"You Have Arrived in Hell": New Evidence Confirms Torture of Deported Venezuelans in El Salvador
A new HRW report confirms what I warned about in March: Venezuelans deported to El Salvador were systematically tortured. Half had no criminal record. Many were asylum seekers. We paid for this.
In late March, I wrote about the Trump administration’s deportation flights to El Salvador, examining the State Department’s own country conditions reports to make clear that the U.S. government was fully aware of the human rights abuses taking place in Bukele’s prisons. At the time, I argued that these weren’t hypothetical concerns but documented realities backed by our government’s own extensive research. I warned that sending people to CECOT, El Salvador’s maximum-security “terrorism confinement center,” raised serious questions about non-refoulement, the fundamental principle that no one should be returned to a country where they would face torture or other irreparable harm.
Today, we have confirmation of these concerns. Human Rights Watch and Cristosal have released an 81-page report titled “’You Have Arrived in Hell’: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison,” providing the most comprehensive account to date of what the 252 Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration in March and April 2025 endured while detained in CECOT. The findings are as disturbing as they are methodologically rigorous, and they demand our attention regardless of where we stand on immigration policy or enforcement priorities.
Before I discuss what the report documents, I want to express deep gratitude to the researchers at Human Rights Watch and Cristosal who undertook this extraordinarily difficult work. Between March and September 2025, researchers conducted interviews with 40 people who had been held in CECOT and another 150 people with credible knowledge of their experiences, including relatives, friends, employers, and lawyers. They reviewed photographs of injuries, analyzed criminal records from multiple countries, examined judicial documents, consulted international forensic experts, and worked with the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center’s Investigation Lab to corroborate detainees’ accounts. This is painstaking, methodologically sound research that represents exactly the kind of work that makes it possible to hold governments accountable for human rights violations. This is research in action.
Who Was Actually Deported
In March and April 2025, the U.S. government sent 252 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. Of these deportations, 137 were carried out under the Alien Enemies Act, an archaic 1798 statute that the Trump administration invoked by declaring that Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal group, constituted part of a “hybrid criminal state perpetrating an invasion.” The remaining 101 were removed under Title 8, basically the regular immigration procedures. The Salvadoran government was paid $4.76 million by the U.S. government to hold these individuals.
Although the Trump administration sought to characterize these people as gang members, many of these people were not gang members at all. Human Rights Watch analyzed ICE data showing that at least 48.8 percent of the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador had no criminal history in the United States whatsoever. Only 3.1 percent had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense. In 58 of the 130 documented cases that Human Rights Watch examined in detail, the individuals had no criminal records in Venezuela or other countries in Latin America either. This finding aligns closely with my own research showing a growing trend of detained immigrants with no criminal record.
Perhaps even more troubling, many of these people appeared to have been denied their right to seek asylum. Of the 130 cases Human Rights Watch documented, 62 said they were removed while their asylum cases were pending, all having passed their initial “credible fear interview” which gave them the right to a full hearing before an immigration judge. Sixteen sought asylum during deportation proceedings and claimed they were denied a full process. Three had arrived after completing the Safe Mobility Offices program vetting process, having been conditionally recognized as refugees, but were detained at the airport apparently because CBP officers linked their tattoos to Tren de Aragua.
Systematic Torture and Abuse
What happened to these people in CECOT constitutes torture under international human rights law. This is not an activist characterization or political rhetoric. The abuses documented by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal meet the definition of torture as understood in international legal frameworks. More significantly, these were not isolated incidents carried out by rogue guards. Every single former detainee interviewed reported being subjected to serious physical and psychological abuse on a near-daily basis throughout their entire detention.
The report documents that beatings began the moment planes landed in El Salvador and continued systematically throughout detention. The report says that the CECOT director told the detainees, according to multiple accounts, “Welcome to my prison. You are here as convicts. The only way out of here is in a black bag.” Guards and riot police beat detainees during daily cell searches, when they considered that detainees had broken prison rules, when detainees requested medical attention, and following visits by U.S. officials and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The most severe beatings took place in punishment cells known as “the Island,” small dark spaces where guards took detainees to punish or intimidate them for infractions such as speaking loudly, showering at the wrong time, or requesting medical assistance. After beating detainees, guards left them locked in these punishment cells for periods ranging from four hours to three days, often denying them food, water, and medicine.
