‘Welcome to hell’: Inside the megaprison where the U.S. deported migrants angielski

One detainee was beaten unconscious. Others emerged from the dark isolation room covered in bruises, struggling to walk or vomiting blood. Another returned to his cell in tears, telling fellow detainees he’d just been sexually assaulted. “Let’s hit him like a piñata,” guards shouted amid the beatings, detainees recalled, the blows echoing against the metal walls.

They called it “La Isla” — The Island — the cell where Venezuelans deported from the United States by the Trump administration said they suffered some of the worst abuse of their 125 days in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. The matching firsthand accounts across multiple interviews offer the most complete view yet of conditions inside the megaprison, where inmates are denied access to lawyers and almost all contact with the outside world — and where about 14,000 Salvadorans remain incarcerated. Few detainees have ever left CECOT, and fewer have spoken publicly of their experience there.

The Washington Post interviewed 16 of the more than 250 men who were deported by the United States to CECOT, held there for four months and then released this month to Venezuela as part of an international prisoner swap. The Venezuelans, rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, told The Post they were subjected to repeated beatings that left them bruised, bleeding or injured. They said prison staff restricted medical care for detainees suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure or kidney failure. The men slept on metal bunks — usually with no cushions — in group cells where overhead lights blazed 24 hours a day. They were expected to bathe and relieve themselves using a water tank and toilets that offered no privacy from cellmates. They were rarely allowed out of their cells. Three Salvadoran government spokespersons, provided with detailed accounts of the detainees’ allegations, did not respond to requests for comment. Damian Merlo, a U.S.-based lobbyist for Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, described the detainees as criminals who belong in prison, and said their claims are “baseless.”

“Additionally, footage made available on social media of their departure from El Salvador showed them in good spirits,” Merlo said, “happily … heading back home to Venezuela.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, provided a statement that repeated administration claims that the detainees were members of the Tren de Aragua gang — though government officials have acknowledged in court that many of those sent to CECOT had no criminal record.

Robert L. Cerna, an acting field office director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a court filing in March that the “lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat” and that the limited information about each individual “actually highlights the risk they pose.”

“President Trump and [DHS] Secretary [Kristi L.] Noem will not allow criminal gangs to terrorize American citizens,” McLaughlin said. “Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members. We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said the Trump administration is grateful for its partnership with Bukele “to help remove the worst of the worst illegal criminals, terrorists, and gang members from the United States.” She deferred questions about specific allegations to El Salvador’s government.

If the detainees’ accounts are true, their treatment at CECOT may have violated U.N. conventions against torture to which El Salvador and the U.S. are signatories, said Isabel Carlota Roby, a senior staff attorney at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization who has spoken with some of the detainees. Whether the U.S., which paid Bukele’s government $6 million to hold the Venezuelans, could be implicated in human rights violations would depend on the evidence, Roby said, including how much U.S. officials knew about the conditions.

Torture, arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances and sexual assault, if proved to be systematic or generalized and known to the government, can all constitute crimes against humanity. An international panel is preparing a report on El Salvador and investigating whether any of those crimes were committed. At least one member of the panel thinks a criminal investigation is warranted.

“Based on the information I have reviewed,” said Santiago Canton, secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists, “there are reasonable grounds for an investigation by the International Criminal Court.”

The Post has found that many of the detainees had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules.

Many of the men had fled political oppression and extreme poverty under Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a U.S. adversary. Some had been granted permission to live and work in the United States. At least two arrived in the U.S. as refugees seeking safety from persecution in Venezuela.

A number suspected they had been detained and deported by the U.S. based solely on their tattoos.

Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas, 35, had temporary protected status shielding him from deportation and worked legally in kitchens and pizzerias to pay for his mother’s breast cancer treatments back home.

Andry Hernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist, entered the U.S. legally with a CBP One appointment, where an official in a preliminary screening determined he had shown a credible fear of persecution as a gay man living and working in Venezuela.

Roger Molina, a food delivery driver and aspiring professional soccer player, had been vetted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and federal law enforcement, flown to the U.S. and conditionally accepted into a State Department resettlement program for refugees.

As the detained men were shuttled onto flights in Texas on March 15, none were told where they were being taken.

