Flight Logs Reveal Dozens Disappeared on El Salvador Deportation Trips
“These were disappearances,” said one immigrant rights expert of the revelation that dozens of people who the Trump administration has never acknowledged were listed on flight manifests for three deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador in March.
404 Media reported Thursday that in May, a hacker targeted the airline that operated the flights, which has been challenged in court by groups including the ACLU and Democracy Forward.
The data retrieved by the hacker showed that in addition to people whose names had been previously included on a list of deported migrants deported to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), published by CBS News, more than 40 men and women were listed on flight manifests for plans that the Trump administration sent on March 15.
The CBS News story reported on 238 people who had been sent to CECOT without due process, under a $6 million deal with far-right President Nayib Bukele, but the list compiled from the flight manifests puts the total number at least 281.
The flights landed in El Salvador despite a federal judge blocking them, and now, Michelle Brané of the immigrant rights group Together and Free told 404 Media, “we have this list of people that the U.S. government has not formally acknowledged in any real way and we pretty much have no idea if they are in CECOT or somewhere else, or whether they received due process.”
“I think this further demonstrates the callousness and lack of due process involved and is further evidence that the U.S. government is disappearing people,” Brané said. “For almost all of these people, there’s no records whatsoever. No court records, nothing.”
It is unclear whether all the people on the flight manifests were actually on the plans, but if “they were indeed on the flights, it is unknown where they currently are,” 404 Media reported.
The outlet reported that the family of one of the men who is listed on the flight manifests but whose name has never been reported or acknowledged by the Trump administration, has been protesting his disappearance in his home country of Venezuela.
Keider Alexander Flores Navas’ mother, Ana Navas, said in a TikTok video in March that she suddenly stopped hearing him from the day the deportation flights took off—and then saw him in a photo of prisoners at CECOT.
“He was not on any list. But this photo is from El Salvador,” Navas told the Venezuelan outlet Diario VEA.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called the news of the flight manifests “a horror story.”
