Over 200 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador under a controversial US agreement are being held without access to lawyers or the outside world, according to legal representatives and human rights groups.

The detainees, sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center in March as part of an immigration crackdown under former US President Donald Trump, have reportedly vanished into the prison system with no official record of their whereabouts or legal status.

Private attorneys, some contracted by the Venezuelan government and all funded by relatives, say they have filed dozens of habeas corpus petitions before El Salvador’s Supreme Court, demanding either formal charges or the immediate release of their clients. None have received a response.

"None of these people have committed a crime in El Salvador," said Jaime Ortega, director of the law firm Grupo Ortega, which represents at least 30 of the deportees. "If they are foreigners and people who have lived in other countries, why have they come here directly to a penitentiary center?"

Voicing the alarm

The Salvadoran presidency has not commented publicly on the situation. President Nayib Bukele was in Washington on Monday for meetings at the White House.

Rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Salvadoran NGO Cristosal, have condemned the detentions, saying the government is violating due process and international human rights standards. HRW noted that no official list of the Venezuelans held in the prison has been made available, and relatives have been left in the dark.

Cristosal is preparing more than 100 additional habeas corpus filings on behalf of the Venezuelans, though its director, Noah Bullock, expressed little confidence in the outcome.

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"We’ve filed over 7,200 unanswered habeas corpus petitions for Salvadorans arrested during the state of emergency," Bullock said.

Skyrocketing detention rates

Since 2022, Bukele’s government has operated under a sweeping state of emergency aimed at eliminating gang violence.

More than 2% of El Salvador’s adult population has been detained, and the murder rate has dropped significantly — but at a high cost, rights groups warn.

The US and other international observers have criticized Bukele for dismantling judicial independence, removing top judges and the attorney general, and enabling widespread arbitrary arrests, torture, and even deaths in custody.

The current crisis raises further concerns about El Salvador’s role in US immigration policy and its use of mass incarceration to enforce political agreements. For the families of the deported Venezuelans, the wait for answers continues.

Culprits in disappearances

The governments of the United States and El Salvador are forcing 200 Venezuelan nationals into disappearances and arbitrary detention, Human Rights Watch has revealed. 

The US deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador in mid-March, and they were promptly sent to the massive jail Center for Confinement of Terrorism (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, CECOT),  which is notorious for its harsh circumstances. 

The Venezuelans have since been kept incommunicado. Although CBS News released a leaked list of names, US and Salvadoran officials have yet to provide a list of those deported.

Relatives of victims who seemed to have been moved to El Salvador told Human Rights Watch that US authorities refused to give any information about their relatives' location, while Salvadoran officials were entirely unresponsive.

Human Rights Watch's Americas director, Juanita Goebertus, called the circumstances a "grave violation of international human rights law," underlining how "the cruelty of the US and Salvadoran governments has put these people outside the protection of the law and caused immense pain to their families."