Julie Turkewitz, Tibisay Romero, Sheyla Urdaneta, and Isayen Herrera
, The New York Times; Inside Trump’s Deportation of Venezuelans: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison
"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...
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.”
