The accusations contradict the Trump administration’s insistence that deportees were not being mistreated in El Salvador.
Prison guards at a notorious Salvador prison tortured Venezuelan nationals the United States deported to the Central American country, according to a report from advocacy group Human Rights Watch released Wednesday.
The accusations are based on interviews with 40 of the 252 Venezuelan nationals the United States deported to El Salvador during its first months in office and hundreds of others familiar with their plights. The claims from the 40 men challenge the Trump administration’s arguments that conditions at the Center for Terrorism Confinement comply with international human rights standards.
U.S. government lawyers have argued in federal court that the U.S. received assurances from San Salvador that none of the deportees the U.S. sent to the prison would be tortured or treated in any way that would violate international standards around the rights of inmates and prisoners.
Instead, those that spoke to Human Rights Watch say that the prison guards regularly beat and tortured them. They described squalid conditions where detainees received little to no medical attention, few opportunities to bathe and almost no privacy. Prison guards would stop beatings and improve conditions in the lead up to visits from international observers and Trump administration officials to make conditions seem less brutal. When occasional protests broke out, guards fired rubber bullets at inmates.
“These beatings and other abuses appear to be part of a practice designed to subjugate, humiliate and discipline detainees through the imposition of grave physical and psychological suffering,” the report said. The organization emphasized that the allegations would meet the standard for torture and severe breaches of international human rights law on the parts of the U.S. and El Salvador.
The report contains pictures of some injuries inmates claimed to have received in the Center for Terrorism Confinement. Per Human Rights Watch, forensic experts said the images of scarring, disfigured noses and missing teeth were consistent with the accounts of beatings inmates shared. Human Rights Watch said it verified the claims in the report with the help of forensic experts and open-source information researchers have amassed about the Center for Terrorism Confinement facility to ensure that claims were indeed accurate.
Psychological harassment was rampant. “The CECOT director told us ‘you have arrived in hell. Here you will spend the rest of your lives,” said one of the men who spoke with Human Rights Watch and Salvadoran partner organization Cristosal. He is identified in the report as Juan R., a 39-year-old business person from Caracas.
The abuses allegedly committed against the Venezuelans also include cases of sexual violence, including sexual assault. One former detainee recounted being forced to perform oral sex on one of the facilities’ guards, while others recounted being sexually harassed and called homophobic slurs.
Asked for comment about the allegations Human Rights Watch raised, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”
“POLITICO should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump is removing from the country,” Jackson added.
The Departments of State and Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
Accusations of abuses and human rights violations against detainees at the CECOT mega-prison have dogged the Salvadoran government for years. Human rights groups have long criticized the Salvadoran government for denying those arrested due process and rights guaranteed under Salvadoran law. Until the Trump administration took office in January, the State Department’s annual human rights report expressed considerable and consistent concern about conditions at the prison.
But Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele, a populist, has cultivated strong relations with the Trump administration. The Trump administration gave Bukele a warm welcome in April after El Salvador first agreed to accept Venezuelan deportees and jail them for a “small fee,” hosting the Salvadoran leader at the White House.
All of the Venezuelan men deported to the Center for Terrorism Confinement were returned to Venezuela in July as part of a prisoner swap. Caracas released several Americans the U.S. considered wrongfully detained in the swap.