Outsourcing Cruelty: Immigrants Sent to El Salvador's Prisons Likely to Face Human Rights Abuses
Marco Rubio's Department of State is fully aware of the human rights abuses in Bukele's El Salvador as shown in their country conditions reports.
Everyone is talking about the Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, the administration’s not-actually-deportation deportation flights to El Salvador, and the potential “show-down with the courts” that moves us even closer to a constitutional crisis. This includes me. I was on the Majority Report yesterday to discuss the facts of what this means for immigration enforcement.
But there’s something missing from the discussion. Today, I want to introduce you to the State Department’s country conditions reports to make one thing abundantly clear: the U.S. government is fully aware of the human rights abuses in El Salvador and the corruption in Bukele’s government, and is choosing to work with him anyway to jail deported immigrants.
In the urgency of this moment, looking at the government’s own vetted conclusions about corruption and human rights abuses in El Salvador only reinforces concerns that many—including myself—have been raising. These aren’t just hypothetical anxieties or sensationalist takes from a few contrarians. These concerns are explicitly backed by the State Department based on extensive, on-the-ground documentation.
Since my primary goal here is to educate, this is also an opportunity to highlight the country conditions reports as an overlooked but invaluable resource for research and teaching.
What are country conditions reports?
The Country Reports on Human Rights Practices provide a surprisingly detailed account of human rights abuses in nearly every country, covering a broad range of themes—labor rights, police practices, LGBTQ rights, and more. Produced annually, these reports typically offer straightforward historical comparisons, such as whether conditions are improving or deteriorating in different areas.
Notably, there is only one major county whose human rights abuses are not reported on by the State Department: the United States of America. (I’ll leave it to you to speculate what a country conditions report for the U.S. would look like right now.)
In the immigration context, these official reports are crucial for one simple reason: they serve as a key resource for adjudicators evaluating asylum applications. The reports help verify (or call into question) an applicant’s claim that they face persecution in their home country. If the State Department reports that a particular ethnic minority is targeted for extrajudicial killings by police, and an applicant can demonstrate they belong to that group, it doesn’t automatically prove their case—but it significantly strengthens the argument for plausibility.
Relatedly, one of the most essential and fundamental of human rights principles and laws is non-refoulement. Non-refoulement means that no one should be returned to a country where they would face torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and other irreparable harm. This is important when considering the report on El Salvador below.
Because these reports come from the U.S. government, they carry weight with government agencies. But they aren’t always comprehensive, and—as you might expect—they can be shaped by U.S. political interests. That’s why I tend to view them as authoritatively conservative sources. In other words, if a report acknowledges a human rights abuse, it’s almost certainly happening. But if an abuse isn’t mentioned, that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t occurring.
Given these limitations—along with the delays in publishing country conditions reports—the U.S. government isn’t the only entity producing them. Many international and in-country NGOs also publish thematic reports focused on their areas of expertise. In fact, country conditions research is an entire field of work. For example, Berkeley Law School offers a guide to country conditions research with an extensive collection of sources from around the world. Meanwhile, Stanford’s Migration and Asylum Lab produces bulletins on select Latin American countries, adding depth and context to the State Department’s reports.
Now that we are familiar with what country conditions reports are, let’s see what the official Department of State reports say about El Salvador, the country to which people are currently being expelled under the Alien Enemies Act.
Country Conditions in El Salvador
In this section, I’ve included key excerpts from the country conditions report for El Salvador so you can read the official findings for yourself.
To put this in context: The Trump administration has contracted El Salvador to use its prisons at a cost of $6 million per year for 300 people. I fully acknowledge that many of those on recent expulsion flights were likely gang members with serious criminal histories. However, there is also reason to believe that at least some were not. The U.S. has legal mechanisms for deporting serious criminals—mechanisms that don’t raise major constitutional concerns and that ensure due process.
I also recognize that Bukele enjoys significant support—both real and perceived—for his efforts to make El Salvador safer, despite documented human rights violations. But none of this justifies the U.S. undermining its own due process principles and the rule of law. Due process exists for a reason: to ensure the government makes accurate, defensible decisions rather than acting recklessly and sending innocent people into situations where they are likely to face human rights abuses.
