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      Court Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Shuttering of Migrant Entry Program

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      A federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked the Trump administration on Monday from ending a signature Biden-era program that allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants from four troubled countries to enter the country and work legally.The administration moved in late March to shut down the program by April 24, which offered migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti temporary legal status in the United States. Judge Indira Talwani, of the Federal District Court in Boston, said the program’s termination put thousands of immigrants at imminent risk of deportation hearings once their legal status expires in less than two weeks.Judge Talwani blocked the wholesale shutdown of the program. Otherwise, she wrote in her ruling, the migrants would “be forced to choose between two injurious options: continue following the law and leave the country on their own, or await removal proceedings.”Immigrant advocates hailed the decision as a win for those worried about the imminent stripping of their status.“This ruling is a victory not just for our clients and those like them, but anyone who cherishes the freedom to welcome,” said Karen Tumlin, the director of the Justice Action Center, an immigrant advocacy group. “Our clients — and our class members — have done everything the government asked of them, and we’re gratified to see that the court will not allow the government to fail to uphold its side of the bargain.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The judge’s decision came as the Trump administration has moved to end legal protections for migrants from many countries, including by shutting down a program granting legal status to Afghan and Cameroonian migrants. A separate effort to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans in the United States was also blocked by a federal judge.The Biden-era program allowed more migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to fly into the United States and stay temporarily with access to work permits if they had a financial sponsor and passed security checks. They were allowed to stay for up to two years.More than 500,000 migrants entered the country under the program. Biden officials said it was part of an effort to deter migrants from those countries from crossing into the country illegally, and encourage a legal pathway instead.Trump officials, announcing the move to end the program last month, said the program added to immigration problems in the United States by granting some protections to “a substantial population of aliens in the interior of the United States without a clear path to a durable status.” More

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      Another Lawsuit, This Time in Colorado, Over Trump’s Use of the Alien Enemies Act

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      The American Civil Liberties Union filed another lawsuit on Monday seeking to stop the Trump administration from using a powerful wartime statute to deport to El Salvador immigrants from Venezuelan who have been accused of being violent gang members.The lawsuit, brought in Federal District Court in Colorado, was the third of its kind filed in recent days, joining similar legal challenges that were filed last week in Texas and New York.Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. brought the suit on behalf of two men — known in court papers only by the their initials, D.B.U. and R.M.M. The men claim they have been wrongly accused by the administration of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.Court papers say that D.B.U., 32, was arrested on Jan. 26 at a gathering that federal drug and immigration agents have repeatedly described as a Tren de Aragua party. After his arrest, the papers say, he denied being a member of the gang and has not been charged with any crime.Federal agents arrested R.M.M., 25, last month after they saw him standing with three other Hispanic men near their vehicles outside a residence in Colorado that was under surveillance as part of an investigation into Tren de Aragua, court papers said.R.M.M. has claimed that he had nothing to do with the gang and had gone to the location with friends “to meet a prospective buyer for his vehicle at a public meeting,” the papers said.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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      Case in Texas Could Shed More Light on Invocation of Alien Enemies Act

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      Immigration lawyers are reacting to the Supreme Court’s ruling, which declared that any legal challenges to the Trump administration’s plan to use a wartime statute to deport a group of Venezuelan migrants have to be filed where the men are being held.And as they scrambled to adjust on Tuesday, their efforts could be guided by a similar case that is underway in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas. It was filed last month by Daniel Zacarias Matos, a Venezuelan migrant who claimed that the administration tried to deport him — without a hearing or an order of removal — under President Trump’s recent proclamation invoking the wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act.In mid-March, Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who is handling the case, issued an order stopping Mr. Zacarias Matos from being deported until he could look deeper into the matter. His lawyers and lawyers for the Justice Department are expected to file dueling court papers this month laying out the details of what happened.While the facts in Mr. Zacarias Matos’s case do not line up exactly with those in the cases of the Venezuelan migrants directly affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling, they could shed light on some of those proceedings as they start to move forward, most likely one by one.According to court papers, Mr. Zacarias Matos came to the United States with his 8-year-old daughter in December 2023, seeking asylum from Venezuela. Federal immigration agents took him into custody in October at the El Paso County Jail after he was arrested on charges of violating the terms of his probation on two, now-dismissed misdemeanor charges, court papers show.Early last month, the papers say, Mr. Zacarias Matos was sent to the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, where the administration was holding scores of Venezuelan migrants they were planning to deport to a prison in El Salvador under the expansive powers of the Alien Enemies Act.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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      As deportations ramp up, immigrants increasingly fear Ice check-ins: ‘All bets are off’

