Source: The New York Times (posted by CEPR, Center for Economic Policy and Research)
Julie Turkewitz, Tibisay Romero, Sheyla Urdaneta and Isayen Herrera. New York Times. November 8, 2025
They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours.
One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning.
Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.
They said they were told by officials that they would die in the Salvadoran prison, that the world had forgotten them.
When they could no longer take it, they said, they cut themselves, writing protest messages on sheets in blood.
“‘You are all terrorists,’” Edwin Meléndez, 30, recalled being told by officers who added: “‘Terrorists must be treated like this.’”
From the moment he took office, President Trump has seized on what he calls the threat posed by Venezuela and its autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, accusing the government and Venezuelan gangs of orchestrating an “invasion” of the United States.
In March and April, the Trump administration made the extraordinary decision to send 252 Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, saying they had infiltrated the United States in a form of “irregular warfare.”
Mr. Trump accused the men of being members of a dangerous gang, Tren de Aragua, working in lock step with the Venezuelan government. It was an early salvo in the administration’s standoff with Mr. Maduro, which has only intensified since then, with U.S. warships blowing up Venezuelan boats and Mr. Trump warning of potential military strikes on Venezuelan soil.
But the men received little to no due process before being expelled to the terrorism prison in El Salvador, and they were abruptly released in July, part of a larger diplomatic deal that included the release of 10 Americans and U.S. residents held in Venezuela.
Mr. Trump, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September, praised Salvadoran officials for “the successful and professional job they’ve done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country.”
In interviews, however, the men sent to the prison described frequent, intense physical and psychological abuse. Beyond the beatings, tear gas and trips to the isolation room, the men said they were mocked or ignored by medical personnel, forced to spend 24 hours a day under harsh lights and made to drink from wells of fetid water.
The New York Times interviewed 40 of the former prisoners, many at their homes in cities and towns across Venezuela. We then asked a group of independent forensic experts who help investigate torture allegations to assess the credibility of the men’s testimony.
Several doctors from that team, known as the Independent Forensic Expert Group, said the men’s testimonies, along with photographs of what they described as their injuries, were consistent and credible, providing “compelling evidence” to support accusations of torture. The group’s assessments in other cases have been used in courts around the world.
Luis Chacón, 26, from the Venezuelan state of Táchira, was one of several men who said the constant abuse at the prison led him to contemplate suicide. A father of three, he said he had been working as a driver for Uber Eats in Milwaukee before being detained and expelled to the prison. His low point there came in June, he said, on the day of his oldest child’s seventh birthday.
“We had heard that if there was a person who died among us that they would let us all go,” he said. He thought maybe he should be that person: He climbed on a bunk bed, he said, and tried to hang himself with a sheet.
The other men, he said, pulled him down.
The forensic experts said that they were struck by how similar the men’s allegations were. The former prisoners, each interviewed separately, described the same timeline and methods of abuse, with many of the same details.
When such “identical methods of abuse” are described by multiple people, the experts wrote in their assessment, it “often indicates the existence of an institutional policy and practice of torture.”
Presented with the men’s accusations and the experts’ findings, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said: “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”
Ms. Jackson added that reporters should focus on American children who “have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens,” without providing details.
Representatives for President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador did not respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration never released a complete list of the 252 Venezuelan men imprisoned in El Salvador or the crimes it claimed they had committed.
Using a leaked list of the names, The Times found that a relatively small share of the men — about 13 percent — seemed to have a serious criminal accusation or conviction in some part of the world. (The Times searched multiple public records databases, but the American government may have more information that it has not released.)
Of the 40 men interviewed for this article, The Times found criminal accusations, beyond immigration and traffic offenses, against three of them.
Victor Ortega, 25, who said he was shot in the head with a rubber bullet while in the Salvadoran prison, has “pending charges for discharge of a firearm and theft,” according to the Trump administration.
A second man we interviewed, Neiyerver Leon, 27, had a misdemeanor charge for possession of drug paraphernalia and was fined.
In addition, public records in the United States indicate that Mr. Chacón, the man who said he had contemplated suicide in prison, had been arrested in 2024 on a domestic violence charge, and was accused this year of retail theft at a Walmart. (The domestic violence case was dismissed, according to public records, and Mr. Chacón was sent to El Salvador before the theft case could play out.)
Many of the men say they still don’t know why they were put in a prison for terrorists.
“I migrated so that I could buy a house, give my daughter a better education, the one I didn’t have,” said Mervin Yamarte, 29. “And it all went wrong.”
