Camp Manzanar is located in a bucolic Californian landscape. From there, one can appreciate the imposing summit of the famous Mt. Whitney, one of the highest peaks in the United States. The area is attractive to those who enjoy mountain climbing, but the region is best known for having left behind an important historic lesson, after housing one of the internment camps that the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration created during World War II. A warning is written on a plaque visible to the site’s visitors: “May the injustices and humiliation suffered here as a result of hysteria, racism and economic exploitation never emerge again.”

The name of Manzanar has come up in recent weeks in Donald Trump’s America. It was the first of 10 internment camps that the United States set up after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. Roosevelt, who was president at the time, released a series of decrees directed toward people living in the United States who had heritage from or other links to the Axis countries. Washington feared that these residents had sworn loyalty to Germany, Italy or Japan and that it would help them during combat on U.S. territory.

Roosevelt created the series of camps (except for two) through an executive order: 9066, which was signed into effect in February 1942. The order is today a shameful stain on the country’s history, and paved the way to the detention — authorities at the time called them “evacuations” — and incarceration in Manzanar of 110,000 Japanese individuals. Some were immigrants, but it’s been calculated that two-thirds of those detained were born in the country and had U.S. citizenship. The camps also served to imprison 11,500 Germans and around 3,000 Italians.

The legal basis employed at the time was the Alien Enemies Act, a law passed in 1798 that had only been used on a few occasions, all during times of war. The first was in 1812, during a conflict with the United Kingdom. It was revived in the 20th century, initially during World War I and then after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. U.S. authorities began making arrests just 11 days after the attack on the naval base in Hawaii.

It’s the same law that Trump has dusted off as a tool in his fight against what he considers to be another invasion, that of undocumented immigrants. “The Trump administration has set new precedent in the use of conflict-related powers and further expanded the executive branch’s latitude to monitor, detain, and deport noncitizens,” the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank, declared in a statement.

The Republican president has invoked the law in order to facilitate the detention for deportation of citizens of Venezuela and El Salvador, as demonstrated by the case of Kilmar Abrego García. The 29-year-old was arrested in March, accused of belonging to a gang, and sent to his native El Salvador, specifically to President Nayib Bukele’s maximum-security prison. This, despite the fact that he had already established “well-founded fear,” meaning that he’d proven to migrant authorities that his life would be in danger if he returned to his country.

Abrego García’s deportation has caused a clash between different arms of the government. The Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the citizen’s return, with which the executive branch has refused to comply, arguing that he is now out of its jurisdiction. On Wednesday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that if he returned to the country, Abrego García would be deported again.

James Boasber, the district judge who determined that Abrego García’s deportation was illegal, said on Wednesday that he would initiate contempt proceedings against the executive branch. Stephen Miller, Trump’s influential public policy adviser and the mastermind behind the use of the Alien Enemies Act as a weapon to control immigration, has lashed out at the judge, arguing that the law is virtually unassailable.

“The Alien Enemies Act, which was passed into law by the founding generation of this country — men like John Adams — was written explicitly to give the President the authority to repel an alien invasion of the United States. That is not something that a district court judge has any authority whatsoever to interfere with, enjoin, restrict, or restrain in any way. You can read the law yourself; there’s not one clause in that law that makes it subject to judicial review,” Miller asserted at the end of March, when the showdown began between the courts and the White House.

Amid this dispute, the shadow of the internment camps, which operated through 1947 and where day-to-day life was captured by photographers such as Ansel Adams, looms large. Densho, a nonprofit organization that preserves the history of Japanese Americans who were interned, was one of the first to call attention to the parallels. “If this history teaches us anything, it should be the devastating consequences of allowing fear and xenophobia to shape our national policies, and the importance of resisting the resurgence of laws like the Alien Enemies Act,” wrote the association in October, when Trump first promised to wield the law during one of his rallies.

Densho also offered a reminder that during the Second World War, the law led to the creation of a hundred special courts, which decided if detainees would go to an internment camp or receive conditional freedom. Herbert Nicholson, a missionary who worked at the time as a translator, called this process a “farce” that did not allow those accused legal representation nor to dispute the alleged evidence, which was mostly hearsay testimony. Judging by court records, it is precisely this kind of evidence that today has Abrego García locked in a prison thousands of miles from his family.

