Finalist: Staff of The Washington Post

In the early weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, the White House highlighted 72 people ICE had arrested. A Washington Post analysis reveals at least 36, or half, were already in prison. Another 17 were on probation, under supervision or recently charged with another crime. In total, nearly 74 percent of those arrested were already known to ICE, some dating back to the 1990s. One, Alami El Mansouri, was supposed to spend the rest of his life in prison.

By Maria Sacchetti and Artur Galocha

More than two decades ago, El Mansouri and other masked men burst into a family’s home in Oklahoma City. As they pointed guns at the heads of the parents and demanded money, the couple’s six-year-old son crawled under a kitchen cabinet and called 911.

“They’ve got a gun. I’m scared,” the boy told the operator, according to the Oklahoman. “Please come.”

Shortly after President Donald Trump took office, state records show that the Republican governor of Oklahoma commuted El Mansouri’s sentence of more than 100 years to time served so the federal government could deport him to Morocco. Immigration enforcement agents took him into custody Feb. 5. The next day, the White House touted the arrest on social media and claimed that the administration’s actions “make America safe again.”

El Mansouri was catapulted overnight from a forgotten inmate into a notorious criminal — an example that the White House publicity machine uses to justify Trump’s calls for the largest mass-deportation campaign in U.S. history.

El Mansouri’s lawyer says her client, a college-educated software engineer, had fallen into an opioid addiction, committed a crime and was punished — but has overcome his addiction, taken anger management classes and apologized to the victims, who did not object to releasing him so he could be sent home.

“I apologize sincerely for the people and the state of Oklahoma,” El Mansouri, bespectacled and wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, told the state parole board five days before Trump took office. “I just hope that the victims will find it in their hearts to forgive me one day.”

The Trump administration has roared into cities and towns over the past two months, often with cameras and celebrity live-streamers in tow, to arrest thousands of immigrants they say pose a threat to Americans. Trump said officers are “achieving the great liberation of America” from criminals; his border czar, Tom Homan, said the arrests are making neighborhoods safer; and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem has taken credit for getting “these scumbags off of American streets.”

The Department of Homeland Security said on March 13 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested approximately 33,000 immigrants in U.S. cities and towns since Trump took office, but officials will not release all their names or details about them, such as where they were arrested or specific criminal histories.

The White House has showcased 72 ICE arrests.

In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, the White House X account regularly posted stats on ICE immigration arrests. Included as part of that were some detainees’ mug shots in prison-orange frames alongside a partial list of their crimes. The administration labeled them as “some of the worst.”

A Washington Post investigation into these cases found that:

At least 36 — or half — were in state prisons or local jails when Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they arrested them.

Another 17 were on parole or probation after serving years in prison.

And at least a dozen, possibly more, had been deported before, some as many as four times.

In all, nearly 74 percent were known to ICE, some for decades. Others were arrested in communities, or arrest records for them could not be found.

The Post’s findings mirror a national dataset posted by the Deportation Data Project, a repository obtained through public-records requests that shows that a similar percentage of the nearly 17,000 immigration arrests made during the same time period were already in jail, contrary to the Trump administration’s assertions that they were making most arrests in American communities. Hints that they were already incarcerated are in the White House’s photos. Some inmates are dressed in prison uniforms, while others appear against a backdrop of cinder-block walls or industrial doors.

Among the arrests the White House highlighted:

Ever Villafañe Martinez, who had been in federal prison since 2009. The onetime drug kingpin from Colombia was convicted 15 years ago of conspiracy to funnel cocaine into the United States through Mexico and sentenced to life in prison. The White House announced his arrest in February, disclosing that his punishment was reduced to 240 months, and he was taken into immigration custody to be deported. As of Wednesday, two months after his arrest, he remained in a Florida immigrant detention center, according to the agency’s website.

Yared Mekonnen, who was arrested inside a federal prison days after Trump took office. The former taxi driver was sentenced to nine years in prison for the sexual assault and attempted kidnapping of an intoxicated female passenger in D.C. in 2017. That sentence was shortened because of good conduct, and upon release, he was expected to register as a sex offender and remain under U.S. government supervision. Instead, he was arrested by federal immigration officers in New Orleans so he could be deported to Ethiopia, which in 2020 was among more than 20 nations that did not always cooperate with deportations. If he can’t be deported, officials would probably be required to release him into the United States. He remained in ICE detention Wednesday in Louisiana.

Carlos Sosa Horellana, who was in the Rappahannock Regional Jail in Stafford, Virginia, after an arrest in September for assault charges. Sosa Horellana has been deported twice before, illustrating a point often made by advocates for victims that deportation is not the equivalent of a lengthy prison sentence. Nearly two decades ago, he was sentenced to 80 years in prison for raping a 12-year-old girl in Richmond. He served only two years, as the judge suspended most of his sentence because he “will be deported to Honduras,” records show. He returned to Virginia and is facing charges for illegally reentering the country, after being convicted of an aggravated felony, and failing to register as a sex offender.

These sorts of cases amplify the false caricature that Trump has long promoted of immigrants as violent criminals, even though ICE’s data last year showed that the “millions” of criminals that Trump wishes to deport do not exist. Out of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, about 662,500 immigrants have criminal histories. But Trump continues to claim his mass deportation effort is needed to make the country safer, even as his administration has broadened its efforts beyond those accused of crimes and is now targeting immigrants who are in the country legally.

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not dispute The Post’s findings.

Administration officials said the arrests are part of more than 100,000 immigration and border arrests during Trump’s 70 days in office, with a similar number of removals. Officials did not comment on the individual cases. ICE acknowledged that it routinely arrests criminals inside jails and prisons as well as out in communities. But it has not responded to questions about its handling of individual cases or why it has not released a full list of those arrested.

White House spokesman Kush Desai sent a previously published statement saying Trump was elected with a “resounding mandate to secure our borders and mass deport criminal illegal migrants.”

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the 72 cases are a small number of arrests and alleged that the Biden administration failed to arrest criminals or lodge the arrests.

The last administration prioritized the arrest of criminals, and removed tens of thousands of people with criminal convictions, according to the latest ICE report. ICE also flagged immigrants for arrest under Biden, including Sosa Horellana, the man convicted of rape.

Critics worry that as the Trump administration diverts more resources to immigration enforcement — including criminal investigators from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — they are pulling resources away from other efforts to keep the country safe.

“All this showmanship is not equating to keeping us safer,” said Jason Houser, ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration. “You can’t say in one breath that you’re going after violent criminals and then pull the DEA and ATF and the FBI off the job.”

The dangers of dropping charges or shortening sentences

Historically, immigration enforcement officers have arrested most immigrants for deportation inside prisons and jails because they are the easiest and safest places to find criminals, their top priority for removal. Whether an immigrant is in the country illegally or legally, committing a violent crime is usually grounds for removal no matter who is the president. Even some states with “sanctuary” policies to protect some immigrants from deportation, such as New York and California, cooperate to deport serious criminals.

In some cases the White House has publicized, ICE arrested the immigrants before they had gone on trial or, if convicted, completed their sentences, which analysts say is a worrisome trend.

Former federal officials say deportation is a civil procedure that leads to a person’s release in their home country or in the United States if they cannot be deported. Dismissing their criminal charges, or cutting their sentences short, comes with the risk of them reoffending.

For example, prosecutors in an Ohio hamlet dropped drunk-driving charges against Enemias Chilel-Martinez, an immigrant from Guatemala, three days before Trump took office, saying he was “deported,” court records show. The White House didn’t announce his arrest until early February. The local prosecutor did not respond to questions.

Doris Meissner, immigration commissioner in the Clinton administration, said arresting people before their criminal cases are completed is “subverting the aims of the criminal justice system.” Victims deserve closure and perhaps restitution, she said, and the criminal system merits respect.

“You have no idea what their origin country is going to do with them,” said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank. “They may very well have been dangerous people, and they should be fulfilling their sentence.”

Rounds of deportations

Law enforcement officers say ICE can play a valuable role in investigations, with expertise and resources that allow them to track fugitives across the United States and overseas. But some are skeptical that deportations prevent crime.

Many of those featured in orange boxes on the White House’s social media accounts had been deported before, some multiple times.

The White House said ICE arrested Pedro Medina on Feb. 3 in California, saying he was convicted of lewd acts against a child. Officials did not mention that he had earlier been removed four times — in 2013, twice in 2014 and again in 2015, federal court records show. In 2023, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for being in the United States illegally, then released on supervision, and then rearrested in December on a probation violation. ICE arrested him in a federal prison.

