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el salvador
Mysterious Attacks on Ecuadorian Fishers Raise Fears of Expanded US Boat Bombings
“It would be one thing if the US didn’t have an overt maritime strike campaign, but they do, and they’re posting snuff films of boats going up in flames regularly,” said one expert.
Aug 12, 2026
An investigation published Wednesday by The New York Times has raised fresh questions about who attacked three Ecuadorian fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year—but for fishers and their families in the South American nation, the mystery is hardly new.
According to the Times, Ecuadorian fishers aboard the Fiorella, Negra Francisca Duarte II, and Don Maca were separately attacked by what witnesses called unidentified "gringos" using drones. Survivors said they "came under attack by English-speaking assailants wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches, but without any clear insignia to link them to an official government force."
International rights groups have called for an investigation after the Fiorella and its crew of eight disappeared in January amid Operation Southern Spear, President Donald Trump's largely ineffective campaign of extrajudicial strikes on boats that the US administration claims, without evidence, were smuggling drugs.
By the Pentagon's own admission, more than 220 people have been killed in at least 66 such strikes since last September. The US military says no civilians were killed in the strikes, a claim that anonymous government officials called "a fucking joke" and "a total whitewash."
This is a very worrying story. Ecuadorian fishermen are being attacked and killed, and the perpetrators seem to be either the U.S. military engaged in clandestine operations or an American mercenary company working for Bukele or another Central American country.
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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) August 12, 2026 at 7:12 AM
Government officials in countries including Colombia and Venezuela, as well as victims' relatives, have contradicted the US claim. The families of two Trinidadian men killed in one strike earlier this year filed wrongful death lawsuits against the United States. Relatives of a Colombian slain in another US strike also filed a complaint at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Some of the Ecuadorian fishers featured in the new Times piece say they were seized and interrogated by the attackers before being handed over to the Salvadoran navy, which conducts long-range maritime patrols and counternarcotics operations in the Eastern Pacific and occasionally intercepts vessels.
The new Times report says that a maritime patrol aircraft based at a military facility in El Salvador repeatedly flew toward and tracked the Ecuadorian fishing boats in the days before they were attacked or disappeared. An analysis of flight data found that the aircraft's course appeared to follow the vessels over several days.
Yet the aircraft was not listed among Pentagon operational aircraft. According to the Times, it was registered to a private company whose address was a UPS store mailbox in Virginia, deepening the mystery over who was operating it—and for whom.
“It would be one thing if the US didn’t have an overt maritime strike campaign, but they do, and they’re posting snuff films of boats going up in flames regularly," Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in the laws of war, told the Times.
"And that’s what makes this even more squirrelly," added Finucane, now a senior adviser in the US Program at the International Crisis Group. “Who are these people that are operating, and under what authority? And they are using a UPS store as their company address? Come on.”
The Pentagon has denied involvement, claiming that US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) did not know about the attacks or have a role in them. But the new findings raise the possibility that the attacks could have involved a private military contractor or another force operating in coordination with Washington's expanding anti-drug campaign.
“Who are these people that are operating, and under what authority? And they are using a UPS store as their company address?"
In addition to the boat bombing campaign—which the Pentagon has replaced with the newly created Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere—SOUTHCOM has launched Operation Total Extermination, a joint counternarcotics operation with Ecuadorian forces involving the deployment of US ground troops into the Andean nation.
In one operation in the campaign, Ecuadorian soldiers raided and destroyed a dairy farm in San Martín, Sucumbíos, on March 3. Ecuador claimed the site was a traffickers’ camp, but investigations by The New York Times and, later, Human Rights Watch found substantial evidence that it was a working cattle and dairy farm with no credible evidence of a criminal connection. HRW said four workers at the farm were detained and tortured by Ecuadorian forces, and that the broader operation was carried out with US assistance.
The Times investigation published Wednesday followed months of reporting by Ecuadorian and international media and human rights groups, including HRW, on the three fishing vessels and their crews.
In April, Primicias reported growing fear among fishermen in Manabí, Ecuador's major fishing province, where crews said they had been intercepted and attacked at sea. Fishers from the Don Maca and Negra Francisca Duarte II separately described being surrounded by drones and subsequently detained by what they believed were US personnel.
Don Maca's crew told El Universo that drones bombed their boat without warning on March 26. Fishers aboard said they escaped in small boats, approached a foreign vessel for help, and were instead handcuffed and hooded before eventually being transferred to Salvadoran authorities.
El Universo also separately reported a strikingly similar account from the crew of the Negra Francisca Duarte II. Captain Hernán Flores said a drone struck the boat on March 17, setting it ablaze and forcing all 16 fishermen into the water. When they approached a nearby blue vessel seeking assistance, Flores said, armed foreign personnel pointed weapons at them, bound them, and covered their heads.
In the case of the Fiorella, Primicias and El Universo reported that two fishers who had separated from the boat in a smaller vessel saw a drone circling above shortly before they spotted smoke on the horizon. Fiorella and those aboard it have never been found.
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Charges Against Kilmar Ábrego García Thrown Out After Judge Finds Vindictive Prosecution
"Our client... is freed of these outrageous, vindictive charges," said an attorney representing Ábrego García. "It’s a good day."
May 22, 2026
A federal judge on Friday dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García, the man whom the Trump administration unlawfully deported to El Salvador last year.
Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee ruled that the US Department of Justice's (DOJ) case against Ábrego García should be thrown out on grounds of selective and vindictive prosecution.
In his ruling, Crenshaw likened the President Donald Trump's DOJ to a prosecutor who picked "the person first and the crime second" when it indicted Ábrego García on human smuggling charges last year.
Crenshaw, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, zeroed in on the fact that the DOJ reopened a three-year-old investigation into a Ábrego García mere days after the US Supreme Court unanimously ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US, arguing that the timing and other evidence established "likeliness of vindictiveness" of the government's case.