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Los más de 250 migrantes venezolanos deportados de forma irregular a El Salvador desde Estados Unidos bajo el argumento de pertenecer a la organización criminal del Tren de Aragua se han vuelto una suerte de moneda de cambio para el Gobierno de Nayib Bukele. El presidente salvadoreño propuso el domingo a su homólogo venezolano, Nicolás Maduro, un intercambio de “presos políticos”, esto es, los que permanecen en la megacárcel creada en 2023 y conocida oficialmente como Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot), a cambio de presos que se encuentran en Venezuela, entre ellos muchos cercanos a la oposición. Caracas ha rechazado este lunes la propuesta calificándola de “cínica”.

En un comunicado publicado por el fiscal general de Venezuela, Tarek William Saab, el ministerio público ha solicitado la “inmediata liberación” de los migrantes que El Salvador mantiene detenidos. Saab ha asegurado que el Cecot es “un lugar de desaparición forzada de inocentes de nacionalidad venezolana (…) a quienes, como experto en traficar con seres humanos, [Bukele] utiliza para recibir a cambio sumas millonarias de dinero”. Por recibir a los deportados por el Gobierno estadounidense, El Salvador recibe una compensación de seis millones de dólares (algo más de cinco millones de euros).

Saab, que no hizo referencia alguna al estatus legal, las circunstancias en las que se encuentran encarcelados ni al paradero de algunos de los presos políticos venezolanos, asegura que le comunicó su preocupación por la situación de los migrantes a Volker Türk, Alto Comisionado de Naciones Unidas, quien a su vez en repetidas ocasiones ha hecho peticiones a Caracas para que libere a los presos políticos detenidos arbitrariamente.

“A diferencia de nuestros detenidos, muchos de los cuales han asesinado, otros han cometido violaciones, y algunos incluso habían sido arrestados en múltiples ocasiones antes de ser deportados, sus presos políticos no han cometido ningún delito”, afirmó el presidente de El Salvador en su mensaje del domingo. A su vez, Bukele solicitó a su homólogo venezolano “la liberación y entrega de un número idéntico (252) de los miles de presos políticos”, entre los cuales, aseguró, se encuentran Rafael Tudares, yerno del candidato opositor Edmundo González y a quien las autoridades venezolanas acusan de estar vinculado con redes de narcotráfico; el periodista y dirigente del partido Voluntad Popular, Roland Carreño, y la abogada Rocío San Miguel, acusada de participar de un intento de magnicidio en contra de Maduro.

El número de presos políticos en Venezuela se multiplicó por cuatro después de las protestas posteriores a las elecciones presidenciales del 28 de julio pasado, en las que la oposición asegura que venció y que el triunfo de Maduro no es más que una victoria fraudulenta. Entre agosto y septiembre del año pasado, Venezuela llegó a tener 1.500 presos políticos. Hacia el mes de diciembre, las autoridades chavistas comenzaron a revisar casos judiciales y se produjo una excarcelación de varias decenas de personas.

Por su parte, los familiares de los ciudadanos venezolanos detenidos en el Cecot apenas han tenido noticias de ellos desde su deportación por parte del Gobierno estadounidense. Varios de los migrantes les avisaron antes de subir al avión de que serían expulsados a Venezuela, tras lo cual aparecieron en El Salvador. Familiares de los deportados han rechazado las acusaciones que vinculan a los migrantes deportados con El Tren de Aragua ―una organización criminal nacida en Venezuela con presencia en varios países de la región― y el palacio de Miraflores ha organizado actos públicos y manifestaciones para exigir su liberación.

La deportación de ciudadanos venezolanos al Cecot de El Salvador desde Estados Unidos ha producido reacciones encontradas entre muchas figuras públicas de Venezuela. Los sectores de la oposición más críticos con María Corina Machado -que siga siendo la líder con más fuerza entre los críticos del chavismo- le recriminan su postura neutral en este tema, calificándola de subordinada a Donald Trump. Machado ha respondido que hace todas las gestiones posibles para salvar el destino de los prisioneros inocentes, pero ha dicho que no es un tema que se deba dirimir públicamente para que el esfuerzo pueda tener eficacia.

El presidente Bukele ha sido uno de los más férreos aliados del presidente Donald Trump en la región. El 14 de abril, visitó a su homólogo en la Casa Blanca, donde reafirmó su compromiso de recibir en El Salvador más migrantes deportados y rechazó la posibilidad de devolver a Estados Unidos a Kilmar Armando Abrego García, un trabajador de la construcción salvadoreño que llevaba 14 años en el país y que fue deportado por error a su país de origen. “¿Cómo voy a meter de contrabando a un terrorista en Estados Unidos? Por supuesto, no voy a hacerlo”, manifestó Bukele en el Despacho Oval, pese a que las autoridades judiciales no han dado por probados los presuntos vínculos de Abrego con la Mara Salvatrucha, una de las pandillas a las que Bukele ha declarado la guerra.