And on Feb. 13, ICE arrested Horacio Mejia from Guatemala, who is accused of raping a child and has been deported at least once before. ICE officials credited their officers in Knoxville, Tennessee, with getting Mejia “off their streets,” but court records show that Lexington Police had earlier arrested Mejia 200 miles away in Kentucky, based on a tip from a small-town police detective who had searched for Mejia for three years. Sgt. Jeff Parsons of Alcoa, Tenn., population 13,000, said he did not want ICE to deport Mejia until after he stands trial and, if convicted, serves time. “I worry about the risk of him coming back,” he said.

There is also the risk that ICE will be unable to carry out the deportations. Some countries do not take their citizens back because they cannot verify a detainee’s citizenship or because of tense diplomatic relations. The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that ICE cannot detain people forever and must release those they cannot deport.

Another arrest the White House has heralded: Jhon Gerald Urrutia, 35, a Venezuelan man convicted of robbery and credit card fraud in Florida in 2015. Officials did not disclose that the Trump administration released him from immigration custody in 2017, after he was detained for about a year under the Obama administration.

Urrutia was one of more than 1,600 immigrants released during Trump’s first nine months in office, according to data The Post obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. They included people convicted of homicide, drug trafficking and rape. Many were from Iran, China, Cuba and other countries that have a history of delaying or rejecting removals.

Prison reform advocates say the immigration rhetoric is overshadowing legitimate debate over lengthy criminal sentences — and some Republicans argue that it’s better to deport immigrants who committed violent crimes than to pay for their incarceration.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), who commuted El Mansouri’s sentence in February, said it costs about $36,000 a day to incarcerate about 525 immigrants the state says are in the United States illegally, and officials have floated the idea of sending some home to save money. The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment about the cases.

Oklahoma had the nation’s highest rate of incarceration until voters approved ballot measures in 2016 that aimed to reduce it. Stitt campaigned on reducing the prison population.

El Mansouri’s attorney Madison Boone told the state Pardon and Parole Board at his Jan. 15 hearing that her client’s more than 100-year sentence was “grossly excessive” for a first-time offender who committed a robbery in which nobody was maimed or killed.

Now 54, El Mansouri planned to return home to Morocco to live with his brother, she said.

The board voted unanimously to release him, noting that he would be taken into federal custody and deported to Morocco. Stitt commuted his sentence on Feb. 5, and the White House said ICE took custody of him the same day.

Nearly two months have passed, and he has yet to be deported.

About this story

Alice Crites, Emmanuel Martinez and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report. Editing by Jenna Johnson and Sarah Frostenson. Graphics editing by Kevin Uhrmacher and Adrián Blanco Ramos. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Copy editing by Paola Ruano.

The administration rounded up some of the Venezuelans two days before the flights took off, pressing forward even as Venezuela agreed to accept deportees.

By Sarah Blaskey, Samantha Schmidt, Silvia Foster-Frau, Ana Vanessa Herrero, Arelis R. Hernández, María Luisa Paúl and Karen DeYoung

The message from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to El Salvador’s Foreign Ministry outlined an audacious plan: The United States would be sending as many as 500 Venezuelan gang members to the Central American nation, and it planned to do so within 24 hours.

The March 13 communication was part of secretive negotiations with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and served as Rubio’s formal notice that the Trump administration was sending the Venezuelans to be imprisoned there for a year “or until a determination concerning their long-term disposition is made,” documents show. Detainees at the megaprison have no access to lawyers or contact with their families.

A Washington Post investigation shows how officials raced to execute the plan, rounding up some of the men at their homes the same day Rubio’s message went out. And they pressed forward with the removals, even as Venezuela agreed to accept deportation flights, in a high-stakes bid to show power and deter migrants from attempting to cross the border illegally.

The Post examined immigration and court records, and conducted interviews with attorneys, friends and family members, to piece together information about more than 50 of the men believed to be imprisoned at the Terrorism Confinement Center, the megaprison often referred to by its Spanish acronym, CECOT. The review shows that despite the administration’s claims, many of the immigrants sent to El Salvador had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules.

At least two of the men imprisoned in El Salvador had been approved by the State Department to resettle as refugees in the U.S. after extensive vetting by federal law enforcement authorities, documents show. At least four had protections against removal through temporary protected status, often called TPS, granted to those fleeing Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, according to attorneys for the men or records shared with The Post. Others had been active members of Venezuela’s opposition and had open asylum claims.

On March 15, a day later than Rubio’s message anticipated, the U.S. sent more than 260 migrants, including 23 Salvadorans, to El Salvador. Many had no deportation orders. President Donald Trump invoked the wartime powers of the Alien Enemies Act against the Venezuela-based gang known as Tren de Aragua to remove over 100 of the migrants without giving them a chance to contest their removals.

The first flights were over international waters when a federal judge in Washington ordered the Trump administration to turn them around. Instead, they flew to Honduras, where they waited on the tarmac for four hours. Bukele would not allow them to land in El Salvador until the international airport there was closed to commercial traffic for the night, around 10 p.m., according to a U.S. official and an airport administrator. Like others interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal matters.

On March 15, a day later than Rubio’s message anticipated, the U.S. sent more than 260 migrants, including 23 Salvadorans, to El Salvador. Many had no deportation orders. President Donald Trump invoked the wartime powers of the Alien Enemies Act against the Venezuela-based gang known as Tren de Aragua to remove over 100 of the migrants without giving them a chance to contest their removals.

The first flights were over international waters when a federal judge in Washington ordered the Trump administration to turn them around. Instead, they flew to Honduras, where they waited on the tarmac for four hours. Bukele would not allow them to land in El Salvador until the international airport there was closed to commercial traffic for the night, around 10 p.m., according to a U.S. official and an airport administrator. Like others interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal matters.

Those flights were canceled after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, prompting uncertainty about whether Venezuela could still safely send a plane to the U.S. to pick up deportees, according to two people involved in the discussions. Trump’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation says that property belonging to an “alien enemy” and used for hostile activity is subject to “seizure and forfeiture.”

Though Trump administration officials have called the migrants sent to CECOT in mid-March the “worst-of-the-worst criminals,” in court, the government has admitted that many do not have criminal records. Neither the U.S. nor El Salvador has released their names, leaving families to scour unofficial lists and sleuth through videos and photos released by Bukele’s government to determine their loved ones’ whereabouts.

The Trump administration has admitted that it sent one man, Kilmar Abrego García, to El Salvador in error. A federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to return a second man while his asylum claim is adjudicated. The operation was so hurried that officials also flew several women who could not be detained at the all-male prison and had to be returned to the United States. El Salvador also declined to imprison a Nicaraguan the U.S. had sent, fearing conflict with its neighboring countries, court records indicate.

In response to detailed questions from The Post, a senior State Department official acknowledged that the Venezuelan government had planned to accept deportation flights the same weekend as the flights to El Salvador, but dismissed those as “one-offs.”

“The Venezuelan regime began to accept regular repatriation flights of Venezuelan nationals only after the U.S. began the criminal alien deportation flights to El Salvador,” the official said.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the administration would not “detail counterterrorism operations and foreign policy negotiations with foreign countries for the press.” A Justice Department spokesperson said: “Activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy, remove dangerous illegal aliens from our country, and keep Americans safe.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

The Post asked three communications officials in the Salvadoran government to provide the identities, whereabouts and additional information about the deportees transferred to CECOT but received no response.

Rander Peña, Venezuela’s vice minister of foreign affairs, said his government has not received an official list of names of those detained in El Salvador.

The deportations have triggered a standoff between the courts and the Trump administration, which has asserted that its executive power overrides certain due process rights. The administration’s attempts to circumvent court rulings have sparked concerns among some legal scholars of a looming constitutional crisis.

On Thursday, a federal judge blocked the administration from removing migrants in South Texas under the Alien Enemies Act, finding that the president’s invocation of the act had exceeded his authority.

“It’s horrifying,” said Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights group. “The Venezuelans have not had a trial. They have not been convicted. They’ve been deported to El Salvador and disappeared into one of the most brutal prisons in the hemisphere. They’re outside the reach of the rule of law at this point.”

Roger Eduardo Molina and his girlfriend, Daniela Núñez, arrived at a Houston airport less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated.

The couple had wanted to start a new life in the U.S., but only if they could do so legally. They applied to resettle through a State Department-run program called the Safe Mobility Initiative that spent several months vetting them through security checks and face-to-face interviews.

In September, they were conditionally approved for refugee status and, after completing the final clearances, given plane tickets to Texas.

“It was a huge blessing,” said Núñez, 30.

Trump was actively campaigning for president and touting his plan to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, which would allow the government to bypass standard removal proceedings for anyone age 14 or older whom it deemed an “alien enemy.” The 1798 authority had been activated just three times in the nation’s history, all during times of war. It had last been used during World War II, when it paved the way for the incarceration of more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent.

“Those were the old days, when they had tough politicians,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Arizona last year.

