” But “even some of the government’s own data demonstrates there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” he said, referring to the internal data we obtained.
The government data shows 67 men who were deported had been flagged as having pending charges, though it provides no details about their alleged crimes. We found police, court and other records for 38 of those deportees. We found several people whose criminal history differed from what was tagged in the government data. In some cases that the government listed as pending criminal charges, the men had been convicted and in one case the charge had been dropped before the man was deported.
Our reporting found that, like the criminal convictions, the majority of the pending charges involved nonviolent crimes, including retail theft, drug possession and traffic offenses.
Six of the men had pending charges for attempted murder, assault, armed robbery, gun possession or domestic battery. Immigrant advocates have said removing people to a prison in El Salvador before the cases against them were resolved means that Trump, asserting his executive authority, short-circuited the criminal justice system.
Take the case of Wilker Miguel Gutiérrez Sierra, 23, who was arrested in February 2024 in Chicago on charges of attempted murder, robbery and aggravated battery after he and three other Venezuelan men allegedly assaulted a stranger on a train and stole his phone and $400. He pleaded not guilty. Gutiérrez was on electronic monitoring as he awaited trial when he was arrested by ICE agents who’d pulled up to him on the street in five black trucks, court records show. Three days later he was shipped to El Salvador.
But the majority of men labeled as having pending cases were facing less serious charges, according to the records we found. Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, 23, was arrested in Chicago in August 2023 on misdemeanor charges for riding his bike on the sidewalk while drinking a can of Budweiser. His partner, Cherry Flores, described his deportation as a gross injustice. “They shouldn’t have sent him there,” she said. “Why did they have to take him over a beer?”
Generally speaking, if a judge begins an order — in a case where hundreds of men were illegally renditioned to a Salvadoran concentration camp directly against that judge’s orders — by talking about Franz Kafka’s The Trial, you’d think that the judge is going to go hard against the government.
Instead, Judge James Boasberg delivers quite a frustrating ruling: after eloquently explaining why the government’s actions mirror Kafka’s nightmarish bureaucracy, he proceeds to accept the Trump administration’s transparently ridiculous claim that they have no control over people they literally paid El Salvador to imprison.
He does try to concoct a workaround — arguing that while the prisoners can’t file habeas because they’re supposedly not in US custody, their due process rights were violated, so the remedy is to somehow restore their ability to file the habeas petitions they can’t file. But as we’ll see, this “solution” seems quite toothless.
The ruling starts with this somewhat incredible paragraph:
One morning, Kafka’s Josef K. awakens to encounter two strange men outside his room. As he gets his bearings, he realizes that he is under arrest. When he asks the strangers why, he receives no answer. “We weren’t sent to tell you that,” one says. “Proceedings are under way and you’ll learn everything in due course.” Franz Kafka, The Trial 5 (Breon Mitchell trans., Schocken Books Inc. 1998). Bewildered by these men and distressed by their message, K. tries to comfort himself that he lives in “a state governed by law,” one where “all statutes [are] in force.” Id. at 6. He therefore demands again, “How can I be under arrest? And in this manner?” “Now there you go again,” the guard replies. “We don’t answer such questions.” Undeterred, K. offers his “papers” and demands their arrest warrant. “Good heavens!” the man scolds. “There’s been no mistake.” “[O]ur department,” he assures K., is only “attracted by guilt”; it “doesn’t seek [it] out . . . . That’s the Law.” Id. at 8–9. “I don’t know that law,” K. responds. “You’ll feel it eventually,” the guard says. Id. at 9.
And then he makes the direct tie-in from that story to what’s actually happening:
Such was the situation into which Frengel Reyes Mota, Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, and scores of other Venezuelan noncitizens say they were plunged on March 15, 2025. In the early morning hours, Venezuelans held by the Department of Homeland Security at El Valle Detention Facility in Texas were awakened from their cells, taken to a separate room, shackled, and informed that they were being transferred…. To where? That they were not told…. When asked, some guards reportedly laughed and said that they did not know; others told the detainees, incorrectly, that they were being transferred to another immigration facility or to Mexico or Venezuela.
Before long, Reyes Mota, Hernandez Romero, and the other detainees were shuttled onto buses, driven to a nearby airport, and loaded onto planes…. As the planes waited on the tarmac, many passengers aboard reportedly began to panic and beg officials for more information, but none was provided…. The planes eventually departed that evening and, after a stop in Honduras, landed in El Salvador…. Upon their arrival, the detainees were transferred into a Salvadoran mega-prison known as the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT).
