After a few hours in the air, Neri Alvarado Borges and the other Venezuelans on a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight landed in Honduras. Alvarado was hopeful. He had been detained by ICE in Texas in early February. Told he could face years in detention, he agreed to be deported. It was March 15, and Alvarado assumed he would soon be home.
During the brief stopover in Honduras, Alvarado recalls officials giving him and the other Venezuelans boxes of pizza. “Eat,” they said, “because later on we have another surprise for you.” When the plane landed a second time, an ICE agent told the men, “this is the surprise.” Opening the windows, the men realized they had been sent to El Salvador.
Confused, Alvarado asked why they were not in Venezuela. “Those are orders from the President,” the agent replied. The ICE officer told Alvarado to get off the plane quietly because the guards in El Salvador were different. “They are not like us,” he said. “They are going to treat you badly.”
“They knocked out one of my teeth. They messed up my knees. They messed up my ribs.”
The Trump administration had shipped Alvarado and more than 230 other Venezuelans deprived of due process to a notorious megaprison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. In exchange for roughly $5 million, the Salvadoran government agreed to hold the men, who had been accused with scant or nonexistent evidence of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua.
In March, our reporting showed that Alvarado and others had been targeted because of benign tattoos that had no connection to the criminal group. One of Alvarado’s tattoos is an autism awareness ribbon with the name of his younger brother, Neryelson. Alvarado’s story became emblematic of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s decision to disappear Venezuelan migrants to a foreign gulag, where they were held incommunicado for four months.
In his first media interview since the men were released from CECOT on July 18 as part of a prisoner swap deal, Alvarado described to Mother Jones the nightmare he and the others lived through from the first moment they arrived.
Alvarado, 25, said when the plane landed, Salvadoran police officers dragged him off in shackles and violently pushed him onto a bus as if he were a “trash bag.” As he tried to get his bearings, the officers hit him in the head; they cursed, yelling at him to keep his face down. The men were driven around for about half an hour before arriving at CECOT. “Welcome to El Salvador,” the police said.
As they entered the maximum-security prison, Alvarado remembers being thrown to the floor on his knees. He saw hair everywhere. All around him, guards shaved the men’s heads. (The process was recorded and shared as propaganda by the administration of President Nayib Bukele on social media.) “They grab me by the sweater and they were practically choking me,” Alvarado recalled. “It felt like they were choking me for about 15 to 20 seconds, which were the longest 20 seconds of my life because I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”
The guards gave them five seconds to change into the white prison t-shirt and shorts. If detainees took longer, they were beaten. The Venezuelans were then taken to Module 8, a warehouse-like wing of the prison with 32 cells. On the way, Alvarado said a guard asked him who he was and where he was coming from. “From Dallas,” Alvarado said. “What gang are you in?” the guard asked. Alvarado told him he was not a gang member. “But if you’re not a gang member, what are you doing here?” Alvarado wondered the same thing.
In the prison, he recalled seeing blood all over the floor. “They’re going to kill me here,” Alvarado thought. “If I survive, I’ll be locked up my entire life.”
Alvarado and two other Venezuelan men sent to CECOT spoke with Mother Jones about the horrific conditions they were held in. Their stories corroborate reports from others flown to El Salvador, who described CECOT as a place where detainees feared death and torture. Some men contemplated suicide. “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience,” Juan José Ramos Ramos told ProPublica. Guards in the prison enacted a “perverse form of humiliation,” Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas told the Washington Post: “The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us, ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile.”
Wuilliam Lozada Sánchez, 27, told Mother Jones that he and other men were beaten with batons upon arriving at the Salvadoran prison. “They knocked out one of my teeth,” he said. “They messed up my knees. They messed up my ribs.”
Before leaving for the United States in 2023, Lozada worked at a factory that made jeans in Colombia. His goal was to save enough money to open a pants factory in his home state of Táchira. Instead, he ended up spending more than a year in US detention before being taken to CECOT in March. Lozada said they experienced a form of torture in the prison.