More than half a million Venezuelans had entered the United States since 2019, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). And increasingly, Venezuelans became a target in Trump’s remarks.

He falsely claimed that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had emptied out Venezuela’s prisons in order to flood the U.S. with criminals, and he often spoke of Tren de Aragua, which began in a Venezuelan prison and is now a loosely operated transnational network. Experts who have studied Tren de Aragua say it has not established a strong presence in the U.S., but Trump spoke of the gang as if it were in every American city.

Indeed, the same week Molina was granted refugee status, Trump was blasting Venezuelans at a news conference, suggesting, without evidence, that Tren de Aragua had overrun a city in Colorado.

“They’re taking over the place; they took over buildings,” Trump said Sept. 6. “This is just the beginning.”

Molina, 29, was not politically outspoken, but his family said he caught the ire of a local official aligned with Maduro after he organized a fundraiser on Facebook to improve the soccer field where he played. The official saw Molina’s fundraiser as a jab at the government and its poor maintenance of public spaces. Molina began receiving threats on WhatsApp, Núñez said. The couple fled to Colombia in 2021.

They were prepared to start over again when they arrived in Texas on Jan. 8, in the last days of the Biden administration. Then they were stopped by a CBP officer at the Houston airport.

The officer asked Molina whether he had any tattoos. He showed him the crown on his chest, the soccer ball and forest on his wrists, the palm tree on one ankle and the infinity sign inscribed with the word “family” on the other. The officer told them the tattoos were associated with Tren de Aragua, recalled Núñez, who witnessed one of Molina’s conversations with a CBP officer.

Next the agent looked through his phone. In a WhatsApp group chat that included several friends, Molina had once made a joke about the hamburgers he sold to help support his family. He told his friends that if they didn’t buy his burgers, Tren de Aragua would come after them. It was the kind of joke heard often among Venezuelans living in Latin America, the couple told the agent.

“These aren’t the kinds of jokes we make in my family,” the officer said. The officer detained Molina for further questioning. Núñez was told she could either wait in U.S. detention for her case to be sorted out or could return to Colombia that day. She chose the latter. Molina wasn’t given the option.

Another official asked him whether he was afraid of returning to Venezuela, he later told Núñez. When he responded yes, he was informed he would be taken into custody while his case was adjudicated. Three lawyers with extensive experience in refugee law said they had never heard of a vetted refugee being arrested on arrival.

Days after Trump’s inauguration, the new administration began to put in motion plans to speed up deportations.

Trump said he wanted to deport “millions” of immigrants, but reaching that goal would prove difficult. Most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are entitled to an immigration court hearing before they can be deported, including criminals. With the current backlogs, those cases can take months or years to resolve.

In late January, Richard Grenell, Trump’s special missions envoy, traveled to Caracas to meet with Maduro and persuaded Venezuelan officials to temporarily accept deportation flights from the U.S.

The meeting generated international headlines and seemed to signal the level of authority Grenell wielded in the new administration and the contrasting approaches he and Rubio had on Venezuela. While Grenell favored engagement, Rubio had long been a Venezuela hawk keen on applying maximum pressure on Maduro.

Grenell did not respond to questions or an interview request.

Three days later, in early February, Rubio announced an agreement of his own. He said that in an “extraordinary meeting” at Bukele’s lake house, the Salvadoran president had agreed to accept “any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal from any nationality, be they MS-13 or Tren de Aragua, and house them in his jails.”

About two weeks after Rubio announced the agreement with El Salvador, Trump designated Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations. Experts estimate the number of active Tren de Aragua members in the United States is probably in the hundreds. But U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement agencies were announcing arrests of alleged Tren de Aragua members almost every day.

In early March, immigration attorneys started receiving reports that Venezuelan migrants were being moved from detention centers around the country to facilities in South Texas.

Among them was Franco Caraballo Tiapa, who was transferred March 8 to the Rio Grande Processing Center in the border town of Laredo. He told his wife he was dressed in red to identify him as dangerous and put into a cell with dozens of other Venezuelans. He had an ongoing asylum case and no criminal record in Venezuela or the U.S., according to government records reviewed by The Post. According to the asylum application he filed jointly with his wife, he had been detained and beaten for participating in political protests in his home country.

While the transfers to South Texas were underway, Maduro on March 10 stopped accepting U.S. deportation flights in retaliation for the Trump administration revoking Chevron’s license to operate in Venezuela.

But Grenell again stepped in and, on March 13, posted on X that he had persuaded Maduro to resume accepting the deportation flights. They were scheduled to restart within 24 hours. That same morning, as Trump’s envoy was announcing his plan, Rubio sent the formal notice to El Salvador about sending hundreds of Venezuelan deportees. Documents obtained by The Post show U.S. officials also planned to send two Salvadoran members of MS-13.

Bukele had specifically requested the return of one of them, high-ranking gang leader Cesar Humberto Lopez Larios, according to the documents. Lopez Larios had been held on terrorism-related charges by the U.S. Justice Department, and authorities said he had information about an alleged secret deal Bukele had struck with MS-13, granting the gang’s leaders money and privileges in exchange for reduced violence in El Salvador. The Salvadoran government ultimately agreed to take up to 300 Venezuelans and the MS-13 leaders, CNN recently reported, citing an internal document.

As Rubio was sending his message March 13, some of the immigrants who would soon be deported to El Salvador were still being taken into custody. On that day, at least seven Venezuelan migrants were detained at their homes, some of them after Rubio’s message was sent, according to interviews.

That morning, officers arrived at the Dallas-area home of Daniel Paz González, a 29-year-old Venezuelan whom a judge had ordered deported after he missed an immigration check-in appointment, according to his sister, Greilys Herrera.

Although they had come looking for Paz, family members said, the officers also arrested his two Venezuelan roommates: Leonel Javier Echavez Paz, his cousin, and Yohan Fernández. Both men had work permits and no removal orders, Herrera said.

“They have tattoos that need to be investigated,” officers explained to Herrera when she went to the house to pick up Paz’s son, her toddler nephew. Herrera described Echavez’s and Fernández’s tattoos respectively as a rose and a Chicago Bulls insignia — popular motifs that immigration officials have said also sometimes indicate gang membership. Independent experts say Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to identify who belongs to the gang.

While her brother was to be deported because of the judge’s order, Herrera said the officers assured her that her 19-year-old cousin and their friend would later be released. None of the three men were criminals or in a gang, Herrera said.

Documents provided by the family show the three men were transferred to East Hidalgo Detention Center, seven hours south of Dallas but a short, 25-minute drive from an airport in Harlingen, Texas, from which many deportation flights leave.

Historic dust storms whipped across much of Texas on March 14, bringing visibility to nearly zero.

The weather forced the cancellation of the deportation flights to Venezuela that Grenell had posted about the previous day, Venezuela’s interior minister announced. The flights had been slated to leave from the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, according to two people familiar with the plan. They were rescheduled for two days later. Manifests show the rescheduled flights were expected to carry 230 Venezuelans to Caracas.

Hundreds of miles to the southeast, the three planes that would fly to El Salvador waited at the Harlingen airport as groups of mostly Venezuelan detainees from East Hidalgo and three other South Texas detention centers were loaded onto buses and told they were going to be deported. Some in the group later told their attorneys and family members that authorities had informed them that they were headed to Venezuela.

Just after noon, an officer told a group of waiting men that the flights were called off and would be rescheduled for the next day, court records show. The migrants were given varied reasons such as “weather” or “a mechanical issue.”

Salvadoran officials had been asking for documentation showing the criminal associations of each of the men the United States planned to send to CECOT, according to the U.S. official and the administrator of the airport in El Salvador. The New York Times first reported on those negotiations. The airport administrator said those discussions were ongoing as of March 14 when he learned the flights would be delayed.

After the flights were delayed, immigration authorities transferred Abrego García — the man the government would later say was deported by mistake — from a detention center in Louisiana to South Texas. He arrived that evening, his wife told The Post.

The delay also gave the Venezuelans an opportunity to tip off their families and attorneys about their imminent deportation. Rumors began to fly that the planes might be headed to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base or El Salvador, court records show.

At least one attorney, Martin Rosenow, was convinced there had been a misunderstanding. He said he assured his client’s wife that her husband could not be involuntarily deported without a removal order from a judge.

But other attorneys speculated that Trump had secretly signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act and was waiting to publish it online — thus putting it into effect — until the last possible moment as part of a strategy to avoid legal challenges.

Attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward spent their Friday night scrambling to mount a legal challenge before their clients could again be taken to the airport.

They filed in federal court in D.C. in the predawn hours of March 15.

Hours later, guards at the El Valle Detention Center began calling names from a list. For a second day in a row, several dozen men were brought into a room and told to gather their belongings. Among the men were plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit, according to a court filing.

