The Daily - Trump Sent Them to a Notorious Prison. Torture Followed.

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Warning: This episode mentions suicide.In March, the U.S. government sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Over four months, the men said they endured physical, mental and sexual abuse.Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief at The New York Times, interviewed 40 of these prisoners. She explains what she found out about this part of President Trump’s program of mass deportation.Guest: Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.Background reading: “You are all terrorists”: four months in a Salvadoran prison.Photo: Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York TimesFor more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is the Daily. For four months, hundreds of men from Venezuela said they endured physical abuse. And sexual abuse. Mental abuse. And sexual abuse. inside a notorious prison. Today, what my colleague, Julie Turkowitz, found,

actually happened inside that prison, and why many now see it as perhaps the darkest chapter of all in President Trump's program of mass deportation. It's Monday, December 8th. Julie, you have spent the past many months investigating the plight of these roughly 200 Venezuelan nationals who were deported by the Trump administration from the U.S. to a prison in Al Salvador. And along the way, you have broke story after story about who they are, what they did or didn't do. And now you bring us your latest investigation. So tell us what animated that latest probe and what you found.

So I think that so many listeners remember back in March when these 250 or so, when were put on planes to this foreign. prison in El Salvador, accused summarily without trials of being terrorists, and then in a very, very public way, taken off the planes, bent at the waist, shackled, shaved, and put in this maximum security prison in El Salvador. Right. It was the most indelible image in President Trump's mass deportation campaign, because it felt the most unfamiliar and kind of brutal.

Absolutely, and I think that it was meant to send a message. This is what will happen to if you come to the United States illegally. And after that, the men disappeared. They did not have access to lawyers. They did not have access to family members. There were family members in Caracas, in the United States, marching, asking for some kind of information about their love. loved ones, you had courtroom tussles in the United States with lawyers trying to get

these folks back to the U.S., or at the very least, try and find some kind of information about what had happened to them. Right, which was met with a wall of resistance from the Trump administration who basically said, take our word for it, that these are the worst of the worst. Absolutely, and we as journalists asked over and over again, please give us information about these men, give us their names. Their names were never released. And we also asked for information

about their criminal histories, but the Trump administration refused to give us sort of a list describing the different alleged crimes that have been committed by all of these men. The only ways that we found out who they were was through leaks. Right, and so it began to feel

like a pretty endless black box. Correct. And then over the summer, there is a breakthrough. And we start to hear that there are talks happening between the U.S. government and the Venezuelan government, in which the U.S. government is considering releasing these 250-some men from this Salvadoran prison. And one day in July, this is exactly what happens. These men are released and sent to Venezuela. And finally, we have the opportunity to find out what actually happened to these men on the inside. So I immediately begin speaking with a team of reporters who I work with.

who are inside Venezuela, and I ask them to race out and begin to document the reunions of these men with their family members. And from there, all of us as a team, three Venezuelan reporters, a Venezuelan photographer, and myself, we begin these sort of methodical interviews of these men talking to them about their experiences and what they lived through on the inside, we start collecting and cross-referencing their stories, going back, doing follow-up interviews to confirm timelines, facts, narratives in general. We start photographing their injuries, their physical conditions talking to them about the after effects of what they experienced, gathering medical reports from doctors they've seen and what emerges is this pretty clear and very consistent account of widespread abuse among the men inside the prison. The abuse that they describe is physical, it is psychological, at times it is sexual, and in many cases the men describe it as torture.

Wow. And by the time we finish the reporting as a team, we have interviewed 40 of these men. Tell us about one of these men that you spoke to whose story is very consistent with what you heard from all 40. Sure. Luis Elixin Chacon is a young man from Venezuela whose story is really representative, I think, of the stories of so many of these men. He is a father of three. He comes to the United States from Venezuela in 2023.

He comes with his family. Like so many of these guys, he says that he's fleeing a really the bad economic situation, and also that he is following this flow of people that came up through the Darying Gap. Right. And he's working in Milwaukee. He is working for Uber as an Uber eats driver. And the way that he tells the story is that he is with his son, and they are doing Uber.

rates deliveries and they go to McDonald's and he gets an order for a hamburger. So he is making this $11 McDonald's delivery when he is pulled over by the police and told that he has a taillight out. And this is what sort of begins his journey to this maximum security prison in El Salvador. Well, surely it wasn't just a taillight out. Turns out that Luis had had some previous scuffles with the law. He, in 2024, had been accused of domestic violence

and the case was later dismissed. He also had been accused of stealing some things from a Walmart, and that case was still pending. So he had been charged with theft and was awaiting the next step in the case. He is taken to the police station, and it is also in this place where he says that Officials noticed some scars on his leg and say something to the effect of, you know, oh, we got to look out for this guy. These could be bullet wounds.