While the government provided arguments attempting to rebut claims of vindictive prosecution, Crenshaw ultimately found them unpersuasive and argued that the "new evidence" the government used to justify reopening the case was something that prosecutors should have discovered before with due diligence.
After an examination of the government's claims, Crenshaw found that its case against Ábrego García was reverse engineered to justify his unlawful removal to El Salvador—where he was imprisoned at the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
"The objective evidence here shows that, absent Ábrego's successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the government would not have brought this prosecution," Crenshaw wrote in his conclusion. "The executive branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Ábrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the executive branch reopen that investigation."
Sean Hecker, an attorney representing Ábrego García, celebrated the judge's ruling shortly after it was issued.
"We are going to savor this one," Hecker wrote in a social media post. "Our client, Kilmar Ábrego García, is freed of these outrageous, vindictive charges. It’s a good day."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, warned that Ábrego García is not yet out of the woods given that the Trump administration is still trying to deport him to Uganda even though he has said he would accept being deported to Costa Rica.
Reichlin-Melnick nevertheless said that this was a major victory against the Trump administration.
"It is extremely hard to win a vindictive prosecution motion," he wrote, "but here the evidence was so strong that the judge had almost no choice but to grant it."
New York University law professor Ryan Goodman described Crenshaw's ruling as an "extraordinary rebuke" of the Trump DOJ, and noted that it highlighted the role played by acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche in the vindictive prosecution "nearly 30 times."
Journalist Nathan Newman said that Ábrego García deserved praise for standing firm in the face of relentless pressure by the federal government and fighting back.
"When history is written," wrote Newman, "the bravery and tenacity of Kilmar Ábrego García in defiance of the Trump administration will deserve a hefty credit for building the resistance to Trump's evil. A good day."
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A Warning From El Salvador
While President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador, where President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using.
May 06, 2026
Recently, I had the opportunity to stand in a friend’s kitchen eating pupusas, the Salvadoran national food, while listening to an update on conditions in Central America from Cristosal’s Noah Bullock. Cristosal is a key Central American human rights organization engaged in legal advocacy, forensic investigation, and amplifying the voices of people who are experiencing—and resisting—repression in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Noah offered considerable detail on the conditions in those countries, but his basic message for us living so far away was simple: No matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again.
So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.
Benign Neglect?
During the years when our main political work involved opposing US aggression in Latin America, my partner and I used to believe that the whole region would be better off if the imperial eye were focused on other parts of the world. Most Central American countries may be poor, but they’re more likely to prosper during times when Washington isn’t treating them as backyard gold mines, or pawns in a global conflict.
Take Nicaragua, for example. US Marines first occupied that country early in the last century and, by the 1920s, had helped establish a dynastic dictatorship there that would last until 1979. During that time, US companies profited endlessly from various forms of resource extraction, including the gold of the Las Minas (The Mines) area, comprised of the towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza; lumber from various parts of the country; and palm oil from its Atlantic coast.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States used its Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union as a pretext for directly meddling in the lives and politics of countries across Latin America. Bogus threats of a communist takeover, for instance, excused the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Carlos Castillo Armas was then installed as president, the first of a long series of dictators, much to the satisfaction of that US commercial giant, the United Fruit Company, which proceeded to treat the country as its own private orchard.
When Chilean President Salvador Allende supported nationalizing his country’s two biggest copper mines, their US owners benefited from a 1973 CIA-backed coup that overthrew him. The newly installed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet then launched a campaign of terror, torture, disappearances, and the murder of tens of thousands of Chileans over his 17 years in power.
Similarly, the United States supported right-wing, repressive governments in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, and Uruguay during those Cold War decades. However, beginning with the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, most of those countries managed to rid themselves of their repressive rulers in the last two decades of the 20th century.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States began to push Latin America aside and focus elsewhere, sending its “Harvard boys” off to Russia and points east. Like the Chicago Boys of the 1970s, who remade Chile’s economy as a model of laissez-faire capitalism, those young Harvard economists sought to offer similar “benefits” to the benighted former Soviet Socialist Republics. Their efforts led to a fire sale of state industries and birthed a class of oligarchs whose successors still rule Russia and various former Soviet republics.
Then, beginning with the first Gulf War against Iraq (also in 1991), and especially after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, the US acquired a new, if amorphous, “enemy” and launched the Global War on Terror. Washington’s geographic focus then turned to Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, as the US began what would prove to be disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now (with as-yet-unknown consequences) in Iran. Meanwhile, Latin America experienced a bit of what (in entirely different circumstances) President Richard Nixon’s adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed “benign neglect.”
An Evil Harvest
As it happened, however, during the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change. While Mexico’s gangs are largely homegrown affairs, those in El Salvador began as US imports. During the dictatorships and guerrilla wars of the 1980s, numerous Salvadorans, fleeing government repression, sought asylum in the United States. Thousands would settle in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Once the war in El Salvador ended in 1992, many of them headed home again, some bringing the gang culture of California with them, including Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) and the 18th Street gang, both from the Los Angeles area. I got a glimpse of that form of migration in 1993, when I spent a few days in El Salvador. On a wall in the capital city, San Salvador, I saw the tag of a gang from my very own neighborhood in San Francisco, the XXII-B, or “Twenty-two-B” crew. That stood for the corner of 22nd and Bryant streets, the very corner of San Francisco where my partner and I were then living. We’d watched them grow up on our block. They were never a big deal in San Francisco, nor did they really become so in El Salvador, unlike MS-13 and the 18th Street crew.
As for climate change, we obviously can’t pin all the blame for that on the United States alone, although our current president is doing his best to drive us in that direction. (Fond as he is of fake awards, perhaps someday he’ll get one for the World’s Most Devastating Climate Changer.) Until 20 years ago, however, the US was the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and, though now leapfrogged by China, it remains historically by far the world’s largest user of fossil fuels.
One result of the intensifying global climate emergency is a series of devastating droughts in Central America, which lies within the “Dry Corridor,” running from southern Mexico to Panama. That region, inhabited in many places by subsistence farmers, has historically experienced cycles of wetness and drought, corresponding in part to the El Niño oscillation, which periodically warms the Pacific Ocean’s surface, bringing fierce rainfall to the West Coast of the United States and severe drought further south. In recent decades, climate change has been lengthening the drought periods and multiplying their effects. Increased heat reduces soil moisture, while rising seas contaminate estuaries and aquifers, leaving less water available for farming. A new round of droughts began in 2014 and, in 2018 and 2019, farmers across Central America would lose 75% to 100% of their main food crop, corn.
Worse yet, on our ever-hotter planet in this era of ever-more-intense climate change, the strongest El Niño in 140 years is predicted to begin later this year.
It turns out that not only has the US historically treated Central America terribly, but its neglect of the region in our era has hardly been benign. Under such circumstances, it shouldn’t be a surprise that, by the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the combination of US “exports”—murderous gang violence, political repression, and drought—had led record numbers of migrants to our southern border, desperately seeking asylum in this country. And that brings us to Donald J. Trump, and his new best friend, Nayib Bukele.
In El Salvador: Trump’s BFF Nayib Bukele
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.” He’s young, handsome, and extremely popular in his own country. Originally a man of the left, while mayor of the capital, San Salvador, from 2015 to 2019, he succeeded in reducing the murder rate there not through repression but by mending the “tejido social”—the social fabric. He rebuilt the city center, providing streetlights and surveillance cameras, thereby creating a safer central area for street vendors. He also opened up educational and recreational opportunities for the city’s youth. In addition, he made cosmetic changes symbolic of progressive politics like renaming Roberto D’Aubuisson Street, so-called in honor of a death-squad leader.
Bukele claimed that such measures alone had produced a genuine decline in the city’s disturbing murder rate. But investigations have since shown that he also followed in the footsteps of previous Salvadoran presidents by making pacts with the gangs to reduce visible violence. (For an exploration of Bukele’s agreements with them and later with Donald Trump, don’t miss the PBS Frontline film on the subject.)
In his eagerness to play the strongman, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator—and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
His 2019 election to the presidency began his full-scale shift to the right and toward what has now become full-on authoritarian rule. In 2020, he ordered soldiers into El Salvador’s congress to force it to accept a $103 million loan from the United States to underwrite the US-El Salvador anti-gang Plan Vulcan, which involved the massive incarceration of accused gang members (along with many innocents). At the same time, Bukele made an agreement with MS-13 to spare some of its key members in return for a reduction in the capital’s murder rate, which did indeed drop steeply during the first years of his first term as president. But in 2022, some MS-13 members who were supposed to be protected were mistakenly caught up in a sweep and, in retribution, murders spiked once again. As Cristosal’s Noah Bullock explained in that talk I listened to recently, the gangs have the power to dial visible street violence up or down. They use violence as a way to communicate with both El Salvador’s citizenry and its government. A display of corpses on street corners is a way of sending messages to both of them.
In 2021, having captured a majority in the legislature, President Bukele took control of the judiciary, too, by ordering an increasingly supine congress to oust the five members of the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, following a landslide reelection victory in 2024, he rewrote the constitution so that he could serve consecutive terms as president ad infinitum, while also building the now-notorious CECOT “terrorism confinement” prison, where torture and sexual abuse have become daily occurrences.
When Bukele met with President Trump at the White House during his first term, it was clear that the admiration was mutual. Trump could, of course, only dream of exercising the kind of control Bukele by then wielded over all three branches of the Salvadoran government. In 2025, after Trump’s second inauguration, he and Bukele met again and struck a deal: The United States would pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison 250 mostly Venezuelan immigrants to this country in the CECOT mega prison. The transfer of those men (over the objections of a US federal judge) was chronicled in carefully-produced videos of Salvadoran soldiers frog-marching their shackled captives into CECOT, pushing them to their knees, and forcibly shaving their heads.
As investigations would later reveal, those men were not, as claimed by the Trump administration, members of Venezuela’s quasi-gang Tren de Aragua, but ordinary citizens caught up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups. Except for a few Salvadoran citizens, who remain in CECOT to this day, they were eventually freed. Those who were released, however, described weeks of torture and sexual abuse in, among other places, a CBS "60 Minutes" report that was, for a time, spiked by the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Trump admirer Bari Weiss.
In truth, though, $6 million was chump change to a Salvadoran government used to hundreds of millions of dollars of largesse from Washington. In this case, however, Bukele got something he wanted a lot more than money. The US was holding a group of nine extradited MS-13 leaders, and MS-13 wanted them returned to El Salvador. Hoping to keep the retributive killing in his country down, Bukele wanted them back, too. There was, as The Washington Post reported in October 2025, only one problem: Some of those prisoners were US informants, who had assisted the FBI in disrupting MS-13 activity in this country. Federal law prohibited turning them over to El Salvador, but Trump assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to work things out with Bukele. According to the Post:
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.
Rubio’s extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele’s demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump’s early months in office.
Not surprisingly, repression against the press and civil society continues in El Salvador to this day. Many opposition journalists have had to flee the country. In May 2025, human rights attorney Ruth López Alfaro, head of Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption and Justice unit, was arrested. She remains in prison as of this writing. Shortly after that, Cristosal made the difficult decision to move its offices to Guatemala in order to continue its human rights work in greater safety.
Eyes on El Salvador
These days, it’s all eyes on Iran. But while President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador. President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using. The steps are the same for aspiring autocrats around the world, whether in Hungary, Russia, or the United States. Here are a few bits of guidance from that metaphorical manual:
- Attack the judiciary, as Trump & Company have done every time they get an adverse federal ruling;
- Capture the legislature and make it do your will, whatever gerrymandering or electoral finagling it takes in Trump’s case;
- Attack the press and civil society organizations, labeling them, as Trump has, “enemies of the people” and “domestic terrorists”; and
- Plan to rule indefinitely, as Trump repeatedly hints he’d like to do.