By then, their case had been assigned to James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in D.C. At 9:40 a.m. Eastern time, Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order, barring the removal of the five plaintiffs named in the lawsuit. The order instructed the government to “maintain the status quo” until a court hearing he scheduled for early evening.

But across South Texas, DHS officials continued to move forward with the operation.

Shackled migrants were loaded onto buses. Shortly after 3:30 p.m. Eastern, men at El Valle were again loaded onto buses and taken to the airport, one man later said in a sworn statement. Unbeknownst to the deportees on board, the White House published a signed copy of Trump’s proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act at 3:53 p.m. as they were being driven to the airport.

At the airport in Harlingen, the three planes destined for El Salvador waited on the tarmac. A helicopter hovered overhead as people — including some of the ACLU plaintiffs — were taken off the buses and loaded onto the planes in groups of 10.

One man carried documents showing he had an upcoming court appearance in his asylum case and no deportation order, still under the impression he could not be deported.

Inside the planes, people began to panic, according to court filings that described the scene. Some wept. Others desperately asked the officers lining the aisles for information about where they were going. They received no response.

An officer boarded one of the planes and called out several names, including those of the ACLU plaintiffs on board, they later told their attorneys, who shared their accounts in court filings. As they were taken off the plane and again loaded onto a bus, the plaintiffs said they were told by an officer that they had “just won the lottery.”

At 5 p.m. in D.C., the hearing began in Boasberg’s courtroom.

When Boasberg asked a government attorney whether deportations under the act were imminent, the attorney, Drew Ensign, said he did not know.

ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt told the judge he had received reports that planes in Texas were about to take hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison. He urged the judge to temporarily block the government from deporting not just his clients but any detainee under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act.

Boasberg suggested a brief pause to give the government’s attorneys time to gather information before he made a decision.

The hearing adjourned at 5:22 p.m.

“See everybody in 38 minutes,” Boasberg said.

Four minutes later, the first plane departed from the Texas airfield.

The second followed 19 minutes after that.

By the time court reconvened 15 minutes later, the two planes were already flying off the coast of Mexico over international waters, according to flight data.

Ensign told the judge that the government could not publicly provide “operational details as to what is going on” because of potential “national security issues.” But when Boasberg moved the proceeding into a closed session, Ensign said he did not have details to share.

Worried that there would be no way for the judge to intervene once the planes reached El Salvador, the ACLU’s Gelernt pushed the judge to rule quickly. Just before 7 p.m., Boasberg issued a temporary injunction blocking the Trump administration from using the act to deport alleged gang members in custody.

“I think there’s clearly irreparable harm here given that these folks will be deported, and many — or a vast majority — to prisons in other countries or even back to Venezuela, where they face persecution, or worse,” Boasberg said.

To Ensign, he said, “you shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.”

His order was published in writing at 7:26 p.m.

The third plane took off from Texas 10 minutes after that. Officials would later say the migrants on that flight were not deported under the Alien Enemies Act but under traditional immigration law.

The government did not turn the planes around.

The flights made their stop in Honduras, where they waited to comply with Bukele’s request to arrive late at night.

On board, guards circulated a form for the detainees to sign, court records show. It was in English, and the migrants struggled to understand it.

But one phrase did stand out to all of them: Tren de Aragua.

Gladis Caricote said she refused to sign.

Caricote, a Venezuelan woman who believed she was being deported to her home country, peered out her window as the plane landed in El Salvador. What she saw didn’t look right, she told The Post.

“They kept insisting that we were going to Venezuela,” Caricote said. “But we didn’t recognize the airport or the uniforms of the officials on the tarmac.”

While the men on board were violently dragged onto buses, the women were not. U.S. officials had sent them to El Salvador for detainment at CECOT, but the prison houses only men. Bukele would not accept the women.

Caricote said she and the other women became distraught when they saw the men being shoved and slapped by Salvadoran guards. It was a spectacle that would soon be seen by millions around the world. Bukele’s team captured it on camera, then slickly edited it into a video he and Trump shared on social media.

The names of Venezuelans believed to be imprisoned in El Salvador have disappeared from an online ICE detainee tracker. They now appear on a list obtained and published by CBS News that has become, in the absence of government information, an unofficial guide to those shipped to CECOT on March 15.

Venezuela is prepared to send its own planes to “rescue the kidnapped Venezuelans,” said Peña, Maduro’s vice minister of foreign affairs. But the possibility of a quick resolution is further complicated by the fact that Venezuela and El Salvador do not have diplomatic relations.

The U.S. deportation flights to Venezuela that Grenell had helped arrange for March 16 — the ones that had been rescheduled because of weather — were canceled out of concern that Venezuela’s plane could be seized under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act.

A week later, Maduro agreed to send a plane to Honduras to pick up Venezuelans being deported from the U.S.

Since then, Venezuela has accepted at least two deportation flights a week, according to the U.S. official and another person familiar with the flights. Among those Venezuela has taken back is the migrant Rubio has described as a suspected gang member — a man who pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer in Times Square and was originally supposed to be deported March 16.

The Trump administration has also flown at least two other planes of migrants to El Salvador. But it has done so under federal immigration law, not the Alien Enemies Act, and for those flights it has provided a list of names and information on criminal backgrounds for the migrants, who were destined for the megaprison.

The names of Molina, Caraballo and the three men who were arrested at their Dallas home are among those missing from ICE’s online detainee locator and now appear on the unofficial list.

No one has heard from them since the planes left South Texas.

Sarah Cahlan, Mary Beth Sheridan and Joyce Sohyun Lee contributed to this report.

Interviews with 16 former detainees of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center offer the most complete view yet of conditions at the notorious prison.

By Samantha Schmidt, Helena Carpio, María Luisa Paúl, Silvia Foster-Frau, Teo Armus and Aaron Steckelberg

One detainee was beaten unconscious. Others emerged from the dark isolation room covered in bruises, struggling to walk or vomiting blood. Another returned to his cell in tears, telling fellow detainees he’d just been sexually assaulted.

“Let’s hit him like a piñata,” guards shouted amid the beatings, detainees recalled, the blows echoing against the metal walls.

They called it “La Isla” — The Island — the cell where Venezuelans deported from the United States by the Trump administration said they suffered some of the worst abuse of their 125 days in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

The matching firsthand accounts across multiple interviews offer the most complete view yet of conditions inside the megaprison, where inmates are denied access to lawyers and almost all contact with the outside world — and where about 14,000 Salvadorans remain incarcerated. Few detainees have ever left CECOT, and fewer have spoken publicly of their experience there.

The Washington Post interviewed 16 of the more than 250 men who were deported by the United States to CECOT, held there for four months and then released this month to Venezuela as part of an international prisoner swap.

The Venezuelans, rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, told The Post they were subjected to repeated beatings that left them bruised, bleeding or injured. They said prison staff restricted medical care for detainees suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure or kidney failure.

The men slept on metal bunks — usually with no cushions — in group cells where overhead lights blazed 24 hours a day. They were expected to bathe and relieve themselves using a water tank and toilets that offered no privacy from cellmates. They were rarely allowed out of their cells.

Three Salvadoran government spokespersons, provided with detailed accounts of the detainees’ allegations, did not respond to requests for comment. Damian Merlo, a U.S.-based lobbyist for Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, described the detainees as criminals who belong in prison, and said their claims are “baseless.”

“Additionally, footage made available on social media of their departure from El Salvador showed them in good spirits,” Merlo said, “happily … heading back home to Venezuela.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, provided a statement that repeated administration claims that the detainees were members of the Tren de Aragua gang — though government officials have acknowledged in court that many of those sent to CECOT had no criminal record.

Robert L. Cerna, an acting field office director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a court filing in March that the “lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat” and that the limited information about each individual “actually highlights the risk they pose.”

“President Trump and [DHS] Secretary [Kristi L.] Noem will not allow criminal gangs to terrorize American citizens,” McLaughlin said. “Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members. We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said the Trump administration is grateful for its partnership with Bukele “to help remove the worst of the worst illegal criminals, terrorists, and gang members from the United States.” She deferred questions about specific allegations to El Salvador’s government.

If the detainees’ accounts are true, their treatment at CECOT may have violated U.N. conventions against torture to which El Salvador and the U.S. are signatories, said Isabel Carlota Roby, a senior staff attorney at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization who has spoken with some of the detainees. Whether the U.S., which paid Bukele’s government $6 million to hold the Venezuelans, could be implicated in human rights violations would depend on the evidence, Roby said, including how much U.S. officials knew about the conditions.

Torture, arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances and sexual assault, if proved to be systematic or generalized and known to the government, can all constitute crimes against humanity. An international panel is preparing a report on El Salvador and investigating whether any of those crimes were committed. At least one member of the panel thinks a criminal investigation is warranted.

