Despite a federal judge's order temporarily barring President Donald Trump's administration from deporting migrants under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, immigration authorities transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador because flights were in the air at the time of the order, officials said Sunday.
Video released by El Salvador’s government Sunday showed men being hustled out of an airplane and into waiting buses by officers in riot gear.
The men, who had with their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down to have them bend at the waist.
The video also showed the men being transported to prison in a large convoy of buses guarded by police and military vehicles and at least one helicopter.
The men were shown kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform – knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs – and placed in cells.
The migrants were taken to the notorious CECOT facility, the centerpiece of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's push to pacify his once violence-wracked country through tough police measures and limits on basic rights.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated a deal with Bukele to house migrants last month, posted on the site: "We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”
Venezuela’s government in a statement Sunday rejected the use of the Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”
The gang known as Tren de Aragua originated in an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied an exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their nation’s economy came undone last decade.
The Trump administration has not identified the migrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States.
It also sent two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States.
(AP)
