The prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration has sent alleged gang members for detention has a reputation for human rights violations and corruption, with civil rights groups challenging the removals calling it “one of the worst prisons in the world.”
In court cases, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward filed declarations from experts that describe how prisons in El Salvador, and specifically Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, go beyond the generally accepted standards for penalizing and imprisoning convicted criminals.
The director of prisons there was indicted by the United States for arranging meetings in prison for negotiations with MS-13, a violent gang, and deemed corrupt by the U.S. Treasury Department for helping to develop a scheme to embezzle millions of dollars from the prison commissary system, one expert’s testimony points out.
“Deportees who are imprisoned in El Salvador are highly likely to face immediate and intentional life-threatening harm at the hands of state actors and a secondary threat of violence from incarcerated gang members,” Sarah C. Bishop, a professor at Baruch College who has studied the Salvadoran prison system, said.
The Trump administration appears content to lean into that reputation as part of its most aggressive push to follow up on President Donald Trump’s tough-on-immigration promises, as it claims the power under a centuries-old national security law to send people there for detention without information on when they might be released.
Trump on social media thanked El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele “for taking the criminals that were so stupidly allowed” to enter the United States “and giving them such a wonderful place to live!”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week posted a video of herself ostensibly speaking in front of a jail cell in the Salvadoran prison, where she was set to visit during a trip to the country on last week, warning migrants who are illegally in the United States and commit crimes that the jail could be their fate.
“First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed, and you will be prosecuted,” Noem said. “But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday the U.S. military transferred to El Salvador “a group of 17 violent criminals from the Tren de Aragua and MS-13 organizations,” and said they will “no longer terrorize our communities and citizens.”
In the meantime, attorneys for the migrants have raised warnings in court filings that the government has admitted that many individuals removed to the prison do not have criminal records in the United States, and the process for identifying who is a member of the gang is flawed.
‘Severe violations of due process’
One of the individuals is identified in an ACLU filing as Andry, a gay make-up artist who was reportedly sent to El Salvador because of the presence of two tattoos on each of his arms. Each arm is inscribed with “Mom” and “Dad” with crowns over those words, a photo says. The detainee has stated to immigration officials that he isn’t a member of a gang.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said although precedent exists for deporting individuals to places other than their home country, the nature of the deportations to El Salvador is different.
“The Alien Enemies Act deportations are utterly unprecedented given that they do not occur under normal immigration law, and were applied to people who had not yet been ordered removed under normal immigration law,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
Reichlin-Melnick said the status of the migrants currently is an “open question,” including whether there is any expectation at any level that they would be transferred back to their home country or if these individuals are now considered deported.
“The Trump administration has provided literally no information about the custody status of these individuals or its ultimate plan as to what should happen to these people,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “Many of them still have pending immigration court hearings, and reporting suggests neither the immigration judges nor the ICE trial lawyers involved in those cases have any clue what to do.”
The U.S. has asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court order that temporarily blocks deportation under a presidential proclamation based on the Alien Enemies Act without requiring the migrants a chance to contest their designation as a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.
In the petition before the Supreme Court, the Trump administration argues that the president decided “swift removal of TdA members was imperative to prevent them from endangering personnel and detainees in U.S. detention facilities and continuing to infiltrate U.S. communities.”
And it described the removals under the proclamation as a national security operation “which were designed to extirpate TdA’s presence in our country before it gains a greater foothold.”
In a separate case in Massachusetts, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting removals to El Salvador unless they’ve been given notice on where they’re being taken and afforded a meaningful opportunity to submit an application for protections under the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
Vice President JD Vance, in a social media post Tuesday, said the concern should be focused on getting dangerous criminals out of the country.
“Joe Biden sanctioned an invasion of the United States. We have approximately 20 million illegal aliens in this country.” Vance wrote. “Their victims are measured in longer wait times for hospitals, overwhelmed schools, and murder victims the media largely ignored. The media has deteremined [sic] the real victims are the gang members we’re trying to get out of the country.”
Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, in a declaration in a lawsuit, said individuals in El Salvador’s prisons are “denied communication with their relatives and lawyers, and only appear before courts in online hearings, often in groups of several hundred detainees at the same time.”
Although much of the declaration describes the prison at large in El Salvador as opposed to CECOT itself, Goebertus said she expects “the mistreatment of detainees there to be in large part similar to what Human Rights Watch has documented in other prisons in El Salvador.”
“This includes cases of torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions, such as lack of access to adequate health care and food,” Goebertus said.
Human Rights Watch is “not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison,” the filing says. The government of El Salvador doesn’t allow human rights groups access to its prisons and lets in journalists and social media influencers to visit CECOT under highly controlled circumstances, the filing states.
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