“Based on the information I have reviewed,” said Santiago Canton, secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists, “there are reasonable grounds for an investigation by the International Criminal Court.”

The Post has found that many of the detainees had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules.

Many of the men had fled political oppression and extreme poverty under Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a U.S. adversary. Some had been granted permission to live and work in the United States. At least two arrived in the U.S. as refugees seeking safety from persecution in Venezuela.

A number suspected they had been detained and deported by the U.S. based solely on their tattoos.

Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas, 35, had temporary protected status shielding him from deportation and worked legally in kitchens and pizzerias to pay for his mother’s breast cancer treatments back home.

Andry Hernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist, entered the U.S. legally with a CBP One appointment, where an official in a preliminary screening determined he had shown a credible fear of persecution as a gay man living and working in Venezuela.

Roger Molina, a food delivery driver and aspiring professional soccer player, had been vetted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and federal law enforcement, flown to the U.S. and conditionally accepted into a State Department resettlement program for refugees.

As the detained men were shuttled onto flights in Texas on March 15, none were told where they were being taken.

‘We’re giving you a surprise’

Shackled at their wrists, waists and ankles, the migrants were loaded onto three GlobalX charter planes, with many of them believing they were headed to Venezuela. At least they would be going home, Basulto thought. They were prohibited from opening the window shades. “We’re giving you a surprise,” he remembers one immigration official telling them.

When they landed, Basulto said, he found the courage to peek out the window. He saw El Salvador’s blue-and-white flag waving in the air. Detainees began to panic, he said. A female deportee who spoke English read aloud from one of the documents she’d been given. She translated for the rest of the passengers: They would be detained for at least a year in El Salvador.

Some migrants refused to get off the plane. A guard struck a female passenger, Basulto said. Screams filled the plane. Eventually, Basulto and other detainees said, they were kicked, shoved, beaten and forced off. Two Salvadoran officers grabbed his arms.

“Throw them down!” officers yelled, as detainees were pummeled and dragged to buses, according to detainee Miguel Rojas Mendoza. He recounted watching one man get slammed so hard against a bus that his face began gushing blood.

Molina, the refugee who had been vetted for resettlement in the U.S., begged officers for an explanation.

“Please, I don’t understand what I’m doing here,” Molina said. “I haven’t committed any crime. Please, let me talk to someone.” He began to pray. Then a Salvadoran officer grabbed him by the neck.

“Run, son of a b----,” he commanded, according to Molina, and jammed a rifle into his ribs.

Hernández, the makeup artist, watched as the women were turned around and put on a flight back to the United States. The Salvadorans, he said, refused to accept them. The buses now filled with men began rolling.

“Welcome to El Salvador,” hooded officers shouted on the ride, six detainees said. “Welcome to hell.”

At CECOT, Basulto said, guards shaved his head, stripped him of his clothes and took his phone, $700 in cash and the gold pendant he wore for luck.

Hernández cried out for his mother. “Why are you shaving my head?” he asked. “I’m a makeup stylist, I’m gay, I’m not a gang member.”

The men were pushed together in a warehouse, flanked by photographers and guards, and forced to kneel. They were addressed by the prison director.

Here, the director said, the men would have no rights — no right to a lawyer, no access to the sun. They would not eat chicken or meat for the rest of their lives.

“The only way that you will leave,” he said, according to multiple detainees, “is inside a black bag.”

‘The most perverse form of humiliation’

CECOT, opened by Bukele in 2023 as part of his crackdown on Salvadoran gangs, was designed to terrify the most violent of criminals. His government hailed it as the largest prison in the Americas, initially announcing a capacity for 20,000 detainees and later doubling it. The imposing fortress outside San Salvador sprawls across more than 280 acres, surrounded by an electrified perimeter fence and 19 watchtowers. The roof of each pavilion is made of diamond-shaped mesh with sharp edges.

The Venezuelans were placed in cells, up to 20 men in each. The concrete walls showed sweat stains, drops of dried blood and what appeared to be scratches from human nails, one detainee recalled.

Each cell held 80 metal beds stacked closely together in tiers of four, according to detainees and images of CECOT previously shared by Bukele’s government. Use of the water tanks and toilets was controlled by the guards and restricted to certain times of day. With no windows or fans, the detainees lived and ate amid the stench of their own sewage.

The detainees could gauge the time only by the heat that made them sweat during the day and the cold that chilled their metal beds at night. They couldn’t see the sun, they said, but sometimes could hear the rain.

CECOT “seemed like it was for animals,” said detainee Julio Fernández Sánchez, 35. “It was designed for people to go crazy or kill themselves.”

Basulto said detainees were occasionally allowed to leave their cells to play soccer for 20 minutes or attend a brief Bible reading, but time dragged. The men in one cell counted the days by scratching marks into a wall.

Detainees with medical concerns were often housed in Cell No. 8, said Fernández, who was held there after an injury to his shoulder during a beating. There were men suffering from diabetes, skin problems and panic attacks. One day a diabetic prisoner was given the wrong insulin and began convulsing after it was injected, Fernández recalled. Guards took nearly half an hour to get him help.

“The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us, ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile,” Basulto said. “It was the most perverse form of humiliation.”

When Tito Martínez, 26, was in immigration detention in the U.S., he said, a doctor told him he had kidney failure and would need a transplant. After repeated beatings in CECOT, Martínez said he could no longer get out of bed. He would wet himself, and he relied on his cellmates to feed him.

“Tito is dying,” his friends told prison staff. When he was finally treated, Martínez said, the doctor told him that his functioning kidney was operating at only 20 percent and that he would soon need dialysis to survive.

Some detainees attempted suicide by tying sheets around their necks or using rusted pipes to cut their veins.

Disobeying rules proved costly. When Hernández’s head ached from the heat, he tried to cool down by bathing. He forgot to tell his friends to watch for guards.

“Get up, piece of sh--,” an officer told him, he said. He was taken to La Isla, where a tiny hole in the ceiling provided only a needle of light and almost no air.

Four men entered and began touching him with their clubs and putting them between his legs. One forced Hernández to perform oral sex on him, he said.

Basulto said Hernández returned to the cell in tears and told him what had happened. He and other detainees offered to speak up to the prison staff, but he urged them not to. He feared it would provoke officers to “attack us even more.”

‘The locks will break’

After weeks of daily beatings, detainees said, they launched a hunger strike. They went four days without food or water.

“People started fainting. Falling to the floor,” said detainee Mervin Yamarte, 29. The guards “laughed.”

When the hunger strike failed to draw attention, some used shards from metal pipes to slice their skin and write messages on their sheets in blood: “We are not terrorists, we are migrants.”

“We wanted them to see we were willing to die,” said Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel, 27.

The men grew desperate. About two months after arriving at CECOT, detainees tore rails off bunks and used them to break their locks. Dozens broke free and hurled soap and juice cartons at guards. Some broke cement off the walls to throw at them.

The guards fired back with rubber bullets, stormed the cells and forced men to kneel with their hands behind their heads.

“They stood on our legs until we couldn’t feel them anymore,” León Rengel said.

Then came their punishment: They were taken to La Isla. Molina said he sometimes heard screams echoing into his cell for hours at a time.

The next day, he said, guards lined up the handcuffed detainees and took turns beating them.

They broke a tooth of one man and dislocated an arm of another, Molina said. “That [day] was the worst of the beatings.”

Conditions improved only when outsiders visited the prison or when government officials wanted photographs, multiple detainees said. Shortly after a Red Cross visit, Bibles were handed out to each cell.

For a visit by DHS’s Noem, the detainees were given better food and even mattresses, though thin. When a group of U.S. politicians toured the prison, Basulto said, detainees with visible injuries were moved to the remotest cells. After detainees began singing the Venezuelan national anthem, Basulto said, the prison director “quickly cut the politicians’ visit short and hurried them away.”

The Red Cross, which visits Salvadoran prisons regularly, appeared at CECOT twice during the Venezuelans’ time there. Delegates met with the men and collected brief spoken messages for their families, according to Martina Ferraris, deputy protection coordinator for the International Committee of the Red Cross mission in El Salvador. These were vetted by prison staff, Ferraris said.

In their final days in CECOT, detainees said, conditions seemed to improve. Molina was taken to the doctor for an evaluation. He was given a clean shave and the haircut of his choice.

The detainees were given Colgate toothpaste, a Gillette razor and deodorant. A prison official took photos. The director told them to brush their teeth.

At 5 a.m. on July 18, they were loaded onto buses, unsure where they were headed. Then a man in a uniform with a Venezuelan flag on one sleeve stepped onto Molina’s bus. They were going home.

On the plane, the Venezuelans sang a Christian song — with new words.