Three former detainees reported sexual violence. Most interviewees endured verbal and psychological abuse from guards who repeatedly told them they would “never leave alive,” that “no one knew they were there,” and that “their families had abandoned them.” Four detainees said they experienced suicidal thoughts and at least one attempted suicide.
Enforced Disappearance
Beyond the torture, the U.S. and Salvadoran governments subjected these individuals to what amounts under international law to enforced disappearance. Under international law, an enforced disappearance occurs when authorities deprive a person of their liberty and then refuse to acknowledge the detention or disclose that person’s fate or whereabouts.
None of the detainees were told that they would be sent to El Salvador. All family members interviewed said that U.S. immigration authorities initially told their relatives they would be sent back to Venezuela. US authorities removed the people sent to El Salvador from ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System. When relatives called detention centers or ICE offices, officials told them that they could not provide any information, that their family members no longer appeared in the system, or that their whereabouts were unknown.
Neither the U.S. nor Salvadoran government published a list or disclosed the names of individuals sent to CECOT. Between March and July, Cristosal assisted relatives to file 76 habeas corpus petitions before El Salvador’s Supreme Court. The chamber has not issued a response. The Venezuelans were held incommunicado in CECOT, without access to legal assistance or contact with the outside world for approximately four months.
Conditions and the Return to Venezuela
The conditions in CECOT violated multiple provisions of the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. Detainees received inadequate food, had no hygiene products or privacy, and medical staff provided little to no care despite detainees arriving with preexisting conditions or becoming ill during detention. They remained locked inside cells with artificial light 24 hours a day, never allowed outdoors.
On July 18, 2025, El Salvador released the 252 Venezuelans and returned them to Venezuela in exchange for 10 U.S. citizens or permanent residents held in Venezuelan custody. The former detainees continue to suffer psychological harm, with many reporting depression, anxiety, traumatic flashbacks, and difficulty sleeping. At least two former detainees reported that Venezuelan intelligence agents visited them after their return, asking them to record videos about their detention in the United States.
U.S. Complicity and the Path Forward
The Trump administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to arbitrarily detain Venezuelans who were then subjected to systematic abuse by Salvadoran security forces. The U.S. government violated its legal obligations under the principle of non-refoulement by transferring Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador despite easily foreseeable risks of torture and ill-treatment. US officials repeatedly denied relatives information on detainees’ whereabouts, making the U.S. government complicit in enforced disappearances.
In my previous post in March, I detailed the State Department’s own country conditions reports documenting widespread human rights abuses in El Salvador’s prisons. The 2023 State Department report said that El Salvador’s prisons “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 U.S. government knew what conditions were like in El Salvador’s prisons and sent people there anyway.
This is not fundamentally a debate about immigration policy or enforcement priorities. Whatever our views on immigration enforcement, whatever our positions on border security, whatever our opinions about how the asylum system should function, we should all be able to agree on one thing: the United States government should not pay another government to torture people.
As I said in my previous post, the principle of non-refoulement is not some abstract legal technicality, no matter how much the current administration flaunts it or flaunts the law altogether. It is a fundamental recognition of human dignity that transcends political affiliation and policy preferences. It is the recognition that some things are so fundamentally wrong that we must refuse to participate in them, even when we believe we are pursuing legitimate enforcement objectives. Torture is one of those things.
The Human Rights Watch report makes clear that what happened in CECOT was not a series of unfortunate incidents or isolated abuses. It was systematic. It was foreseeable. It was the result of political decisions made by both the U.S. and Salvadoran governments. And it implicates both governments in serious violations of international human rights law.
I am grateful to the researchers who undertook this difficult work. I am grateful to the survivors who shared their testimonies despite the trauma and the ongoing risks they face. And I am asking all of us, regardless of our political views or our positions on immigration, to take the time to understand what happened and why it matters. We must refuse to participate in torture. That is not a policy position. That is a moral imperative.
The full Human Rights Watch and Cristosal report, “’You Have Arrived in Hell’: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison,” is available at hrw.org and at the link below.
USA making torture cool since the w bush regime. Not one bit of change for the better since then either…
This administration must pay for this.