Why did these migrants end up incarcerated without trial in El Salvador?
A week ago, the U.S. deported over 250 people, mostly Venezuelans. The destination: El Salvador, for imprisonment in the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), a mega-prison that opened in 2023. The Trump administration claimed that the deportees were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the deported individuals “heinous monsters.” Yet sworn testimony from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office director acknowledged that many of the deportees had no criminal record in the United States. What’s the full story here?
To incarcerate this group of people in a foreign prison, President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. He claimed that Tren de Aragua is a foreign terrorist organization conducting irregular warfare in the United States. The 1798 act, which has not been used since World War II, allows the government to deport noncitizens without judicial proceedings. Thus, the Trump administration argued it did not have to produce any evidence that the people being deported were gang members or had violated U.S. law.
But there’s little evidence suggesting a coordinated Tren de Aragua campaign of irregular warfare against the U.S. And El Salvador’s already overcrowded prisons certainly are not in need of additional inmates. Yet both Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele may reap political dividends from this partnership. In fact, both leaders publicized a cinematic video created by the Bukele administration showing the deportees being delivered to the Salvadoran mega-prison.
The evolution of Tren de Aragua
Tren de Aragua, Train from Aragua in English, formed in 2005 out of a union of railroad workers in Aragua, Venezuela who began embezzling funds and extorting contractors. They became a coherent gang in Venezuela’s Tocorón prison, where they were allowed to operate with impunity. Gang members not only controlled the prison, but also used it as a base to expand their criminal operations into neighboring communities. The phenomenon of gangs forming and operating in prisons is not unique to Venezuela – in fact, this is common across Latin America. Prisons in the region tend to be underfunded and overcrowded. Prison staff, who are often unable to control prisoners or meet their basic needs, partially cede prison governance to groups such as gangs.
Tren de Aragua then transitioned from local operations into a transnational gang in 2018. Venezuela was experiencing a protracted economic crisis. Many Venezuelans, struggling with shortages of basic goods and failing public services, began migrating en masse. Tren de Aragua expanded its reach by exploiting those trying to leave, “charging them extortion fees, smuggling them into and throughout Colombia, and taking control of various nodes of the human trafficking for sexual exploitation market.”
As political scientists Charles Larratt-Smith and John Polga-Hecimovich note, Tren de Aragua’s expansion mostly followed the flow of Venezuelan migrants – their main targets. Yet the gang lacked the power to successfully expand into areas where the government effectively policed their territory or where other criminal groups were already active.
In response to the regional expansion, Chile, Peru, and Colombia carried out large operations against Tren de Aragua. And then, in 2023, the Venezuelan government broke their long-standing pact with the gang and raided the Tocorón prison, destroying the gang’s base of operations. This appears to have disrupted the group’s transnational operations and its international spread seems to have slowed.
Venezuelan migrants and Tren de Aragua in the U.S.
Facing economic crisis and political repression, approximately 8 million Venezuelans – about 27% of the country’s population – have fled the country. Approximately 89% of the migrants have settled in countries other than the U.S., with most in other Latin American countries. As of 2023, approximately 770,000 Venezuelan immigrants were in the United States, comprising slightly less than 2% of immigrants in the country, according to the Migration Policy Institute. And by 2025, the U.S. government had granted approximately 607,000 Venezuelans Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which requires applicants to undergo a screening process that includes identity verification using biometrics and background checks.
Some members of Tren de Aragua likely followed the broader Venezuelan migration to the United States. Yet there’s a significant barrier to the group’s previous path to expansion. Whereas Tren de Aragua was able to gain footholds by smuggling migrants across borders in South America, Mexican cartels already control migrant smuggling into the U.S. through Mexico. Thus, this part of the criminal economy was not available for development by Tren de Aragua, which is far weaker than the Mexican cartels.
Indeed, evidence from InSight Crime, which has been tracking the group for years, suggests that the attention the group has gotten does not match its actual presence or power in the United States. Only a small number of crimes in the U.S. have been attributed to alleged Tren de Aragua members, including petty crimes not associated with the group’s criminal portfolio. In addition, allegations of gang membership often stand on weak grounds. For example, U.S. officials have cited tattoos as evidence of membership in the gang, but tattoos are not part of the gang’s initiation process. Insight Crime research also found no evidence “of cells in the United States cooperating with one another or with other criminal groups…[or] proof of criminals receiving specific instructions from the organization’s leadership or sending money to Venezuela or other foreign countries.”