Shackled at their wrists, waists and ankles, the migrants were loaded onto three GlobalX charter planes, with many of them believing they were headed to Venezuela. At least they would be going home, Basulto thought. They were prohibited from opening the window shades. “We’re giving you a surprise,” he remembers one immigration official telling them.

When they landed, Basulto said, he found the courage to peek out the window. He saw El Salvador’s blue-and-white flag waving in the air. Detainees began to panic, he said. A female deportee who spoke English read aloud from one of the documents she’d been given. She translated for the rest of the passengers: They would be detained for at least a year in El Salvador.

Some migrants refused to get off the plane. A guard struck a female passenger, Basulto said. Screams filled the plane. Eventually, Basulto and other detainees said, they were kicked, shoved, beaten and forced off. Two Salvadoran officers grabbed his arms.

“Throw them down!” officers yelled, as detainees were pummeled and dragged to buses, according to detainee Miguel Rojas Mendoza. He recounted watching one man get slammed so hard against a bus that his face began gushing blood.

Molina, the refugee who had been vetted for resettlement in the U.S., begged officers for an explanation.

“Please, I don’t understand what I’m doing here,” Molina said. “I haven’t committed any crime. Please, let me talk to someone.” He began to pray. Then a Salvadoran officer grabbed him by the neck.

“Run, son of a b----,” he commanded, according to Molina, and jammed a rifle into his ribs.

Hernández, the makeup artist, watched as the women were turned around and put on a flight back to the United States. The Salvadorans, he said, refused to accept them. The buses now filled with men began rolling.

“Welcome to El Salvador,” hooded officers shouted on the ride, six detainees said. “Welcome to hell.”

At CECOT, Basulto said, guards shaved his head, stripped him of his clothes and took his phone, $700 in cash and the gold pendant he wore for luck.

Hernández cried out for his mother. “Why are you shaving my head?” he asked. “I’m a makeup stylist, I’m gay, I’m not a gang member.”

The men were pushed together in a warehouse, flanked by photographers and guards, and forced to kneel. They were addressed by the prison director.

Here, the director said, the men would have no rights — no right to a lawyer, no access to the sun. They would not eat chicken or meat for the rest of their lives.

“The only way that you will leave,” he said, according to multiple detainees, “is inside a black bag.”

CECOT, opened by Bukele in 2023 as part of his crackdown on Salvadoran gangs, was designed to terrify the most violent of criminals. His government hailed it as the largest prison in the Americas, initially announcing a capacity for 20,000 detainees and later doubling it. The imposing fortress outside San Salvador sprawls across more than 280 acres, surrounded by an electrified perimeter fence and 19 watchtowers. The roof of each pavilion is made of diamond-shaped mesh with sharp edges.

The Venezuelans were placed in cells, up to 20 men in each. The concrete walls showed sweat stains, drops of dried blood and what appeared to be scratches from human nails, one detainee recalled.

Each cell held 80 metal beds stacked closely together in tiers of four, according to detainees and images of CECOT previously shared by Bukele’s government. Use of the water tanks and toilets was controlled by the guards and restricted to certain times of day. With no windows or fans, the detainees lived and ate amid the stench of their own sewage.

The detainees could gauge the time only by the heat that made them sweat during the day and the cold that chilled their metal beds at night. They couldn’t see the sun, they said, but sometimes could hear the rain.

CECOT “seemed like it was for animals,” said detainee Julio Fernández Sánchez, 35. “It was designed for people to go crazy or kill themselves.”

Basulto said detainees were occasionally allowed to leave their cells to play soccer for 20 minutes or attend a brief Bible reading, but time dragged. The men in one cell counted the days by scratching marks into a wall.

Detainees with medical concerns were often housed in Cell No. 8, said Fernández, who was held there after an injury to his shoulder during a beating. There were men suffering from diabetes, skin problems and panic attacks. One day a diabetic prisoner was given the wrong insulin and began convulsing after it was injected, Fernández recalled. Guards took nearly half an hour to get him help.

“The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile,” Basulto said. “It was the most perverse form of humiliation.”

When Tito Martínez, 26, was in immigration detention in the U.S., he said, a doctor told him he had kidney failure and would need a transplant. After repeated beatings in CECOT, Martínez said he could no longer get out of bed. He would wet himself, and he relied on his cellmates to feed him.

