People have referred to CECOT, the Salvadoran gulag, as “The Prison that Nobody Leaves.” That’s one reason (of many) that it was so concerning that the Trump regime was renditioning people there with no due process. Indeed, most had no criminal record at all. This is why there were concerns that it would, in fact, be impossible to ever get Kilmar Abrego Garcia (who goes by Kilmar Abrego) back: because El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele, would never let anyone out to say what they had seen.
Indeed it was surprising enough, when Senator Chris Van Hollen was finally able to meet with Abrego, that he was told that once the controversy over his detainment got enough attention, he had been moved to a different prison. It was even more surprising that the US did actually bring him back to the country, even though it was to face what appeared to be completely fabricated criminal charges.
Because, bringing him back—even to fight criminal charges—would allow him to do something like tell the world (and the courts) about the hellscape that is CECOT.
Plaintiff Abrego Garcia reports that he was subjected to severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.
The handoff from US to Salvadoran custody was seamless—and brutal:
Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was pushed toward a bus, forcibly seated, and fitted with a second set of chains and handcuffs. He was repeatedly struck by officers when he attempted to raise his head. He observed an ICE agent on the bus communicating with Salvadoran officials to confirm the identities of the Salvadoran nationals on board before the bus departed.
But the real horror began upon arrival:
Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body.
The psychological torture was as systematic as the physical:
In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.
Guards weaponized the prison’s gang population as a tool of terror:
While at CECOT, prison officials repeatedly told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that they would transfer him to the cells containing gang members who, they assured him, would “tear” him apart.
These weren’t idle threats:
Indeed, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia repeatedly observed prisoners in nearby cells who he understood to be gang members violently harm each other with no intervention from guards or personnel. Screams from nearby cells would similarly ring out throughout the night without any response from prison guards on personnel.
The physical toll was severe and immediate:
During his first two weeks at CECOT, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia suffered a significant deterioration in his physical condition and lost approximately 31 pounds (dropping from approximately 215 pounds to 184 pounds).
The complaint reveals that officials weren’t just torturing Abrego—they were actively trying to hide the evidence. This included staging photos to create a false narrative and, once the controversy grew, moving him to a different facility where he could be hidden from oversight.
The desperation to silence Abrego explains why the Trump administration is freeing actual criminals in exchange for their testimony against him—a remarkable admission that they’d rather have dangerous felons on the streets than let this witness speak freely.
Abrego’s testimony represents the first unfiltered account of conditions inside CECOT—and it’s damning. But this isn’t just about one man’s suffering. It’s about a deliberate policy of sending people, most without any criminal record, to a facility that operates as a torture chamber.
The Trump administration knew exactly what CECOT was when they started using it as a foreign rendition site. They knew people wouldn’t come back to tell their stories. They counted on the silence.
That silence has now been broken. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for turning torture into immigration policy.
Not content with just shipping people to a foreign concentration camp, Donald Trump now has his own, homegrown concentration camp in Florida. Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gleefully toured the hastily constructed concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, obnoxiously referred to as Alligator Alcatraz, in reference to (1) the infamous island prison in San Francisco that Trump is obsessed with and (2) the number of alligators (and crocodiles — the one place in the world that has both) that live in and around the Everglades.
There’s no way to look at what the US government is doing here and not think of it more as Auschwitz than Alcatraz. The parallels are unmistakable: hastily constructed camps in remote locations, euphemistic naming designed to obscure their true purpose, and—most tellingly—officials proudly touring the facilities while discussing plans to build “a system” of such camps nationwide.
But here’s where today’s American concentration camps differ from their 20th-century predecessors: the Trump regime isn’t trying to hide what they’re doing. They’re merchandising it. They’re selling t-shirts celebrating human suffering as if it were a sports team or a vacation destination.
The United States government is literally selling branded merchandise to celebrate putting human beings in cages surrounded by dangerous predators. This isn’t just about policy—it’s about turning cruelty into a consumer product. It’s about making the suffering of others into something you can wear to own the libs.
This commodification of human rights violations represents something uniquely American and uniquely horrifying: the gamification of genocide. Previous authoritarian regimes at least had the decency to be ashamed of their concentration camps. Trump is selling tickets to the show.
These are the sorts of things that history books (should they exist in the future) will talk about as one of the many moments of pure evil that some people gleefully embraced without recognizing that people setting up concentration camps are, inherently, “the baddies.”
