On arrival, a prison officer told Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.”
Remember Kilmar Abrego Garcia? The Salvadoran father of a 5-year-old disabled child that the Trump administration sent to a torture prison in El Salvador by mistake and (initially) refused to bring back?
Well, he’s back in the US, facing charges of migrant smuggling – to which he has pleaded not guilty and which a magistrate has found to be based on “insufficient evidence”.
He’s still in custody – after his lawyers warned that he is at risk of being captured and deported again by ICE if he’s let out on bail.
But he’s filed a complaint against the government, outlining in extreme detail how he was beaten and subjected to torture while being held at Salvadoran mega-gulag CECOT.
In the court document are a lengthy list of horrific abuses suffered by Garcia – and many other people wrongly imprisoned in the “prison.”
Here’s a recap of the case – and some of the “highlights” of Garcia’s legal complaint.
Who is Kilmar Abrego Garcia – and why was he deported?
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a dad from Maryland, who was rounded up by ICE and rendered to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador, despite having no criminal record, a ‘do not deport’ order on his file and government lawyers admitting he’d been wrongly deported.
Even after the Supreme Court told the administration they should really bring him back and give him at least a day in court, they steadfastly refused.
Garcia, who is married to a US citizen has no criminal record in the US.
And after fleeing gang threats in El Salvador to the US in 2011, aged 16, he was granted protected legal status known as “withholding of removal” from a judge who found he would be targeted by gangs if he was deported back.
But the White House has variously claimed he’s a member of the MS-13 gang, a people smuggler, and is guilty of “monstrous crimes against humanity.”
And Trump himself claimed a manifestly photoshopped image of Garcia’s hands was evidence of gang membership.
Garcia, like many Americans, has tattooed knuckles – a marijuana leaf on his index finger, then a smiley face with crossed out eyes, a cross and a skull on his pinkie.
Trump was pictured holding a photograph handily marked up to point out that marijuana starts with an M and smiley starts with an S…then it gets a bit confusing.
The cross, which one could imagine standing for a T at a push, is marked up as standing for a digit 1, with the skull for no adequately explained reason standing for a 3.
This is, of course, nonsense.
But what would be even more nonsense is if someone thought the “MS-13” text overlaid clumsily on top to “illustrate” the translation, was actually part of the tattoo. Which Trump apparently did.
What is CECOT?
CECOT is the biggest and most notorious “mega prison” in El Salvador
Salvadorian mega prisons are notoriously brutal.
In fact, the US State Department’s travel advisory for El Salvador includes a stern warning about “harsh” prison conditions, without access to due process.
It reads: “Overcrowding constitutes a serious threat to prisoners’ health and lives. In many facilities, provisions for sanitation, potable water, ventilation, temperature control, and lighting are inadequate or nonexistent.”
Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, has been very close to Trump since his re-election.
Bukele has been exceptionally successful at reducing the crime rate in El Salvador, mainly through a brutal crackdown on gang membership.
He increased prison sentences for gang members from 3-5 years to 20-30 years and reduced the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 12.
He launched a nationwide crackdown, arresting and detaining some 85,000 people over the course of three years. Many of them are held in CECOT, which is said to have capacity to hold as many as 40,000.
Human rights groups have raised concerns that the arrests were largely arbitrary, and had little to do with gang violence – suggesting Bukele had used them to consolidate his own power and to target critics of his Presidency. Many arrests were based on the suspect’s appearance, tattoos or location. Human Rights Watch said the government’s policy had been “first arrest, then tweet, and investigate later”.
On the other hand, in El Salvador he and his crackdown is incredibly popular with those who haven’t been arrested and thrown in the gulag.
El Salvador currently has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.
In 2019, when he was trying to get the legislature to sign off funding for his crackdown, he called for his supporters to surround the Assembly building and ordered 40 soldiers into the meeting to coerce legislators into approving it. Opposition politicians have described this as a “self-coup” – a term regular readers of our Trump roundups will be familiar with.
Here’s what Kilmar Abrego Garcia says happened to him in CECOT
The legal complaint says Garcia “was subjected to severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture..”
“Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor and he was frogmarched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way…”
“In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself…”
“After approximately one week at CECOT, prison director Osiris Luna and other officials separated the 21 Salvadorans who had arrived together. Twelve individuals with visible gang-related tattoos were removed to another cell, while Plaintiff Abrego Garcia remained with eight others who, like him, upon information and belief had no gang affiliations or tattoos.”
And this one’s the kicker, given how much Trump himself wailed about Garcia having MS-13 tattoos on his hands…
“As reflected by his segregation, the Salvadoran authorities recognised that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was not affiliated with any gang, and at round this time, prison officials explicitly acknowledged that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia’s tattoos were not gang-related, telling him “your tattoos are fine.”