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      Venezuelans deported by Trump are victims of ‘torture’, lawyers allege

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      Lawyers for 252 Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration and imprisoned in El Salvador for two months have alleged that the migrants are victims of physical and emotional “torture”.A law firm hired by the Venezuelan government said that it had been unable to visit the migrants in the mega-prison where they are locked up.The lawyers are seeking “proof of life”, but say they have come up against a wall of silence from President Nayib Bukele’s administration and the Central American nation’s justice system.Grupo Ortega filed a habeas corpus petition with the supreme court on 24 March seeking an end to what it calls the “illegal detention” of the Venezuelans, but is still waiting for a ruling.“They are treating them like common criminals,” lawyer Salvador Ríos said, after the migrants were shown dressed in prison clothing, shackled and with shaved heads.“This is torture,” both physically and psychologically, Rios said in an interview with AFP.The lawyers delivered a letter in early May to Bukele, a key ally of Donald Trump, requesting authorization to visit the Venezuelans, but so far without success.AFP sought a comment from the Salvadorian presidency about the case and the lawyers’ efforts, but has not received a response.Félix Ulloa, the Salvadorian vice-president, told the French media outlet Le Grand Continent that his government merely provides a “service that we could call prison accommodation”.Trump’s administration has paid Bukele’s government millions of dollars to lock up migrants it says are criminals and gang members.Trump invoked rarely used wartime legislation in March to fly migrants to El Salvador without any court hearing, alleging they belonged to the Tren de Aragua gang, a charge that their families and lawyers deny.The Venezuelans, as well as 36 deported Salvadorian migrants, are being held in a maximum-security prison built by Bukele to house thousands of suspects arrested during his sweeping crackdown on street gangs.Images of the Venezuelans entering the Cecot mega-prison in shackles illustrate the brutality, Ríos said.“The damage is not only physical, but also psychological,” Ríos said.In their letter to Bukele, the lawyers sought permission to interview the prisoners, either in person or virtually, which could serve as “proof of life”.They asked Bukele to release the list of the 252 Venezuelans, something that Washington has not done either.One Salvadorian migrant who was initially incarcerated in Cecot – but in April was moved to a prison farm – is Kilmar Ábrego García, a US resident deported due to what the United States itself admitted was an administrative error.A Venezuelan identified in US court documents as “Cristian” was also mistakenly expelled.In both cases, US judges unsuccessfully ordered the Trump administration to facilitate their return to the United States.Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, said this week that the situation “raises serious concerns regarding a wide array of rights that are fundamental to both US and international law”.“Families we have spoken to have expressed a sense of complete powerlessness in the face of what has happened and their pain at seeing their relatives labelled and handled as violent criminals, even terrorists, without any court judgment as to validity of what is claimed against them,” he said in a statement.Isael Guerrero, another lawyer with Grupo Ortega, described the detentions as “completely illegal” because the Venezuelans “are not being legally prosecuted in any court” in El Salvador.The firm’s head, Jaime Ortega, said they were “100% migrants”.“Not a single one of them is being prosecuted” in the United States for their alleged membership of the Tren de Aragua gang, he said.The fate of the Venezuelans now depends entirely on Bukele, as “the expulsion completely nullifies US jurisdiction”, Ortega said.In April, Bukele offered to trade the 252 Venezuelans for an equal number of political prisoners held by President Nicolás Maduro’s government. More

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      This pregnant woman sued Trump over birthright citizenship. Now it’s up to the supreme court

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      With the highest court in the US poised to hear her case – and decide her family’s future – Monica was keeping busy babyproofing her house.Monica is a plaintiff in one of three lawsuits challenging Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order, a case that is being heard before the nation’s highest court on Thursday. She’s expecting her first child in early August.The Guardian first spoke with her in January, not long after Trump took office and signed an executive order seeking to end the constitutionally recognized right of birthright citizenship. Since then, she said, her belly has grown bigger, her feet more swollen. And she is still waiting to see whether her baby will be born as a citizen, or stateless.“We can only wait and hope,” she said. “Let’s wait in faith and trust in the laws of this country.”The Guardian is not publishing Monica’s surname, to protect her from retribution. She and her husband fled political persecution in Venezuela in 2019, and came to the US seeking asylum. The couple had been waiting for their immigration court hearing when they found out, in early January, that Monica was pregnant.“We were so excited,” she said. Just two weeks later, news of Trump’s executive order landed like a blow. Acquiring Venezuelan citizenship for their child would be impossible – both Monica and her husband were outspoken critics of their country’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro – and contacting the government could put them in danger.“I had to fight for my baby,” she said.She had been a member of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (Asap), a non-profit group that advocates for immigrant rights, and when lawyers from the group reached out to expecting parents to see if any would like to join a lawsuit challenging Trump’s order, Monica felt compelled to respond.Two immigration advocacy groups, Asap and Casa, are named as plaintiffs alongside Monica and four other mothers in one of three cases challenging the executive order. A second case was filed by four states and pregnant women, and a third by 18 states, the District of Columbia and San Francisco. The supreme court is hearing these cases consolidated as one.Other than her mother and a few close relatives, nobody knows that she is involved in one of the most closely watched cases to come before the supreme court this year. She has concealed her identity and tried to maintain a low profile, to avoid biasing her family’s asylum case, and to protect her family in Venezuela.But the topic of birthright citizenship and the administration’s intention to end it often comes up in her conversations with friends – especially with immigrant mothers who, like her, worry about their babies’ futures. “We are all on standby,” she said.They worry, too, about news that mothers are being separated from their babies – or being deported alongside their children. “Every day there are new changes, there are new executive orders about us immigrants,” she said. “Every day there is more fear in immigration conditions.”In the meantime, she said, there’s nothing to do but focus on the day to day. Monica and her husband have kept busy getting their home baby-ready, purchasing and assembling cribs and car seats. Now that she’s in her third trimester, she’s packed a go-bag with a change of clothes and other essentials – ready in case she needs to rush to the hospital. “We’re really down to the last few weeks already,” she said.Recently, they settled on a name. More