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      Jorge, a 22-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela, reported in February to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Portland, Oregon, for what he figured would be a routine check-in. Instead, he was arrested and transferred to a detention center in another state.Alberto, a 42-year-old from Nicaragua who had been granted humanitarian parole, checked in with Ice using an electronic monitoring program that same month. Three days later, he was arrested.Sergei and Marina, a young couple from Russia with a pending asylum case, went into an immigration office in San Francisco in March, thinking they needed to update some paperwork. Agents arrested Sergei and told Marina to come back in a few weeks.For years, immigrants of all sorts with cases in process, pending appeals or parole, had been required to regularly check in with Ice officers. And so long as they had not violated any regulations or committed any crimes, they were usually sent on their way with little issue. Now, as the Trump administration pushes for the mass arrest and deportation of immigrants, these once routine check-ins have become increasingly fraught.Ice does not appear to keep count of how many people it has arrested at check-ins. But the Guardian estimates, based on arrest data from the first four weeks of the Trump administration, that about 1,400 arrests, or about 8% of the nearly 16,500 arrests in the administration’s first month – may have occurred during or right after people checked in with the agency.The Guardian reviewed cases in the arrest data, which was released by the Deportation Data Project from UC Berkeley Law School, where people who had previously been released on supervision were now arrested, as well as cases of people with pending immigration proceedings who were arrested in their communities. According to immigration lawyers, these types of arrests are most likely to match arrests that are occurring during or shortly after check-ins – though the actual number of cases may be higher.View image in fullscreen“Essentially, these people are low-hanging fruit for Ice,” said Laura Urias, a program director and attorney at the legal non-profit ImmDef. “It’s just very easy to arrest them.”Under the Biden administration, immigration officials had been instructed to prioritize detaining and expelling people who posed threats to public safety, and had criminal records. There were arrests during Ice check-ins during the Biden administration, too. A Guardian analysis found there were 821 arrests per month, on average, in 2024 that appeared to have occurred during or right after check-ins. But officials often used their discretion to allow immigrants who weren’t considered a priority for deportation to remain in their communities, on orders of recognizance or supervision.One of Donald Trump’s first actions after he was sworn in for his second term was to broaden Ice’s mandate – now all immigrants without legal status are prioritized for arrest, including those who have been checking in and cooperating with authorities.“Under this new administration, all bets are off,” said Stefania Ramos, an immigration lawyer based in Seattle. “So anyone with an Ice check-in appointment is frantic, looking for a lawyer, trying to figure out what they can do to protect themselves.”Attorneys and advocates cannot advise clients to skip check-ins because doing so would mean violating immigration regulations. And because these immigrants have been complying with Ice requirements, the agency knows their current home and work addresses. Many under Ice supervision had been ordered to wear ankle monitors or use facial recognition apps to check in – and allow the agency access to their real-time whereabouts.But lawyers are advising clients to prepare for the possibility that they could be detained at check-ins, and to bring someone, either a family member or an attorney, along with them.Jorge, the 22-year-old from Venezuela, had been checking in with Ice every three months while awaiting a court date to assess his asylum case. “Truly, I was never afraid I’d be arrested, because I did everything right,” he said on the phone, from the detention center in Tacoma where he is now being held.When an immigration official in Portland summoned him to sign some paperwork on 20 February, he had no reason to think he’d be relocated to a detention center one state over. “The truth is, this is so crazy,” he said. “I have a clean record. That’s why I voluntarily went to Ice.”In detention, he’s seen glimpses of the news that the president has declared war on Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, that Venezuelan men with no criminal convictions were being sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. “I’m afraid,” he said. He isn’t from the state in Venezuela where Tren de Aragua operates, and he has no tattoos – which the government has spuriously cited as evidence that men are members of a gang. “But I don’t