“If I had faith as small as a mustard seed, I would tell my brothers, ‘We’re leaving. We’re leaving. We’re leaving!’” they sang. “And the locks will break.”

Men dressed in black waited for the detainees on a plane set to fly to Venezuela. Detainees would later learn that Maduro had sent officers of the SEBIN, his feared secret police, usually used to detain or disappear his political opponents.

Before being reunited with their families, one detainee said, they were told to record a video thanking the Venezuelan government. He said he was warned that if he fled again and was deported back, he could be charged with treason. The detainee spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Maduro government.

Several of the men, who had once fled the authoritarian country, said they were genuinely grateful to Maduro for negotiating their release when it seemed no one else would. Still, some said they’d leave for the U.S. again, perhaps once Trump leaves office.

Not Molina. He doesn’t think he could do it again, he said, “having lived through that.”

“The American Dream,” he said, “became a nightmare.”

Ana Vanessa Herrero, Sarah Blaskey, Razzan Nakhlawi and Monika Mathur contributed to this report. Maps by Laris Karklis. Diagrams by Aaron Steckelberg. Video editing by Erin Patrick O’Connor.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are ramping up arrests. But the share of detained migrants with a criminal record has been declining.

By Emmanuel Martinez, Marianne LeVine and Álvaro Valiño

The Trump administration is increasingly targeting unauthorized immigrants with no criminal record as it ramps up arrests, a Washington Post analysis of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data shows.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem often touts that ICE officers are arresting the “worst of the worst.” But more than half of those removed from the country since Jan. 20 do not have a criminal conviction. What’s more, as arrests increase, the share of detained migrants with a criminal conviction has been dropping.

DHS’s statistics office has stopped publishing monthly data on arrests and removals. But the Deportation Data Project, a team of lawyers and academics, worked with the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE to obtain the new dataset.

The dataset offers one of the most detailed snapshots yet of the people ICE is arresting and removing as it attempts to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. The Post’s examination of the data shows a substantial increase in arrests, but one that is still significantly below what Trump and his advisers are attempting to do. That could change as Congress prepares to infuse DHS with a massive amount of cash.

The data does not cover all arrests and removals; U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s numbers were not included.

The data shows that ICE officers have made more than twice as many arrests from Jan. 20 to June 11 compared with the same period last year. And the number of people taken into custody has shot up over the past month in particular. Since May 20, ICE has averaged nearly 1,000 arrests per day, compared with about 600 in the months prior.

That uptick still puts ICE below White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s goal of making a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day.

Texas, Florida and California registered the highest number of arrests, but many other states saw substantial increases. In Virginia, ICE officers arrested four times as many people in the first months of the Trump administration as they did over that same period in 2024. That is the biggest percentage increase of any state.

A majority of the undocumented immigrants ICE has arrested during the current Trump administration did not have a criminal conviction. About 40 percent did have a conviction, while another 32 percent had pending charges. Details on those charges and convictions were not available.

Over 60 percent of the undocumented immigrants removed from the country did not have a criminal conviction. Nearly 40 percent did have a conviction, though many of their crimes involved nonviolent offenses.

The proportion of detainees with a criminal conviction has fallen in recent months, the data shows. In January, nearly 46 percent of those detained had been convicted of a crime. By June, that number had dropped to 30 percent.

The number of Venezuelan immigrants arrested by ICE quadrupled in the last two years, The Post analysis found. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 486,000 Venezuelans were living as unauthorized immigrants in the United States as of mid-2023. Many had what is known as temporary protected status and were shielded from deportation. But Trump has now canceled that protection for a large number of them.

Mexican migrants, however, accounted for the most arrests.

The administration does not appear on track to deport 1 million migrants this year, as has been its goal. The data, however, offers a limited picture of the administration’s deportation efforts. DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said that as of Monday, the Trump administration had made more than 273,000 arrests and deported more than 239,000 people. That data is likely to include CBP figures that were not in the dataset analyzed by The Post.

The vast majority of the people removed by ICE are men. They accounted for nearly 90 percent of removals.

In an interview with The Post last month, Trump border czar Tom Homan said that whether the administration can fulfill its goals will depend on funding. Congressional Republicans have gained approval of $170 billion more in spending on immigration enforcement and border security that could result in a dramatic increase in the number of arrests.

Methodology

The Post identified the number of arrests and removals conducted by the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement, breaking them down by convictions and charges, location and citizenship.

The Post relied on the Deportation Data Project, which obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE and makes it publicly available online. The data shows every arrest and removal made by ICE – but does not represent actions by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection – and is current as of June 11. The arrest data goes back to September 2023, whereas the removal data includes only 2025.

The arrest data includes information about where ICE made the arrest, such as state, the ICE field office and a landmark site, which is a more specific location and can sometimes denote a county jail, for example. In roughly 20 percent of the data, the state is missing; reporters cleaned many of these records by inferring state based on the location of field offices and landmark sites.

Both the arrest and removal data included duplicate records. The Post dropped duplicated arrest records for individual persons. Reporters also identified instances where a person’s unique identifier had two different birth years, for example. In those cases, reporters kept one of those records, removing the other. In all, reporters removed fewer than 2,000 arrest records, working with 99 percent of the original data, and dropped fewer than 1,500 removal records from an original dataset that included more than 106,000 rows.

As the Trump administration rushes to open massive makeshift holding centers nationwide, ICE’s own inspectors say the marquee Texas project is violating dozens of federal standards for immigrant detention.

By Douglas MacMillan, Samuel Oakford, N. Kirkpatrick and Aaron Schaffer

When the first immigrants arrived at their new detention quarters at a Texas military base this summer, they were marched onto an active construction site. Dust swirled and excavators hummed as contractors raced to build the tent encampment, where development had begun just two weeks earlier and would go on for months.

Locked up in the unfinished facility, migrants were subjected to conditions that violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention, the detention oversight unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement found earlier this month in a contractually required inspection.

The detention center at Fort Bliss, called Camp East Montana, failed to properly monitor and treat some detainees’ medical conditions, lacked basic procedures for keeping guards and detainees safe and for weeks did not provide many of them a way to contact lawyers, learn about their cases or file complaints, according to a copy of the inspection report obtained by The Washington Post.

The ICE inspection report, which is not public and has not been previously reported, raises significant new concerns about the safety of workers and detainees at one of the Trump administration’s marquee immigration projects. Expected to hold up to 2,700 migrants at a time this month and as many as 5,000 by the end of the year, Camp East Montana has been publicly described by officials as the prototype for a new breed of large-scale holding facilities that will help ICE achieve its goal of doubling the nation’s detention capacity by the end of the year.

“There is no way that this facility should be operating with their current numbers, let alone expanding,” Michelle Brané, the former head of the federal Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman under President Joe Biden, said after reviewing a copy of the report provided by The Post. She called it among the most concerning detention center audits she had ever seen and said the violations “will directly affect safety in very serious ways.”

After receiving a list of questions about the report and interviews on conditions at the facility, ICE spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa said the agency “had every intention to provide responses.” But after more than five days, ICE had not provided responses to any of The Post’s questions.

On Wednesday evening, a day after this article published online, the Department of Homeland Security posted a news release accusing The Post of “twisting inspector notes.”

“All detainees are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with lawyers and their family members,” said the statement, attributed to Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “… Meals are certified by dieticians. Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE.”

Zamarripa declined a reporter’s request to tour Camp East Montana, saying she hoped to provide media tours “soon” but offering no other specifics.

Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has led the push to build more large-scale facilities, which he said “create more efficiencies” and allow ICE agents to “arrest more bad people on the street,” he told a group of reporters last month. He said concerns raised about conditions at the Alligator Alcatraz detention encampment in the Florida Everglades were “fake stories,” and said the facility was “just as good” as the temporary, makeshift facilities used by federal emergency responders in natural disasters.

There are few federal laws regarding conditions in immigrant detention centers. ICE sets the standards, and contractors agree to follow them. ICE can impose penalties, and facilities with too many violations can be closed.

Many of the deficiencies ICE found in its inspection of Camp East Montana in the first week of September appear to stem from the hasty construction and early opening of the makeshift facility. While the largest private prison firms say it can take up to three months just to hire and train enough staff members to open a new ICE facility in an existing building, contractors at Fort Bliss have turned an empty patch of desert into one of the nation’s largest ICE holding sites in less than two months. The site is still not complete.

“You can’t build things quickly and expect them to be good,” said Imelda Maynard, legal director at Estrella del Paso, an El Paso-based nonprofit legal services provider for migrants.

As of early September, ICE held nearly 59,000 detainees in 187 facilities. More than 1,400 were at Fort Bliss.

In an interview with The Post, Chavez, 57, said it was obvious to him that Camp East Montana was brand new and poorly managed. He said that he was fed cookies, candies and potato chips in lieu of meals, that he was allowed only infrequent outdoor recreation, and that problems with the building caused water to seep into his cell when people used the showers.

