Irina Park
Read our editorial on mass deportations here, and the ongoing struggle against it here.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran construction worker from Maryland and father of 3 who was kidnapped and illegally deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration in violation of a court order, revealed he was tortured inside the Salvadoran concentration camp Anti-Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) following his deportation. Abrego Garcia offered a harrowing account of his experiences which were detailed last week in court documents filed in his civil lawsuit brought by Abrego Garcia’s wife in Maryland against the Trump administration.
In the filing, his lawyers state that “Plaintiff Abrego Garcia reports that he was subjected to severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.”
Abrego Garcia’s wife recounted that her husband was so badly and so frequently assaulted by guards upon his arrival to CECOT that he was covered in wounds and bruises the next day. According to the filings, he and other inmates were forced to kneel for nine hours straight through the night or would be hit by guards and were denied bathroom breaks. Prison staff threatened to transfer Abrego Garcia to cells with gang members who would “tear him apart”. He lost 31 pounds in his first two weeks in CECOT as a result of this torture.
Detainees were held in overcrowded cells with metal bunks. The court documents say that Abrego Garcia “repeatedly observed prisoners in nearby cells who he understood to be gang members violently harm each other with no intervention from guards or personnel.”
CECOT, a project of Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs”, operates under near-total secrecy. Journalists are not allowed access to CECOT and there are few first-hand accounts of the treatment from within, with El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele vowing that its prisoners will never be released. Bukele has been a loyal servant to US imperialism, carrying out the Trump administration’s dictates in taking on deportees to alleviate the US’s economic crisis while promising maximum terror.
Since his return, Abrego Garcia is eligible for conditional release while awaiting trial. However, his attorneys have asked that he remain in jail over concerns he could again be deported, demonstrating the brutal precarity imposed on migrant workers through state terror. Abrego Garcia’s union and other workers and activists across the country continue to demand his release from the sham trial.
Photo: El Salvador President Nayib Bukele tours CECOT.
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