Venezuelan Men Sent to CECOT on What They Endured and Reuniting With Their Families — ProPublica

Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, needs the world to know that he was tortured over 4 months in a Salvadoran jail. He mentioned guards stomped on his fingers, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside different inmates and lick their backs.

Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he’s. He’s not a member of a gang or a global terrorist, only a man with tattoos whom immigration brokers noticed using in a automotive with a Venezuela sticker on the again.

Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, mentioned he puzzled day-after-day of his time in jail whether or not he’d ever maintain his mom in his arms once more. He’s relieved to be again residence in Venezuela however struggles to make sense of why he and the opposite males had been put via that ordeal within the first place.

“We’re a bunch of people that I contemplate had the unhealthy luck of ending up on this black listing,” he mentioned.

These are the accounts being shared by among the greater than 230 Venezuelan males the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security jail in El Salvador often called CECOT. All through the lads’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the reality about who they’re and why they had been focused. The president has each hailed the lads’s removing as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in workplace and touted it as an indication of the lengths his administration was prepared to go to hold out his mass deportation marketing campaign. He assured the general public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the nation of immigrants who’d dedicated violent crimes, and that the lads despatched to El Salvador had been “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”

Few instances have gotten as a lot consideration because the Venezuelans despatched to CECOT. They had been deported in opposition to the directions of a federal choose, frog-marched off American planes and compelled to kneel earlier than cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to substantiate the lads’s names or present details about the allegations it had made in opposition to them. In the meantime, the deportees had been held with out entry to legal professionals or the power to talk to their households. Then, 12 days in the past, they had been returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.

Now that they’re residence, they’ve begun to speak. We interviewed 9 males for this story. They’re bewildered, frightened, offended. Some mentioned their emotions about what occurred had been nonetheless so uncooked that they had bother discovering phrases to explain them. The entire males mentioned they had been abused bodily and mentally throughout their imprisonment. Their kinfolk say they, too, went via hell questioning whether or not their family members had been alive or useless, or if they’d ever see them once more. All the lads mentioned they had been relieved to be free, although some mentioned their launch was proof the U.S. had no purpose to ship them to jail to start with.

Blanco, for instance, has no legal file within the U.S., in line with the federal government’s personal knowledge. His solely violation was having entered the nation illegally. He’d come as a result of he wasn’t incomes sufficient to assist his dad and mom and assist his seven kids, ages 2 to 19, after his household’s wholesale dairy and deli provide enterprise failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Move, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was launched to proceed his immigration course of.

Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and located work delivering meals. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Whereas he was there, he determined to inform the company that he’d modified his deal with. On his means out of the constructing, an immigration agent stopped him and requested about his tattoos. He has a number of of them, together with a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock exhibiting the time his mom was born.

He mentioned the tattoos signified his affection for his household, not proof of affiliation with a gang. Data present the officers didn’t imagine him and detained him. Whereas in custody, a choose ordered his deportation. Nonetheless, as a result of Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan authorities was refusing to just accept most deportees from the USA on the time. Immigration officers launched Blanco again into the U.S. till they might ship him residence.

For the subsequent seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up extra work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers requested Blanco to return in for one more appointment and detained him. A month later, regardless of Venezuela agreeing to take again some deportees, Blanco was on one in every of three planes certain for El Salvador.

“From the second I spotted I used to be in El Salvador and that I might be detained, it was anguish,” he mentioned. “I used to be shaken. It hit me laborious. Onerous, laborious, laborious.”

To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure regulation from the 1700s often called the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the lads had been all a part of a Venezuelan jail gang known as Tren de Aragua that was invading the USA. Inside days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there have been anecdotal stories indicating that not all the deportees had been hardened criminals, a lot much less “savages.” By early April, a number of information organizations had reported that almost all of the lads didn’t seem to have legal information.

Administration officers dismissed the stories, saying that most of the deportees had been identified human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outdoors of the U.S. The actual fact they hadn’t dedicated crimes in the USA, they mentioned, didn’t imply they weren’t a risk to public security.

To look at these claims, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a workforce of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Insurgent Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Faux Information Hunters) launched an exhaustive investigation of the backgrounds of the 238 males on the listing of detainees first printed by CBS. Final week, we printed a first-of-its-kind database that highlights our findings, together with the actual fact the Trump administration knew a minimum of 197 of the lads had no criminal convictions within the U.S. Nearly half the men had open immigration cases when they were deported, and a minimum of 166 have tattoos, which consultants have advised us are usually not an indicator of gang membership.

When requested for remark for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White Home spokesperson, known as ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent legal unlawful aliens who by no means belonged in the USA.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our nation.”

A Division of Homeland Safety spokesperson echoed the White Home’s declare. “As soon as once more, the media is falling throughout themselves to defend legal unlawful gang members,” the spokesperson mentioned in a press release. “We hear far an excessive amount of about gang members and criminals’ false sob tales and never sufficient about their victims.”

The truth that border encounters have plummeted to file lows after reaching file highs in the course of the Biden presidency means that the administration’s efforts are having the impact that Trump meant. After what occurred to him, Colmenares mentioned he didn’t suppose migrating to the U.S. was protected anymore.

He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela earlier than setting off for the U.S. He adopted the principles and received an appointment to strategy the U.S.-Mexico border final October, as had greater than 50 of the lads. On the appointment, Colmenares mentioned an agent pulled him apart to take footage of his many tattoos — then detained him. He by no means set foot within the U.S. as a free man.