“You have to keep drying it,” he said via a recorded voice memo in Spanish.

This account of Camp East Montana’s first 50 days — from when the contract was awarded to the final day of the ICE inspection, on Sept. 5 — is based on internal ICE documents, the interview with Chavez, interviews with people who have visited the site and satellite photos showing its construction.

No telephones

The scramble to build the massive new detention facility in a remote stretch of desert northeast of El Paso was already underway on July 19, a day after the government announced it had awarded the contract, satellite photos show.

Acquisition Logistics LLC was selected to oversee the $1.2 billion contract for the construction and operation of the facility. The small business is registered to the Virginia home of Ken Wagner, the company’s 77-year-old owner.

An archived version of Wagner’s website says he is a retired senior Naval flight officer who has led a variety of technical projects for the federal government, including developing a classified data communications system for an intelligence agency.

Acquisition Logistics did not respond to requests for comment, nor did any of the five subcontractors listed on contract documents.

ICE documented its first detainees at Fort Bliss on Aug. 1. They were given little opportunity to communicate with the outside world, inspectors later found, noting this would violate ICE rules requiring immigrant detainees be permitted to contact lawyers and family members.

For much of August, when relatives or others searched ICE’s public-facing website for the names or identification numbers of people they now know were held there, the site did not show any facility name. Instead, it displayed an ICE phone number that was rarely answered by a human being, according to attorneys and advocates who tried calling many times.

Rather than telephones, the facility had a batch of tablet computers that detainees were told to use to make calls, according to ICE inspection documents. Several reported that the pin numbers they were given to access the tablets weren’t working. The report said detainees were told it could take up to a week to fix the problem. It’s unclear whether it continues.

For the first three weeks of August, when legal representatives and Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents El Paso, tried to meet with detainees in person, they were turned away.

On Aug. 4, ICE officials declined a request from Escobar to tour the detention facility, saying in a follow-up email on Aug. 8 that the site was “still under construction and will not be operational until” Aug. 17. At the time of the email, internal ICE records obtained by The Post show the facility held 15 detainees.

Federal law permits members of Congress to enter “any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens.” Escobar noted she was following the agency’s own guidelines, which require seven days’ notice for such visits. ICE confirmed her request met that requirement, but said it was not allowing visits until “construction is complete” and did not admit her until two weeks after her initial request.

Crystal Sandoval, a legal representative with Las Americas, an El Paso-based nonprofit, said she was also turned away, on Aug. 25, but allowed into the facility on Aug. 29. After passing through security, she was brought to a white tent on the west side of the fenced compound. Inside, six detainees were waiting in a pod outfitted with slots that she likened to money-changing windows.

“One of my biggest concerns was the privacy,” she recalled.

The room was hot and noisy, and she had trouble hearing the men. More than 110 HVAC units were visible adjacent to detention tents, satellite images taken on Aug. 31 show.

Sandoval was told a “contact room,” where legal representatives could speak directly with detainees one-on-one, wasn’t yet complete.

Inspectors later found that detainees were in the dark about their cases because they didn’t even know who their assigned deportation officer was, in violation of ICE standards, which say facilities must provide contact information and scheduled hours for ICE staff.

This is a serious problem but is not uncommon in ICE detention centers, Denise L. Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, said in an interview.

“One of the very worst things about immigration detention is just not even understanding why you’re there, how long you’re going to be there, what you can do to further your case,” Gilman said. “Whether that’s to just ask to be sent back home or to claim asylum or to fight for your case in some other way.”

Chavez, a journalist who says he fled Peru after receiving death threats for his coverage, was living in Miami this summer when he was arrested for selling ceviche on the street without a permit. The misdemeanor landed him in jail before he was transferred to a series of ICE detention facilities and eventually brought to El Paso.

While being held at Camp East Montana for more than three weeks, Chavez says he was given no information about the status of his asylum case.

“You never, ever, ever speak with an ICE officer personally about your case,” he said. “They give us generic answers. And when you focus on one issue, they say, ‘I don’t know your case, I couldn’t tell you.’”

‘Visible frustrations and unruliness’

By Aug. 18, ICE had shipped more than 900 migrants to Camp East Montana from all over the country.

The migrants, mostly men but some women, had a variety of backgrounds and countries of origins, Escobar said. Many had been living and working in the United States for decades and had wives and children who are U.S. citizens, she said.

Detainees were brought to live in enormous white tents, each as long as two football fields. Inside, temporary walls divided the cavernous spaces into smaller pods, where up to 72 people ate, showered, slept in bunk beds and used the bathroom, documents and interviews show. Because the pods were open on top, with no ceilings of their own, the conversations, outbursts and cries of hundreds of people created a cacophony day and night.

ICE’s website states that immigrant detention is not meant as a form of punishment, but rather, only to ensure people show up for their court hearings and removal proceedings. And yet, ICE’s inspectors found some people at Fort Bliss were being held without many basic human necessities.

During the first few weeks, some toilets and sinks didn’t work, according to a memo written by an ICE employee in August and obtained by The Post.

In its statement Wednesday, DHS said that “temporary maintenance issues were resolved immediately.”

By September, inspectors found that only one of the four planned outdoor recreation areas had been completed, and it had to be shared among 1,200 detainees. ICE requires one hour of recreation time per day, five days a week. At Fort Bliss, each person was only allowed 40 minutes of recreation per session, and some detainees reported only getting three sessions in a two-week period.

“There’s just one yard for everyone, and it’s a tiny yard,” Chavez said. This added to detainees’ “visible frustrations and unruliness,” the ICE inspectors wrote.

Because of concerns that detainees were not being given enough food, the facility decided to increase “overall meal calories by 30%,” the ICE inspectors wrote, noting in early September that this plan had not been implemented and was still awaiting the approval of a dietitian. Inspectors also found that detainees needing a certain diet for a medical condition were being served a generic “medical meal” that did not necessarily address the needs of their specific conditions.

ICE inspectors also said contractors failed to follow mandatory procedures for medical care.

Some medical charts were never filled out and some intake screenings were never conducted, meaning, the inspectors wrote, that the medical team could not “identify emergent or past chronic medical conditions, mental illness issues such as suicidal/homicidal ideation or intent that could lead to detainee life-safety issue.”

One detainee had been given psychotropic medication but there was no record of that person ever consenting to it. Another had been placed on suicide watch but there was no record of anyone watching them.

The medical contractor at Camp East Montana, a Florida-based firm called Loyal Source, runs dozens of medical clinics for migrant facilities along the Southwest border. In 2022, a federal oversight agency blamed Loyal Source for “critical understaffing” of these facilities that jeopardized the health and safety of migrants in custody.

Loyal Source did not respond to requests for comment. In comments to congressional investigators published in a report this year, Loyal Source said it does not have a responsibility to fully staff all of the migrant facilities, because its contract only requires it to fill a certain percentage of positions. The company partly blamed the government’s lengthy background check process for its inability to quickly hire new staff members.

A ‘serious vulnerability’

In a press briefing outside the base last month, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the facility would be part of an effort to deport immigrants with “criminal charges or convictions” who have exhausted all of their legal remedies.

“We’re not talking about gardeners, housekeepers or people like that,” Cornyn said.

The ICE inspection report says that Camp East Montana holds migrants “of all security levels,” and ICE’s own public data says the facility has admitted both criminal and noncriminal migrants. The facility classifies detainees based on risk level upon their arrival and has a system for keeping high- and low-risk populations separate from one another.

The report says the facility does not, however, have good policies and practices for keeping all of the site’s occupants secure from danger.

When federal inspectors arrived in September, they reported that Camp East Montana had 286 security personnel for more than 1,200 detainees. That’s only a portion of the 452 detention officers Acquisition Logistics told the government it would employ by the time the detainee population passed 1,000, contract records show.

Inspectors also found the facility had no approved security policy, which would include procedures for finding contraband that may pose a threat or controlling access to keys or equipment that could be used as weapons.

Armed guards stationed along the facility’s perimeter were given instructions about the care and handling of their weapons, but the instructions did not explain which situations would justify the use of lethal force, inspectors noted, calling this “a serious vulnerability.”

DHS said Wednesday that the contractor’s security team “is reviewing their Use of Force policy to align with ICE’s Use of Force policy.”

Daniel Gilbert and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.

Trump administration videos purporting to show the triumph of recent immigration operations used footage that was months old or recorded thousands of miles away, an analysis found.

By Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee

The Department of Homeland Security posted a swaggering montage to social media in August declaring it had triumphed in its takeover of Washington, D.C. It showed footage of federal agents fighting what a DHS official called a “battle for the soul of our nation” and working “day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals from our nation’s capital.”

