2 men say they were deemed a threat over their tattoos, beaten in Salvadoran prison after deportation from U.S.
Nicolás Maduro, the former president of Venezuela, now sits in a federal jail in New York awaiting trial.
After a high stakes raid, the White House touted Maduro's capture as a blow to narco-terrorists who it says flooded U.S. streets with drugs.
The repression of the Maduro regime over more than a decade forced eight million Venezuelans to flee— nearly a million of them to the United States.
Last year, in the biggest U.S. immigration crackdown in recent history, hundreds of those Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador – a country most had no connection to.
The White House claimed they were part of a violent gang and designated them as terrorists. The administration invoked a centuries-old wartime power, the Alien Enemies Act, to rapidly deport some of the men.
Between March and April of last year, the U.S. sent 252 Venezuelan men to a brutal maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as "CECOT"
You will hear from two of those men. They describe torture, sexual and physical abuse inside the prison.
Since November, 60 Minutes has made several attempts to interview key Trump administration officials on camera about our story. They declined our requests.
Tonight, our report from inside CECOT.
It began as soon as the planes landed.
The deportees thought they were headed back to Venezuela, but then saw hundreds of Salvadoran police waiting for them on the tarmac.
Shackled, they were paraded in front of cameras, pushed on to buses, and delivered to CECOT, El Salvador's notorious maximum security prison.
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): When we got there, the CECOT director was talking to us. The first thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again. He said, "Welcome to hell. I'll make sure you never leave."
Sharyn Alfonsi: Did you think you were gonna die there?
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
We met Luis Muñoz Pinto in Colombia. He was a college student in repressive Venezuela, and hoped to seek asylum in the United States.
In 2024, he says he waited in Mexico until his scheduled appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in California. During that interview…
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): They just looked at me and told me I was a danger to society.
Sharyn Alfonsi: You have no criminal record?
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): I don't even– I never even got a traffic ticket.
Nevertheless, he was detained by Customs. He says he spent six months locked up in the U.S., waiting for a decision on his asylum case, when he was deported -- one of 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT between March and April.
Inside, he says their hands and feet were tied, forced to their knees, their heads were shaved.
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn't take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves. When you get there, you already know you're in hell. You don't need anyone else to tell you.
He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Tell me about what they did to you personally.
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): Four guards grabbed me. And they beat me until I bled, to the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall; that was when they broke one of my teeth.
CECOT, the terrorism confinement center, was built in 2022 as a key part of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's sweeping anti-gang crackdown.
The massive prison, designed to hold 40,000 inmates, and its harsh reputation, are a point of pride for Bukele, who regularly allows social media influencers to tour it.
Guards show off cramped cells where metal bunks are stacked four high. There are no mattresses or sheets. Inmates said they had no access to the outdoors and no contact with relatives.
International observers warned CECOT was violating the U.N. standard for minimum treatment of prisoners.
And two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department cited "torture" and "life-threatening prison conditions" in its report on El Salvador.
But this year, during a meeting with President Bukele at the White House, President Trump expressed admiration for El Salvador's prison system.
In March, the U.S. struck a deal to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees at CECOT.
Karoline Leavitt (during White House press briefing: These are heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country and they must be held accountable.
Sharyn Alfonsi: The U.S. government said these people are the worst of the worst?
Juan Pappier: These people are migrants. And the sad reality is that the U.S. government tried to make an example out of them. They sent them to a place where they were likely to be tortured. To send migrants across Latin America– the message that they should not come to the United States.
Juan Pappier is a deputy director at the nonprofit, Human Rights Watch.
In an 81-page report released in november, the organization concluded there was systematic "torture and other abuses" at CECOT, and that nearly half of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent there "had no criminal history."
Only eight of the men "had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense."
Sharyn Alfonsi: How do you know they weren't gang members?
Juan Pappier: We cross-reference federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States, and also obtained criminal records in Venezuela and in the countries where these people lived. And the information we obtained in the United States is based on data provided by ICE.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So ICE's own records said--
Juan Pappier: ICE's own records say that only 3% of them had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime.
60 Minutes reviewed the available ICE data; it confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch.
It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the U.S., which could include immigration violations. We don't know because the Department of Homeland Security has never released a complete list of the names or criminal histories of the men it sent to CECOT.
Rapid deportations have been a key part of the Trump administration's immigration overhaul. The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal. Illegal crossings are now at a historic low.
But some immigration attorneys say the administration has used flawed criteria to justify deportations.
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English) I have some tattoos. None of them have anything to do with any criminal group. I explained to them, saying that I didn't belong to any gang, to which the agent responded, "But you are Venezuelan."
60 Minutes reviewed this document agents used to assess Venezuelans.
A person with "8 points" was designated as a Tren de Aragua gang member and deportable. Tattoos that immigration officers suspected of being gang related earned four points.
But criminologists who study gangs say tattoos are not a reliable way to identify Venezuelan gang members because, unlike some Central American gangs, such as MS-13, Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to signal membership.
Venezuelan national Wuilliam Lozada Sanchez was also deported to CECOT. He told us the guards there also accused Venezuelans with tattoos of being gang members.
He detailed months of abuse and being forced into stress positions.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So you had to be on your knees for 24 hours?
Wuilliam Lozada Sanchez (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): Yes, because they put a guard there to watch us so that we wouldn't move.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And what would happen if you couldn't make it?
Wuilliam Lozada Sanchez (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): They'd take us to the island.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What's the island?
Wuilliam Lozada Sanchez (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): The Island is a little room where there's no light, no ventilation, nothing. It's a cell for punishment where you can't see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour. And they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there.