While being processed, the men were made to line up in a row and kneel. Then, according to Alvarado and other Venezuelans, the prison’s director told the men: “Welcome to hell.” “He told us that we were not going to leave anymore and that he was going to make sure that we never again ate meat or chicken,” Julio Zambrano Perez told Mother Jones. The only way out of that place, the director said, was in a black bag.
On a video call from Venezuela, Zambrano showed a cut on his left eyebrow that he said was from beatings he endured right after arriving in El Salvador. That first night at CECOT, Zambrano couldn’t sleep as he thought about how his life had been ripped away from him. In North Carolina, Zambrano, who, like Alvarado, turned 25 while at CECOT, worked shifts at a hotel and a restaurant to provide for his wife, Luz, and their two daughters, one of whom was born while he was in ICE detention. The family had applied for asylum in the United States.
During the months inside, Alvarado held on to a Bible verse for hope: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”
In late January, Zambrano had what he thought would be a routine check-in appointment with ICE. Instead, the agents took him to a room and started interrogating him about his tattoos, a rose and a crown with his name on it. He tried to explain it was normal for Venezuelans to have tattoos, but to no avail. ICE kept him detained and later moved him to Georgia and from there to the El Valle Detention Facility in Texas. “They never had any evidence to say that I belonged to a gang,” he said.
Alvarado had a similar experience. Originally from Yaritagua, a city about four hours west of Caracas, he studied psychology in school but had to abandon his studies for financial reasons. Alvarado went on to get certified as a personal trainer and worked as a swim instructor. (While he was at CECOT, members of the swim club in Venezuela where Alvarado coached made a video demanding his release.) In 2023, he decided to leave for the United States—partly in hope of being able to help pay for the medical bills for his brother, who has autism. Like many others, Alvarado made the grueling journey through the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama before eventually reaching the US-Mexico border.
After he turned himself over to Border Patrol agents, Alvarado spent about 24 hours in custody before being released. He said border officials reviewed his tattoos and concluded that they were not indicative of gang membership. Along with the autism awareness ribbon, Alvarado has three tattoos written in English and Spanish: One reads “self love,” another “brothers,” and the third “familia.”
Once in Dallas, Alvarado started working at a Venezuelan bakery. It allowed him to send about $500 per month back home to help support his family and his younger brother. But his life was upended in February, when he said ICE and DEA agents, with guns drawn, arrested him outside his apartment. The officers took Alvarado to ICE’s Dallas field office, where he was questioned about his tattoos and gang affiliations.
Alvarado said during the interview he was struck by the ICE agent’s appearance. The man questioning him was covered in tattoos from his hand to his neck. The officer, Alvarado said, even had a tattoo of a rose—one of the tattoos that ICE has used as evidence of membership in Tren de Aragua.
When the agent asked Alvarado about his tattoos, Alvarado—who had been charged earlier in the Trump administration with the misdemeanor offense of entering the country illegally in April 2024—said he showed him the autism awareness ribbon on his leg. “Wow, that’s nice,” he remembered the agent saying in response. The officer then checked Alvarado’s phone and social media accounts before concluding that he had no relation to the gang. “Well, you came to the United States to do good,” Alvarado recalled the ICE agent telling him. “You have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.” Moments later, a different ICE agent decided to detain Alvarado. (DHS did not respond to a request for comment about whether it sent Alvarado to CECOT in error.)
At his final immigration hearing, Alvarado said there was no mention of Tren de Aragua. He explained to the immigration judge that he had a valid Venezuelan passport and could return home on a commercial flight. Alvarado recalled the judge saying that it was not necessary. ICE would fly him back home soon.
In CECOT, the men settled into a bleak daily routine. They slept on metal beds without mattresses, sheets, or pillows. Their diet was largely rice, beans, and tortillas. On occasion, Zambrano said, the guards would serve them a slightly better meal, only to snap a photo and take it away before they could eat. The lights were always on, and the men were allowed a single shower at 5 a.m. When they sought medical attention, they were given a pain pill and told to drink water—the same water they bathed in.
