Tens of thousands of prisoners are locked up in rows of metal bunks at a jail where criminals are disposed of “without using the death penalty”.
CECOT is a maximum security mega-prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, where hundreds of immigrants are being sent from the US by the Trump administration. The prisoners, who have alleged links Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua cartel, were sent even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring their deportations. US District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday temporarily blocking the deportations, but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras.
Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order. Trump sidestepped a question over whether his administration violated a court order while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening. “I don’t know. You have to speak to the lawyers about that,” he said, although he defended the deportations. “I can tell you this. These were bad people.”
Footage released by El Salvador’s government Sunday showed men exiting airplanes onto an airport tarmac lined by officers in riot gear. The men, who had their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down to have them bend down at the waist.
The video also showed the men being transported to prison in a large convoy of buses guarded by police and military vehicles and at least one helicopter. The men were shown kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform — knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs — and placed in cells.
The immigrants were taken to the notorious CECOT facility, the centrepiece of President Nayib Bukele’s push to pacify his once violence-wracked country through tough police measures and limits on basic rights.
Tens of thousands of prisoners are locked up on bare metal bunks which don’t have a mattress in conditions described as inhumane. Cells have two toilets and a basin which are open with no privacy while there are no windows and they are watched by guards from holes in the mesh ceiling.
Inmates are made to wear white t-shirts and shorts and have their heads shaved every five days, while they are not given cutlery for eating. Prisoners don’t have any recreational space and only leave their cells for court hearings or if they are being put in solitary confinement.
The El Salvador government boasts that the prison is one of the most secure in the world with two sets of electric fences, and that is on top of two concrete walls.
Miguel Sarre, formerly on a United Nations’s sub-committee for the prevention of torture said the prison is a “perverse calculation to dispose of people without formally applying the death penalty”. Meanwhile, President Bukele’s reaction on X to the deportation of the immigrants from the US despite the court order was: “Oopsie…Too late.” He has agreed to house about 300 immigrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house immigrants, posted on X: “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”
Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Judge Boasberg’s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order but that the Trump administration clearly violated the “spirit” of it. “This just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,” Mr Vladeck said.
Tren de Aragua originated in an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied an exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their nation’s economy came undone during the past decade.
Trump seized on the gang during his campaign to paint misleading pictures of communities that he contended were “taken over” by what were actually a handful of lawbreakers.
The Trump administration has not identified the immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States. It also sent two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States.
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