know what to think. It feels like I am being unjustly imprisoned simply for being Venezuelan.”Jorge had himself fled violence back home. He had first escaped to Colombia in 2022, but he had found it impossible to make money and survive there. That year, he continued north, through the Darién jungle, to Panama, but eventually decided to return home to Venezuela when he realized the US was enforcing its “remain in Mexico” policy, sending migrants arriving at the southern border back to Mexico. “I was back for only three months, but I was living a nightmare. I had to leave,” he said. He witnessed multiple homicides and was harassed by local law enforcement. “I was afraid for my life.”View image in fullscreenHe crossed through the Darién Gap again in 2023, and registered an asylum claim and was given a court date in 2025. In the two years since, he enrolled in community college and completed the accredited irrigation program in partnership with Portland Community College, worked as an advocate with the Voz Workers’ Rights Education Project and trained in emergency preparedness. He danced bachata and played on pick-up sports teams in town. “I left my family in Venezuela, but I found my community in Portland,” he said.“Now I feel despair. My future is literally hanging in the balance,” he said. On 20 March, a judge denied his appeal for bond – which means he will likely have to remain in detention until September, unless his lawyers are able to successfully appeal. Meanwhile, his friends have been raising money to cover legal expenses and commissary funds in detention.“I’m trying to keep courage,” he said. “But I don’t know why I’m here.”More than a dozen immigration lawyers, advocates and former immigration officials that the Guardian interviewed for this story said they have been hearing of similar cases across the country.ImmDef, which maintains a rapid response hotline for the families of people who have been detained, has received several calls from people who said their loved ones were arrested at check-ins. But the organization has also seen a number of cases where people went to their check-ins, and encountered no problems.“It hasn’t been consistent,” said Urias. “We haven’t seen much of a pattern, per se.”Ice did not respond to questions about whether its agents are increasingly arresting people at check-ins, or whether the frequency of these check-ins had changed, though the agency acknowledged it received the Guardian’s query.View image in fullscreenUrias was especially worried for one of her clients, a woman who survived domestic violence. She has a removal order but a pending application for a U-visa, which is offered to the victims of certain crimes.“She had been checking in with Ice since 2016, we actually survived the first Trump administration,” said Urias. Normally, Urias doesn’t accompany her to the check-ins but did so earlier this month. But then, the check-in happened without incident – and she was told to come back in a year. “It was a huge relief,” said Urias. “But also it feels like there’s no rhyme or reason why some people are ok, and others are picked up.”Lawyers and advocates said people such as Urias’s client – who have been given prior “orders of removal” by Ice, but were allowed to remain in the US because they had pending cases or appeals, because they had children or family in the US under their care, or because home countries weren’t accepting deportation flights – were among the most vulnerable to deportation at the moment.Ice always had the power to execute removal orders at any time – and now the agency seems particularly poised to wield that power.That’s what worries Inna Scott, an immigration attorney in Seattle, whose client had crossed into the US from Mexico as a teenager, and was issued a deportation order in 1997. But he has continued to live in the US since then. In 2021, he was able to get a permit to work legally in the US after complying with Ice’s orders to regularly check in.When he reported, as usual, in March this year, immigration officials told Scott that they would likely seek to enforce her client’s removal order from the 90s, and instructed them to return in a month. “My client has no criminal history and has been a well-behaved resident of the country for decades,” she said. “But now he’s all of a sudden subject to detainment.” Ice could reinstate his old deportation order without giving him any opportunity to make his case in front of an immigration judge.Scott said she wasn’t particularly shocked because Ice officials made similar arrests during the first Trump administration – which had also issued a broad mandate to deport anyone without legal status. “But it is unfortunate. These are people without any kind of criminal history. These are people who are not national security risks. They’re not fugitives, they are living their lives working lawfully, with their work permits,” she said. “And they’re still being uprooted from their lives and taken to a country they haven’t been to in decades.” More