‘Welcome to Hell’
A swarm of helicopters surrounded the airport. It was just after midnight on March 16, 2025. As the aircraft descended, the Venezuelan men said they saw a phalanx of officers in riot gear awaiting them.
A sign identified their landing place as El Salvador.
At detention facilities in the United States, U.S. officials had told them they were being deported back to Venezuela, the detainees recalled. On a stopover in Honduras, they had been given pizza. Now, a Salvadoran official was boarding the plane.
“You’re staying here,” Ysqueibel Peñaloza, 25, recalled the official saying.
Panic swept down the aisles, he said. The men tightened their seatbelts, Mr. Peñaloza said, in a feeble attempt to prevent removal. The harsh tactics of El Salvador’s president were well known. Some men began to shout, he recalled, demanding to see a U.N. representative, a lawyer or a diplomat from their country.
Then Salvadoran officials, in body armor and carrying batons, boarded the plane, several men recalled, and began to remove the group by force.
“They started hitting us all,” said Andry Hernández, 32, a makeup artist who had been in U.S. detention since crossing into the United States in 2024. “If you raised your head even a little they would knock it down with a blow. Many of our companions had broken noses, split lips, bruises on their bodies.”
Officers bent the handcuffed men at the waist, dragging them off the plane and pushing them onto buses, they said. Cameras rolled. Hours later, Mr. Bukele posted a video of the arrival, packaged with music and drone shots like an action film. Within three days it had been viewed nearly 39 million times.
“We continue advancing in the fight against organized crime,” Mr. Bukele wrote on X, when he posted the video. “But this time, we are also helping our allies.”
Inside the prison, the men said, they were told they were members of Tren de Aragua.
“‘Welcome to hell,’” Anyelo Sarabia, 20, recalled being told upon arrival. “‘From here you’ll leave only in a body bag.’”
To send the men to prison in El Salvador, Mr. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a sweeping, rarely used 18th-century law that allows for the expulsion of people from an invading nation.
It wasn’t entirely clear at the time, but it was a first step in a larger case the Trump administration has been making: that Mr. Maduro, Venezuela’s president, poses a major security threat to the United States by flooding it with migrants, crime and drugs.
U.S. officials “told us they were going to bring us back to our country,” said Maikel Moreno, 20. “They tricked us and brought us to El Salvador.”
Many of the men held in the Salvadoran prison said that, far from working with Mr. Maduro, they had been fleeing his government when they migrated north.
The autocrat has overseen a devastating economic crisis and held on for over a decade through brutal repression and vote rigging. His government retains its own torture centers, according to the United Nations and others, and often seeks to discredit political enemies by branding them as “terrorists.”
In fact, some of the men shipped to El Salvador had sought political asylum in the United States, claiming they would be persecuted for taking part in protests against Mr. Maduro, according to applications reviewed by The Times.
Life on the Inside
Cut off from the world, the men began to adjust to their new lives. Officials divided them into cells, usually 10 people in each, they said. Meals, three times a day, consisted mostly of rice, beans, spaghetti and tortillas.
They said they occasionally received special treatment, like better food and brief moments outdoors, but only when they had rare, official visitors, including Kristi Noem, head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The prisoners said they were never allowed visits from lawyers or relatives.
In one cell, they used soap to etch a calendar into a metal bed frame, recalled Carlos Cañizalez, 25. Some of the men began saving their tortillas and molding them into dominoes, playing games to distract themselves.
Desperation grew, they said. Tito Martínez, 26, began to feel sick and weak, until he could not get out of bed and other men had to feed him, several recalled. Eventually, Mr. Martínez was taken to an infirmary, where he said he was beaten in front of medical personnel.
There, he said, a woman who identified herself as a doctor told him: “‘Resign yourself. It’s time for you to die.’”
When he arrived at the prison, Aldo Colmenarez, a 41-year-old diabetic, according to a Venezuelan doctor’s report, asked officials for insulin, he said. It was five days before they gave it to him, he explained. After that, dosage and application were erratic, said several of the men, leading to episodes of hypoglycemia that left Mr. Colmenarez cold, sweaty and unconscious.
Punishment often felt random and disproportionate, the men said. Bathing was allowed only at 4 a.m. Men who splashed water on themselves to stay cool at other times were sent to the island, the former prisoners said, recounting a dark isolation room with just a pinhole of light in the ceiling, where they were beaten by several guards at a time.
