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nayib bukele
Salvadoran Officials Say for First Time US Has Authority Over 130 Detainees at Notorious Prison
"We are pleased that El Salvador publicly told the truth about what we all knew: that it's the United States that controls the fate of the Venezuelans," said one attorney.
Jul 08, 2025
A Monday court filing by attorneys for migrants being held in El Salvador's notorious maximum-security prison contained what one expert called a "huge" admission by Salvadoran officials that casts new doubt on the Trump administration's claims that it can't bring back the 130 men it sent to the facility.
In a filing submitted to Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., lawyers for four of the migrants included a document that the Salvadoran government had sent to the United Nations in response to an inquiry about their detention at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
Contrary to the Trump administration's claims—and those of far-right Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—officials representing the Bukele government said in the filing that "the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters."
The four men whose disappearances are being investigated by the U.N. Office of The High Commissioner for Human Rights Working Group are among the more than 100 migrants whom the Trump administration swiftly sent to CECOT in mid-March after President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a centuries-old law that allows the U.S. government to expedite the deportations of non-citizens deemed to be a national security threat.
The law has previously only been invoked during wartime, but the administration has claimed the people sent to CECOT—citing questionable and threadbare evidence in many cases—are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the White House has claimed is working in connection with Venezuela's government.
As Common Dreams reported in May, the U.S. intelligence agencies never endorsed Trump's claim that the street gang was taking orders from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro—raising one of many legal questions about the president's use of the Alien Enemies Act and his claim that Tren de Aragua has "invaded" the United States.
The filing on Monday by lawyers at Democracy Forward and the ACLU also called into question the administration's repeated claims that it has no authority to bring the migrants back from El Salvador, which has agreed to detain the men under a $6 million deal.
"The actions of the state of El Salvador have been limited to the implementation of a bilateral cooperation mechanism with another state, through which it has facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure for the custody of persons detained within the scope of the justice system and law enforcement of that other State," the Salvadoran authorities told the U.N., according to the filing.
The lawyers also told Boasberg that the Trump administration was clearly aware of El Salvador's statements about the men being held at CECOT, as U.S. officials were copied in the Salvadorans' communication to the United Nations.
"We are pleased that El Salvador publicly told the truth about what we all knew: that it's the United States that controls the fate of the Venezuelans," Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the ACLU, told The New York Times. "That the United States did not provide us or the court with this information is extraordinary."
Boasberg has expressed frustration with the White House several times since first taking on the case regarding the use of the Alien Enemies Act. He ordered two deportation flights to be turned around in March, and said the following month that there was "probable cause" to hold administration officials in contempt of court for disobeying the order.
Last month, the judge ordered the administration to provide detainees at CECOT with habeas corpus relief and said the mass removal of the men was unlawful.
The U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on whether the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act was lawful, but ordered the White House to provide people with sufficient opportunity to contest their removal under the law.
Last week, a federal appeals court in New Orleans held a hearing on Trump's use of the law in a case that is likely to make its way to the Supreme Court.
In March, the case of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia became one of the most high-profile cases of the migrants who were sent to CECOT. The forced removal of Abrego Garcia, who had no criminal record and was accused by an anonymous police informant of being a gang member, was the result of an "administrative error," according to the U.S. Department of Justice, but both Trump and Bukele claimed they had no authority to bring him home.
Last month Abrego Garcia was transferred from El Salvador to a prison in Tennessee, where he faces charges of transporting migrants.
His lawyers last week described "severe beatings" that Abrego Garcia and other migrants sent to CECOT suffered when they arrived at the prison. A court filing also detailed "severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture."
"This," said journalist Megan Stack after Abrego Garcia's account was made public, "is where our government sends people with no due process."
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Abrego García’s Detention Opened a Window Into El Salvador’s Obscure Prison System
The basic rights Abrego has been denied in El Salvador—including to communicate with his family—are a stark reminder of the plight of thousands of Salvadorans.
May 18, 2025
After mounting pressure, on April 17 U.S. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen met with Kilmar Abrego García, 29, a Maryland man wrongfully deported to El Salvador on March 15 by the Trump administration. Abrego García was granted a rare opportunity to speak with someone outside of prison—in this case, a U.S. senator.
But Since Salvadoran authorities suspended some due process rights in March 2022, security forces have detained more than 85,000 people—often without warrants, access to legal counsel, or any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention. My organization has interviewed dozens of people who have gone months or even years without being able to communicate with their loved ones in prison or access information about their whereabouts, the status of legal proceedings, or their well-being.
“Every week I went, and every week I left crying,” the mother of a 24-year-old domestic worker told us, about her visits to government offices to seek information. Her daughter was detained in April 2022, as she slept beside her 4-year-old daughter. Officers entered their home without a warrant, citing “presidential orders.” They took her first to a police station and then to the women’s prison.
When Van Hollen met with Abrego García, he came face-to-face with the harsh reality that tens of thousands of Salvadoran families have endured for months—even years.
She was later charged with “unlawful association,” a vague offense frequently used to hold people detained in El Salvador. When her mother attempted to submit documents to show her daughter was not a gang member, including employment papers, a public defender told her they were “useless.” The public defender did not give her any answers, alleging, as she recalls, that “sharing information with families of detainees is prohibited.”
The mother has been forced to piece together information from multiple sources, including calls from people who said they had been detained with her daughter, and rumors in WhatsApp and Facebook groups created by relatives of people detained. She learned, for example, in September 2023, that her daughter had a hernia, causing her to vomit frequently. Sixteen months later, she learned that her daughter had been hospitalized briefly, for a medical checkup. She does not know what her health status is.
