The first video from inside El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison shows newly deported Tren de Aragua-accused migrants hollering from their cells.
The scene unfolded as US representatives toured the facility with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele.
Video shows the caged men shouting and screaming as Reps Andy Ogles, Vicente Gonzalez, Anna Paulina Luna as well as former congressman Matt Gaetz made their way through.
‘I saw evil today. I will never forget it,’ Luna said of her visit. ‘I heard a story of a MS-13 admitting to watching an infant being murdered.
‘I watched and listened to another member of MS-13 admit to murdering over 50 people.
‘I saw murderers. Recruited as young boys and as boys their souls and humanity was crushed. Forcing them to commit murder as a way of blooding in.
‘The Dems in congress advocating for this need to STOP. Some of these MEN were illegally in MD, MA, VA, TX, etc. multiple times deported.’
Other footage showed her sampling a typical meal given to the inmates – burgers and fries.
CECOT houses some of El Salvador’s most hardened criminals and has a capacity for 40,000 inmates.
The prison in Tecoluca, which opened in 2023, is a sprawling complex and a symbol of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s harsh crackdown on gang violence.
Buekele struck a $6 million deal with the US to house accused migrants in the prison, which is known as a ‘black hole of human rights’.
For the strongman president of El Salvador the deal with the US is an opportunity to show the world the brutal efficacy of his repressive ‘State of Exception’ regime – an excess of the growing autocratic trend turning its back on liberal democracy.
At least 363 people have died in Salvadoran prisons since the policy came into effect, prisoner rights group Cristosal told MailOnline, citing ‘horrific overcrowding, disease, systematic denial of food, clothing medicine, and basic hygiene’.
The jewel in the crown, CECOT has been heralded by Bukele as a superweapon in the war on gang violence.
Confined to cells of 70 for all but 30 minutes a day, prisoners are held in dire conditions, forbidden from going outside or having visitors, and are made to sleep on steel cots without mattresses in cramped conditions.
It has recently become home to hundreds of alleged Tren de Aragua members who had been residing in the US.
They were deported as part of the president’s immigration crackdown.
Between February and March, 13,300 migrants were deported, according to NBC’s tracker.
The policy has caused some backlash after some of the migrants removed to El Salvador claimed they had been falsely accused.
Testimony emerged about migrants being rounded up on the basis of sporting tattoos similar to those adopted by the prison gang or other flimsy so-called evidence.
The deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who has been in the states since 2011, caused a huge controversy after the Department of Homeland Security admitted he had been deported in error.
Garcia has no criminal convictions in the US or in El Salvador and strongly refutes the allegation that he is part of Tren de Aragua.
An immigration judge had also previously ruled that he could not be sent home due to persecution by the gang.
But Trump officials have refused to back down even as the highest courts in the country ordered his return to the US.
The president raised more eyebrows this week when he unveiled plans to suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right of a person to challenge their detention in court, as part of his sweeping immigration crackdown.
‘The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,’ White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters.
‘So it’s an option we’re actively looking at,’ Miller said. ‘A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.’
Federal judges have so far been skeptical of the Trump administration’s past efforts to use extraordinary powers to make deportations easier.
Trump argued in March that the U.S. was facing an ‘invasion’ of Venezuelan gang members and evoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority he has tried to use to speed up mass deportations.
Federal courts around the country, including in New York, Colorado, Texas and Pennsylvania, have since blocked the administration’s uses of the Alien Enemies Act for many reasons, including amid questions about whether the country is truly facing an invasion.
