It began as soon as the planes landed.
The deportees thought they were headed from the
U.S. back to Venezuela.
But instead, they were shackled, paraded in front
of cameras, and delivered to CECOT, the notorious
maximum security prison in El Salvador, where they
told 60 Minutes they endured four months of hell.
Did you think you were going to die there?
We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
Tonight, 60 Minutes reaches for a new high
with a breathtaking climb to base camp on
Mount Everest.
I am not looking down, don't talk.
Oh God, it's windy.
I do not like this at all.
We hiked 10 days into thin air.
Welcome to Everest Base Camp.
Our guides were the Sherpas who risked their
lives to assist climbers.
We found there's little margin for error on
the journey to Everest.
I'm Leslie Stahl.
I'm Scott Pelley.
I'm Anderson Cooper.
I'm Sharon Alfonsi.
I'm John Wertheim.
I'm Cecilia Vega.
I'm Nora O'Donnell.
I'm Bill Whitaker.
Those stories, and in our last minute, an
18-letter milestone.
Tonight on 60 Minutes.
You may recall earlier this year when the
Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to
El Salvador, a country most had no connection to.
The White House claimed the men were terrorists,
part of a violent gang, and invoked a
centuries-old wartime power, saying it allowed them
to deport some men immediately without due process.
An unusual strategy that sparked an ongoing legal battle.
Tonight, you'll hear from some of those men.
They described torture, sexual and physical abuse inside
CECOT, one of El Salvador's harshest prisons, where
they say they endured four months of hell.
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 onto buses, and delivered to CECOT, El
Salvador's notorious maximum security prison.
When we got there, the CECOT director was
talking to us.
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.
Did you think you were going to die there?
We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
We met Luis Munoz 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...
They just looked at me and told me
I was a danger to society.
You have no criminal record?
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.
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.
Tell me about what they did to you personally.
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.
As you can see, we're literally in the
middle of the desert.
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.
They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they
don't play games.
In March, the U.S. struck a deal
to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to
house Venezuelan deportees at CECOT.
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.
The U.S. government said these people are
the worst of the worst.
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 Papier is a deputy director at the
non-profit 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.
How do you know they weren't gang members?
We cross-referenced 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.
So ICE's own records said...
ICE's own records say that only three percent
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's 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.
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 eight 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 William Lozada Sánchez 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.
So you had to be on your knees
for 24 hours?
Yes, because they put a guard there to
watch us so that we wouldn't move.
And what would happen if you couldn't make it?
They'd take us to the island.
What's the island?
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.
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.
They were hitting your private parts?
Sí.
With a baton?
No, they tugged at them with their hands.
And they did that to multiple people?
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.
Did you have access to clean water?
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.
If we had serious injuries, when the doctors
examined us, they told us that drinking water
would heal it.
So they're telling the injured prisoners to drink
water and the water's filthy?
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.
Did they speak to anybody, any of the prisoners?
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.
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.
There were men standing behind her, heavily tattooed.
Who are those men?
Do we know?
We know that those men in her video
are not Venezuelans.
They are Salvadorians, probably accused of being gang
leaders, 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 UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center.
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.
Not the Venezuelans?
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.
These are the rooms of solitary confinement.
That matched the description of the so-called
island where the deportees described being tortured.
And they get absolutely nothing to use to
sleep or to rest.
Just pure common.
A show-and-tell of the armory confirmed
CECOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards
used on them.
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.
They were showing that off in the videos.
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.
The light system is 24 hours a day.
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.
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.
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.