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      Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Venezuelan Deportations to Resume

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      The solicitor general contended that a group of migrants had barricaded themselves inside a Texas detention center and threatened to take hostages.The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday evening for permission to deport a group of nearly 200 Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members and detained in Texas.In a filing to the court, the administration contended that “serious difficulties have arisen” from the detention of the group of 176 migrants, who were shielded from deportation in an emergency overnight ruling by the court in mid-April.According to a declaration by a Homeland Security Department official included in the court filing, a group of 23 migrants had barricaded themselves inside a housing unit for several hours on April 26. The group threatened to take hostages and harm immigration officers, and tried to flood the unit by clogging the toilets, according to the filing.“The government has a strong interest in promptly removing from the country” gang members “who pose a danger to ICE officers, facility staff and other detainees while in detention,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the court filing.The details of the episode, which had not been previously reported, occurred at the Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Texas, where migrants “barricaded the entrance doors of their housing unit using bed cots, blocked the windows and covered surveillance cameras,” according to a declaration by Joshua D. Johnson, a Homeland Security official and the acting director of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement’s Dallas Field Office.The group then “threatened to take hostages” and to “injure” ICE officers and facility staff members, and “remained barricaded in the housing unit for several hours,” Mr. Johnson said in the declaration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Federal Judge Casts Doubt on Trump Arguments in Venezuelan Migrants Case

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      The judge pressed a lawyer for the Justice Department on the government’s role and responsibilities in the men’s deportation and incarceration in El Salvador.A federal judge on Wednesday night expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s reasons to avoid seeking the return of scores of Venezuelan immigrants who had been expelled to El Salvador in March, saying he was inclined to order officials to provide more information on the arrangement between the American and Salvadoran governments.The questions raised by the judge, James E. Boasberg, came at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, where lawyers for the deported men claimed that because the administration had sent them to a prison in El Salvador under an apparent agreement with the Salvadoran government, it should be responsible for facilitating their return to U.S. soil.Over the past several weeks, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union have secured orders from judges in several courts across the country stopping the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to summarily deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a terrorism prison in El Salvador.But at least so far, the lawyers have not been able to protect about 140 Venezuelan migrants who are already in Salvadoran custody after the United States sent them on charter flights under the act on March 15.The hearing in Washington on Wednesday night was held in part to debate two crucial issues: what role the Trump administration played in having the men detained in the Salvadoran prison in the first place, and whether officials could be held accountable for bringing them back to the United States.In seeking to answer the first of those questions, Judge Boasberg pressed a Justice Department lawyer about a recent statement by President Trump concerning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in the same set of flights as the Venezuelan migrants.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Identity of second man illegally deported to El Salvador prison revealed

