Trump Administration Deported 238 Men to Hellish Prison in El Salvador. 75% Apparently Have No Criminal Record

Trump administration officials have cast the Venezuelan men being deported to a hellish El Salvadoran prison as “terrorists” and gang members. But a recent investigation by 60 Minutes revealed that the vast majority of those men have no known criminal records.

The news program got its hands on a government list of 238 men who were flown to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (or CECOT) last month without any due process, and despite a court order barring their immediate deportation. After identifying the names on the list, 60 Minutes found that 179 of the men—75% of the names on the list—had no known criminal record in the U.S. or abroad.

One of those men is a 31-year-old makeup artist named Andry Hernandez Romero, whose lawyer told 60 Minutes he was targeted in Venezuela for being gay and was going through the asylum process in the U.S. The Trump administration has insisted, without providing evidence, that Romero’s social media activity suggests he is part of the gang Tren de Agua.

But according to 60 Minutes, a decades’ worth of posts revealed mostly glamour shots of Romero posing with beauty queen crowns and makeup brushes. The report also cited a photographer who documented the moments Romero arrived at CECOT, where he was stripped naked, had his head shaved, and cried for his mother as he was slapped by guards.

The Trump administration responded to 60 Minutes’ reporting by arguing that many of the men on the list simply “don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.,” but that they are “terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more.”

However, that kind of blanket statement sidesteps the obvious question: If there really was more evidence to back up these deportations, why wouldn’t the government share it?

As 60 Minutes notes, in court documents, the administration has used evidence as flimsy as a Real Madrid soccer tattoo to assert people’s gang affiliation. In another case, immigration officials pointed to an old Facebook photo in which a father of two named Jerce Reyes Barrios was flashing rock and roll hands, which immigration officers argued was actually a gang sign.

The easiest explanation for why the Trump administration is keeping so much apparently damning evidence hidden away, of course, is that it has none. As Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem’s recent photo op at CECOT showed, the horrifying images coming out of the prison have become a useful piece of propaganda to frighten people out of coming to the United States illegally and to show Trump’s most zealous supporters that he’s keeping his promise about expelling “the worst of the worst.” And it’s a lot easier to make that claim when you never have to prove its veracity.

But despite its best efforts to prevent its deportation decisions from being scrutinized, the administration’s story is quickly unraveling. Already, it has admitted in court to the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland father who was sent to El Salvador, despite having legal protected status. The administration has called the move an “administrative error,” but has fought against correcting that error. On Monday, the administration appealed to the Supreme Court to block a lower court’s order that García be returned to the U.S.