More Than 50 Men Entered The US Legally Only To Later Be Sent To CECOT, Report Finds

More than two months after the Trump administration flew more than 200 people to a detention camp in El Salvador, there’s still a lot that remains unclear.

We still don’t know who, exactly, the government sent there. We don’t know how many people were aboard each plane that went from Texas to El Salvador on March 15; we don’t know who was removed under the wartime Alien Enemies Act, and who was removed under more standard immigration authorities. The question of whether non-citizens that the U.S. government is paying El Salvador to hold are entitled to habeas corpus protections is also, somewhat ominously, unanswered.

It’s shocking given the lawlessness of the operation: the Trump administration sought to shield these removals from judicial scrutiny from the start, and, per the finding of one federal judge, sought to delay a court hearing until the airplanes could depart for El Salvador.

A report published this week by the Cato Institute adds another egregious fact to this story: many of those sent to El Salvador entered the United States legally.

The researchers behind the study attempted to learn as much as they could about a list of 238 men rendered to CECOT, the El Salvador prison, on March 15, obtained and reported by CBS News. They found that at least 50 of the more than 200 men sent to El Salvador complied with U.S. immigration law as they entered the country.

Their resulting removal and indefinite confinement in El Salvador has been a betrayal, David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute and the author of the study, told TPM.

“They came to the United States really under the false pretense that they would be welcomed and admitted into the country,” he said.

The result was, instead, that having entered legally, they were removed extralegally. The administration branded these people as members of a Venezuelan gang, in many cases — without any evidence — before flying them to El Salvador for indefinite detention.

Many of those that Bier identified came as refugees. One entered on a tourist visa before later requesting refugee status. Four were approved as refugees before their arrival. The remaining 45 entered via the CBP One app; around half of those later were paroled.

The Trump administration has tried to justify these peoples’ indefinite incarceration in CECOT by casting them broadly as criminals. In addition to labeling them as members of Tren de Aragua, a legal necessity under the proclamation Trump issued, they’ve touted the invocation of the law as a “promise kept.” Vice President JD Vance called them “violent criminals and rapists,” border czar Tom Homan has called it an effort to “remove public safety threats and national security threats.” DHS calls those removed “illegal aliens.”

The report shows that apart from largely lacking criminal records, many of those removed were not, in fact, “illegal.”

In spite of that, the result was that they were removed to CECOT without any trial or opportunity to contest the government’s decision-making in any form.

“The fact that you got advance permission to travel here was no protection against potentially being subject to rendition to a foreign prison,” Bier said.