Many of the men described being placed in a “crane” position, in which guards made them kneel with their hands cuffed behind their backs, then lifted them by the arms.
Tensions grew in April. After a few men asked one of the guards, an officer who used the alias Satan, to stop banging cell bars at night, the guards dragged them into a central area and released tear gas in their faces, said two men who were in a nearby cell, Andy Perozo, 30, and Maikel Moreno, 20.
Another of the inmates, Andrys Cedeño, 23, began to convulse.
“Boss,” he said he cried, “I’m asthmatic.”
What the guard did, he said, “was laugh.”
Mr. Cedeño then grew limp and unresponsive. The men who could see the attack said they thought that he had died.
Scared and angry, the prisoners threw soap bars and cups of water, they recalled. The next day, they resolved to stop eating, demanding better treatment.
Then they began to slice their bodies with the rough edges of metal bed ladders and plastic pipes, said several men, using blood to write messages on sheets they hung from the plumbing.
“We’re not criminals, we’re migrants,” said one message, according to several of the men, including Edicson Quintero, 28, who said he cut his abdomen to draw blood for a protest sign.
The hunger strike lasted four days, the men said. Afterward, Andry Hernández, the makeup artist, said officers sent him to the isolation room. There, guards in hoods forced him to crouch and perform oral sex, he said.
“They passed the baton over my parts,” he recalled, “they put the baton through my legs and raised it, they groped me, they touched me, and I just screamed.”
He later described the experience to several cellmates.
In May, a guard search of one of the cells turned violent, many of the prisoners recalled, and some of the men, enraged and desperate, began dislodging metal parts from their beds and using them to break the locks on cell doors.
Briefly, gates swung open.
Officers responded with guns and what the prisoners described as rubber bullets.
“When the first guy was hit we ran back into the cell,” recalled Edwuar Hernández, 23. “They began to shoot at us point blank, from the bars toward the inside.”
Mr. Ortega said he was hit with a projectile that ricocheted off his forehead, making him bleed profusely. Luis Rodríguez, 26, said a shot tore into his hand. José Carmona, 28, was hit in the thigh, he said.
After this attempt at a rebellion, officials forced many of the men to the island, including Mr. Chacón.
There, he said, “they put our heads inside a tank as if to drown us, and they took our heads out again and hit us on the ribs, on the legs, with whatever they could find.”
A Secret Deal
Far from the prison, diplomats from the United States and Venezuela were hashing out a deal that would determine the prisoners’ fates.
Mr. Maduro had spent the last year imprisoning U.S. citizens and permanent residents in an effort to gain leverage over Washington. In July, he agreed to release 10 of them, along with 80 Venezuelan political prisoners, in exchange for the 252 men imprisoned in El Salvador.
In the weeks before the release, the men said, some of the abuse subsided.
Eventually, guards arrived with Head & Shoulders shampoo, Speed Stick deodorant and Colgate toothpaste, the men recalled, and they were shaved and their hair was cut.
Then the prison director appeared.
“You have 20 minutes to bathe,” he told them, according to Jerce Reyes, 36.
“We all started screaming and crying,” he said, “because we knew we were leaving.”
Mr. Maduro, who many Venezuelans blamed for their exile, now had the opportunity to portray himself as a champion for migrants rejected by Mr. Trump.
When they touched down in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, the men were met by the country’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, who had become the face of the country’s surveillance and repression apparatus. They were held for several days, made to tell their stories on state television, and then sent home.
In some cases, officials from the country’s feared intelligence service escorted them to their doorsteps.
Of the 252 men, seven had serious criminal histories in Venezuela, Mr. Cabello claimed on television, saying his government had detained 20 who were “wanted” by the government, without explaining further.
In September, a U.S. federal appeals court blocked the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants. But the ruling does not prevent the government from using other lawful means to remove people from the United States, meaning Mr. Trump could send more people to prison in El Salvador.
In the interviews, the freed prisoners reported ongoing physical and mental health problems, which they attributed to the beatings and other abuse: blurred vision; recurring migraines; trouble breathing; shoulder, back and knee pain some linked to the “crane” position; nightmares; insomnia. Some have seen doctors, but many said they could not afford to.
Mr. Cedeño, 23, the man with asthma, has been hospitalized twice since returning to Venezuela, he said, once after an asthma attack left him unconscious, and another after a heart attack, according to an October doctor’s report.
At night, he doesn’t sleep, he said, haunted by the rattle of handcuffs, the voices of Salvadoran officials and the clang of cell doors.