“Executive Summary
Under the state of exception, reports of gang violence decreased significantly, allowing citizens to exercise their right to life, liberty, and security of person, and to engage in daily activities and commerce without the constant threat of violence and extortion. Arbitrary arrests and mass pretrial hearings, however, undermined due process and exacerbated historically difficult conditions in overcrowded prisons. …
Arbitrary Deprivation of Life and Other Unlawful or Politically Motivated Killings
There were reports that the government or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, largely stemming from deaths of detainees while in prison, either from medical neglect or physical abuse. …
Disappearance
There were regular reports that security and law enforcement officials arrested persons and did not inform their families of their whereabouts. Socorro Jurídico Humanitario reported that as of August, it was tracking 1,376 cases in which the families of those detained under the state of exception did not receive confirmation that their relatives were in the prison system, information regarding their whereabouts, or confirmation that they were alive. …
Prison and Detention Center Conditions
Prison conditions before the state of exception were harsh and life threatening due to gross overcrowding; inadequate sanitary conditions; insufficient food and water shortages; a lack of medical services in prison facilities; and physical attacks. The addition of 72,000 detainees under the state of exception exacerbated the problem. Human rights organizations reported that as of August 22, more than 70 detainees died in prisons from violence, insufficient medical care, and chronic health conditions. …
Arbitrary Arrest or Detention
The constitution prohibited arbitrary arrests, and the law provided for the right of any person to challenge the lawfulness of their arrest or detention in court. The state of exception, itself a legal mechanism, suspended the right to legal defense, as well as the requirement that persons be informed of the reason of their arrest at the time of their detention, and increased the number of days an individual could be held in detention before being formally charged. The government did not always observe the requirements of the law and constitution. …
Political Prisoners and Detainees
The government arrested or continued to detain sitting and former politicians from opposition parties and the governing party. Media questioned the legitimacy of the detentions, but the government declared the charges against them were legitimate. The detainees were generally subjected to the same harsh prison conditions as convicted prisoners. …
Freedom of Expression, Including for Members of the Press and Other Media
The constitution provided for freedom of expression, including for members of the press and other media, and the government generally respected this right. Journalists, media and civil society organizations, and opposition figures criticized the government’s online harassment of critics and rhetoric towards journalists. There were sporadic reports of monitoring and threats against journalists. …”
These findings show that under Bukele’s leadership, gang violence dropped, but at the cost of widespread human rights abuses. Arbitrary arrests, harsh prison conditions, and deaths in custody raised serious due process concerns. Families were often left in the dark about detained relatives, and political opponents faced questionable imprisonment. While press freedom existed, journalists and critics faced harassment and intimidation.
To me, this does not sound like the kind of rights landscape to which the United States should be sending immigrants—and the US government’s own findings about the political and legal conditions in El Salvador thoroughly substantiate these concerns. Despite this, Trump is using the Alien Enemies Act to avoid accountability and oversight that could ensure that innocent people aren’t being sent to dangerous conditions.
I will be watching to see what happens with the 2024 country conditions reports. Since they will be produced and released under Marco Rubio’s leadership, we could see the new reports downplay El Salvador’s human rights abuses.
Those are the main excerpts that I found relevant from the Department of State’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for El Salvador. The full report is much longer. You can read the report for yourself online or download the PDF below.
For complimentary information, I recommend the Migration & Asylum Lab report below as another important resource.
As always, if you have additional information or experiences you would like to share, or if I got something wrong that you believe should be corrected or improved, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or email me directly.
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Thanks, Austin. These things should be known by everyone. As you mentioned, the DOS report you're reading is from 2023. We should soon be up to 2024 (I believe these are published in April). I can only imagine what the new El Salvador report will look like, as compared to the reports of the other NGOs. And I am facing cases where I would typically argue that imprisonment in El Salvador is akin to torture -- an idea that the DOS agreed with previously, but which is now antithetical to the beliefs & practices of the current admin. Since the DOS report is the heavyweight in the immigration court context, it will be wild, to say the least, to have all the NGOs on the opposite side, and El Salvador's report as benign as New Zealand's. This is what I'm imagining will happen, anyhow. Everything is so backwards.
Thanks for this Austin- my only criticism is that you follow the report convention and use the past conjugation, when it would be more accurate to use the present tense. When I visited El Salvador last May, people told me directly about loved ones disappearing, living under military occupation, and the total lack of due process (mass hearings of hundreds at once, a faceless judge, and the vast majority of those rounded up are accused of a 'status crime' (illicit association) often based on hearsay-- rather than a crime of substance, such as a demonstrated harm, based on solid investigation). Last November we hosted Salvadoran human rights lawyers at my University who gave us the latest news on arbitrary arrests, on torture and state killings in the prison system, and on the targeted incarceration of Bukele's political opponents. As you may also be aware, while conducting his political spectacle of a 'crackdown,' behind the scenes Bukele has protected MS-13 members from extradition and given gang leaders the most comfortable and modern digs in the highly variable penal infrastructure, which also includes crumbling cinder block warehouses and steel cages with no running water where most of the deaths occur. This raises the distinct possibility that the administration is less concerned with actually investigating gangs, bringing accountability, and establishing order (much less upholding the rule of law, which would require the government to follow rather than suspend the Salvadoran Constitution) than they are with subordinating the gangs and incorporating their illicit activities into existing corruption networks within the state infrastructure. I think it's important to note that in addition to violating basic due process and human rights of detained people as the reports above indicate, over the past six years President Bukele's administration has also removed members of the Supreme Court, removed judges, removed the attorney general who was investigating them for corruption, changed the number of legislators and gerrymandered the country to achieve their majority, and ran their candidate for a second term (and won) despite the Constitutional prohibition against a president being elected twice, put in place after the civil war to prevent a return of the military dictatorships of the 20th century. It's not shocking to me that this is happening, but it is a chilling sign of the kind of police state that some would like to put in place in the US, and Bukele has created a roadmap in terms of propaganda, political abuses, and violent repression.