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      The identity of a second man illegally deported from the US by the Trump administration in defiance of a court order and now in detention in El Salvador has been revealed.Daniel Lozano-Camargo, a 20-year-old Venezuelan, was deported to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot terrorism confinement facility in March under the White House’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, Politico reported.His deportation came after authorities declared him, along with about 240 other men, to be a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the US government has defined as a terrorist organization. Lozano-Camargo’s family members deny that he has gang affiliations.Politico revealed Lozano-Camargo’s identity after a Maryland judge last month ruled that the Trump administration had improperly removed him in violation of a 2024 legal settlement that forbade immigration authorities from deporting him while his application for asylum was pending.The judge, Stephanie Gallagher, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, ordered officials to “facilitate” Lozano-Camargo’s return to the US. So far, the administration has not complied.He is reported to have entered the US in 2022 as an asylum seeker, initially spending time in a facility for underage migrants until he turned 18.According to Politico, he was subsequently twice arrested for possession of cocaine, most recently last November, and was sentenced in January to 120 days in prison. It was from there that he was transferred to the custody of the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement authority (Ice), which filed an application for his detention, claiming that he was in the country illegally.In her ruling, Gallagher agreed with immigrant rights advocates that Lozano-Camargo should not have been deported until his asylum application was resolved. While withholding his identity by referring to him only by a pseudonym, “Cristian”, she said he was “fleeing danger and threats in Venezuela”.Politico said Lozano-Camargo’s identity was disclosed in metadata embedded in government court filings.A justice department court filing released on Monday disputed the judge’s assessment, saying he belonged to “a violent terrorist gang”, thus disqualifying him from asylum in the US. Bringing him back to the US “would no longer serve any legal or practical purpose”, justice department lawyers wrote.Gallagher was due to further rule on the matter in a Baltimore court on Tuesday.Lozano-Camargo’s case resembles that of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador in March despite a previous court order issued in 2019 establishing that he had protected status because he was at risk of violence if he was returned to the country of his origin. Ábrego García is Salvadorian by birth. The US government, which has claimed that he is a member of the MS-13 gang – something Ábrego García denies – admitted that he had been deported by mistake but has defied court orders to return him to the US.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionÁbrego García was removed from the US on the same set of flights as Lozano-Camargo but has been transferred from Cecot to another facility because of the international publicity surrounding his case.Lozano-Camargo’s family has tried to draw attention to his plight in social media posts. His mother, Daniela, has proclaimed his innocence in a tearful Facebook video.Possessing a valid work permit, he is said to have been living in Houston and washing cars for a living before his detention.His deportation was among those highlighted by the Guardian in March, amid speculation that he was one of hundreds of Venezuelans singled out for removal on the basis of their tattoos, which authorities claimed identified them as members of Tren de Aragua.Lozano-Camargo is said to have several tattoos, including one bearing the name of his father – who died when he was a child. Critics say Tren de Aragua members do not use tattoos to advertise their membership of the gang. More

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      Rwanda in Talks With Trump Administration to Take in Migrants Deported From U.S.

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      Discussions with the Central African country come as the Trump administration looks for more countries willing to accept deportees as part of a sweeping crackdown.Rwanda is in talks with the Trump administration to take in migrants deported from the United States, the central African nation’s foreign minister said late Sunday. It was unclear if a deal would involve migrants who had already been deported or those who will be in the future, but any deal would potentially make Rwanda the first African country to enter into such an agreement with the United States.Rwanda’s foreign minister, Olivier J.P. Nduhungirehe, said on Sunday that his country’s government was in “early stage” talks about receiving third-country deportees from the United States.“It is true that we are in discussions with the United States,” Mr. Nduhungirehe said in an interview with Rwanda TV, the state broadcaster. “These talks are still ongoing, and it would be premature to conclude how they will unfold,” he added.Rwanda’s government did not respond to a request for comment. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Rwanda has long positioned itself as a partner to Western nations seeking to curb migration, offering to provide asylum to migrants or house them as they await resettlement elsewhere, sometimes in return for payment. Mr. Nduhungirehe did not say whether Rwanda would be paid as part of any U.S. agreement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘He’s just a kid’: the Maryland teenager swept into Trump immigration dragnet

