Among the men pressed head-down and pushed across a prison yard in El Salvador on March 15 was Francisco Javier García Casique. He was spotted by his brother and mother watching a video of his humiliation back home in Venezuela. Though his face was not clearly visible, they recognized the tattoos on his right arm and his bulky frame, and promptly shared their concerns on social media.
The three-minute video released by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on March 16, later amplified by U.S. President Donald Trump on his social media accounts, captured a few agonizing moments in the lives of 261 men—238 of them Venezuelans—sent by the United States to the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador.
U.S. officials insist that the Venezuelan men incarcerated in El Salvador are members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang of Venezuelan origin targeted in an executive order issued by Mr. Trump that controversially invokes the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The men will be held at El Salvador’s infamous mega-prison for at least a year, according to an agreement reached between the Trump and Bukele administrations.
“My brother has never committed a crime in Venezuela or elsewhere,” Sebastián García Casique wrote in a post on Instagram. “His only mistake has been to enter the United States as a migrant. He has been labeled as a Tren de Aragua member just because of his tattoos.”
Mr. García has produced copies of his brother’s background reports, which testify that he had no criminal record.
The identities of Francisco and the other prisoners have not been officially confirmed by the U.S. government, nor have Salvadoran prison officials released any information on the immigration status or criminal background of the prisoners. But on March 20, CBS News acquired and released an internal list of the names of the deportees. Francisco’s name was among them.
More than a month after his brother’s removal to El Salvador, “we have no further news about him,” Sebastián told America from his home in Venezuela. “We haven’t spoken to him; we don’t know anything about what is to come.” But “we want him back with us.”
Family members of some of the other Venezuelans who had been removed to El Salvador have also publicly denied that their relatives had any gang affiliation or had engaged in criminal acts while living in the United States. Among them are Jerce Egbunik Reyes Barrios, 36, a soccer coach who had applied for political asylum in the United States—his asylum claim had been scheduled to be reviewed in court in April—and Arturo Suárez Trejo, 28, a professional musician who had resided in the United States legally under temporary protected status. Family members tell media that they still have not been able to contact their missing relatives.
Demands for due process
In Venezuela, both human rights groups and government officials have expressed frustration and anger about the treatment of these Venezuelan nationals, complaining that the United States violated its own due process provisions to effect their removal. Many in Venezuela also urge that migration, as an inevitable global phenomenon, should be decriminalized.
In March, the Foro por la Vida (Forum for Life), a coalition of eight respected Venezuelan human rights organizations, called for “due process” for all 238 Venezuelans imprisoned at CECOT and for the “immediate cessation of all arbitrary detentions” of migrants in the United States.
None of the Venezuelans removed to El Salvador were properly deported to their home nation or received due process under U.S. and international law, according to Marino Alvarado, a lawyer and Judicial Coordinator for Provea—the Venezuelan Program for Education and Action on Human Rights—one of the member organizations of Foro por la Vida.
Regarding the removal of migrants from a receiving country, the United States, to a third state, El Salvador, “I have seen no precedent like this,” he said.
Provea is currently helping six families in Venezuela to establish contact with Salvadoran authorities through the Venezuelan Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoría del Pueblo), Mr. Alvarado said. In Caracas, the government led by Nicolás Maduro, whose July 2024 presidential election victory is disputed by the United States and other western powers, currently has neither diplomatic relations with El Salvador nor diplomatic representation in the United States.
Diplomatic ties between Venezuela and El Salvador have been frozen since 2019, but this status does not prohibit the exchange of information. “The Venezuelan authorities can request information from their Salvadoran peers—the Procuraduría para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos or Human Rights Ombudsman Institution—for further information on the health and possible charges the imprisoned deportees are facing,” Mr. Alvarado said.
“We tell the families that the Venezuelan government is not doing them a favor,” he added. “It is a legal mandate” that the Maduro government do what it can on behalf of the detained Venezuelans.
That may not include returning some of the prisoners to Venezuela. The principle of non-refoulement in international law “prohibits states from transferring or removing individuals from their jurisdiction or effective control when there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm upon return,” Mr. Alvarado explained.
“Some of them could face danger back in the country if they left because of political prosecution,” Mr. Alvarado warned. In Venezuela, almost 900 political prisoners are held in government detention centers.
Officials from the Maduro government described the removal of migrants to El Salvador as acts of “arbitrary kidnapping” and initiated support programs for their relatives, including the launch of a digital platform called Comité Venezolano para la Defensa de los Migrantes (Committee for the Defense of the Venezuelan Migrants). Lawyers hired by both the government and families of the detained men have filed habeas corpus writs at the Salvadoran Supreme Court of Justice but so far have not even been allowed to meet with the detainees.
Venezuelan officials have sponsored a voluntary return campaign, Plan Vuelta a la Patria (Return to the Homeland), bringing Venezuelans back from the United States. At least two flights from the United States have landed in Caracas since March 16. None of these returnees had been threatened with imprisonment in El Salvador.
Eight million stories
The family of Francisco García Casique says that he is a 24-year-old barber from a humble background who first left Venezuela in 2017 to seek work in Perú. In 2023 he decided to resettle in the United States, crossing through the infamous Darién Gap (a dangerous route through a 66-mile expanse of rainforest between Colombia and Panama) on his way to the United States.