Diversas organizaciones han denunciado las repetidas violaciones de los derechos humanos que se producen en las cárceles salvadoreñas desde la llegada de Nayib Bukele a la presidencia. Cristosal, la principal organización en defensa de los derechos humanos de la sociedad civil en El Salvador, ha documentado la muerte de decenas de presos por torturas, golpes o asfixia mecánica por estrangulación. En el Cecot―prisión que han visitado la secretaria de Seguridad de Trump, Kristi Noem, y la ministra de Seguridad argentina, Patricia Bullrich― cientos de personas permanecen detenidas por una cuestión tan difusa como la “asociación ilícita” o por el hecho de tener tatuajes.

On March 15, Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele turned 238 different stories into one. A day earlier, 26-year-old Luis Carlos José Marcano Silva called his mother from a migrant detention center in Texas. Adelys Del Valle Silva was celebrating her birthday in Margarita Island, Venezuela; she was happy to hear her son’s voice, but noticed something strange. A few hours later, another call came in. Her son was crying. He didn’t want to ruin his mother’s day, but he had to tell her that he was going to be deported to Venezuela the next day. He couldn’t understand, if he had done nothing wrong in the almost year and a half he had been living with a temporary permit in the U.S. after crossing the border and applying for asylum, he told his mother weeping. If he was removed from the country, he thought, his wife and two daughters, aged eight and three, who had arrived with him, would be left behind alone. Adelys tried to comfort her son. They would find a way to be together once he was back home. But Luis Carlos never returned. He was deported from the United States to El Salvador and detained in an infamous maximum security prison. His mother and wife have not heard from him since.

Luis Carlos is at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, along with 237 other Venezuelans, after Donald Trump’s government deported them under the alleged claim that they are members of the Tren de Aragua gang, a group declared a terrorist organization on the first day of the Republican’s return to the White House. And he did it to the Central American country thanks to the complicity of one of his biggest allies in Latin America, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who has boasted of the agreement to receive alleged criminals from the United States. The practice of sending people to a third country is increasingly used and is not illegal in principle, but none of the deportees were brought before a judge and, since they have been in the Central American jail, none of their relatives have received any proof of their condition.

In the case of at least 137 of the 238 deported Venezuelans, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, enacted in 1798 and only previously activated in the War of 1812 and the two world wars. This law allows for the expulsion of foreign nationals if they can be proven to be part of an invading force. The U.S. administration’s argument, in line with its anti-immigrant discourse, is that these men, whom it labels as gang members mostly without proof, amount to a conquering army.

Family members of the deportees argue that this is not the case. Many recognized their sons, brothers, nephews, or husbands in the images that Bukele published when they arrived in El Salvador. In them, Bukele, who is set to receive $20,000 a year from the U.S. government for each prisoner, boasts of how these men were greeted with their wrists, hips and ankles shackled, along with 23 Salvadorans accused, for their part, of being members of the MS-13 gang.

As do hundreds like him, Noel Guape, uncle of deportee Roger Eduardo Molina, suspects that his nephew’s fate was sealed the moment the government saw the tattoo of a crown on his chest. He was being routinely interrogated by immigration agents at the Houston airport on January 8, where he had arrived from Bogota with his papers in order after following a UNHCR asylum program. “The officials told him that they had investigated and that they could see that he had no criminal record, and what kind of record would he have if it was his first time in the United States?”. Still, since that day Roger has only slept in detention centers or jails, and has not seen his girlfriend, who was traveling with him and was immediately returned to Colombia.

The fact that tattoos are for U.S. authorities one of the indicators for identifying suspected members of the Tren de Aragua was confirmed at the end of March, when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published as evidence in a lawsuit a Department of Homeland Security guide that establishes a point system for determining whether a suspect belongs to the gang. Reaching eight points is equated to being a gang member, a very easy sum to achieve under the criteria detailed in the document. For example, having tattoos such as a crown, a train, a watch, or the popular phrase “Real hasta la muerte,” by reggaeton musician Anuel AA, is worth four points. Wearing sportswear from U.S. teams such as the Chicago Bulls or the Jordan brand awards another four points.

