The Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador

HubMP2012

MARCH 28, 2025

President Bukele’s authoritarianism reaches new heights as he puts Venezuelan deportees from the US into El Salvador’s notorious prison system. This report is edited from the blogs of Tim Muth, who lives in the country.

The weekend of March 15th-16th saw the first implementation of Nayib Bukele’s offer to the United States to act as the offshore jailers of persons Donald Trump wants to expel from the country. During the visit of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to El Salvador in February, Bukele offered to not only to take back Salvadorans from the US, but also to accept deportees from other nations, and even to imprison US citizen criminals for a fee.

On Friday, March 14th, Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798, asserting that gang members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua are part of an “invasion” of the US threatening its citizens. The old statute gives a president power during wartime to arrest and detain persons from a country with whom the US is at war. Of course, the US is currently not at war, although Trump is attempting to claim it.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward filed suit on Saturday, March 15th, and sought an immediate temporary restraining order to block Trump’s attempted use of the AEA.  The named plaintiffs in the suit were Venezuelans who had been moved to an ICE facility in south Texas and told they would be deported within hours. None were members of Tren de Aragua, according to their statements. The suit was also brought as a class action on behalf of all Venezuelans whom Trump might attempt to deport under the AEA.

District of Columbia federal district judge James E. Boasberg held a virtual hearing on Saturday, and first granted a temporary restraining order against the removal of the five named plaintiffs in the suit, and later expanded his order to all Venezuelans who could be impacted by Trump’s attempted use of the Alien Enemies Act.  While the judge was issuing the order, the Trump administration had planes full of Venezuelans taking off from Texas, and did not turn them around until they had reached El Salvador and unloaded their human cargo.

In fact it was not too late; the order was in the hands of the government before any of the planes had landed in El Salvador, and the government simply ignored the order, claiming it had no force once the planes were out of US airspace. 

Bukele’s media production team was waiting in El Salvador for the arrival of the planes Saturday night, and filmed the shackled men being hustled off to buses, surrounded by military and security forces, and then showed their delivery into the CECOT prison. Within hours, Bukele was tweeting about the arrival of the Venezuelans.

Bukele’s post states that all 238 persons on the flight were immediately sent to CECOT. However, reporting by Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News indicates that only 137 were alleged Tren de Aragua gang members and the remainder were deported under “regular immigration law,” suggesting that they may have been undocumented and with final removal orders, but not necessarily persons who had been charged with, much less convicted, of any crime.   All of them have been “disappeared” into the Salvadoran prison system without any word from the US government of the identity of the Venezuelans or the individualized basis for their detention and removal.

There have been many subsequent developments regarding the US removal of 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador.  Here is a summary with links to news articles:

• The US government admits that many of them had no criminal records. (ABC)
• A US photo journalist was at the airport and later at the prison to see the arrival of the Venezuelan prisoners and published photos of how they were handled. (Time)
• CBS News obtained a leaked copy of a list of the names of all the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there.  (CBS)
• Venezuelan families shared the stories of their loved ones who had actually fled from Venezuela and Tre de Aragua, rebutting than any suggestion they were part of a criminal gang. (Beyond the Border) (NPR) (BBC).
• At least two of them were refugees who arrived in the US after extensive vetting by the government and refugee organizations. (Miami Herald)
• Eight women on the flight were not allowed to disembark and were returned to the US because Bukele was not accepting women into CECOT. (USA Today)
• US federal district Judge James Boasberg turned his temporary restraining order against use of the Alien Enemies Act into a preliminary injunction and one basis for his ruling was the likelihood that persons sent to Salvadoran prisons would suffer torture. (Ruling)  On March 26th, the DC Court of Appeals refused the government’s request to set aside that injunction. (Washington Post).
• One federal appeals court judge suggested that Nazis detained under the Alien Enemies Act during World War II received more due process than the Venezuelans. (NPR)
• A US State Department official told Congress that, despite Bukele’s cooperation, Salvadorans would continue to be deported if they were in the country illegally. (Diario El Mundo)
• A group of Salvadoran lawyers announced they were filing habeas petitions on behalf of 30 Venezuelan prisoners with the country’s Supreme Judicial Court. Although the habeas remedy exists in the country, the high court has refused to apply it in the hundreds of petitions filed by Salvadorans caught up in the State of Exception.  (LPG)
• The authoritarian president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, has called the imprisonment of the Venezuelans a “kidnapping” and is demanding they be allowed to return to Venezuela. (CNN).

Tim Muth is a US-trained lawyer who works on matters involving civil liberties and human rights. He blogs at El Salvador Perspectives, and you can follow him on Twitter as @TimMuth.

Image: Prison guards transfer US deportees, alleged Venezuelan gang members, to El Salvador’s terrorism confinement centre. (AP pic). https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/highlight/2025/03/25/nazis-got-better-treatment-judge-says-of-trump-admin-deportations/ Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed