Human rights groups writing on behalf of over a dozen families filed an emergency petition with an inter-American human rights commission Friday, urging the commission to pursue the immediate release of hundreds of people the United States has sent to an infamous mega-prison in El Salvador without charge or trial.
The filing centered on U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration sending at least 288 men to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, since mid-March. The groups called for the release of the detained Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants to the United States. Many of the migrants had open U.S. asylum cases and other protections and were not given due process before being condemned by Trump to potential life imprisonment in one of the hemisphere’s most notorious prison systems.
“I knew that this kind of thing was happening in Venezuela, sending innocent people to a detention center without a trial,” the partner of one of the CECOT detainees, identified by her initials DCNP, said in a press release accompanying Friday’s filing.
“I find it almost unbelievable to see this happening in the United States and in El Salvador with [my partner].”
Friday’s request sought emergency “precautionary measures,” and was sent to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of all individuals transferred by the United States to CECOT since mid-March and their families. It listed declarations from family members of 18 individuals who the United States transferred to CECOT.
The commission is an independent body within the Washington, D.C.-based Organization of American States. Its seven commissioners may direct that a state adopt precautionary measures with regard to “serious and urgent situations presenting a risk of irreparable harm to persons or to the subject matter of a pending petition or case before the organs of the inter-American system,” according to commission rules. While the commission lacks serious enforcement powers, ignoring its findings can come with political repercussions.
The request was submitted by four U.S.-based human rights legal groups: the Boston University School of Law International Human Rights Clinic, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, the Global Strategic Litigation Council and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
“This is a moral and legal failure of two governments — and a human rights emergency demanding global attention,” Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council, said in a statement included in Friday’s announcement.
“The U.S. and El Salvador have colluded to strip hundreds of people — including many individuals with pending asylum claims in the U.S. — of their rights and freedom. These individuals have been ripped from their families, vanished without a trace and abandoned in a prison widely condemned by the international community. This is state-sanctioned enforced disappearance and must end now.”
The filing, a copy of which HuffPost reviewed, stresses the urgency of the detainees’ situation: They have been held incommunicado for months in a facility known for overcrowding, abusive practices and torture. Family members of the detainees have faced a grave “psychological and emotional toll” having not heard from them for all that time, the release said.
“Conditions in CECOT and other detention facilities in El Salvador are beyond appalling,” Isabel Carlota Roby, a senior staff attorney at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights who unsuccessfully tried to access the prison in person recently, said in a statement. “Detainees are held in inhumane conditions, without charges, without representation and without hope. This is arbitrary detention on a mass scale.”
The request urged the commission to issue a series of measures against El Salvador, including the immediate release of the U.S. CECOT detainees, the ability to resolve habeas corpus petitions, facilitation of communication with family members and legal counsel, confirmation of detainees’ identities and any alleged legal basis for their detention, independent monitoring of detention conditions, and a refrain from any transfer of the detainees to any other country where they might be deprived of their human rights.
The Trump administration’s decision to make a multimillion-dollar agreement with El Salvador’s president, self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world” Nayib Bukele, to indefinitely detain hundreds of people transferred from the United States without due process marks yet another step away from democratic norms by the Trump administration.
Since 2022, El Salvador’s president has ruled over a “state of exception” involving sweeping consolidation of executive power and degradation of due process, with tens of thousands of people being detained without the ability to exercise their legal rights.
According to public reporting and legal filings, U.S. immigration agents told several detained migrants that they were being sent to CECOT simply due to common tattoos like clocks and crowns. The vast majority don’t have any criminal record, in any country.
The Trump administration has not released a list of names of the people it has sent to CECOT, and has only acknowledged a handful of the U.S. detainees by name in interviews or legal filings. As a result, many legal scholars consider Trump’s expulsions to CECOT to be “enforced disappearances,” a violation of international law in which people are detained and deprived of their rights without any official acknowledgement, outside of the rule of law. Friday’s filing used the same term.
The Trump administration has labeled roughly half of the people it’s sent to CECOT as “alien enemies,” using an 18th century law to deny them due process by arguing not only that they are members of the Tren de Aragua gang but also that they are working with the Venezuelan government and are akin to an invading army.
Others were sent to El Salvador after receiving standard deportation orders from an immigration judge. Immigration proceedings are civil processes, not criminal ones, and Trump’s use of an infamous prison as a destination for otherwise-standard deportees is unprecedented.
Several U.S. courts have, for now, essentially paused ongoing transfers of U.S. detainees to CECOT. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month lifted a lower court’s pause on sending noncitizens to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act — but the court also required that future detainees have some ability to make a case against their removal in court.
Separately, a federal judge in Boston ruled that the United States must give any deportee to a “third country” — other than their country of origin — a chance to express a fear of removal to that country and reopen immigration proceedings.
Other federal judges around the country have paused Alien Enemies Act removals for anyone in their specific judicial districts.
Still, the administration has demonstrated it is willing to openly defy court orders — as with its continued defiance of the Supreme Court, which found that the United States must facilitate the return of one CECOT detainee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador despite an immigration judge previously granting him protection from deportation to that country specifically.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Thursday there was “no scenario” in which Abrego Garcia would step foot in the United States again, despite him having a wife and children in the country, the backing of the Supreme Court and having been afforded no due process for his Salvadoran detention.
Even after Trump himself acknowledged that he could bring Abrego Garcia home with a phone call, a Trump administration lawyer said in federal court Thursday that “influence does not equate to constructive custody,” arguing that the fate of U.S. detainees in CECOT is really up to Bukele, not Trump.
There’s some hope that pressure from the Inter-American Commission could move the needle. Earlier this year, the United States banished several hundred deportees from around the world to Panama, where some were sent back to their home countries, but others were held in custody without trial, first in a hotel and then in a jungle camp. (A parallel situation is ongoing in Costa Rica.)
The Global Strategic Litigation Council sought IACHR precautionary measures, urging the deportees’ release from the camp and a pause on their deportations. Panama took those steps, offering over 100 migrants temporary humanitarian permits. Still, their future, like the detainees in El Salvador, is uncertain.