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      Joe Rogan, Voices on the Right Raise Alarm Over Trump’s Immigration Moves

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      Influential figures on the right have largely cheered on the opening months of the Trump presidency. But as the administration has rushed to carry out deportations as quickly as possible, making mistakes and raising concerns about due process along the way, the unified front in favor of President Trump’s immigration purge is beginning to crack.When the administration deported a professional makeup artist and accused him of being part of a criminal gang, the enormously popular podcaster Joe Rogan balked.“You’ve got to get scared that people who are not criminals are getting lassoed up and deported and sent to El Salvador prisons,” Mr. Rogan, who endorsed Mr. Trump, said on his show “The Joe Rogan Experience.” He added that the case was “horrific.”When the administration arrested a former Columbia University graduate student who had been involved in campus protests, the far-right commentator Ann Coulter questioned the move.“There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?” Ms. Coulter wrote on social media.The dissenting voices, which have been limited mostly to commentators rather than elected Republicans, are remarkable because conservatives don’t often openly break with the president. And while the objections have largely been contained to tactics — not the overarching goal of ramping up deportations — the cracks show how seriously some conservatives are taking the administration’s aggressive and at times slapdash methods.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 is not a gang member’: outrage as US deports makeup artist to El Salvador prison for crown tattoos

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      For as long as anyone can remember Andry José Hernández Romero was enthralled by the annual Three Kings Day celebrations for which his Venezuelan home town is famed, joining thousands of fellow Christians on the streets of Capacho to remember how the trio of wise men visited baby Jesus bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh.At age seven, Andry became a Mini King, as members of the town’s youth drama group Los Mini Reyes were known. Later in life, he tattooed two crowns on his wrists to memorialise those carnival-like Epiphany commemorations and his Catholic roots.“Most Capacheros get crown tattoos, often adding the name of their father or mother. We’ve lots of people with these tattoos – it’s a tradition that began in 1917,” said Miguel Chacón, the president of Capacho’s Three Kings Day foundation.The Latin American tradition appears to have been lost on the US immigration officers who detained Hernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist, hairdresser and theatre lover, after he crossed the southern border last August to attend a prearranged asylum appointment in San Diego.Hernández, who is gay, told agents he was fleeing persecution stemming from his sexual orientation and political views. Just weeks earlier, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, had unleashed a ferocious crackdown after being accused of stealing the presidential election to extend his 12-year rule.But Hernández’s tattoos were deemed proof he was a member of Venezuela’s most notorious gang, the Tren de Aragua, and a “security threat” to the US.View image in fullscreen“Detainee Hernandez ports [sic] tattoos ‘crowns’ that are consistent with those of a Tren de Aragua member,” an agent at California’s Otay Mesa detention centre claimed, according to court documents published this week.Those 16 words appear to have sealed the fate of the young Venezuelan stylist, who friends, family and lawyers say has never committed a crime.On 15 March, after more than six months in custody in the US, Hernández was one of scores of Venezuelans flown from Texas to a maximum security prison in El Salvador as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. To the horror of their relatives, some detainees were paraded before the cameras and filmed being manhandled by guards and having their heads shaved before being bundled into cells.“Let my son go. Review his case file. He is not a gang member,” Hernández’s mother, Alexis Dolores Romero de Hernández, pleaded as she came to terms with her son’s disappearance into the notorious Central American “terrorism confinement centre”, known by the Spanish acronym Cecot.