Such tattoos and clothing are very common among young Venezuelans. For Adelys del Valle the conclusion is simple: “Being Venezuelan is now a crime.”

Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, author of the book El Tren de Aragua: La banda que revolucionó el crimen organizado en América Latina (Tren de Aragua: The gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America, Editorial Dahbar), assures that according to her own research, tattoos or clothing are not indicative of gang members, and she also doubts that those deported are really members of the group. “It is likely that there are members of the Tren de Aragua in the United States, but there are no details or official evidence coming out of a police investigation. When you try to look into it, it’s like scraps that an official said at some point.”

Moreover, adds Rísquez, since an operation by Venezuelan authorities in 2023 in the Tocorón prison in Aragua state dismantled its center of operations, the group has been weakened and its activities and dynamics are unclear, while the whereabouts of its leaders are unknown. “To call it a terrorist organization is absolutely disproportionate. They don’t even come up to the soles of Al-Qaeda’s shoes and neither if we compare it even to the Mexican cartels [also declared a terrorist organization by the Trump administration], that are singled out for bringing in tons of drugs that have killed thousands of Americans. That doesn’t mean that the Tren de Aragua are saints, of course.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW), which is conducting its own investigation, has confirmed the absence of criminal records for most of the Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador. They have been exhaustive, and have searched for such records in Venezuela, in the United States, at the federal level and in each of the 50 states of the nation, as well as in other countries through which the deportees have passed at some point, such as Colombia, Peru or Chile. There are some who do have warrants for their arrest, and a few who have committed minor offenses. The conclusion of the organization, however, is that this is a case of a mass arbitrary detention and forced disappearance.

The deputy director of HRW’s Americas Division, Juan Pappier, justifies the application of these categories: “At no point were they notified that they were going to be deported to El Salvador. And they were sent there from one day to the next. The U.S. immigration authorities erased their cases from the database used by lawyers and families to locate people who have open cases or are detained. When they call ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), at best they are told that their family members were deported, but nothing else. In other words, there is a constant refusal to confirm the whereabouts and fate of these people, which constitutes an enforced disappearance under international law.”

The government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela shares on this rare occasion the opinion of an organization that has repeatedly denounced him. On March 24, a Salvadoran law firm hired by the Venezuelan vice-presidency filed a habeas corpus before the Supreme Court of El Salvador to demand the immediate release of the Venezuelans imprisoned in Bukele’s mega-jail. Senior officials of the Venezuelan regime have been in contact with relatives of the detainees and have promised to do everything possible to secure their return to Venezuela. However, the country has no diplomatic relations with El Salvador, so there is much uncertainty about the success of the mission.

After a month without news, the anguish of family members is growing. They all know about the allegations of mistreatment and human rights violations at the CECOT, the prison where the deportees are being held. And these become all the more frightening when they have already heard them describe the terrible conditions in U.S. detention centers.

Julio Rafael Fernández Sánchez was held for eight months in one of these centers in the state of Arizona, after being detained in the border city of Nogales on July 18 last year along with his wife, Carolina, and their 17-year-old son. They entered the country with an appointment they got through the CBP One application, which the Biden administration launched to expedite entries and asylum requests, after six years living in Peru, where they set up a small motorcycle cab business, and several months working in a taqueria in Mexico City. The woman and the teenager were released, but Julio never left the center. The moment they saw the tattoo of a clock on his arm, an anniversary gift from Carolina, his luck turned.

Four days passed before Carolina was able to talk to him. “They said they were going to question him and everything went fine. But there he remained. I even got him his criminal record because he thought that’s why he wasn’t getting out. And months went by and nothing,” says the wife, who talked to Julio every day. “He said he couldn’t talk much because the calls are recorded. But at one point he said that it hurt a lot to raise his arm, that he had a tear. And I didn’t understand, if he said he slept well. But he pretended to be strong so as not to worry me. What did worry him was that he couldn’t go to the bathroom [due to stomach problems]. He would go 20 days without going, and he would ask for a pill or something and they wouldn’t give him anything,” she says, her voice breaking as she imagines her husband, who turned 35 years-old last Thursday in the black hole of the CECOT, suffering.

Several relatives have gone so far as to fear that their sons or husbands would commit suicide because of the terrible conditions. For this reason, at this moment, as if it were a kidnapping, the least they are asking for is proof of life of the detainees from the Salvadoran government.