“Tito is dying,” his friends told prison staff. When he was finally treated, Martínez said, the doctor told him that his functioning kidney was operating at only 20 percent and that he would soon need dialysis to survive.

Some detainees attempted suicide by tying sheets around their necks or using rusted pipes to cut their veins.

Disobeying rules proved costly. When Hernández’s head ached from the heat, he tried to cool down by bathing. He forgot to tell his friends to watch for guards.

“Get up, piece of sh–,” an officer told him, he said. He was taken to La Isla, where a tiny hole in the ceiling provided only a needle of light and almost no air. https://szmer.info/pictrs/image/bd1b2f21-0e00-4da7-836c-dcbe6a1402b7.jpeg

Four men entered and began touching him with their clubs and putting them between his legs. One forced Hernández to perform oral sex on him, he said.

Basulto said Hernández returned to the cell in tears and told him what had happened. He and other detainees offered to speak up to the prison staff, but he urged them not to. He feared it would provoke officers to “attack us even more.” After weeks of daily beatings, detainees said, they launched a hunger strike. They went four days without food or water.

“People started fainting. Falling to the floor,” said detainee Mervin Yamarte, 29. The guards “laughed.”

When the hunger strike failed to draw attention, some used shards from metal pipes to slice their skin and write messages on their sheets in blood: “We are not terrorists, we are migrants.”

“We wanted them to see we were willing to die,” said Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel, 27.

The men grew desperate. About two months after arriving at CECOT, detainees tore rails off bunks and used them to break their locks. Dozens broke free and hurled soap and juice cartons at guards. Some broke cement off the walls to throw at them.

The guards fired back with rubber bullets, stormed the cells and forced men to kneel with their hands behind their heads.

“They stood on our legs until we couldn’t feel them anymore,” León Rengel said.

Then came their punishment: They were taken to La Isla. Molina said he sometimes heard screams echoing into his cell for hours at a time.

The next day, he said, guards lined up the handcuffed detainees and took turns beating them.

They broke a tooth of one man and dislocated an arm of another, Molina said. “That [day] was the worst of the beatings.”

Conditions improved only when outsiders visited the prison or when government officials wanted photographs, multiple detainees said. Shortly after a Red Cross visit, Bibles were handed out to each cell.

For a visit by DHS’s Noem, the detainees were given better food and even mattresses, though thin. When a group of U.S. politicians toured the prison, Basulto said, detainees with visible injuries were moved to the remotest cells. After detainees began singing the Venezuelan national anthem, Basulto said, the prison director “quickly cut the politicians’ visit short and hurried them away.”

The Red Cross, which visits Salvadoran prisons regularly, appeared at CECOT twice during the Venezuelans’ time there. Delegates met with the men and collected brief spoken messages for their families, according to Martina Ferraris, deputy protection coordinator for the International Committee of the Red Cross mission in El Salvador. These were vetted by prison staff, Ferraris said.

In their final days in CECOT, detainees said, conditions seemed to improve. Molina was taken to the doctor for an evaluation. He was given a clean shave and the haircut of his choice.

The detainees were given Colgate toothpaste, a Gillette razor and deodorant. A prison official took photos. The director told them to brush their teeth.

At 5 a.m. on July 18, they were loaded onto buses, unsure where they were headed. Then a man in a uniform with a Venezuelan flag on one sleeve stepped onto Molina’s bus. They were going home.

On the plane, the Venezuelans sang a Christian song — with new words.

“If I had faith as small as a mustard seed, I would tell my brothers, ‘We’re leaving. We’re leaving. We’re leaving!’” they sang. “And the locks will break.”

Men dressed in black waited for the detainees on a plane set to fly to Venezuela. Detainees would later learn that Maduro had sent officers of the SEBIN, his feared secret police, usually used to detain or disappear his political opponents.

Before being reunited with their families, one detainee said, they were told to record a video thanking the Venezuelan government. He said he was warned that if he fled again and was deported back, he could be charged with treason. The detainee spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Maduro government.

Several of the men, who had once fled the authoritarian country, said they were genuinely grateful to Maduro for negotiating their release when it seemed no one else would. Still, some said they’d leave for the U.S. again, perhaps once Trump leaves office.

Not Molina. He doesn’t think he could do it again, he said, “having lived through that.”

“The American Dream,” he said, “became a nightmare.”