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): The torture was never-ending. They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days.
Some of the deportees described being sexually assaulted by the guards.
Sharyn Alfonsi: They were hitting your private parts?
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish): Si.
Sharyn Alfonsi: With a baton?
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): No, they tugged at them with their hands.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And they did that to multiple people?
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): To most of us.
The men say they grew weaker by the day. They claim the prison lights were left on 24-hours a day, making it difficult to sleep, and that food and medicine were often withheld.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Did you have access to clean water?
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): They never gave us access to clean water. The same water from our baths and toilets was the same water that we had to drink and survive on.
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): If we had serious injuries, when the doctors examined us, they told us that drinking water would heal it.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So they're telling the injured prisoners to drink water, and the water's filthy.
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): Super filthy. The sicker and more injured we were, the better it was for them.
In late March, about 10 days after the first U.S. deportees arrived, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the prison.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Did they speak to anybody– any of the prisoners?
Luis Muñoz Pinto (speaking in Spanish/translated in English): Never, not with any of the detainees. They never spoke to us. We only saw the cameras.
At some point, Secretary Noem went to another area of the prison to record this video.
Secretary Noem (video at CECOT): First of all, I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them.
Sharyn Alfonsi: There were men standing behind her, heavily tattooed. Who were those men? Do we know?
Juan Pappier: We know that those men in her video are not Venezuelans. They are Salvadoran, probably accused of being gang leaders and probably people who have been in jail for many, many years in El Salvador.
Human Rights Watch was able to confirm that with the help of this intrepid team of students at U.C. Berkeley's Human Rights Center.
Student 1: All the visible men have either an 'MS' on their chest, or a '13,' or an 'ES' for El Salvador, and all those gangs are associated with El Salvador.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Not the Venezuelans.
Student 1: Yeah.
To help verify the deportees' stories for Human Rights Watch, the team of students combed through open source data for weeks.
Students are trained in advanced techniques and follow strict international standards for obtaining digital evidence that can be used in courts.
Analyzing satellite imagery, they mapped the prison and identified the building where the Venezuelans were held.
And remember all those influencers who filmed inside CECOT? One toured an isolation cell.
That matched the description of the so-called "island" where the deportees described being tortured.
A show-and-tell of the armory confirmed CECOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards used on them.
Student 2: What we did see in these videos was the use of the T-batons on prisoners. Additionally, we also saw the use of painful body positions.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And they were showing that off in the videos?
Student 2: And they do that. It's sort of a practice.
But it was this interview with the prison warden that proved to be most helpful.
Social media video (CECOT warden in Spanish/translated in English) The light system is 24-hours a day.
Student 2: One of the questions that we had was, "Are the lights on 24/7?" He said, "Yes, they are." So he's talking about how hot it can get in the prison. So there's this sort of pride around the poor conditions and around the suffering.
Using extreme temperatures or light to disorient inmates is also prohibited under U.N. standards.
Alexa Koenig: I think one of the things that the work of this team has really shown is that a lot of these stories can be believed.
Alexa Koenig is the director of Berkeley's Investigations Lab, which trains students to research war crimes and human rights violations.
Alexa Koenig: And it's those little details that I think then, if you can bring that together with the physical evidence, I think you have the strongest possible case for accountability, whether it's a court of public opinion or at some point in a court of law.
The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request.
In July, after four months, the 252 Venezuelan men were finally released from CECOT and sent back to Caracas in exchange for 10 Americans that had been imprisoned in Venezuela.
The Trump administration has arranged more deals, some valued at millions of dollars, to offload U.S. deportees to other so-called "third countries" – nations to which they have no connection.
Among them, war-torn south Sudan and Uganda, which have well- documented histories of torturing prisoners.
60 Minutes has repeatedly asked the Department of Homeland Security for the complete records and criminal backgrounds of all 252 Venezuelan men the U.S. sent to CECOT.
It would not provide them.
This past week, DHS told us: "We are confident in our law enforcement's intelligence, and we aren't going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one. that would be insane."
Because of this, we relied on the ICE data that is available for our reporting.
Of the 252 men, that data shows that 33 had been convicted of a crime in the U.S. -- again, eight of them for violent or potentially violent crimes.
Another 70 had pending charges – but we don't know the nature of those charges because DHS refuses to share that information.
Neither of the two detainees in our story has been convicted of any crimes in the U.S.
Nine days ago, DHS sent 60 Minutes a photo of Wuilliam Lozada Sanchez's left arm, with this swastika tattoo.
When we interviewed Lozada in November, this is what his arm looked like.
He told us he got the offensive tattoo at 15 and didn't know what it meant. He claims he regretted it and had it changed just before the U.S. sent him to CECOT.
Five gang experts told us that swastikas and 666, another tattoo on Lozada's arm, have no connection to the violent Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.
In a statement to 60 Minutes, the White House said, "President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens…." The administration's statements are available in full online. DHS deflected all questions about abuse allegations at CECOT, saying the men were not under U.S. jurisdiction while in El Salvador.
But last month, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. had maintained what's called "constructive custody" over the Venezuelans who were sent to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act.
He ordered the Trump administration to give those men the due process they were denied.
In a declaration to the court, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, in part, that bringing the deported Venezuelans to the u.s. for hearings or holding remote ones at this time would risk, quote, "material damage to U.S. foreign policy interests in Venezuela."
Produced by Oriana Zill de Granados. Associate producers, Mirella Brussani, Erin DuCharme and Emily Gordon. Edited by Matthew Lev.