And they also look suspiciously at his tattoos, he recalled. And why does all that end up mattering? What we know is that in many cases, The Trump administration was using tattoos as a sign that these individuals were gang members and, in fact, had a rating system that it used to determine who was a supposed member of a gang and then to send people to this prison. We have no evidence that Luis Chacon is or was a member of this gang, Rendeira Agua, just like we have very little evidence that many of these men were members of this gang. Nevertheless, they were sent to this prison, and the Trump administration has said publicly that they were all part of this gang.

And what does Luis describe as his journey to the president? this prison in your conversations with him. Luis Chacon has a very interesting journey to the prison in El Salvador. He describes asking to be deported to Venezuela. He does not want to extend his time at all in detention because he knows that he needs to get out and be somewhere. where he can make some money to support his family. And he believes that he is being sent

by the United States to Venezuela. He has heard about these men going to El Salvador. He's very scared that he's going to be sent to El Salvador. He says that he was assured that he was not going to El Salvador. And then he is loaded onto this deportation plane. But eventually they do land in El Salvador, and the men who were on these planes described looking out their window, seeing a sign that indicated that they had arrived in El Salvador and just the terror of realizing that they might be staying there. They talked about Salvador and guards getting on the plane. One of them talked about sort of trying to tighten their seatbelts in this feeble attempt to stay on the plane.

And then, of course, being forced off of the airplane. And these guards are just bending these guys at the waist, slamming them down the stairs against vehicles, onto buses, and bringing them into this feared prison where they are forced to their knees, where they are shaved, and eventually thrown into these prison cells, which have these four plank metal beds that someone described as a sort of living morgue.

And Luis specifically recalls being told, This is hell? You will leave here only in a body bag. So, Julie, what are the conditions that Luis and the rest of these Venezuelans find in this prison? So the men are divided into cell blocks, approximately 10 men in each cell. they are given bunk beds metal most often without any kinds of mattress or sheet. The water is a sort of open cistern. They're supposed to use that water to drink as well as to bathe.

They're supposed to drink their bathing water. Correct. They also say that they are consistently denied medical care. There is one man named Aldo Colmenares who, comes into the prison with diabetes. He tells officials there he has diabetes and needs insulin. He said that he was denied insulin for five days. He's eventually given the wrong kind of insulin, which leads to hypoglycemia and two attacks that lead him to pass out. There is a young man who becomes very, very sick to the point where the other inmates are bringing food and water

to his lips with their hands. And he's eventually sent to an infirmary where he says that a doctor told him he should just resign himself. It is time to die. It's stunning. And for the most part, what these men speak about

is just constant physical abuse. This, means beatings. And it also means being kicked and dragged. Many of the men said many of the men spoke about a position.

they called the gruea position, the crane position. They were forced to kneel for hours and handcuffed behind their backs and then at times lifted by the handcuffs to put pressure on their shoulders and backs and sometimes also stomped on their feet and hands while in this position. It sounds like torture. This abuse goes on for months and they talk about getting to. points of extreme psychological desperation. And one day, they sort of start to crack. And they decide that they're going to stop eating and ask for better treatment. And they decide that they want to write their messages. They take some metal from the beds and cut themselves and And using their own blood write on the sheets messages like, we are not criminals, we are migrants.

And they hang these sheets from what they called the piping in the cells. I mean, they are that despondent, that they are writing messages of protests in their own blood. That's how far gone the situation has become. Exactly. I don't think that they believed they had any other options, and this was something. But what happens next is an even bigger rebellion. In May, there's a guard search of one of the cells. And during this search, officials beat a man so badly that he is bleeding from him. head to toe, according to Luis.

And this sets off so much anger that some of the inmates dislodge metal parts from their bed and use the metal parts to open cell doors. And for a moment, some of these men had this taste of something like freedom. Then, of course, they immediately realize that they are completely outmatched by the guards. Luis tells us they retreat into their cells, and that is when the guards begin going cell by cell and really punishing the men shooting them at point blank with what they call rubber bullets.

in the hand, in the head, in the leg. My photographer colleague traveled around Venezuela photographing these men and you can see one of them has this gash down the front of his face that he said was caused by a rubber bullet that ricocheted off of his forehead.