He was detained at the U.S.-Mexico border and received a deportation order from a U.S. immigration judge. Before finding himself removed to El Salvador, he believed, like many others among the “deported” men, that he was being sent back home to Venezuela.
His is one among nearly 8 million stories that Venezuelan refugees and migrants could tell about their flight from Venezuela because of a severe humanitarian, political and economic crisis that has continued over 10 years—the second largest displacement crisis in the world, according to recent figures from the International Organization for Migration.
About 85 percent, or 6.7 million, of Venezuela’s refugees have resettled into countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Migration Policy Institute reported in 2023 that 770,000 Venezuelan immigrants live in the United States, slightly less than 2 percent of the 50 million immigrants residing there.
Just about all Venezuelan families have one or more family members who have fled abroad since the nation’s political and economic crises began. Big family occasions like birthdays are celebrated through video-messaging applications, and remittances from family working far from home make up a significant part of the country’s economy.
The Jesuit Refugee Service in Venezuela has tracked the status of Venezuelan migrants, refugees and displaced persons for many years. Founded in 2001, it is currently active in three offices across the 1,400-mile-long Colombian-Venezuelan border. This work has also meant close collaboration with peers JRS Colombia and JRS/USA.
“We must understand the diversity of the Venezuelan migrant population to make sure the right protection measures are met in the receiving countries,” said Édgar Magallanes, S.J., the director of JRS Venezuela. “They are escaping from varied circumstances, many times to save their lives from dire economic backgrounds, political persecution or a serious health condition that cannot be treated within the country
These individual trials propelling migration, he said, occur within a Venezuelan context of “an already deteriorating internal state of law, where there is no due process and official complaints are difficult to make.”
The status and treatment of Venezuelan deportees in El Salvador greatly worries him: “The United States can play a great role in the world, but in the particular case of the deported Venezuelans in CECOT, international law about human rights is not being acknowledged, with no due process and transparency about any possible criminal backgrounds.”
Like his colleague from Provea, Father Magallanes worries that other migrant groups could soon be subjected to the same illegal treatment if U.S. officials do not begin a course correction soon.
“Let’s see others as human beings first,” Father Magallanes said. “Migrants are being criminalized right away because of a tattoo or supposedly belonging to the Tren de Aragua, with no solid proof. Let’s open ourselves to listening to others, to their families and not renounce our humanity.”
Other groups and individuals in Venezuela have strongly protested the removal of the Venezuelans by the Trump administration. The Venezuelan Episcopal Conference reposted and commented on a letter originally sent by Pope Francis to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in February. “Alongside Francis, we call all the faithful and all men and women of goodwill to not give in to narratives that discriminate and needlessly inflict suffering upon our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters,” the Venezuelan bishops wrote.
Some Venezuelans have strongly challenged the Trump administration’s assessment of the detained and removed prisoners as terrorists and gang members. Ronna Rísquez, a respected Venezuelan investigative reporter, has studied Tren de Aragua since its beginning and has written one of the few in-depth books about the gang.
Despite talk of an invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, Ms. Rísquez estimates the gang numbers no more than 3,000 members in Venezuela and scattered across a number of different Latin American countries in addition to the United States. And despite the criteria used to identify Tren de Aragua members by U.S. immigration officials, she said that tattoos are not known to be a signifier of gang allegiance.
She told America, “There is no excuse whatsoever that justifies the lack of due process and human rights violations that have happened here.”
She reported that there has been no official information exchange between U.S. and Venezuelan law enforcement regarding gang profiles of the people removed to El Salvador and their involvement, if any, in criminal activity. She has been contacted by human rights advocates in the United States seeking more information about Tren de Aragua but said that no one from the Trump administration has contacted her for information about the gang or to confirm the identity of gang members among the people sent to El Salvador.
According to Ms. Rísquez, Tren de Aragua was first organized in 2014 in a Venezuelan jail called “Cárcel de Tocorón,” located in Aragua, a north central Venezuelan state.
Ms. Rísquez told 9WNews in an English-language interview in November 2024 that Tren de Aragua members work under “territories”—which can be a street, even a building—and have focused on human and drug trafficking, she said. Tren members began to migrate to neighboring countries when the economic crisis deepened in 2017, like most other Venezuelan migrants then just looking for job opportunities.
“When some of them saw that it was not so easy [to find legitimate work]...unfortunately, they returned to crime,” she said.
InSightCrimes, a multinational think tank that has tracked the gang for the last eight years, corroborates this fact and also asserted in 2024 that there was no active information exchange between Venezuelan and U.S. authorities, meaning that U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials cannot easily discover if an individual is a former prisoner or suspected Tren de Aragua member.
In Ms. Rísquez’s view, repeated media and political focus on the gangs in the United States may give them more power than what they practically have while diminishing the image of Venezuelan migrants in general: “Migrants are being criminalized; Venezuelans are being stigmatized,” she told 9WNews.
“The majority of Venezuelans that have arrived in the United States and worldwide because of the disgrace they live in their home country have come to work, to survive and give the best of themselves to the communities to which they arrived,” Ms. Rísquez said.