For what it’s worth, Trump did little to dispel the notion that this is part of his new fascist campaign to imprison anyone who disagrees with him. During the tour, Trump and Noem talked about prosecuting CNN for their reporting and for releasing an app that alerts people to where ICE agents are located (both of which would violate the First Amendment, if it were still a thing anyone believed in).
Trump admitted that he had brought up this idea as a joke, but his idiot advisors ran with it:
“Is this a dream come true for you, sir” a reporter asks.
“It was meant more as a joke, but the more I thought of it, the more I liked it… they were actually crocodiles,” Trump said.
“We’d like to see them in many states. At some point, they might morph into a system,” Trump said on Tuesday.
A “system.” The word choice isn’t accidental. This is the language of industrial-scale human rights violations, spoken with the same casual tone you’d use to discuss a chain restaurant expansion.
In case you’re wondering how much it costs to go full Nazi, this one concentration camp will cost the American taxpayer nearly half a billion dollars a year. That money will come from FEMA, the organization that Trump (with an assist from former friend Elon Musk and DOGE) stripped budget from, meaning there will be even less to pay for actual emergencies, because all of that money will be used to jail people Trump doesn’t like in a swamp.
The Everglades facility will cost Florida some $450 million to run for one year, according to DHS, though much of that will be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). While the airstrip is owned by Miami-Dade County, where officials have viewed the plan with skepticism, DeSantis is using his emergency authority to proceed on a tight schedule.
We are watching the latest march forward of American fascism in real time, complete with branded merchandise and gleeful photo ops. The US government is building concentration camps and selling t-shirts about it. This isn’t hyperbole. This isn’t partisan hysteria. This is what’s actually happening.
Every day you don’t call this what it is—fascism—you become complicit in normalizing it. Every time you treat this as just another political story, you help them make it routine. They’re counting on your exhaustion, your normalization, your willingness to look away.
The survivors of the Holocaust warned us this could happen again. They’re mostly gone now, but their warnings echo: it starts with camps, it starts with dehumanization, and it starts with good people doing nothing while evil wraps itself in flags and sells t-shirts.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.
The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.
President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst.” When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down. It said that its assessment of the deportees was based on a thorough vetting process that included looking at crimes committed both inside and outside the United States. But the government’s own data, which was obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of journalists from Venezuela, showed that officials knew that only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and that most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.
The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.
We conducted a case-by-case review of all the Venezuelan deportees. It’s possible there are crimes and other information in the deportees’ backgrounds that did not show up in our reporting or the internal government data, which includes only minimal details for nine of the men. There’s no single publicly available database for all crimes committed in the U.S., much less abroad. But everything we did find in public records contradicted the Trump administration’s assertions as well.
ProPublica and the Tribune, along with Venezuelan media outlets Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) and Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), also obtained lists of alleged gang members that are kept by Venezuelan law enforcement officials and the international law enforcement agency Interpol. Those lists include some 1,400 names. None of the names of the 238 Venezuelan deportees matched those on the lists.
The hasty removal of the Venezuelans and their incarceration in a third country has made this one of the most consequential deportations in recent history. The court battles over whether Trump has the authority to expel immigrants without judicial review have the potential to upend how this country handles all immigrants living in the U.S., whether legally or illegally. Officials have suggested publicly that, to achieve the president’s goals of deporting millions of immigrants, the administration was considering suspending habeas corpus, the longstanding constitutional right allowing people to challenge their detention.
Hours before the immigrants were loaded onto airplanes in Texas for deportation, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that the Tren de Aragua prison gang had invaded the United States, aided by the Venezuelan government. It branded the gang a foreign terrorist organization and said that declaration gave the president the authority to expel its members and send them indefinitely to a foreign prison, where they have remained for more than two months with no ability to communicate with their families or lawyers.
Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal fight against the deportations, said the removals amounted to a “blatant violation of the most fundamental due process principles.” He said that under the law, an immigrant who has committed a crime can be prosecuted and removed, but “it does not mean they can be subjected to a potentially lifetime sentence in a foreign gulag.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to our findings that “ProPublica should be embarrassed that they are doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens who are a threat,” adding that “the American people strongly support” the president’s immigration agenda.