Oh, and it doesn’t matter how evil your partners in crime turn out to be, whether it’s Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Nayib Bukele. In his eagerness to play the strongman, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator—and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
But, as Noah from Cristosal told our little gathering the other day, we have to keep on walking through the dark, knowing that every act of solidarity and resistance brings the dawn that much closer.
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Seeking $56 Million, Legal Migrant Claims ICE Intentionally Sent Him to Salvadoran Prison
“The Trump administration knowingly and unlawfully locked up an innocent person for four months in a concentration camp-like prison," said one attorney for the plaintiff.
Mar 31, 2026
A Utah law firm said Tuesday that it plans to sue the US government for its allegedly unlawful detention and deportation of a Venezuelan immigrant who was sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador known for its torture and abuse of inmates.
“Our client is a young Venezuelan man who came into the US legally to escape threats of violence by the Venezuelan government against his family for their opposition to the Maduro regime," said Brent Ward, an attorney at Parker & McConkie, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was kidnapped by US forces during a January invasion of his country.
Ward said that the client—identified by the pseudonym "Johnny Hernandez"—is seeking $56 million in damages and "has no criminal record either in the US or in Venezuela."
A man entered the U.S. legally, had no criminal record, and was still sent to one of the world's most dangerous prisons for four months. Parker & McConkie is pursuing $56 million in justice on his behalf.www.parkerandmcconkie.com/blog/parker-...#CivilRights #JusticeForJohnny #Immigration #CECOT
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— Parker & McConkie | Personal Injury Law (@parkermcconkie.bsky.social) March 31, 2026 at 2:40 PM
Hernandez was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and subsequently deported to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca, central El Salvador, where he allegedly suffered torture and other abuse.
“The Trump administration knowingly and unlawfully locked up an innocent person for four months in a concentration camp-like prison where he suffered torture, shooting, beatings, and solitary confinement," Ward stated. "When the US government knowingly and purposefully violates the law by detaining and deporting innocent individuals on false charges and is not held responsible, the individual rights of not just legal immigrants but all Americans are placed in jeopardy."
"Our client suffered catastrophic injuries in CECOT from which he will never fully recover," the lawyer said. "Failing to demand accountability now places all Americans in jeopardy in the future.”
The impending lawsuit comes as ICE proposes to literally warehouse up to 10,000 arrested immigrants in a "megacenter" in Salt Lake City, Utah. Opponents have compared the 833,000-square foot facility to a concentration camp akin to the Topaz War Relocation Center, a harsh, desolate desert prison where Japanese Americans and Japanese people living in the Western US were forcibly interned during World War II.
The case also follows last week's filing of a lawsuit by Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel, one of the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. Like Hernandez, León Rengel—who is seeking $1.3 million in damages—was in the US legally when he was arrested by federal immigration authorities.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently said on the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation of Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and others that, of the 9,000 Salvadorans expelled from the US since the beginning of last year, “only 10.5% had a conviction in the United States for a violent or potentially violent crime.”
The Salvadoran investigative journalism outlet El Faro—which, along with its staff, has been the target of sweeping government persecution—last year published a report on CECOT, citing one former prisoner who said that inmates are “committing suicide out of desperation.”
At least one deported Salvadoran—longtime Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García—was wrongfully expelled due to what the Trump administration called an “administrative error.”
The Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans to CECOT under a multimillion-dollar agreement between the Trump administration and the government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
While Trump claimed—often without evidence—that the Venezuelan deportees were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, only about 3% of them had violent criminal convictions in the United States, and Department of Homeland Security records show that the Trump administration knew it.
In July 2025, El Salvador released 252 Venezuelans imprisoned at CECOT and sent them to Venezuela in a prisoner swap that saw Maduro's government free 10 US citizens and permanent residents whom it jailed. Many of the repatriated Venezuelans said they suffered torture, sexual assault, severe beatings, and other abuse at CECOT.
Last December, Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Trump administration broke the law by deporting the Venezuelans without due process.
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Trump Deportees 'Sent to a Black Hole' of Forced Disappearance in El Salvador
“The desperation of families to find disappeared loved ones evokes the darkest days of dictatorships in Latin America,” said one human rights campaigner.
Mar 16, 2026
The administration of right-wing Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is arbitrarily detaining and forcibly disappearing Salvadorans deported from the United States, a leading rights group said Monday.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump's mass deportation of Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and others that, of the 9,000 Salvadorans expelled from the US since the beginning of last year, "only 10.5% had a conviction in the United States for a violent or potentially violent crime."
Yet according to HRW, these deportees—most of whom were illegally expelled without the requisite due process—were "immediately detained in El Salvador" upon arrival and "have not been allowed to communicate with their relatives or lawyers."
"None of the relatives or lawyers have had any indication from the authorities that the men have been brought before a judge since their arrival," HRW said. "Some have not been informed of where their loved ones are held, or why. In five cases, relatives learned about deportees’ whereabouts only though litigation at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)."
HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus said that "whatever the criminal history of these Salvadoran men, they have a right to due process, to be taken before a judge, and their relatives are entitled to know where they are being held and why."
"Deportation cannot mean enforced disappearance," Goebertus added.
Many of the deportees have been sent to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca in central El Salvador. HRW and others have documented a range of serious human rights abuses committed by staff at the megaprison, including torture, sexual violence, and brutal beatings.
The Salvadoran investigative journalism outlet El Faro—which, along with its staff, has been the target of sweeping government persecution—last year published a report on CECOT, citing one former prisoner who said that inmates are "committing suicide out of desperation."
While the Trump administration has alleged that many of those expelled are members of MS-13, a street gang founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles, neither US nor Salvadoran authorities have provided much evidence to substantiate claims regarding many of the deportees.