The battle in the United States is now legal and revolves around the denial of due process. As the flights loaded with migrants accused of being invading gang members departed, a federal judge named James Boasberg ordered the suspension of the law justifying the deportation because the detainees had not been in court, as required by law. The government ignored that order —Bukele’s message mocking Boasberg, shared by several senior Trump administration officials, encapsulated that moment: “Oopsie… Too late,” he wrote on X— and that has precipitated a legal showdown that has quickly reached the Supreme Court.

The issue may yet escalate into a constitutional crisis over the limit of Trump’s executive power if he chooses to defy court orders. Currently the decision of a divided Supreme Court that allowed the use of the Alien Enemies Act, but which also determined that a deportation must be ordered by a judge, governs. Judge Boasberg said this week that there is a basis for holding the government in contempt, while the Supreme Court prohibited early Saturday morning the expulsion of a group of Venezuelans detained in Texas while their case is analyzed in court.

On the other hand, rights groups, led by the ACLU, have sued the government, arguing that the conditions for invoking the old law —a war or an actual invasion— are not met. Last month, Appeals Court Judge Patricia Millet was blunt: “The Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.”

But while that battle is being fought in the highest courts of the country, the relatives of the detainees must live with the silence from the CECOT. In the last month, EL PAÍS has told the stories of several detainees, such as Arturo Suárez-Trejo, Frizgeralth Cornejo, Brayan Palencia Benavides, Alirio Belloso or Mervin Llamares. In all these cases, relatives in Venezuela, Colombia or the United States keep their voices raised to make their situations public and increase pressure on the authorities. In private, they endure the pain of uncertainty.

“Not knowing anything is the hardest thing,” says Nataly Villalobos, sister-in-law of deportee Alirio Belloso, 30, originally from the western Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, and who entered the United States through the southern border in November 2023. “The whole family is very sad and desperate.” They have had to split up. Alirio’s brother has stayed in Maracaibo, but his wife and mother have temporarily moved to Caracas in order to follow the steps the Venezuelan government is trying to take. Alirio was arrested in a police raid in Utah five days after Trump took office. He had been working as an Uber driver for a few months and had no police history, as evidenced in his immigration record.

In Colombia, where 24-year-old Brayan Palencia Benavides’ entire family has lived for a decade, his mother, Amine Ester Benavides, has lost her appetite: she feels guilty if she eats three times a day when she doesn’t know if her son is being fed properly. Brayan was detained on January 30 in Los Angeles when he went to an immigration appointment to regularize his status after more than a year in the country, during which he worked in construction with an uncle in Miami. “I am very sad,” Amine says plainly. Her husband, Erly Palencia, uses another adjective: “She is stunned”. The consulates have not responded for Brayan. Nor have they been contacted by the law firm hired by the Venezuelan government. “The only one I talk to is God, he is the one who gives me strength and he will defend Brayan,” says the mother.

Hope for the families of deportees has taken the form of Kilmar Abrego García, the Salvadoran migrant mistakenly deported to his home country on the same flights as the 238 Venezuelans, despite a court order prohibiting his removal from the United States. His case has made headlines in the U.S. and international media recently and the Supreme Court has unanimously ordered his return, a rare vote in a court clearly divided 6-3 along ideological lines.

So far, neither the Trump administration nor the Bukele government has shown any willingness to do so. In the Oval Office, during the Central American president’s visit to the White House last Monday, the press asked several times about this issue. Both Bukele and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi flatly rejected the idea. A few days later, Congressman Chris Van Hollen visited El Salvador to fight for his return to Maryland, where his U.S. wife and three daughters are demanding his release, and to confront the government’s counterattack that portrays him, with scant evidence, as a danger to society.

In the case of the Venezuelans, despite the fact that figures like Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, have said they should spend the rest of their lives in the CECOT, HRW believes the most promising option is judicial and media pressure on the U.S. government. The Venezuelan route has the profound obstacle of the non-existent relationship between the Maduro and Bukele regimes and the lack of judicial independence in El Salvador. While there is not even a hint of a possible international strategy.

The immigration machinery set in motion by Trump since he took office for the second time has shown in just two months that his cruelty is not shy. Quite the contrary. The policy of performative terror unleashes in millions of people in the United States the fear of being caught in the clutches of the Republican government and released into a maximum security prison that, in a dialectical coincidence worthy of analysis, boasts of being the guardian of terrorism.

No information comes out of its walls. There is no word on how the deported men are doing, or whether they know of the anguish of their families. Outside, the world talks about them now and then, while the global order is shaken by the same man who sent them there and suddenly made 238 independent lives have only one future.