The Trump administration has flown 238 Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison that human rights groups say is designed to disappear people.
Despite a judge’s order temporarily blocking the move, the US government flew more than 200 men that it had accused of gang membership to the “Terrorism Confinement Center”, or Cecot – a draconian mega-prison that has become central to the promise of the Salvadorian president, Nayib Bukele, promise to rid his country of crime.
The prison, which can hold up to 40,000 people, has filled up since El Salvador declared a state of exception, allowing police and the military to arrest people on suspicion of gang affiliation without any evidence. Now, Venezuelan immigrants to the US, many of whom are also suspected of gang affiliation without apparent evidence, have joined Salvadorian prisoners in the Americas’ largest – and one of its cruelest – prison systems.
Mneesha Gellman, a political scientist at Emerson College who researches human rights and violence, says the US deportees will face dire conditions and uncertain fates. “We don’t know how any of this will play out, because it’s never exactly happened before,” she said. “Because these are Venezuelans being deported to a country most of them have never been.”
The Guardian spoke to Gellman, who often testifies as an expert witness in asylum cases for Salvadorians, to better understand the conditions that US deportees will face in El Salvador. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve emphasized in your writings that Bukele has ordered a communication blackout between incarcerated people and people outside the prison. But some scholars and journalists have been able to gain some understanding of what Cecot, and other Salvadorian prisons, are like on the inside. What do we know so far?
We know that there is severe overcrowding, that there’s inadequate food, and sanitation is a really big issue. People are locked in their cells a majority of the time.
There’s been a few political prisoners who’ve been released and spoken to the media. Some of them have described things like seeing people die in the cells with them, and then the bodies are left there for extended periods of time.
But because of this contact blackout – there’s no phone, mail or visits – there’s so many people wondering about their loved ones, who have no way to confirm if they’re living. Our understanding is that there’s almost no medical access, or access to medications in any sort of regular or consistent way. If someone has diabetes, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to get insulin. I assume that those conditions would be similar for the Venezuelans being deported from the US.
And reports from Amnesty International and Cristosal found that in Salvadorian prisons overall, there’s systemic torture – it is a regular, institutionalized practice.
Is there any sense that the US deportees will be treated any differently than the Salvadorians who are incarcerated?
The US has accused these people of gang membership, so on the one hand, there’s a concern that they could attract the attention of rival gangs or cartels operating in the prison. For someone to come in and be perceived, whether or not it’s true, as being a member of a different gang is a territorial threat – and gangs in prison maintain their territorial control through violence and intimidation.
And then there is a chance people who have been deported from the US will also have a higher risk of targeting because of their connections to people in the US, and to the US economy. We know this kind of targeting also happens to Salvadorians who are deported from the US. They could be targeted for physical violence as a threat to make them pay, for example – that’s one of the many concerns I have.
As you said – it’s unclear that the men who were deported actually have any affiliation with Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that Donald Trump has designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” and vowed to root out in the US. In many cases, the families of these men believe they were targeted due to innocuous tattoos.
So using tattoos as criteria to detain and incarcerate people has become practice under the state of exception in El Salvador, and it’s deeply problematic because officials could point to something like a rose tattoo – which someone might get because they like roses or they want something beautiful on their body.
And tattoos became an acceptable criterion to use to incarcerate people because Salvadorian police officers and military personnel were given not just a mandate, but for at least a certain period of time, quotas for the numbers of people they needed to arrest and detain each day.
Of course, the US policing system has also long used tattoos erroneously to get people into gang databases. And the criterion to label someone as gang affiliated or gang involved has gotten so vague as to render it pointless. Now it’s a deeply troubling situation where anyone with a tattoo of anything can become vulnerable.
They’re at risk for getting flagged by law enforcement. And then I’ve seen cases where people who have gotten non-gang-related tattoos are perceived in prison as being part of a rival gang, so they’re targeted for violence.
The Bukele government’s quotas for arrests sound similar to the Trump administration’s issuing quotas to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. As someone who has researched human rights and prisons in both the US and El Salvador, are you seeing parallels between Bukele and Trump?
Oh, I am seeing so many parallels – every parallel. I think that Bukele and Trump are arm in arm, populist rightwing authoritarian leaders who are using their executive power beyond the limits that executive power is supposed to be used in democratic regimes. That is worrying for everyone in any country, not just for people in the US and El Salvador, and not just for people being deported from the US to El Salvador.
This situation of these mass deportations brings up multiple points. First of all, we need to remember that every person is a human being, and the dehumanization of people who are incarcerated creates a sub-class of humanity that is unacceptable for those of us that want to live in a more equitable world.
And second, we have two populist authoritarian leaders in both the US and El Salvador – and those of us that are interested in protecting human rights need to push back and call for accountability.