And he reminds everyone that the government literally ignored his pretty clear order to not take these men out of the country:
This Court, at a swiftly convened hearing on March 15, ordered the Government not to relinquish custody of the men,but that mandate was ignored. Such defiance is currently the subject of the Court’s contempt inquiry.
So far, so good. The judge has laid out a perfect analogy for what happened and documented the government’s contempt of his direct orders. Then he completely undermines himself:
While it is a close question,the current record does not support Plaintiffs’ assertion that they are in the constructive custody of the United States. Even crediting the public statements characterizing the arrangement as outsourcing the U.S. prison system and acknowledging the President’s unofficial assertion of his power to request a release, such comments cannot overcome a sworn declaration from a knowledgeable government official attesting that the CECOT Class’s ongoing detention is a question of Salvadoran law
This is where the ruling goes completely off the rails. Judge Boasberg claims that further details that the DOJ filed under seal about the nature of the deal between the US and El Salvador suggest that the deal is basically “we ship ‘em to you, you do whatever the fuck you want with them,” and thus they shouldn’t be seen as being in “constructive custody” of the US any more.
This is obvious bullshit, and the judge knows it. Because there’s almost no one in the world who thinks that if the US government called up President Bukele and said “yo, we need that person back” that Bukele wouldn’t do it. Hell, we know this because the US already did that. As an article the NY Times wrote back in April revealed (buried so deep down that I haven’t seen much commentary on it) El Salvador has already sent back at least eight people that were incorrectly sent there:
In Washington, the Trump administration was working to address Mr. Bukele’s confusion about whom the United States had sent him. Eight women who had been mistakenly sent were swiftly flown back.
So when the US wants someone back from CECOT, they get them back. But somehow that information isn’t at play here.
Judge Boasberg does admit that it’s entirely possible the government is lying to him, but basically says his hands are tied by the Supreme Court:
This conclusion, to be sure, presumes the truthfulness and reliability of the Kozak Declaration, which is rendered more difficult given the Government’s troubling conduct throughout this case. The Court nonetheless follows the lead of the Supreme Court, the D.C. Circuit, and other courts within this district in taking Kozak at his word. In Munaf, the Supreme Court instructed federal district courts not to “second-guess” assessments of the political branches as to the nature of detention under a foreign sovereign. See 553 U.S. at 702. Applying that principle, our Circuit has found governmental submissions similar to the Kozak Declaration to be conclusive on the question whether ongoing detention is “on behalf of the United States.”
Seems bad!
He also admits that the Trump admin’s claims in this case aren’t nearly as detailed or believable as in the precedents he feels bound by, but basically says the plaintiffs (who, again, are mostly disappeared in a concentration camp no one gets released from) really need to provide more proof that the US government has some say in their detention, even as he admits it contradicts other statements that [checks notes]… the US government is making.
Plaintiffs, however, have unearthed no comparably reliable evidence to rebut the Kozak Declaration. The Court must therefore at this point accept the Government’s representations as to the nature of the CECOT Plaintiffs’ ongoing detention,despite their incongruity with multiple public statementsmade by both Salvadoran and U.S. officials.
Great.
The judge then proceeds to explain why this exact scenario — shipping prisoners beyond the reach of habeas corpus — was one of the grievances that led to American independence. But apparently that’s just an interesting historical footnote now:
The Court is nonetheless mindful of the possibility, raised by Plaintiffs, that the Government has adopted and presented its arrangement with El Salvador as a “ruse — and a fraud on the court — designed to maintain control over the detainees beyond the reach of the writ.” …. Our legal tradition is wholly incompatible with the establishment of a network of overseas prisons, shielded from the Great Writ by the facade of foreign control, to which the Government routinely exports detainees without due process — a legal no man’s land.Indeed, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 generally prohibited detention “beyond the seas” to places where the writ did not run, … and such abuses partly animated this nation’s War for Independence. See Declaration of Independence para. 21 (U.S. 1776) (listing amongst grievances against the King that he “transport[ed]” colonists “beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”).Were such a scheme to subsequently be made apparent to the Court, it would follow the Supreme Court’s instruction to “take such action as will defeat attempts to wrongfully deprive parties entitled to sue in Federal courts [for] the protection of their rights in those tribunals.”