At least one deported Salvadoran—longtime Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García—was wrongfully expelled due to what the Trump administration called an "administrative error." Abrego García said he was tortured at CECOT before a US federal judge ordered his release last December.
For its new report, HRW interviewed relatives of many of the Salvadoran deportees, one of whose sisters said she "kept calling the migrant shelter in El Salvador, but they never gave me any information."
"So I filed a complaint with the [Salvadoran] Human Rights Ombudsperson’s Office,” she said. “An official told me that my brother was deported on March 15 [but] because of the state of emergency they would not provide any information.”
The mother of another Salvadoran deportee told HRW that she struggled to find legal representation for her son.
“I started looking for lawyers in El Salvador, but several told me they could not take those cases because they feared government reprisals,” she said.
“I called several institutions, the attorney general’s office, the Ombudsperson’s Office, a migrant shelter, and government ministries in El Salvador, but they gave me no information," the woman added. "At the Ombudsperson’s Office, they told me that due to the state of emergency, they were not obligated to provide me with information. I feel abandoned.”
HRW Americas Program deputy director Juan Pappier told The Washington Post Sunday that “these people have been sent to a black hole, a court system with no due process."
Goebertus echoed Pappier's language, saying Monday: “The desperation of families to find disappeared loved ones evokes the darkest days of dictatorships in Latin America. The United States should stop casting people into the black hole of El Salvador’s prison system.”
While credited for dramatically reducing crime in what was not too long ago the world's murder capital, the state of emergency—officially the State of Exception—declared by Bukele in 2022 has been denounced by human rights defenders. It purportedly targets criminals, but others—including journalists, lawyers, human rights advocates, environmental activists, nonprofit workers, political critics, clergy, labor organizers, and community leaders—have been persecuted under the decree.
Originally authorized for 30 days, Bukele has repeatedly extended the State of Exception, fueling accusations of authoritarianism.
HRW noted Monday that Bukele's government has used the emergency decree "to suspend, among others, the rights to be informed promptly of the grounds for arrest, to remain silent, to legal representation, and the requirement to present any detainee before a judge within 72 hours of arrest."
In addition to Salvadorans, hundreds of Venezuelans were sent to CECOT under an agreement between the Trump and Bukele administrations. The US paid millions of dollars to El Salvador to accept the deportees, who Trump claimed—often without evidence—were members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
However, only about 3% of the deported Venezuelans had been convicted of violent criminal offenses in the United States—and the Trump administration knew it, according to Department of Homeland Security records.
Last July, El Salvador released 252 Venezuelans imprisoned at CECOT and sent them to Venezuela in a prisoner swap that saw the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro free 10 US citizens and permanent residents jailed in the South American nation.
Following their repatriation, many of the Venezuelans said they endured torture, sexual assault, severe beatings, and other abuse at CECOT.
Last December, Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Trump administration broke the law by deporting the Venezuelans without due process.
Last week, the International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations Under the State of Exception in El Salvador (GIPES)—an independent panel of jurists established in 2024—published a report which found that "the serious human rights violations committed by the government of El Salvador during the state of emergency may indeed constitute crimes against humanity because of the widespread and systematic nature of the attacks, their commission against the civilian population, and their commission as part of a state policy or plan."
International Commission of Jurists general secretary Santiago Canton—a member of the panel—said that “the Bukele model is sustained by the dismantling of the rule of law to systematically violate human rights without institutional restraints."
"In the very short term, it may appear to improve security, but it inevitably weakens the very security it claims to protect," Canton added. "The danger is that this approach is increasingly being promoted across Latin America by authoritarian and unscrupulous political leaders as a solution to crime."
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Judge Rules Trump Admin Must Give Due Process to Venezuelans Sent to El Salvador Torture Prison
"This ruling makes clear the government can't just send people off to a brutal foreign prison with zero due process and simply walk away," said an ACLU lawyer representing the men.
Dec 23, 2025
A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration acted illegally when it deported over 200 Venezuelan nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process earlier this year.
On Monday, Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Trump administration to submit plans by January 5 for 137 men to contest their designation under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows foreign nationals from "hostile" nations to be removed without hearings.
In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport two planeloads of Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador without any explanation or court hearing. They were sent to a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, which is known to subject inmates to torture and severe deprivation, with zero contact with the outside world.
The administration claimed the men were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the administration referred to as a "hybrid criminal state" invading the United States. In reality, only a few dozen of the 238 men sent to CECOT had any criminal charges against them. As part of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) efforts to fast-track their deportations, many were rounded up based solely on the fact that they had tattoos.
“Plaintiffs should not have been removed in the manner that they were, with virtually no notice and no opportunity to contest the bases of their removal, in clear contravention of their due-process rights,” Boasberg wrote.
Boasberg is the same judge who launched criminal contempt proceedings against the Trump administration in April for "willful disregard" of his order to stop the flights to El Salvador. A pair of Trump-appointed judges later halted those proceedings.
In a "60 Minutes" special that was recently spiked by CBS News' Trump-friendly editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, several inmates testified to the conditions they were subject to inside CECOT.
"The first thing they told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again," said college student Luis Muñoz Pinto, who came to the US from Venezuela in 2024 through the legal asylum process. He said the CECOT director told prisoners, "Welcome to hell. I'll make sure you never leave."
According to a report published by Human Rights Watch in November, inmates were beaten daily, subject to sexual violence by guards, deprived of basic food, medical treatment, and hygiene, and forced to participate in degrading torture rituals.
Pinto, who now lives in Colombia, has no criminal record. "I never even got a traffic ticket," he said.
While the Trump administration claimed it no longer had jurisdiction over the prisoners once they were in El Salvador, and therefore could not follow court orders to bring them back to the US, this was belied by filings from the government of the far-right Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele at the United Nations, which stated that "the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively" with the US.