“Everyone has these crowns, many people. But that doesn’t mean they’re involved in the Tren de Aragua … He’s never had problems with the law,” said Hernández, 65, who has not heard from her son since he called on the eve of his transfer to let her know – incorrectly – that he was being deported to Venezuela.View image in fullscreen“We know nothing. They say nothing. They give no information. That’s the trauma – not knowing anything about these young men, especially mine,” Alexis Hernández complained.Her son’s plight has caused outrage in Táchira, the western state where he grew up, with people packing Capacho’s picturesque 19th-century church, San Pedro de la Independencia, to demand his freedom.“We’re talking about someone who has been part of Capacho’s Three Kings Day celebrations for 23 years,” said Chacón, who is leading the campaign. “That’s why I’m doing everything I can to get this young man released. He is completely innocent.”Krisbel Vásquez, 29, a manicurist, denied her “calm, kind and humble” childhood friend was a villain. “I’ve known him all my life. He doesn’t bother anyone,” Vásquez said, urging Trump and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to backtrack.Xiomara Ramírez, 57, said her son had grown up with Hernández, with the pair doing homework together at her house. “I wonder why so much injustice. Why doesn’t the US give good people like Andry opportunities?” Ramírez asked.Melissa Shepard, an attorney from the California-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, representing Andry, was perplexed that her “very sweet, kind and thoughtful” client had been incarcerated in “one of the worst places in the world.“The fact that this administration has taken somebody who is so vulnerable and put them into such a terrifying situation has just been horrific. We fear that if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone,” she said.View image in fullscreenGrowing indignation over Hernández’s plight, and that of other apparently innocent Venezuelans deported to El Salvador on the basis of their tattoos, is spreading to unexpected places.“It’s horrific,” Joe Rogan, a Trump-endorsing podcaster, said on his latest show. Rogan supported Trump’s offensive against Venezuelan “criminals” the president claimed terrorised the US. “But let’s not [let] innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs,” he said, asking: “How long before that guy can get out? Can we figure out how to get them out? Is there any plan in place to alert the authorities that they’ve made a horrible mistake and correct it?”But the Trump administration has shown no sign of reconsidering its decision to send so many Venezuelans to El Salvador on the basis of such flimsy evidence.On Monday, Trump thanked Bukele for receiving another group of alleged Latin American criminals “and giving them such a wonderful place to live!”Bukele said the deportations were “another step in the fight against terrorism and organised crime”, claiming the 17 detainees were all “confirmed murderers and high-profile offenders”.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, bristled when questioned about agents’ use of a “points system” to classify detainees as gang members based on their tattoos or attire. “Shame on you and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these [criminal] individuals,” she replied, claiming “a litany of criteria” was used to correctly identify “foreign terrorists” or “illegal criminal aliens” for removal.View image in fullscreenShepard questioned the administration’s assertion that detainees such as Hernández were being “removed”. “He has been disappeared,” she said. “I know the government tries to use the language that he was ‘removed’ [but] … he has absolutely been disappeared.”Thousands of miles away in Capacho, Hernández’s mother spoke sorrowfully of how her son had decided, against his family’s wishes, to abandon their economically damaged country last May and make the perilous journey north through the Darién jungles between Colombia and Panama. “He left because he wanted to help us … and to fulfil his dream,” Hernández said, adding: “Now the reality is different.”On a recent evening, she and hundreds of protesters filled the San Pedro church for their latest vigil in support of Hernández. The crowd included three men dressed as the Three Kings, who wore theatrical beards and diadems dotted with fake jewels and carried plaques bearing the words: Conscience, Justice and Freedom.“We, his family, and the entire town vouch for [Hernández’s] innocence. It’s not possible that in Capacho having a crown tattoo is a symbol of pride, but for him, it makes him a criminal,” Chacón said, appealing directly to the presidents of the US and El Salvador.“I know Trump is a good man and Bukele is a good man,” Chacón said. “But it cannot be that they have sent this young man to prison. There must be many others like him.” More

