MEXICO CITY

El Salvador is forcibly disappearing and arbitrarily detaining Salvadorans deported from the US, according to a report published Monday by Human Rights Watch.

The New York-based human rights group interviewed 20 relatives and lawyers of 11 Salvadorans deported by the US between mid-March and mid-October last year who said they have no knowledge of the status or even the whereabouts of their loved ones after they were immediately detained in El Salvador.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has claimed that most of the detainees are members of the transnational criminal organization Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) or asserted that they have criminal records in the US.

To support its claim, the US government shared the identity of one of the detainees, Cesar Humberto Lopez Larios (“El Grenas”), a known MS-13 gang leader. However, neither the US nor El Salvador have proven that the rest of the deportees have ties to criminal organizations.

In its report, HRW said that based on its analysis of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data, only 10.5% of the 9,000 people detained and deported by the Trump administration since January 2025 have been convicted of a violent crime.

In addition, the relatives interviewed tried to obtain information about their loved ones on the ICE Online Detainee Locator System to no avail. In El Salvador, requests for information have been rejected by Salvadoran authorities.

“Whatever the criminal history of these Salvadoran men, they have a right to due process, to be taken before a judge, and their relatives are entitled to know where they are being held and why,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

The disappearance of deported Salvadorans is taking place under a state of exception that has been in place since March 2022. The government has used it to suspend individual rights and expand the powers of the police and military.

Although the state of exception has been praised by President Nayib Bukele and his loyalists as being central to a drastic reduction in gang violence and homicides following decades of control by gangs such as MS-13, observers and experts have documented serious human rights violations perpetrated under Bukele’s government.

Recently, the International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations under the State of Exception in El Salvador (GIPES) published a study documenting crimes against humanity committed by the Bukele government.

According to the commission’s findings, torture, killings, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, persecution and other inhumane acts have been documented.

So far, the group has been able to verify 403 deaths in state custody, including four children, and 540 cases of enforced disappearance under the state of exception.

In February 2025, El Salvador agreed to accept deportees from the US regardless of their nationality. The agreement was celebrated and put into motion when the Trump administration deported 137 Venezuelans to El Salvador in March 2025.

The deportees were taken into Salvadoran custody and transferred to the maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a mega-prison and signature project of Bukele, where detainees were subjected to torture, beatings, and in some cases sexual abuse, according to reports from human rights organizations and former detainees.

The HRW report adds to the list of accusations against Bukele’s government and the migration agreement between his administration and that of Trump.

“Deportation cannot mean enforced disappearance,” Goebertus said.