The men detained at CECOT were then transferred, mainly to Venezuela, in July as part of a prisoner exchange for 10 US nationals.
Boasberg says the US government "maintained constructive custody" of the men while they were interned in CECOT and that it violated their rights to due process by not allowing them to contest the accusations that they were gang members.
He said the Trump administration must give them a "meaningful opportunity to contest their designation," by allowing them to return to the US for a court hearing. He said the government "could also theoretically offer plaintiffs a hearing without returning them to the United States so long as such a hearing satisfied the requirements of due process."
"This ruling makes clear the government can't just send people off to a brutal foreign prison with zero due process and simply walk away," said Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the ACLU, who served as lead counsel for the plaintiffs.
The Trump administration will almost certainly appeal the ruling. And while many of the former CECOT inmates may seek to return for their day in court, some say the experience has left them traumatized and fearful of returning to the United States.
Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and youth coach, returned to Venezuela after being released in July. According to his attorney, he was falsely accused due to a tattoo that the government claimed was a gang symbol, but was actually based on the Real Madrid soccer logo.
"I've focused my time on taking care of my daughters, coaching young kids, all to avoid those thoughts. At night, I sometimes have nightmares, and I feel like I'm still in CECOT," Reyes Barrios told ABC News. "At this moment, I'm not ready to decide if I want to fight this case."
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CBS Journalist Says Bari Weiss Spiked Segment on El Salvador Prison for 'Political' Reasons
"When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship," wrote veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi.
Dec 22, 2025
A CBS News correspondent on Sunday accused Bari Weiss, the outlet's editor-in-chief, of pulling a "60 Minutes" segment on El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison for "political" reasons, shortly before it was scheduled to air.
Late Sunday afternoon, "60 Minutes" said in an editor's note that the broadcast lineup for the night had been "updated," removing the planned "Inside CECOT" segment. The note said the report on the maximum-security prison—to which the Trump administration sent more than 200 Venezuelan migrants—would "air in a future broadcast," without providing any specifics.
In an internal email obtained by the New York Times, veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the segment, said she learned on Saturday that "Bari Weiss spiked our story" and did not grant the journalist's request for a phone call to discuss the decision.
"Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices," Alfonsi wrote. "It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one."
CBS News is owned by Paramount Skydance, a company headed by David Ellison—the son of Trump ally and GOP megadonor Larry Ellison.
Alfonsi went on to note that "60 Minutes" had "been promoting this story on social media for days," and "when it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship."
"I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight," she added.
Below is a trailer of the shelved segment, which included interviews with people sent to CECOT. Alfonsi said participants "risked their lives to speak with us."
BREAKING: CBS just pulled this episode of 60 Minutes claiming it is “postponed” Here is the trailer that was pulled for the now “postponed” segment.
Make sure everyone sees it.
It’s remarkable how much harm Pro-Trump Bari Weiss has managed to inflict on CBS News in such a… pic.twitter.com/gccW338rFF
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) December 22, 2025
In a statement issued late Sunday, Weiss—whose brief tenure at the helm of CBS News has been embroiled in controversy—suggested she pulled the plug on the "Inside CECOT" segment because it lacked "sufficient context" and was "missing critical voices." Unnamed people familiar with internal discussions at CBS News told the Times that Weiss pushed for the inclusion of a "fresh interview" with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an architect of President Donald Trump's lawless mass deportation campaign.
But Alfonsi wrote in her email that "we requested responses to questions and/or interviews with [the Department of Homeland Security], the White House, and the State Department," but the requests went unanswered.
"Government silence is a statement, not a VETO," Alfonsi wrote. "If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch' for any reporting they find inconvenient."
The decision to spike the CECOT segment has further inflamed internal tensions at CBS News over Weiss' leadership. CNN reported that "some employees are threatening to quit" over the move.
"It is unclear when Weiss first viewed the [CECOT] story," CNN noted. "But she has recently become personally involved in '60 Minutes' stories about politics, the CBS sources told CNN."
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'A Forceful Stand for Our Constitution': Judge Orders Release of Kilmar Ábrego García
Judge Paula Xinis found that the Trump administration redetained the Salvadoran father of three "without lawful authority."
Dec 11, 2025
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the immediate release of Kilmar Ábrego García—who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration earlier this year—from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
"Since Ábrego García's return from wrongful detention in El Salvador, he has been redetained, again without lawful authority,” US District Judge Paula Xinis wrote in her ruling. “For this reason, the court will grant Ábrego García's petition for immediate release from ICE custody.”
In early April, Xinis—an appointee of former President Barack Obama—ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Ábrego García's return to the United States after he was deported in March to the abuse-plagued Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) maximum security prison in El Salvador. This, after the US Department of Justice (DOJ) admitted in a court filing that Ábrego García was wrongfully deported due to what it called an "administrative error."
The US Supreme Court also weighed in on the case in favor of Xinis' ruling. However, the Trump administration refused to comply with the judge's order, arguing that it had no legal obligation to return Ábrego García to the US and could not force El Salvador's government to free him.
The DOJ dubiously contended that Ábrego García—a 30-year-old Salvadoran father of three who entered the US without authorization when he was a teenager—was a member of the gang MS-13, an allegation based on a statement from an anonymous police informant. The Trump administration deported him despite a judge's 2019 ruling that he could not be removed to El Salvador because he could be tortured there.
An attorney representing Ábrego García said at the time that his client suffered beatings and "psychological torture" while imprisoned at CECOT.
Ábrego García was transferred to a lower security Salvadoran prison before being sent back to the US on June 6 to face DOJ charges for allegedly transporting undocumented immigrants, to which he pleaded not guilty. He was immediately taken into custody and sent to an immigration detention facility in Tennessee.
On July 23, federal Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes in Tennessee ruled that Ábrego García must be released from custody pending his trial. That same day, Xinis issued a simultaneous ruling in Ábrego García's wrongful deportation case blocking ICE from immediately seizing him once released in Tennessee and ordering the government to provide at least 72 hours' notice before attempting to deport him to any third country.