There is another man who said that he was shot in the thigh with a rubber bullet and has this really sort of gnarly welt in his thigh that we documented. What happened after this shooting? Did these men get any kind of medical treatment? So they talk about asking for medical care following these injuries, and some of them were eventually taken to an infirmary. the man with the bullet in his leg, for example, talks about it being removed without any kind of anesthesia. And Luis describes how after this attempted rebellion, what really happens is there is a sort of new wave of punishment and repression inside the prison. And what does that look like? So there is an isolation room in the prison that the men spoke to us about.

They call La Isla, the Island. And these men say that the island is really the place where some of the most depraved acts occurred. Luis speaks a bit of a tank in a pogano. Luis speaks. about experiencing punishment that included having his head dunked in water as if the guards were attempting to drown him. And, you know, this is pretty graphic for some of our listeners, but one of the inmates talks about being taken there alone by several of the guards wearing hoods,

who forced him to perform oral sex in this space? Julie, throughout this period, as all these horrific actions are allegedly occurring, are these men able to speak to anyone in the outside world through phone calls, emails, anything? These men are denied access to the people they want to speak to during this entire period, they receive two important visits, one from Christy Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and from the Red Cross, which speaks to them, interviews them, and delivers a report to the government of El Salvador, but never makes that report public. Hmm. And as we know, Secretary Noam praises this operation. So,

It would seem she did not hear these kinds of accounts from these men. We don't know what Christy Noem heard while she was inside the prison. What we know is that these men felt so powerless that several of them began to contemplate suicide. Luis is one of these men. He had heard inside the prison that if one person died, maybe all of them would be able to go free. And he gets a sheet.

He gets up on one of the beds. And he indicates to his fellow inmates that he's going to hang himself. And they pull him down. He said, were it not for my companions, that me backer and me amarranted because they were to armare me, I don't have to be talking to me. He said, were it not for these men, my companions,

I would not be here today telling you the story that I'm telling you. I want to ask you what might seem like a somewhat insensitive question given the really shocking descriptions from these men. But I think as journalists, we have to ask it. How do you and our colleagues go about making sure that this harrowing testimony is true? This is a very important and fair question. Of course, we interviewed 40 of these men. their testimonies were consistent with each other's, but we weren't inside the prison. We couldn't

speak to the guards. We couldn't speak to officials in El Salvador. And so we wanted somebody else to help us understand how much we should believe these testimonies. And so we reached out to a nonprofit group of forensic experts. And we provided them with a summary of the testimony as well as photographs of the injuries, in some cases, doctors reports. You basically asked them to audit your reporting. Correct. And what they said was that the testimony and the other evidence that we provided were consistent and credible. And they said that in there, assessment, much of the abuse that was described met the United Nations definition of torture. And I think it bears repeating that this is torture inflicted on men whose deportation to this prison

was not based on any normal legal process. They were never tried on allegations of being terrorists. In fact, the only judge who ever touched their case was a federal judge in the U.S. who tried to stop the flights carrying many of them from ever landing in El Salvador, an order that the Trump administration pretty much ignored. And in the case of Luis, yes, there are charges of theft in the U.S. that in theory might merit a regular old deportation. But in no world would the allegations against someone like him ever seem to justify beatings and torture in a prison in El Salvador? Correct. I'm curious what motivated the release of these men if inevitably releasing them would mean that they could tell these stories to the world, stories of essentially torture.

It's a good question. And I think that many of us following the story thought that these men might spend the rest of their lives in this prison. But the Venezuelan government, which wanted the release of these men, had a bargaining chip. And that bargaining chip is that the government of Nicolas Maduro, the country's autocrat, had been detaining U.S. citizens and U.S. residents inside Venezuela over the last year. And so by July had amassed a sort of group of 10 U.S. prisoners. And the government of Venezuela negotiated with the government of the United States the release of these 10 U.S. citizens and residents in exchange for the freedom of these now 252 men who were in the Salvadoran prison. Hmm. So in the end, it's Maduro, not Trump, who forces these men's awful saga to come to an end.