When asked about the differences between the administration’s public statements about the deportees and the way they are labeled in government data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin largely repeated previous public statements. She insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were dangerous, saying, “These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
As for the administration’s allegations that Tren de Aragua has attempted an invasion, an analysis by U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro and that reports suggesting otherwise were “not credible.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, fired the report’s authors after it became public. Her office, according to news reports, said Gabbard was trying to “end the weaponization and politicization” of the intelligence community.
Our investigation focused on the 238 Venezuelan men who were deported on March 15 to CECOT, the prison in El Salvador, and whose names were on a list first published by CBS News. The government has also sent several dozen other immigrants there, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who the government admitted was sent there in error. Courts have ruled that the administration should facilitate his return to the U.S.
We interviewed about 100 of the deportees’ relatives and their attorneys. Many of them had heard from their loved ones on the morning of March 15, when the men believed they were being sent back to Venezuela. They were happy because they would be back home with their families, who were eager to prepare their favorite meals and plan parties. Some of the relatives shared video messages with us and on social media that were recorded inside U.S. detention facilities. In those videos, the detainees said they were afraid that they might be sent to Guantanamo, a U.S. facility on Cuban soil where Washington has held and tortured detainees, including a number that it suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Trump administration had sent planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants there earlier this year.
They had no idea they were being sent to El Salvador.
Among them was 31-year-old Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, who left Venezuela and his job as a youth soccer coach last July. His sister, Leidys Trejo Solórzano, said he had a hard time supporting himself and his mother and that Venezuela’s crumbling economy made it hard for him to find a better paying job. Colmenares was detained at an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border in October because of his many tattoos, his sister said. Those tattoos include the names of relatives, a clock, an owl and a crown she said was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer club’s logo.
Colmenares was not flagged as having a criminal history in the DHS data we obtained. Nor did we find any U.S. or foreign convictions or charges in our review. Trejo said her brother stayed out of trouble and has no criminal record in Venezuela either. She described his expulsion as a U.S.-government-sponsored kidnapping.
“It’s been so difficult. Even talking about what happened is hard for me,” said Trejo, who has scoured the internet for videos and photos of her brother in the Salvadoran prison. “Many nights I can’t sleep because I’m so anxious.”
The internal government data shows that officials had labeled all but a handful of the men as members of Tren de Aragua but offered little information about how they came to that conclusion. Court filings and documents we obtained show the government has relied in part on social media posts, affiliations with known gang members and tattoos, including crowns, clocks, guns, grenades and Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman” logo. We found that at least 158 of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador have tattoos. But law enforcement sources in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said the agency is confident in its assessments of gang affiliation but would not provide additional information to support them.
John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, “for political reasons, I think the administration wants to characterize this as a grand effort that’s promoting public safety of the United States.” But “even some of the government’s own data demonstrates there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” he said, referring to the internal data we obtained.
The government data shows 67 men who were deported had been flagged as having pending charges, though it provides no details about their alleged crimes. We found police, court and other records for 38 of those deportees. We found several people whose criminal history differed from what was tagged in the government data. In some cases that the government listed as pending criminal charges, the men had been convicted and in one case the charge had been dropped before the man was deported.
Our reporting found that, like the criminal convictions, the majority of the pending charges involved nonviolent crimes, including retail theft, drug possession and traffic offenses.
Six of the men had pending charges for attempted murder, assault, armed robbery, gun possession or domestic battery. Immigrant advocates have said removing people to a prison in El Salvador before the cases against them were resolved means that Trump, asserting his executive authority, short-circuited the criminal justice system.
Take the case of Wilker Miguel Gutiérrez Sierra, 23, who was arrested in February 2024 in Chicago on charges of attempted murder, robbery and aggravated battery after he and three other Venezuelan men allegedly assaulted a stranger on a train and stole his phone and $400. He pleaded not guilty. Gutiérrez was on electronic monitoring as he awaited trial when he was arrested by ICE agents who’d pulled up to him on the street in five black trucks, court records show. Three days later he was shipped to El Salvador.
But the majority of men labeled as having pending cases were facing less serious charges, according to the records we found. Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, 23, was arrested in Chicago in August 2023 on misdemeanor charges for riding his bike on the sidewalk while drinking a can of Budweiser. His partner, Cherry Flores, described his deportation as a gross injustice. “They shouldn’t have sent him there,” she said. “Why did they have to take him over a beer?”