As Ábrego García was released on August 22, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) informed him that he could be deported to Uganda—one of several nations to which the administration has sought to send him. A bid by Ábrego García to reopen a previous bid for asylum in the US was denied in early October by an immigration judge.
Ábrego García is currently being held in an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania. Responding to Xinis' latest ruling, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Thursday that "this is naked judicial activism by an Obama-appointed judge."
"This order lacks any valid legal basis and we will continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts," she added.
Advocates for Ábrego García welcomed Thursday's ruling.
"For months, the Trump administration has sought to deny Kilmar Ábrego García his rights to due process and fair treatment by our justice system," US Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.)—who met with Ábrego García in El Salvador in April—said on social media.
"Today’s ruling by Judge Xinis—requiring the government to immediately release him—is a forceful stand for our Constitution and all of our rights," he added.
Lydia Walther-Rodríguez, chief of organizing and leadership at CASA, hailed what she called "a moment of joy and relief."
“Kilmar finally gets to return home to his family, where he belongs," she said. "No one should be separated from their loved ones while fighting for justice.”
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Over 150 Religious Orgs Endorse Salvadoran Mining Ban Reversed by Bukele
A joint letter expresses "steadfast support for the people of El Salvador and their religious institutions and leaders who are struggling to maintain their country’s historic ban on metal mining... so all Salvadorans can enjoy their God-given right to clean water."
Dec 01, 2025
More than 150 faith-based organizations from 25 countries launched an open letter on Monday supporting an El Salvadoran ban on metals mining that was overturned by right-wing President Nayib Bukele in 2024.
The original ban was passed by the country’s legislature in 2017 following years of study and the advocacy of El Salvador’s religious communities. The letter signatories, which include 153 global and regional groups from a wide range of traditions, stood with faith groups in El Salvador in calling both for no new mining and for an end to the political persecution of land and water defenders.
"We, the undersigned, from a diversity of church structures (representing local, regional, and national expressions of churches and related agencies), express our steadfast support for the people of El Salvador and their religious institutions and leaders who are struggling to maintain their country’s historic ban on metal mining—in place from 2017 to 2024—so all Salvadorans can enjoy their God-given right to clean water," the letter begins. "We stand in solidarity with civic and religious leaders who are being persecuted and imprisoned for working against injustices, including the devastation that metals mining would cause their communities."
The faith leaders also released a video reading sections of the letter aloud.
“This letter is a hope-filled expression of solidarity and humanism."
“Through this declaration, faith communities from around the world have affirmed their solidarity with faith leaders in El Salvador as they carry out their duty to protect water as a sacred inherited trust, a human right meant to be shared by all,” Rev. Dr. Japhet Ndhlovu, executive minister for the Church in the Mission Unit of The United Church of Canada, said in a statement.
El Salvadorans already struggle to gain access to clean and plentiful water. The water of 90% of Salvadorans is contaminated, half of all Salvadorans have "intermittent access to water,” and one-half of those with water access report it is poor quality, said Gordon Whitman, managing director for international organizing at letter-signatory Faith in Action, at a Monday press briefing anouncing the letter.
"Restarting mining would be catastrophic," Whitman said.
The mining ban was already hard won.
A 2012 study commissioned by the government affirmed that mining would endanger the nation’s rivers and watersheds with cyanide, arsenic, and other toxins and found widespread public opposition to mining. Before the ban was passed in March of 2017, the archbishop of San Salvador mobilized support for it by leading a march to deliver a draft of the ban to the National Assembly. After it passed unanimously, he called it a "miracle," according to John Cavanagh, a senior adviser at the Institute for Policy Studies.
The law made El Salvador "the first nation on Earth to ban mining to save its rivers," Cavanagh said at the press briefing.
“The Salvadoran precautionary approach banning metal mining is essential to protect drinking water and aquatic ecosystems, given the irreparable damage that has been done by irresponsible mining around the world,” Willamette University professor emeritus Susan Lea Smith of the Ecumenical Water Network of the World Council of Churches said in a statement. “El Salvador had made a difficult but wise choice in banning metal mining. Clean water is a gift from God, and so, for the sake of clean water and the rest of Creation, we work together for the common good."
"It is a sin to render water undrinkable.”
However, in December 2024, Bukele's government passed a new law that allows mining once again without environmental oversight or community consultation.
“It’s a law that has become one of the main threats for the Salvadorans' right to clean water," Pedro Cabezas of International Allies Against Mining in El Salvador said in the press conference.
Cabezas also said the new law was a "symptom of what El Salvador has been going through over the last five years” as Bukele concentrates all power within the executive and his own party.
While the Salvadoran public and civil society groups remain opposed to mining—a December 2024 poll found that 3 in 5 are against the practice in the country—the Bukele government has ramped up its criminalization of dissent.
In this context, the Catholic, protestant, and evangelical churches in El Salvador are among the remaining institutions "with space to speak out" against mining, Christie Neufeldt of the United Church of Canada explained at the briefing.
For example, in March, Mons. José Luis Escobar Alas, the archbishop of San Salvador, presented an anti-mining petition signed by 150,000 people.
International faith groups wanted to stand in solidarity with their Salvadoran counterparts.
“This letter is a hope-filled expression of solidarity and humanism in the face of forces that would degrade” the Earth, human rights, and democracy, Neufeldt said.
Salvadoran faith groups "remind us that access to water is a fundamental human right and that clean water is not a commodity, but a shared inheritance entrusted to all people by God. And they remind us that ending the mining ban is fueling egregious rights violations against those organizing to protect their water and land from destruction," the letter says.
Whitman spoke about the importance of water to several religious traditions.
“All of our faith traditions teach that water is a sacred gift of God,” Whitman said, adding, "It is a sin to render water undrinkable.”