Yes. I mean, the Maduro government definitely has a hand in securing these men's freedom. So I just want to reflect on what happened in this prison and why it happened. And at the end of the day, it happened because the Trump administration wanted it to happen. And I'm old enough, and I'm old enough, and I'm old enough. and I suspect you are, too, to remember when the United States had to reckon in a very visible and official way with the idea that it had carried out torture systematically after 9-11 to those that the U.S. had detained in response to those terror attacks that year. And when the conduct that occurred to these detainees was revealed, American officials, members of Congress, were so offended and so convinced that it betrayed America's values that they released a report documenting it. So the whole country could see it. And they said, this will never happen again. And here it is again, not conducted by the U.S. per se, as it was after 9-11. But this time, in a sense, outsourced to a foreign country by American government officials.

How should we think about that? It's hard to imagine that U.S. officials did not have some idea that something like this was going to happen inside the Salvadoran prison. Just two years before these men were sent there, the U.S. government released its own report. It's a public report saying that there was strong reason to believe that torture was happening inside the Salvadoran prison system. Wow. They knew. They knew. And I mean, one of the questions I have is why there has not been more outrage about what these men experienced inside this prison, why we have not seen the same kind of outrage that we saw after night. And why do you think that is if you had to make an educated journalistic guess here? Yeah. It's very interesting that the Trump administration and the Buchali administration didn't really try and hide any of this.

Donald Trump came into the White House promising to address the immigration problem at the border in the country in general. and he promised to deter migration. And that is what he has done. I mean, the numbers at the U.S. border are way down. And what I was thinking about a lot as I was reporting this story is how far basically are Americans willing to go for migration deterrence. And, you know, when we went to the Trump administration with our findings, they did not deny any of the testimony.

Instead, a spokeswoman said to us that we should be focusing our reporting elsewhere, specifically on children who had been killed by, quote, vicious illegal aliens. Hmm. I mean, first of all, that suggests that the men who end up in this prison in El Salvador have killed children, and I don't believe you found any evidence of that.

Putting that aside, this sounds like a spokesperson for the White House basically saying to the New York Times, we've seen all your reporting, we've seen these accounts of torture of men, we put in this prison, and our response is, who cares? Which is very striking. Correct.

And I should mention that the legal door is still open for the Trump administration, to continue sending people to El Salvador. And to this prison in El Salvador? Correct. I want to end by asking you what has become of men like Luis now that they are released.

Have they achieved anything resembling normalcy now that they are back in Venezuela? A country, of course, that they had sought to flee, which is why they came to the United States in the first place, now they are back having been through this experience. What are they saying life is like right now? Sure. Well, Luis, for one, is separated from his family.

His partner and their three children are in the United States. All of these men talked about suffering pretty intense, psychological trauma, as well as physical problems. They talked about blurred vision, recurring migraines, troubles. breathing, many of them described themselves as zombies, essentially. This sounds like a form of PTSD. For sure.

They talked about not being able to sleep, and when they do sleep, experiencing a sensation of feeling like they're back in the prison. And one of the men, in particular, described

going to bed and hearing the rattle of handcuffs, the voices of Salvadoran officials, and the clang of his cell door. Well, Julie, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. down to 20 per year. Isn't that amazing? 20,000 to 20. On Sunday, the Republican chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Bill Cassidy, recommended that parents vaccinate their newborn babies against hepatitis B,

despite a controversial vote on Friday by a federal panel, to end that decades-long recommendation. Cassidy said that the government's original recommendation, dating back to 1991, had prevented, thousands of infections and warned that babies who do become infected with hepatitis B are at much higher risk of long-term health problems. Those who are infected at birth, 95% of them become chronic carriers. So what does it mean to be a chronic carrier? It means that you're at risk for in-stage liver disease, for liver cancer, for infecting other people. But if you vaccinate at

birth, that never happens. And later today, the social Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major test of President Trump's power. The case revolves around the question of whether Trump can fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency, simply because she is not aligned with his political agenda. An existing law says that the president can only remove commissioners for wrongdoing or for neglecting their duties. A ruling in Trump's favor would overturn 90 years of legal precedent. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Michael Simon Johnson, with help from Eric Kruppke.

It was edited by Patricia Willens with help from Lexi Diao. Contains music by Diane Wong, Mary Lazano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to T.B. Cy Romera, Sheila Ordinetti. Issa Yen Herrera and Adriana Lerrero Fernandez. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Bobar. See you tomorrow. Thank you.