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      When 19-year-old Javier Salazar was loaded on to a bus from an immigrant detention center in northern Texas, he had no idea where he was being taken.He wondered if he was being transferred to another facility or maybe deported back to his native Venezuela. He and the other passengers, their hands and feet shackled, settled into a tense silence. Then a terrifying possibility crept into Salazar’s mind.“My fear was being sent to El Salvador,” he said, to the brutal prison where the Trump administration has dispatched more than 200 Venezuelans into a legal black hole. They are accused of being violent gang members, but reportedly on flimsy evidence for most, deported without even a court hearing.Salazar became stressed “because we’d been listening to the news and the other people at the facility”, he said in a telephone interview from detention.His and other buses in the convoy from the remote Bluebonnet facility pulled over on the side of the road for an unexplained 15 minutes then drove on to Abilene regional airport, about 200 miles west of Dallas. Salazar recognized it as where he landed a few days earlier from detention in Farmville, Virginia, where he had been for about a month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrested him and his father in neighboring Maryland.But once they arrived at the airport in Abilene, the buses abruptly turned around. On the way back to Bluebonnet, a guard told them to be thankful to God, Salazar said. Later he found out the likely reason why. An emergency order in the early hours from the supreme court had temporarily blocked their removal from the US, in the latest clash between Donald Trump and the courts.View image in fullscreen“I thank God that we weren’t sent to El Salvador, but I am still sad knowing that I am in this detention facility when I do not [even] have any tattoos [and have committed] no crimes,” Salazar said in a 25 April phone call, through an interpreter.He is being held in stark conditions, separately from his father, and unable to speak with his ailing mother, who lives in Colombia.Salazar’s case demonstrates that “if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail,” said his attorney, Travis Collins. Based on court documents, exclusive interviews with Salazar, his brother and his attorney, and a review of an 23 April phone conversation between the 19-year-old and his legal team, the Guardian has pieced together how Salazar was swept into the administration’s dragnet.Javier Salazar came to the US as an unaccompanied minor in 2022 and reunited with his father and some other relatives. The Guardian is using only his middle name, as he fears retaliation in Venezuela.His father had listed him as a beneficiary on his own US asylum application, where an unmarried offspring under 21 gains asylum if it is granted to the parent. Javier has no known criminal record, was at school and, per the justice department website, has an immigration court date in Virginia scheduled for 14 May, where Collins had planned to request Salazar’s release from Ice detention while his legal case progresses.But on an early mid-March morning, agents entered his father’s house in Maryland and took Salazar and his father away in handcuffs.Afterwards, scrolling through his social media on their phones, agents interrogated Salazar and asked him to identify various people in his network. Salazar saw one of the agents writing down in his notes something about a gun – an English word he recognized, he said.View image in fullscreenThe agents did not show him the image, but Salazar remembers insisting to them that whatever they saw was probably a toy water pistol. The Guardian has reviewed an image that Salazar’s family thinks Ice may have been referring to, it shows a person standing near Salazar with a blue-and-white item peeking out of a pants pocket that resembles a small plastic water pistol.Salazar was recorded in the authorities’ computer system as an alleged member of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal gang and was made to wear green prison clothing that signifies an alleged gangster, according to a court filing.Ice was approached by the Guardian for comment but did not respond before publication.Javier’s older brother Daniel described Salazar as the video game-obsessed “baby” of the family.“He’s just a kid, still in the process of growing up,” Daniel told the Guardian in Spanish. Daniel’s full name is being withheld as he has an open immigration case. “Like any human being, he deserves a chance,” he added.The family is in pain. “We miss him, my family, my aunts, my mom, what we do is cry,” Daniel said.He has been posting social media slideshows with photos and videos set to music of Javier making peace signs at the beach, doing bicep curls at the gym, horsing around in a school cafeteria, rolling up a snowball.“You are not a criminal, you are a human being with many dreams and goals, you do not deserve that injustice,” text on one of these slideshows reads in Spanish.On 7 April, the supreme court ruled that immigrants subject to the obscure Alien Enemies Act (AEA) wartime law Trump is using to justify summary deportations must be given due process and time to seek legal remedies “before such removal occurs”.A week later, attorneys heard murmurs that the Trump administration was preparing to ship more migrants to El Salvador. On 14 April, when a 9am video call with Salazar from detention in Virginia was abruptly cancelled via email at 7.11am, Collins knew something was wrong.He scrambled to figure out where his clients were, “fearing the worst”, he said. Only two days later did he learn that they were taken to northern Texas, which at that time was not subject to a court block on summary removals under the AEA.On 17 April, Bluebonnet staff separated Salazar from his father, took him outside and handed him a notice in English. They asked him to sign it without reading it to him in Spanish or giving him a chance to consult his lawyer. When he refused, the agent said: “It ‘doesn’t matter, you’re going to be deported within the next 48 hours. Where you’re being deported to, I don’t know,’” Salazar later recounted to Collins in the phone conversation reviewed by the Guardian.The next thing Salazar knew, he was on that bus. The supreme court order has now bought him some time, but the battle is far from over. In a court filing from 24 April, the administration said it believed a mere 12 to 24 hours was a “reasonable” amount of time for detainees to contest their removal – and that it may continue with removals even if such a petition is pending, if a court denies a request for an emergency pause.Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)’s Immigrants’ Rights Project vowed that his organization “will continue to fight in courts around the country, including the US supreme court, to ensure there is due process, so that no individual ends up, perhaps permanently, in a brutal foreign prison without ever having had a chance to contest the government’s allegations and use of a wartime authority during peacetime”, he told the Guardian.Salazar’s relatives grapple with their decision to seek refuge and opportunity in the US. Daniel had thought that “the process would have been fair” based on how America has been portrayed on television, he said.“I feel guilty because I told him to come so he could have a better life,” he said. “And look at what happened.” More

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      Timeline: How the Administration Deported Migrants Despite Judge’s Order

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      <!–> [–><!–>The New York Times reconstructed how the Trump administration and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador struck a deal that led to the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> –>The day before<!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Mr. Trump secretly signed an executive order invoking an 18th-century wartime law called […] More