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      Human rights groups rebuke Kristi Noem’s visit to El Salvador prison: ‘political theater’

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      Human rights organizations on Thursday denounced the visit by the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to the notorious prison in El Salvador that is holding hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the US earlier this month without a hearing, calling her actions “political theater”.Critics condemned Noem’s visit as just the latest example of the Trump administration’s aim to spread fear among immigrant communities, as the cabinet member stood in a baseball hat in front of a line of caged men bare from the waist up.Noem visited the so-called Cecot, or Terrorism Confinement Center, an infamous maximum-security prison. The prison, built in 2022 during a brutal government crackdown on organized crime, is where nearly 300 migrants, previously in US custody, were recently expelled and are currently detained.They have been accused of being violent gang members, despite family members of several of the men asserting that they are not.“The Department of Homeland Security secretary’s visit is an example of the fear that Trump’s government wants to instill in immigrants,” attorney Ivania Cruz said on Thursday. Cruz works with the Committee to Defend Human and Community Rights (Unidehc), a human rights organization in El Salvador. “This is precisely what Noem has done — use the Cecot as a cinematographic space,” she added.Noem’s visit to the prison “was a typical gross and cruel display of political theater that we have come to expect from the Trump administration,” Vicki Gass said. Gass is the executive director of the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), a human rights organization based in Washington DC. “That the Trump administration is flouting judicial orders and denying due process to people within the US borders is outrageous and frightening.”Earlier this month, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime provision that allows the executive to detain and deport people coming from an “enemy” nation. Despite a federal judge blocking the invocation of the act, shortly after, planes from the US landed in El Salvador, filled with men and women in immigration custody. More than 250 men, mostly from Venezuela, were quickly and forcibly shuffled into the Cecot, where officials shaved their heads and placed them in cells.Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that the men were members of transnational gangs. When invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump – without proof – accused the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua of having “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government. US intelligence agencies contradict Trump’s claims about ties between the gang and the Venezuelan government, the New York Times has reported, and the Venezuelan government has also denied it is connected.News reports across various publications have emerged revealing the identity of the Venezuelan men expelled to El Salvador, with family members saying some of the men are innocent. When pressed, the DHS has not provided proof of those men’s purported ties to the gang and they were flown out of the US without a hearing, raising questions about violations of constitutional due process rights.The federal judge in Washington who blocked the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has repeatedly pressed the Trump administration to provide information about their process to conduct the operation, also ordering “individualized hearings” for people Trump wants to expel under the act. In response, the Trump administration invoked “state secrets” privilege, to avoid disclosing any information about the operation.The Salvadorian prison that Noem visited was constructed in 2022, during El Salvador’s “state of exception”, a move by the president, Nayib Bukele, that rounded up thousands of people in an attempt to crack down on criminal gangs. According to Cruz, the human rights attorney, and other organizations, the state of exception violated due process rights, with thousands being caught up in arrests and detention without proof of gang membership.Cruz has been targeted for her work denouncing conditions in the Salvadorian prisons. During the state of exception, her brother was arrested and imprisoned by the Bukele government. Cruz fought for his release and since then, she has taken on a role as a key spokesperson for people who have been wrongfully detained in the prisons.“It is not by chance that the expelled immigrants are from Venezuela, when we know there is a political conflict between the two countries,” Cruz said. “Today it is Venezuelans – tomorrow may be Chileans, then Colombians. It’s an international problem that is provoking conflict.”Noem’s visit came one day before a protest organized by a Salvadorian rights organization, opposing the Central American government’s “arbitrary detentions”.“I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” Noem said in a video posted on X from the Cecot prison. “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”The use of another country’s vast, maximum-security prison to detain immigrants from a third country is unprecedented, especially considering the grave allegations of abuses at this and other Salvadorian prisons.“Amnesty International has extensively documented the inhumane conditions within detentions centers in El Salvador, including the Cecot, where those removed are now being held,” the organization said in a statement on Wednesday. “Reports indicate extreme overcrowding, lack of access to adequate medical care, and widespread ill-treatment amounting to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”According to Ana María Méndez Dardón, the Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights non-profit in DC, there are two or three huge prisons in El Salvador where the mass incarceration of people has been concentrated. The detention centers in the country have faced extreme allegations of human rights abuses.“The Cecot has a capacity for 40,000 people, that is to say only 30% of the current prison population, the rest of the population is located in other centers, such as the one in Mariona, where torture and other human rights violations have been documented,” Méndez Dardón said.She added: “Unlike the videos edited and produced about Cecot, President Bukele is not showing the world the true reality within the other detention centers, where the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has stated that they have committed torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment.”Reports have described bare metal bunks stacked high like shelving and with no bedding whatsoever.The Trump administration’s practice of denying due process and defying judicial orders “is outrageous and frightening”, Gass, from LAWG, added. “So is forcibly disappearing them to Cecot where prisoners are not allowed to meet with lawyers or their family members, are jammed into overcrowded cells, and never see the light of day.” More

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      Un tribunal de apelaciones mantiene el bloqueo de las deportaciones que invocan la Ley de Enemigos Extranjeros

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      El tribunal dijo que, aunque se necesitaban más argumentos, los abogados de los migrantes probablemente tendrían éxito en sus alegaciones de que a los venezolanos se les había denegado el debido proceso.Un tribunal federal de apelaciones de Washington mantuvo el miércoles, por el momento, el bloqueo del uso por parte del gobierno de Donald Trump de una ley invocada de manera inusual para tiempos de guerra para deportar sumariamente a migrantes venezolanos acusados de pertenecer a una violenta banda.En una votación de 2 a 1, un panel del Tribunal de Apelaciones de Estados Unidos para el Circuito del Distrito de Columbia dijo que era probable que los migrantes venezolanos tuvieran éxito en sus alegaciones de que el gobierno no puede utilizar la ley de guerra, la Ley de Enemigos Extranjeros, para trasladarlos sumariamente a una prisión en El Salvador sin una audiencia.“El plan de expulsión del gobierno niega a los demandantes siquiera un hilo del debido proceso, aunque el gobierno reconozca su derecho a la revisión judicial de su expulsión”, escribió la jueza Patricia A. Millett.La decisión asestó un duro golpe a los esfuerzos del gobierno de Trump por impulsar su programa de migración mediante la ley de guerra, pero la orden subyacente expirará de todos modos dentro de unos días. Es probable que el juez James E. Boasberg, presidente del Tribunal Federal de Distrito de Washington, vuelva a pronunciarse sobre la conveniencia de dictar una orden judicial de mayor duración.A mediados de marzo, Boasberg dictó una orden de restricción que prohibía al gobierno de Trump utilizar la Ley de Enemigos Extranjeros para expulsar sumariamente a los venezolanos que, según él, pertenecen a la banda Tren de Aragua. Su orden no prohíbe al gobierno detener a esos hombres ni deportarlos tras las audiencias previstas en la ley de migración usual.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