Human Rights Watch and El Faro report that Salvadoran deportees under Bukele’s government endure arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and abuse at CECOT, raising urgent human rights concerns.
Salvadoran deportees human rights abuses are intensifying under the administration of Nayib Bukele, where a leading rights group says individuals deported from the United States are being arbitrarily detained and forcibly disappeared.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation of Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and others that, of the 9,000 Salvadorans expelled from the US since the beginning of last year, “only 10.5% had a conviction in the United States for a violent or potentially violent crime.”
Yet according to HRW, these sports—most of whom were illegally expelled without the requisite due process—were “immediately detained in El Salvador” upon arrival and “have not been allowed to communicate with their relatives or lawyers.”
“None of the relatives or lawyers have had any indication from the authorities that the men have been brought before a judge since their arrival,” HRW said. “Some have not been informed of where their loved ones are held, or why. In five cases, relatives learned about sports’ whereabouts only though litigation at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).”
HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus said that “whatever the criminal history of these Salvadoran men, they have a right to due process, to be taken before a judge, and their relatives are entitled to know where they are being held and why.”
“Deportation cannot mean enforced disappearance,” Goebertus added.
Many of the sports have been sent to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca in central El Salvador. HRW and others have documented a range of serious human rights abuses committed by staff at the megaprison, including torture, sexual violence, and brutal beatings.
The Salvadoran investigative journalism outlet El Faro—which, along with its staff, has been the target of sweeping government persecution—last year published a report on CECOT, citing one former prisoner who said that inmates are “committing suicide out of desperation.”
While the Trump administration has alleged that many of those expelled are members of MS-13, a street gang founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles, neither US nor Salvadoran authorities have provided much evidence to substantiate claims regarding many of the sports.
At least one deported Salvadoran—longtime Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García—was wrongfully expelled due to what the Trump administration called an “administrative error.” Abrego García said he was tortured at CECOT before a US federal judge ordered his release last December.
For its new report, HRW interviewed relatives of many of the Salvadoran sports, one of whose sisters said she “kept calling the migrant shelter in El Salvador, but they never gave me any information.”
“So I filed a complaint with the [Salvadoran] Human Rights Ombudsperson’s Office,” she said. “An official told me that my brother was deported on March 15 [but] because of the state of emergency they would not provide any information.”