It feels like he’s begging for evidence that the Justice Department is lying to him and reminds the government that “any official who makes knowingly false statements in a sworn declaration subjects himself to perjury prosecution.”
Having accepted the government’s lie about custody, the judge then concocts a workaround that’s somehow even more absurd: since the men’s due process rights were violated, the equitable remedy is… to have the Trump admin somehow restore their ability to file habeas petitions they can’t file because they’re supposedly not in US custody.
That principle permits Plaintiffs to proceed here. Just like litigants have since the beginning of our legal tradition, they may invoke this Court’s equitable authority to restrain the Government from infringing upon constitutional protections. They need not do so in habeas, nor are they obligated to identify a cause of action conferring that right.
The judge does conclude the due process violation is clear, citing recent Supreme Court holdings in this and related cases:
In light of those Supreme Court holdings, this Court ultimately agrees with the CECOT Plaintiffs that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their due-process claim. Defendants plainly deprived these individuals of their right to seek habeas relief before their summary removal from the United States — a right that need not itself be vindicated through a habeas petition. Perhaps the President lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Perhaps, moreover, Defendants are correct that Plaintiffs are gang members.But — and this is the critical point — there is simply no way to know for sure, as the CECOT Plaintiffs never had any opportunity to challenge the Government’s say-so.Defendants instead spirited away planeloads of people before any such challenge could be made. And now, significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.
So what’s the remedy for this constitutional violation? The judge orders the government to “facilitate” the prisoners’ ability to seek habeas relief — the same meaningless directive that’s already been ignored (if not mocked) in similar cases:
Because the other preliminary-injunction factors also support the CECOT Plaintiffs, the Court concludes that their Class is entitled to preliminary relief. In short,the Government must facilitate the Class’s ability to seek habeas reliefto contest their removal under the Act. Exactly what such facilitation must entail will be determined in future proceedings. Although the Court is mindful that such a remedy may implicate sensitive diplomatic or national-security concerns within the exclusive province of the Executive Branch, it also has a constitutional duty to provide a remedy that will “make good the wrong done.”
Let’s recap this judicial pretzel: The prisoners can’t file habeas because they’re supposedly not in US custody. But their due process rights were violated by being denied the chance to file habeas before removal. So the remedy is to restore their ability to file habeas… which they still can’t do because they’re not in US custody.
As is now clear, CECOT Class members were entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removability pursuant to the Proclamation. That process — which was improperly withheld — must now be afforded to them. Put differently, Plaintiffs’ ability to bring habeas challenges to their removal must be restored. In light of the well-established law of remedies and the example that has already been set by all three levels of the federal judiciary, then,Defendants must facilitate Plaintiffs’ ability to proceed through habeasand ensure that their cases are handled as they would have been if the Government had not provided constitutionally inadequate process.
The judge acknowledges what’s really at stake here:
The Court determines that such a remedy balances Defendants’ distinct role in conducting foreign affairs with the grave need to right their legal wrongs;absent this relief, the Government could snatch anyone off the street, turn him over to a foreign country, and then effectively foreclose any corrective course of action.See Abrego Garcia, 145 S. Ct. at 1019 (statement of Sotomayor, J.).
Well, duh. That’s the whole fucking concern. And, yes, the government already did snatch people off the street to send to a foreign country, effectively foreclosing any corrective course of action.
So what happens now? The judge punts, asking the government to submit a “plan” for facilitating something they’ve already shown zero interest in facilitating:
Mindful of national-security and foreign-policy concerns,the Court will not — at least yet — order the Government to take any specific steps. It will instead allow Defendants to submit proposals regarding the appropriate actions that would “allow [Plaintiffs] to actually seek habeas relief.”
We all know how this ends: the DOJ will file some theatrical bullshit claiming they’d love to help but gosh, foreign sovereignty and all that. The judge will wring his hands some more. And hundreds of men will continue rotting in CECOT because everyone involved would rather play legal theater than acknowledge the obvious solution: if you shipped them there, you can damn well get them back.
Perhaps Judge Boasberg will surprise us and come up with something that has actual teeth, but it feels long past the time for that.
Meanwhile, the men who were disappeared into this Kafkaesque nightmare remain trapped in a foreign prison, casualties of a legal system more interested in procedural niceties than actual justice. The judge opened with Kafka, which would lead you to believe his goal is to not be just another cog in a Kafkaesque machine, but the authority who puts an end to the nonsense. Instead, we just keep getting another round of bureaucratic bullshit.
