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"The US government has not been linked to acts of systematic torture on this scale since Abu Ghraib."
"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."
“This is not crowd control, but a campaign of intimidation,” said a Human Rights Watch official of federal agents' tactics in Illinois.
Residents of Chicago's Little Village are angrily lashing out at federal immigration officials who rolled into their neighborhood and detained residents for a second consecutive day.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports that US Border Patrol agents, led by Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino, stormed into Little Village on Thursday morning wearing military-style gear and gas masks. Witnesses tell the Sun-Times that the agents began by trying to enter a discount mall in the neighborhood, only to realize that it had been closed.
The agents' presence drew the attention of local residents who gathered around them and demanded that they leave their neighborhood.
Baltazar Enriquez, president of the Little Village Community Council, said that he arrived on the scene and tried to deescalate tensions between the agents and the community. However, he told the Sun-Times that Bovino appeared to be itching for confrontation and was the first federal official to lob a tear gas canister into the crowd.
"I told him not to throw it because all he was going to do was rile people up, but he just smirked at me and threw it anyway,” said Enriquez, who also accused Bovino of leading an "orchestrated" assault on the neighborhood.
At the end of the operation, Border Patrol agents detained five people, including at least two people whom locals said were US citizens.
Illinois state Rep. Edgar González (D-23), who grew up in Little Village, expressed fury at the agents' tactics.
“It pisses me off to see them coming into our neighborhood and terrorizing our people,” he said, while also cautioning residents against getting into violent confrontations with federal officials.
"It’s a normal reaction to want to resist and to be angry,” González said. “I’m angry, too. But we need to remember not to take the bait."
The raid in Little Village came on the same day that Human Rights Watch released a report documenting the use of excessive force by federal immigration officials on protesters, journalists, and volunteer street medics outside of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Broadview, Illinois.
According to Human Rights Watch—and reporting published since the Trump administration launched Operation Midway Blitz last month—federal agents have repeatedly lobbed tear gas canisters and fired projectiles into crowds of peaceful protesters who are posing no threat to law enforcement officials.
“This is not crowd control, but a campaign of intimidation,” said Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch. “Federal agents are using chemical irritants and firing projectiles at peaceful protesters, volunteer street medics, and journalists in broad daylight. The message is clear that dissent will be punished.”
"An ICE agent shot Silverio dead," said Chicago's Rep. Delia Ramirez. "DHS lied about what happened."
Local police body camera footage released Monday has further called into question the government's justification for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent's fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a 38-year-old father of two, in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park on September 12 during a traffic stop.
In a statement justifying the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Villegas-Gonzalez “refused to follow law enforcement’s commands and drove his car at law enforcement officers. One of the ICE officers was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon.”
Video footage of the incident recorded by local businesses had already raised doubts about the government's version of events, showing that Villegas-Gonzalez had not initially driven his car forward toward the agents, but that one of them had instead grabbed ahold of his window frame as he attempted to reverse.
Federal law enforcement's refusal to provide information on the shooting has raised further suspicion, leading Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and groups like Human Rights Watch to call for independent investigations.
The ICE agents who conducted the arrest were not wearing body cameras at the scene after the Trump administration scrapped a policy requiring them.
According to Belkis Wille, the associate director of the Human Rights Watch’s crisis, conflict, and arms division, who wrote about the shooting last week, “law enforcement officers can only use lethal force when an individual poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person.”
But the body camera footage from a Franklin Park police officer who responded to the scene, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, has cast doubt on DHS's claims that one of the agents involved in the shooting had been severely injured.
(Video: Chicago Sun-Times)
In the video, the injured agent is shown with a large hole in his blue jeans, revealing a scraped knee. Over the radio, the other agent is heard explaining to police that his partner had suffered "a left knee injury and some lacerations to his hands.”
The injured agent said it was "Nothing major,” and his partner reiterated: “Nothing major."
Later, after his partner was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, the other agent was heard explaining: "I think we’re good, man. Just shooken up a little."
This video footage directly contradicts the description of events presented by DHS, that the agent “sustained multiple injuries” and was “seriously injured” by Villegas-Gonzalez's car.
Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Chicago native, reacted to the video on social media: "An ICE agent shot Silverio dead. DHS lied about what happened."
"There needs to be a full, thorough investigation into what happened that morning," she added. "All camera footage must be released. And [Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi] Noem must come to the committee and account for ICE's unlawfulness and lies."