These investigations and clarifications should raise questions about the Trump administration claims underpinning the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.
Where are the deported Venezuelans now?
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visiting Central America in February, El Salvador’s president agreed to accept deported Salvadorans. Bukele also offered to accept and imprison people sent from the U.S. – regardless of their country of origin. In this latest deal, Bukele reportedly agreed to imprison 238 Venezuelans for a year for $6 million and the return of 23 members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang that were in U.S. custody.
CECOT, the mega-prison where the Venezuelans are now incarcerated, opened two years ago as part of Bukele’s extreme crackdown on Salvadoran gangs. Bukele often shows off the prison in highly produced videos, but actual conditions inside the prison are hard to document. Journalists allowed entry can only follow tightly controlled and choreographed tours. The government publicizes the harsh conditions: Inmates sleep on metal bunks with no mattresses or linens, are forced to eat with their hands, and have only 30 minutes a day to exercise in a corridor. Yet the government refuses to release basic figures on how many people are housed in the prison and does not allow access to lawyers or human rights monitors to verify conditions.
However, Amnesty International gathered evidence of overcrowding and deplorable conditions, documenting “physical and verbal abuse, disproportionate use of pepper spray, and severe restrictions on basic aspects of daily life such as food, water and using the toilet, as well as a lack of access to open-air spaces.” This fits into a broader pattern of carceral abuse in Salvadoran prisons. Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights group, describes these abuses as “a systematic policy of generalized torture.” Conditions are surely exacerbated by the sky-rocketing prison population. El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world with 1,659 out of 100,000 people in prison, a rate more than twice as high as the next highest country.
The potential political dividends
Trump campaigned for president on the promise of mass deportations and a “bloody story” for immigrants. Bukele, with his social media savvy, was an excellent partner to turn the deportation into a made-to-tweet coercive spectacle. In addition, during Trump’s first term, human rights groups produced reports on abuses in U.S. migrant detention centers and detention centers were at times sites of protest. Those will not be relevant issues in El Salvador’s CECOT – and not only because it is far from the U.S. The lack of access by outside monitors have earned the prison the reputation as “a black hole of human rights.”
For Bukele’s part, the partnership gives him an opportunity to curry favor with Trump. Bukele has functionally turned El Salvador into a one-party state and he dominates traditional and social media. Bukele’s increasingly hegemonic control of El Salvador has already benefited from the freezing of USAID funds, which supported the few small independent journalism outlets in the country.
In addition, the return of MS-13 members is an important win for Bukele. According to the Central American news outlet El Faro, the U.S. Department of Justice has evidence of a pact between the Bukele government and MS-13 between 2019 and 2022. The return of these gang members not only prevents them from revealing potentially embarrassing information in U.S. courts, but also serves to “send a message to gang members imprisoned in the United States” that collaborating with U.S. authorities will not protect them from being returned to El Salvador.
The cruel new tactics of immigration enforcement
While the flights were en route to El Salvador, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the administration to halt the deportations. Boasberg did not find that the Alien Enemies Act “provided a basis for the president to assert that the gang’s presence in the United States was akin to an act of war.” He demanded that the planes turn around and return to the U.S. The administration ignored the court order and has since refused to provide the information requested by the court.
Karoline Leavitt recently clarified that of the 238 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador, 137 were alleged gang members deported under the Alien Enemies Act, while 101 were deported “under regular immigration proceedings.” Reports from family members suggest that some of the men had signed voluntary departure orders and thought that they were going back to Venezuela. They are all now incarcerated without trial in El Salvador.
Deportation of noncitizens is not new. According to historian Adam Goodman, the U.S. has deported over 50 million people since the first deportations in 1882 – through formal deportation proceedings and using the administrative process referred to as voluntary departure orders. While deportees may spend time in detention – a practice that dramatically expanded beginning in the 1980s – the typical deportation process would end with the migrant being repatriated to their home country.
What is different with the immigrants sent to El Salvador is that rather than detaining them in the U.S. or returning them to their home country, the U.S. government has sent them with no trial to prison in a third-party country. Sending migrants to a Salvadoran prison – like the recent expulsion of migrants to a makeshift detention camp in Panama – marks a major departure from previous deportation processes and perhaps should not even be described using the same language. None of this bodes well for due process and the protection of human rights.
Heather Sullivan is a 2024-2025 Good Authority fellow.
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