The relatives of a 61-year-old civil engineer, who was detained in June 2022, told us a similar story. He has multiple serious health conditions—including diabetes, glaucoma, neuropathy, hypertension, and other chronic illnesses. Yet his family does not know if he is receiving the medical attention he needs, including daily refrigerated insulin—something detainees in El Salvador rarely obtain.
He was detained at a police unit in San Salvador, then transferred in September 2023 to a prison. Since then, his family has only been able to see him once, very briefly, in June 2024. They saw him then from afar, handcuffed and escorted into a courtroom, where he appeared visibly weakened.
His lawyer has asked repeatedly that he be sent to house arrest to receive adequate medical treatment, to no avail.
This regime of extreme incommunicado detention has also allowed corruption to thrive. As the investigative news outlet El Faro recently exposed, many relatives have paid bribes to be able to exercise a basic right: to communicate with their detained loved ones.
Yet many, often from vulnerable neighborhoods in El Salvador, are unable to pay. Many told us that the most they can do is take a bag with basic items, such as food, medicine, and clothes, to prison. They spend a significant amount of their income and time to do so, often fearing that their relatives will never receive the goods.
Thanks to outside pressure, Abrego García was not only able to speak to a U.S. senator but also to be transferred out of the draconian Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), where thousands of the detainees are being held.
These positive steps are clearly insufficient: Abrego García should be sent back to the United States. But the basic rights Abrego has been denied in El Salvador—including to communicate with his family—are a stark reminder of the plight of thousands of Salvadorans who have seen their loved ones completely cut off from the outside world for months or even years.
When Van Hollen met with Abrego García, he came face-to-face with the harsh reality that tens of thousands of Salvadoran families have endured for months—even years. A prison system cut off from the rest of the world where the lives of detainees remain in limbo and families are left in anguish, endlessly searching for answers.
“I wish I could be a bird and fly into the prison just to see how my daughter is,” one of their relatives said.
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Trump Ally Bukele Reportedly Set to Arrest Journalists Who Revealed His Secret Pact With Gangs
One critic said the Salvadoran president "wants to silence" the acclaimed digital news site El Faro "because they're shattering the myths of the Bukele administration."
May 05, 2025
An internationally acclaimed digital news outlet in El Salvador said Monday that the administration of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is preparing to arrest a number of its journalists following the publication of an interview with two former gang leaders who shed new light on a power-sharing agreement with the U.S.-backed leader and self-described "world's coolest dictator."
"A reliable source in El Salvador told El Faro that the Bukele-controlled Attorney General's Office is preparing at least seven arrest warrants for members of El Faro," the outlet reported. "The source reached out following the publication of an interview with two former leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios on Bukele's yearslong relationship to gangs."
"If carried out, the warrants are the first time in decades that prosecutors seek to press charges against individual journalists for their journalistic labors," El Faro added.
Bukele responded to the interview in a Friday evening post on the social media site X that read in part, "It's clear that a country at peace, without deaths, without extortion, without bloodshed, without corpses every day, without mothers mourning their children, is not profitable for human rights NGOs, nor for the globalist media, nor for the elites, nor for [George] Soros."
While the pact between Bukele and gang leaders is well-known in El Salvador, El Faro—which has long been a thorn in the president's side—was the first media outlet to air video of gangsters acknowledging the agreement.
As El Faro reported:
At the heart of the threat of arrests is irony: El Faro was only able to interview the two Revolucionarios because they escaped El Salvador with the complicity of Bukele.
One, who goes by "Liro Man," recounts that he was taken to Guatemala, through a blind spot in the Salvadoran border, by Bukele gang negotiator Carlos Marroquín; the other, Carlos Cartagena, or "Charli," was arrested on a warrant in April 2022, early in the state of exception, but quickly released after the police received a call at the station and backed off.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Salvadorans were being rounded up without due process, on charges of belonging to gangs.
The video interview explains the dichotomy: For years, Salvadoran gang leaders cut covert deals with the entourage of Nayib Bukele. In their interview with El Faro, the two Revolucionarios say the FMLN party, to which the now-president belonged a decade ago, paid a quarter of a million dollars to the gangs during the 2014 campaign in exchange for vote coercion in gang-controlled communities, on behalf of Bukele for San Salvador mayor and Salvador Sánchez Cerén as president.
"This support, the sources say, was key to Bukele's ascent to power," El Faro noted. "'You're going to tell your mom and your wife's family that they have to vote for Nayib. If you don't do it, we'll kill them,' Liro Man says the gang members told their communities in that election. Of Bukele, he added, 'he knew he had to get to the gangs in order to get to where he is.'"
Part of the deal was a tacit "no body, no crime" policy under which gang leaders agreed to hide their victims' corpses as Bukele boasted of a historic reduction in homicides in a country once known as the world's murder capital.
"We've wanted to talk about this for a long time, for the simple reason that the government beats their chests and says, 'We're anti-gang, we don't want this scourge,'" Liro Man told El Faro. "But they forgot that they made a deal with us, and you were the first to get this out."
In an ironic twist, the Trump administration deported gang members from the U.S. to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison who faced federal indictments that could have resulted in their testifying in court about the pact with Bukele.
Responding to the possible arrest warrants for El Faro staffers, Argentinian journalist Eliezer Budasoff said on social media Sunday that "it's clear" that El Salvador's leader "wants to silence" the outlet "because they're shattering the myths of the Bukele administration, simply with more journalism."
The Bukele administration's attacks on El Faro include falsely accusing the outlet of money laundering and tax evasion, banning its reporters from press briefings, and surveilling its staffers with Pegasus spyware. El Faro has remained steadfast in the face of these and other actions.
"Every citizen must decide for themselves whether they want to be informed, or whether they prefer the blind loyalty this administration has demanded of its supporters since its first day in power," the outlet's editors wrote in 2022. "We don't have that choice. Our job is to report. We can't change the news, and we never will."
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