More than a year after they were deported from the United States and sent to El Salvador under an agreement neither government ever made public, 11 Salvadoran men are still unaccounted for, and their families are demanding to know where they are being held, according to an investigation by the consortium The Deportation Project, coordinated by Forbidden Stories, which includes RFI and G1.
The men arrived in San Salvador on military flights chartered by Donald Trump’s administration between March and April 2025, on the same aircraft that carried 252 Venezuelans, all of them presented by both governments as dangerous criminals. They were taken to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), the maximum-security prison built during Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on the country’s gangs, and held incommunicado, without a lawyer and without a legal process. The Venezuelans were sent home four months later; the Salvadorans remained in detention. Rights groups later established that 36 Salvadorans had been on those flights, and families have identified 11 of them.
The terms of the deal emerged in September 2025, when documents from the Trump administration surfaced in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward: Washington had agreed to pay El Salvador $4.76 million to hold Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees at Cecot.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that only 10 percent of the Salvadorans had records in the United States for violent or potentially violent crimes. In June 2026, El Salvador confirmed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that Elmer Concepcion Romero Janes, one of the 11, was being held incommunicado at Santa Ana prison, without saying what he was accused of, and prosecutors gave his family a certificate stating that he has no criminal record in El Salvador. Lawyers representing nine of the 11 identified families filed a complaint against the Salvadoran state for enforced disappearance. “The crime starts in the United States and continues in El Salvador,” said Kelvi Zambrano, one of those lawyers. El Salvador’s government did not respond to requests for access to the prisons or to the consortium’s questions.