In the press briefing, speakers acknowledged the link between rising authoritarianism and environmental deregulation, in El Salvador and beyond.
Cavanagh noted that, as the energy transition increases demand for rare earth minerals and global instability makes gold more attractive, "oligarchs linked to extractivism" have begun "pumping money into elections” to boost candidates who will allow them to exploit resources.
“It’s not at all surprising that the opposition to mining comes from the people, and so it’s absolutely natural that the oligarchs, that the transnational corporations are going to want to crack down on public dissent," Smith said, adding there was an "intimate connection between authoritarianism and any extractive industry, including mining."
In the end, however, the letter signatories expressed faith for a greener, freer future.
"We pray for the Salvadoran people and their government, that they protect the sacred gift of creation, uphold human rights, and ensure every family clean water—now and for generations to come," they concluded.
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Report Exposes Torture Endured by Migrants Trump Sent to El Salvador Prison
"The US government has not been linked to acts of systematic torture on this scale since Abu Ghraib."
Nov 12, 2025
"You have arrived in hell."
That's what the director of El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) told 26-year-old Gonzalo Y., one of the 252 Venezuelans deported by US President Donald Trump to the infamous prison in March and April, according to a report released Wednesday.
The report was compiled by US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Cristosal, a regional group that fled El Salvador in July, citing harassment and legal threats from President Nayib Bukele's government. They used the CECOT director's comment to Gonzalo as a title.
"When we arrived at the entrance of CECOT, guards made us kneel so they could shave our heads... One of the officers hit me on the legs with a baton, and I fell to the ground on my knees," Gonzalo said. "The guards beat me many times, in the hallways of the prison module and in the punishment cell... They beat us almost every day."
NEW: The Venezuelan nationals the US government sent to El Salvador in March and April were tortured and subjected to other abuses, including sexual violence.In a new report, HRW and @cristosal.bsky.social provide a comprehensive account of the treatment of these people in El Salvador.
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— Human Rights Watch (@hrw.org) November 12, 2025 at 10:18 AM
Gonzalo is among 40 detainees interviewed for the report. The groups also spoke with 150 individuals with credible knowledge of the conditions, such as lawyers and relatives; consulted international forensic experts; and reviewed "a wide range" of materials, including criminal records, judicial documents in El Salvador and the United States, and photographs of injuries.
While the US and Salvadoran governments claimed that most of the migrants sent to CECOT were part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, HRW and Cristosal found that "many of them had not been convicted of any crimes by federal or state authorities in the United States, nor in Venezuela or other Latin America countries where they had lived."
Up until they were sent to Venezuela as part of a prisoner exchange on July 18, the report states, "the people held in CECOT were subjected to inhumane prison conditions, including prolonged incommunicado detention, inadequate food, denial of basic hygiene and sanitation, limited access to healthcare and medicine, and lack of recreational or educational activities, in violation of several provisions of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the 'Mandela Rules.'"
"We also documented that detainees were subjected to constant beatings and other forms of ill-treatment, including some cases of sexual violence," the publication continues. "Many of these abuses constitute torture under international human rights law."
According to the 81-page report:
Daniel B., for instance, described how officers beat him after he spoke with [ International Committee of the Red Cross] staff members during their visit to CECOT in May. He said guards took him to "the Island," where they beat him with a baton. He said a blow made his nose bleed. "They kept hitting me, in the stomach, and when I tried to breathe, I started to choke on the blood. My cellmates shouted for help, saying they were killing us, but the officers said they just wanted to make us suffer," he said.
Three people held in CECOT told Human Rights Watch and Cristosal that they were subjected to sexual violence. One of them said that guards took him to "the Island," where they beat him. He said four guards sexually abused him and forced him to perform oral sex on one of them. "They played with their batons on my body." People held in CECOT said sexual abuse affected more people, but victims were unlikely to speak about what they had suffered due to stigma.
In a Wednesday statement, Cristosal executive director Noah Bullock drew a comparison to the early stages of the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.
"The US government has not been linked to acts of systematic torture on this scale since Abu Ghraib and the network of clandestine prisons during the War on Terror," he said. "Disappearing people into the hands of a government that tortures them runs against the very principles that historically made the United States a nation of laws."
Although many migrants have been freed from El Salvador's CECOT, "they continue to suffer lasting physical injuries and psychological trauma," the report notes. They also face risks in Venezuela, which "suffers a humanitarian crisis and systematic human rights violations carried out by the administration of Nicolás Maduro."
"Their repatriation to Venezuela violates the principle of nonrefoulement," the document explains. "Additionally, in some cases, members of the Venezuelan intelligence services have appeared at the homes of people who were held in CECOT and forced them to record videos regarding their treatment in the United States."
The CECOT renditions were crimes under both domestic and international law. and some people remain disappeared. www.hrw.org/report/2025/...
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— KatherineHawkins (@krhawkins.bsky.social) November 12, 2025 at 12:55 PM
The report notably comes as Trump has spent recent months blowing up small boats from Venezuela under the guise of combating drug trafficking—which experts across the globe have condemned as blatantly illegal—and as the White House stokes fears of strikes within the country aimed at forcing regime change.
Stressing that "officials cannot summarily kill people they accuse of smuggling drugs," HRW Washington director Sarah Yager has called on the US military to "immediately halt any plans for future unlawful strikes" on boats in the Caribbean and Congress to "open a prompt and transparent investigation."
With the release of the new report, HRW and Cristosal also issued fresh demands, including an end to the United States' transfer of third-country nationals to El Salvador and for other nations and international bodies, including the United Nations Human Rights Council, to increase scrutiny of the Trump and Bukele governments' human rights violations.
"The Trump administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to arbitrarily detain Venezuelans who were then abused by Salvadoran security forces on a near-daily basis," said HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus. "The Trump administration is complicit in torture, enforced disappearance, and other grave violations, and should stop sending people to El Salvador or any other country where they face a risk of torture."
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