There was one problem. Several of the clips had been recorded during unrelated operations months earlier, in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Florida. The official’s sound bite about deportations in D.C. played over a clip from May showing detainees on a Coast Guard boat off the coast of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island 400 miles away.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have used similarly misleading footage in at least six videos promoting its immigration agenda shared in the last three months, a Washington Post analysis found, muddying the reality of events in viral clips that have been viewed millions of times.

Some videos that purported to show the fiery chaos of Trump-targeted cities included footage from completely different states. One that claimed to show dramatic examples of past administrations’ failures instead featured border crossings and smuggling boats recorded during Trump’s first term.

The Post provided DHS a detailed list of videos featuring misleading footage. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin did not dispute the errors or explain what had happened but said the videos were a small percentage of the more than 400 that the agency has posted this year. “Violence and rioting against law enforcement is unacceptable regardless of where it occurs,” she said.

The Post sent the same details to the White House. Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman there, did not comment on the errors but said “the Trump administration will continue to highlight the many successes of the president’s agenda through engaging content and banger memes on social media.”

DHS’s video operation now includes in-house photographers and videographers who routinely capture the action of ICE raids and protest responses for videos that administration officials have widely promoted online. In a video DHS posted to X this month, a man in a Border Patrol flak jacket, his camera held aloft, can be seen jogging to catch up with officers putting a detainee into an SUV.

The administration’s intense digital strategy has helped grab Americans’ attention and shape discussion around current events, with some of its videos now capturing bigger audiences on social media than mainstream news reports. A White House video claiming Chicago was “in chaos,” which used footage from other states, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times across Instagram, TikTok and X.

But John Cohen, a former DHS official who worked on federal law enforcement and intelligence issues under both Democratic and Republican administrations, said the mix of misleading and polarizing content could weaken the administration’s ability to build trust with the American public long-term.

During his time in government, Cohen said, law enforcement and security officials worked to ensure that “any message or content we were putting out was absolutely accurate,” fearing misleading information would push people to start tuning them out during national emergencies.

“If people come to believe that what you’re saying is inaccurate or not based on an objective evaluation of a threat or emergency situation, they’re not going to pay attention or listen to you,” said Cohen, who now works at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security. “The goal of a law enforcement organization should be to de-escalate. And the way you de-escalate is by providing accurate information.”

‘Soul of our nation’

The misleading example about the “battle for the soul of our nation” was offered in the form of a news-style video featuring DHS deputy assistant secretary Micah Bock. A collection of video clips showcased how the operation had worked to safeguard the “hallowed halls” of Washington, the “heart of our republic,” according to Bock.

But The Post’s analysis, which used reverse-image searches, geolocation tools and other techniques to find the clips’ original sources, found that stretches of the footage had been filmed in different places or times than DHS had presented.

Some footage came from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in L.A., according to The Post’s analysis, which matched it to a DHS press release.

Other clips came from an ICE video showing officials conducting “routine daily operations” in February in West Palm Beach. The footage had been uploaded to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, a public repository of military and law enforcement video run by the Defense Department.

A third set of video clips came from federal operations in May on the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, which ICE said led to 40 arrests. The Nantucket Current, a small local news outlet, had published photos and videos onto its website and Instagram while reporting on the arrests, during which agents detained undocumented immigrants at traffic stops and loaded them onto a patrol boat for removal.

DHS’s X account reposted the Current’s video that month. So did White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who added, “Bye bye! 👋”

“The visual of it was really jarring to see,” said Jason Graziadei, the Current’s editor in chief. “Typically when you see ICE arrests, they don’t involve a Coast Guard boat and life jackets.”

‘Antifa terrorists’

The video wasn’t the only DHS release to use a journalist’s footage without credit — or to get its location wrong.

The freelance journalist Ford Fischer was scrolling through X earlier this month when he saw a DHS video overlaid with a message saying “antifa terrorists” had stormed federal facilities in Portland, Oregon. But he recognized the footage because he’d captured it himself days earlier, outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.

The video, which The Post verified, had been cropped to remove Fischer’s watermark. And it seemed to bolster Trump’s claim that the Oregon city was overwhelmed by violent leftists who were “burning [it] to the ground.”

But Fischer had recorded the footage 1,700 miles away, at a prominent protest zone outside Chicago, where federal agents routinely scuffle with protesters seeking to block an ICE facility’s gate.

Fischer said he worried the video’s misleading description could warp Americans’ understanding of how the government was interacting with the public. He also questioned how the mistake was made in the first place: In Broadview, Fischer said, he saw multiple DHS officials gathering video of the scuffles, including one holding a camera-stabilizing tool known as a gimbal commonly used by professional videographers and influencers.

“They seem very media-savvy and very focused on the production of these slick high-end videos,” he said. “But it creates a sense of concern about how the work is being used and how it’s being disconnected from the original source.”

‘Resounding in their thankfulness’

Footage from the Broadview clashes was misused in another DHS video in September seeking to champion federal agents’ move into Memphis. In the video, Bock said the Tennessee city’s communities had been “abandoned to crime and lawlessness” and that residents had been “resounding in their thankfulness” when DHS moved in.

But in the video, Bock spoke over clips showing armed guards outside the ICE facility in Illinois, more than 500 miles away. The video, which was bookended by footage showing Memphis landmarks and its mayor, gave no indication it was recorded in a different state.

‘Decimated our way of life’

Beyond getting its places wrong, the DHS videos have also given incorrect dates.

In a video from this month saying Trump had “secured our nation,” DHS shared clips it said showed how past administrations’ failures had let in criminals who “decimated our way of life.” One showed a middle-of-the-night crossing of the southern border, while another showed a smuggling boat.

‘Chicago is in chaos’

The White House has made notable errors in its own video operation, posting a video this month that claimed “Chicago is in chaos” and said the city “doesn’t need political spin — it needs HELP.”

The video, however, recycled footage from a months-old ICE operation in Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. A fact-checker at Agence France-Presse also found other clips in the video had come from operations in Arizona, California, Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas, some of which had been recorded during President Joe Biden’s time in office.

In a statement to the Daily Beast, which first reported the mismatch, a spokesman for Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) made a joke about one of the video’s more notable telltale details. Chicago, he said, isn’t known for its palm trees.

‘I really appreciate you guys’

In one case, ICE posted a photo that many people suspected was false but was mostly accurate.

Earlier this month, ICE’s X account shared a photo of a woman holding a sign outside its facility in Portland that read, “I really appreciate you guys!” Many users argued the image was a fake, saying the strange angles of her arm, the odd contours of the sign and the visual artifacts around the edges of her body suggested the image had been doctored or generated by artificial intelligence.

DHS shared surveillance video of the scene with The Post showing the woman with the sign was real. But an examination of the footage by The Post and independent analysts also found that the photo had been retouched in a way the agency did not disclose. On the sidewalk under the woman’s feet, someone had written, “Chinga la migra” — a Spanish-language curse against the immigration authorities. Most of the message was removed in the image shared by ICE, save for two of the letters visible behind her legs.

The flawed clips show the risks for the administration as it pushes to build support and capture attention through the social media and online-video feeds many Americans now view as their sources for news.

The department has invested in a nationwide social media ad campaign warning undocumented immigrants they should leave the country or be “hunted down.” It also recently bought a $28,000 Skydio X10D drone to add to its aerial recording fleet; ICE this month posted a drone video of protesters clashing with officers onto its Facebook page.

Some of that real-world footage has been used in the department’s trolling memes and dark jokes around mass deportation. One clip, showing a home’s door being blown off as part of a Chicago ICE operation, was used in a video splicing together detained immigrants with Pokémon soundtracked to the cartoon’s theme song, “Gotta Catch ’Em All.”

The White House explained the administration’s strategy of online irreverence in March by telling The Post it would help “reframe the narrative” around immigration and push back against criticism “in the harshest, most forceful way possible.”

But the pattern of misleading clips in their news-style videos amounts to more than just minor editing errors, said Eddie Perez, a former director for civic integrity at Twitter, now called X. Instead, they suggest that the administration has worked to undercut criticism by pumping out videos that could deceive Americans about the scale or success of their policies, transforming government channels into propaganda tools.

“What we are witnessing is the collapse of government accountability through communication based on facts,” he said. “They’re not trying to communicate actions and outcomes. They’re acting like filmmakers, trying to make people laugh, to make them feel scared, to inspire certain emotions regardless of the truth.”

DHS hasn’t let the criticism slow it down. Officials there have continued to frequently post immigration and protest videos in a newscast-like format, often by including an official criticizing the “fake news hoaxes” of media reporting and explaining why viewers should turn to them for the real truth.

“If you lie or smear our brave men and women of @ICEgov law enforcement, you WILL be debunked,” DHS said in an X post on Sunday. “Watch here for the FACTS.”