Source: Washington Post
By Teo Armus, Samantha Schmidt, Helena Carpio and Arelis R. Hernández
Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.
Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.
“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.
When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b-----s,” a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.
The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.
Many of the former detainees began to reunite with their families in hometowns across Venezuela — communities that in some cases they left years ago. After 125 days denied contact with the outside world, some began to share details of their treatment.
“I practically felt like an animal,” González said by telephone from his parents’ home. “The officials treated us like we were the most dangerous criminals on Earth. … They shaved our heads, they would insult us, they would take us around like dogs.”
The Post was unable to confirm the three men’s accounts independently. In several details, they matched the account given by lawyers for Kilmar Abrego García, the longtime Maryland resident who was removed from the U.S. in March and returned this month under federal court order.
Asked to respond to some of the allegations in the accounts, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. had deported “nearly 300 Tren de Aragua and MS-13 terrorists” to CECOT, “where they no longer pose a threat to the American people.”
“Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The three men denied any gang affiliations. Neither the U.S. nor El Salvador has provided evidence that they are gang members.
A Salvadoran communications official did not respond to a request for comment.
When the three men first arrived at CECOT, they said they were told to run, hunched over without looking up, the shackles so tight that Suárez said he could hardly bear it. He saw some of the other detainees’ blood on the floor. They were pushed close together, kneeling on the floor. A man who identified himself as the prison director addressed them all as gang members and terrorists, Blanco and Suárez said.
“This is hell,” Suárez recalled the prison director saying, “and you’re never going to get out.”
At CECOT, the detainees said, Venezuelans were held in cells of nine to 15 people with metal benches for beds — thin mattresses were brought in for photographs and then taken away — and water buckets for drinking and bathing. “It looked like a cage,” González said.
On the first day, Blanco vomited and had no way to clean his shirt for several days, he said. Eventually the detainees said they were given soap and toothpaste, but not regularly.
It was uncomfortably hot during the day, González said, and frigid at night. The cells reeked of urine and sewage, Blanco said.
The detainees were awakened at 4 a.m. and given time to wash themselves, González said. If they were seen cleaning themselves with the bucket outside of showering hours, he said, they were taken to a dark cell for punishments, where they would be shackled to a chair and hit with a stick. Blanco recalled hearing the screams from down the hallway.
An attempted hunger strike in April made conditions worse, González said. Guards fired rubber bullets and plastic pellets at some detainees. When they asked for a lawyer, he said, guards told them: “That word doesn’t exist here.”
At one point, the detainees used sharp iron pipes to cut themselves and write messages in their blood on white sheets as an act of protest, Suárez said. “We are not terrorists,” the messages read. “We are migrants.”
They were served meals of tortillas and beans three times a day, González said. Blanco said the food was the only relief in his day; detainees would occasionally be given pancakes for breakfast or hamburgers for lunch, he said. There is no outdoor space for recreation in CECOT and only certain corner cells have access to the sun, Suárez said.
“With time we all lost our fear because we were practically dead people living,” Blanco said. “We felt dead.”
Few people have left CECOT, and fewer have spoken publicly about their experiences there. Bukele opened the high-security megaprison outside San Salvador in 2023 to incarcerate top-level gang members.
Abrego is one such survivor. The El Salvador native, now in U.S. custody, remains at the center of a court fight with the Trump administration. In a court filing this month, his lawyers said he and other detainees were severely beaten and forced to kneel for nine straight hours upon their arrival.
The Trump administration accused the Venezuelans it sent to CECOT of being members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. But a Post review found that many of the migrants the administration removed had entered the United States legally and were complying with U.S. immigration rules. At least two were approved by the State Department to resettle in the country as refugees; at least four had protections against removal through temporary protected status. Abrego was protected from deportation by a court order.
As a teenager, González was a professional baseball prospect who attended player development academies and played on elite teams in Venezuela, his family said.
Unable as an adult to find work in Venezuela, he said, he traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border, waited months for an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and entered the U.S. legally in April 2023. But as soon as he set foot on U.S. soil, he said, he was accused of affiliation with Tren de Aragua and detained.
He was held for a year. He had no criminal record in any of the four countries where he’d lived and worked, he said.
ICE released González to his sponsor in 2024. He cleaned offices and painted buildings while wearing an ankle monitor and conducting regular check-ins with ICE. He applied for asylum, withdrew and then was unable to reopen his case, according to his family and records. Then he applied for temporary protected status.
He had not yet received an answer when he checked in with ICE in Tampa in October. He was detained again and signed documents agreeing to be deported back to Venezuela. His parents expected him home on March 13, but the flight never took off. Bad weather grounded his plane on March 14.
González told his parents U.S. officials had said he’d be in Venezuela the next day.
“He relayed a message to me saying we would see each other soon,” said his mother, Nancy Troconis. “They lied to us.”
At 9 a.m. on March 15, González’s family lost contact with him. They later saw his name on a list of detainees deported to El Salvador.
One of the most painful parts of the experience, González said, was being robbed of his savings. While in U.S. custody, he said, he had hidden $6,400 in cash in his underwear. When he arrived at CECOT, he said, he was ordered to undress and put on the uniform the detainees would wear for the next four months: white sandals, socks and white boxers. He stripped, he said, and never saw the money again.
The detainees were never told their rights, González said, and never allowed to speak to a lawyer. Officials from the Red Cross came inside the prison twice and gave them the chance to handwrite letters to their families. In an attempt to learn information about what was happening outside the prison, Venezuelans would also exchange food with Salvadoran detainees and ask them what they were hearing, Blanco said.
In their final days at CECOT, the detainees noticed a shift, Blanco said. They were given haircuts, and provided with Head & Shoulders shampoo and Gillette razors. The rare luxuries served as clues that they might be leaving the prison soon.
“They played with our minds,” González said. “They tortured us mentally and physically. The whole thing is indescribable.”