“The nation with the Statue of Liberty disadvantaged us of our liberty with none type of proof,” he mentioned in an interview two days after he was returned to his household. “Who’s going to go to the border now, understanding that they are going to seize you and put you in a jail the place they are going to kill you?”

The lads we interviewed mentioned the fear they felt in El Salvador started virtually instantly upon arrival.

Salvadoran police boarded the planes and commenced forcing the shackled males off — shoving them, throwing them to the bottom, hitting them with their batons. 5 mentioned they noticed flight attendants crying on the sight.

“This can train you to not enter our nation illegally,” Colmenares mentioned one ICE official advised him in Spanish. He wished to elucidate that wasn’t true in his case however may inform there was no level. He received off the aircraft and was loaded onto a bus to jail.

As soon as inside, guards stripped them all the way down to white boxers and sandals. Those that tried to refuse to have their heads shaved had been overwhelmed. Blanco mentioned he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was advised: head down, physique limp.

They had been loaded up once more on the buses and brought to a different a part of the compound. Blanco mentioned the shackles had been so tight that he couldn’t stroll as quick because the guards wished, so that they beat him till he handed out and dragged him the remainder of the best way. Inside, they dropped him so laborious that his head banged on the ground. As he opened his eyes and noticed the guards, brilliant lights and polished concrete flooring, he requested: “God, why am I right here? Why?”

The lads mentioned beatings by the guards had been random, extreme and fixed. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them whereas sporting heavy work boots and shot them at shut vary with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to mentioned he suspects he can have an enduring harm from a tough kick to the groin.

Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate throughout himself after a very extreme beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “actual males.”

Simply as vicious, the lads mentioned, was the psychological abuse. They misplaced monitor of the times as a result of they had been by no means allowed outdoor. Blanco mentioned that every time he requested a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you need to know what time it’s? Have someplace to be? Is somebody ready for you?”

Again and again, the lads mentioned, the guards known as them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They mentioned the guards advised them so typically that they had been nobodies and that nobody, not even their households, cared about them that some began to imagine it.

The lads mentioned they waged a minimum of two dayslong starvation strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they had been fed most days, to demand an finish to the abuses and a proof for why they had been in jail. “They advised us nothing about how the method was going, what was going to occur to us, once we had been going to see a choose, once we had been going to see an legal professional,” Ramos mentioned.

A number of of these interviewed mentioned suicide crossed their minds. Ramos mentioned he thought: “I’d quite die or kill myself than to maintain dwelling via this expertise. Being woken up day-after-day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and overwhelmed. For desirous to bathe, for asking for one thing so primary. … Listening to your brothers getting overwhelmed, crying for assist.”

4 talked a couple of man who began reducing himself and writing messages on the partitions and sheets together with his blood: “Cease hitting us.” “We’re fathers.” “We’re brothers.” “We’re harmless individuals.”

A few of them grew to become associates. They made enjoying playing cards out of juice containers and soaked tortillas in water and formed the cornmeal into cube. They talked about their households and puzzled if anybody knew the place they had been. They prayed.

About three and a half months into their detention, the lads mentioned they observed a change within the guards and within the circumstances within the facility. They had been overwhelmed much less regularly and fewer severely. They got ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They had been advised to shave and bathe. And a psychologist got here in to judge them.

Then, someday after midnight on July 18, guards started banging their batons on the bars of the lads’s cells. “Everybody take a bathe,” they yelled.

This time, when Blanco requested for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.

Photographers and reporters had been allowed into the ability. Blanco puzzled whether or not he was about to be part of a publicity stunt. He advised himself he wouldn’t give them what they wished. No smiles for the digicam.

Then, a high Salvadoran official walked in. “You’re leaving.”

In a quick telephone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vp, denied any mistreatment and pointed to movies of the lads wanting unscathed as they left the jail as proof they had been in fine condition. He declined to touch upon what position, if any, the U.S. had performed in what occurred to the lads whereas they had been in El Salvador. Nonetheless, in line with court records, the Salvadoran authorities beforehand advised the United Nations that whereas it was bodily holding the lads, they remained beneath U.S. jurisdiction.

The Trump administration pledged hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to El Salvador to carry the deportees in CECOT.

Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Division, mentioned the U.S. will not be accountable for the circumstances of the lads’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the lads have returned to Venezuela, she mentioned, “the USA will not be concerned within the dialog.”

Throughout his months in CECOT, Ramos mentioned he discovered solace within the Bible, the one e book accessible. He mentioned he felt notably drawn to the E book of Job, a rich man whom God examined with loss and ache. Regardless of his losses, Ramos mentioned, Job “by no means denied God.” He mentioned Job “had lots of religion.”

That’s how Ramos, a former phone technician, noticed his time in El Salvador: a divine take a look at that he’d overcome with religion. The seven lengthy months it had taken him emigrate from Venezuela to the USA — which concerned strolling via the treacherous Darién jungle — appeared simple by comparability.

As quickly as his household and neighbors received phrase that he was on his means residence to Guatire, simply outdoors Caracas, they cobbled collectively $20 to assist his mom, Lina Ramos, enhance the home and make a meal of rooster and rice with plantains.

Realizing that his mom had marched and fought for his launch, that nobody had forgotten him and the opposite males who’d been detained with him, he mentioned, “was one of the best reward we may have gotten.”

However the results of what he went via nonetheless linger. Now, when he tries to learn the Bible, he mentioned, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was attributable to a selected beating, one in every of many, the place guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to wash outdoors of the designated time. He mentioned he has no cash for the time being to see a physician. He arrived residence with nothing however the garments he was sporting.

He’s positive he’ll work one thing out, although. He has religion.