For a while, they were only allowed out of the cell twice a week to hear a few minutes of a religious sermon. To pass the time, they made dice out of tortillas. They tried to exercise inside the cell every day. “If we kept our minds busy,” Alvarado said, “we wouldn’t think so much about the situation we were going through.” During the months inside, Alvarado held on to a Bible verse for hope: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.”
Alvarado and others say that those who resisted or complained about the conditions were brutalized in a small isolation cell they called la isla, the island. “What they did there was torture us,” Zambrano said. “They always wanted to take us to la isla for whatever reason.” He said he spent two days in the dark, confined space. When the guards weren’t kicking and beating them, they would hit the doors, laugh, and tell the men they would rot in there. Alvarado recalled hearing the screams and the thud sound from beatings. “They hit them everywhere, on the head, on the legs, on the back, on the abdomen, on the ribs,” he said.
One day, some of the men started protesting in their cell. The guards responded with tear gas. They hit one man so hard he passed out. “They left him there lying on the floor,” Zambrano said. Fearing he had been killed, the Venezuelans started a hunger strike that went on for a few days. “If we’re going to get out of here, dead or alive,” Zambrano reasoned, “then let’s get out defending ourselves.”
As the weeks dragged on, the men started wondering if they had been forgotten. Lozada said he had no idea that their cases were the subject of major legal battles in the United States. “They were telling us that our country—that our president—had abandoned us,” Lozada explained. “That our families had abandoned us as well, and that we were going to die there in prison…that no one was fighting for us.”
Alvarado recalled the Salvadoran guards saying, “There’s no family here, there are no lawyers here, nobody exists here.” During the four months at CECOT, he saw the sun only once.
Like others, Alvarado said conditions improved slightly on the days when US officials like Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem or the Red Cross visited. They’d be given a thin mattress and a pillow, as well as deodorant, soap, and toothpaste. But, after the visits, everything was taken away. (El Salvador’s Vice President Félix Ulloa denied that the men were mistreated to ProPublica.)
After nearly four months, Alvarado said the men were asked to provide their shoe and clothing sizes. Soon after, they had check-ups with a dentist, a nutritionist, and other doctors. The next day, they were given a new pair of underwear and socks, along with deodorant and shampoo. Alvarado suspected something was about to happen, but was not sure what.
Finally, in the early hours of Friday, July 18, the guards woke them up and told them to get ready in five minutes. They were taken to the airport, where they were received by Venezuelan officials. But it wasn’t until the plane took off that they believed they were headed home. The men cried and applauded. “For a moment, we thought it was going to be impossible to get out of there,” Zambrano said. “It’s the first time we’ve seen a person get out of that prison alive.”
After arriving near Caracas in Venezuela, Zambrano called his wife, whose number was the only one he remembered by heart. He spent two days in a hotel and then was let go, late at night on a Sunday, to reunite with his mother. “I started to cry, we started to cry,” he said. “I imagined all the suffering they had gone through not knowing about me.”
Zambrano’s children and wife are still in the United States. He has yet to meet his youngest daughter, who’s only six months old, in person. When they had their first video call after his release, he said he barely recognized her because she had grown so much. Zambrano said he would like to go back to the United States to be with his family and continue to fight his asylum case. But he is scared of being detained again.
For now, the family talks on the phone every day. And he hopes for an acknowledgment of the evil done to him and others and the fact that he is now separated from his wife and daughters. “The first thing I want is to clear our names and for justice be done for everything that happened to us there in El Salvador,” he said.
The day he arrived home, Alvarado said his block was packed with people waiting to greet him. He became overcome with emotion when he saw his family. “It was like I could breathe,” he said, “like finally I’m here.”
Still, the four months in CECOT have taken a toll on his mental health. He has had nightmares about being back in the prison before waking up and realizing with relief that he’s home. And if he sees a police officer or a patrol car, he grows anxious. “I remember everything that happened in CECOT,” he said.
Like Zambrano, Alvarado also hopes for accountability. “Now we’re free in our country,” he said, “but my life was already established in the United States. I was helping my family and now they have sent me back here, where I have to start from zero.”
His main goal, Alvarado said, is to support the younger brother whose name adorns his autism awareness tattoo.