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00:00It began as soon as the planes landed.
00:04The deportees thought they were headed from the U.S. back to Venezuela.
00:09But instead, they were shackled, paraded in front of cameras, and delivered to Seacot,
00:15the notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador,
00:19where they told 60 Minutes they endured four months of hell.
00:23Did you think you were going to die there?
00:25We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
00:30Tonight, 60 Minutes reaches for a new high,
00:34with a breathtaking climb to base camp on Mount Everest.
00:37I am not looking down. Don't talk.
00:40Oh, God. It's windy. I do not like this at all.
00:44We hiked 10 days into thin air.
00:47Welcome to Everest base camp.
00:49Our guides were the Sherpas who risked their lives to assist climbers.
00:54We found there's little margin for error on the journey to Everest.
01:00I'm Leslie Stahl.
01:03I'm Scott Pelley.
01:04I'm Anderson Cooper.
01:05I'm Sharon Alfonsi.
01:07I'm John Wertheim.
01:08I'm Cecilia Vega.
01:09I'm Nora O'Donnell.
01:11I'm Bill Whitaker.
01:12Those stories end in our last minute, an 18-letter milestone.
01:18Tonight, on 60 Minutes.
01:20You may recall earlier this year when the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador,
01:35a country most had no connection to.
01:38The White House claimed the men were terrorists, part of a violent gang,
01:42and invoked a centuries-old wartime power, saying it allowed them to deport some men immediately, without due process.
01:50An unusual strategy that sparked an ongoing legal battle.
01:54Tonight, you'll hear from some of those men.
01:57They described torture, sexual, and physical abuse inside SICOT, one of El Salvador's harshest prisons,
02:05where they say they endured four months of hell.
02:10It began as soon as the planes landed.
02:12The deportees thought they were headed back to Venezuela,
02:18but then saw hundreds of Salvadoran police waiting for them on the tarmac.
02:25Shackled, they were paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to SICOT,
02:32El Salvador's notorious maximum security prison.
02:36When we got there, the SICOT director was talking to us.
02:44The first thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again.
02:51He said, welcome to hell. I'll make sure you never leave.
02:55Did you think you were going to die there?
02:57We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
02:59We met Luis Munoz Pinto in Colombia.
03:02He was a college student in repressive Venezuela and hoped to seek asylum in the United States.
03:09In 2024, he says he waited in Mexico until his scheduled appointment
03:13with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in California.
03:17During that interview...
03:20They just looked at me and told me I was a danger to society.
03:23You have no criminal record.
03:25I don't even... I never even got a traffic ticket.
03:28Nevertheless, he was detained by customs.
03:31He says he spent six months locked up in the U.S.,
03:34waiting for a decision on his asylum case when he was deported.
03:40One of 252 Venezuelans sent to SICOT between March and April.
03:47Inside, he says, their hands and feet were tied.
03:50Forced to their knees, their heads were shaved.
03:53There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn't take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves.
04:02When you get there, you already know you're in hell.
04:05You don't need anyone else to tell you.
04:07He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons.
04:12Tell me about what they did to you personally.
04:15Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled, to the point of agony.
04:21They knocked our faces against the wall.
04:23That was when they broke one of my teeth.
04:25SICOT, the terrorism confinement center, was built in 2022.
04:35As a key part of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's sweeping anti-gang crackdown.
04:41The massive prison, designed to hold 40,000 inmates and its harsh reputation, are a point of pride for Bukele,
04:50who regularly allows social media influencers to tour it.
04:54As you can see, we're literally in the middle of the desert.
04:57Guards show off cramped cells, where metal bunks are stacked four high.
05:02There are no mattresses or sheets.
05:04Inmates said they had no access to the outdoors and no contact with relatives.
05:11International observers warned SICOT was violating the U.N. standard for minimum treatment of prisoners.
05:18And two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department cited torture and
05:24life-threatening prison conditions in its report on El Salvador.
05:29But this year, during a meeting with President Bukele at the White House,
05:33President Trump expressed admiration for El Salvador's prison system.
05:38They're great facilities, very strong facilities.
05:41They don't play games.
05:44In March, the U.S. struck a deal to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees at SICOT.
05:53These are heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators,
06:00who have no right to be in this country and they must be held accountable.
06:03The U.S. government said, these people are the worst of the worst.
06:07These people are migrants.
06:09And the sad reality is that the U.S. government tried to make an example out of them.
06:15They sent them to a place where they were likely to be tortured to send migrants across Latin America
06:22the message that they should not come to the United States.
06:25Juan Papier is a deputy director at the non-profit Human Rights Watch.
06:30In an 81-page report released in November, the organization concluded there was systematic torture
06:37and other abuses at SICOT and that nearly half of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent there had no criminal history.
06:43Only eight of the men had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.
06:50How do you know they weren't gang members?
06:52We cross-referenced federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States,
06:58and also obtained criminal records in Venezuela and in the countries where these people lived.
07:05And the information we obtained in the United States is based on data provided by ICE.
07:11So ICE's own records said...
07:14ICE's own records say that only 3% of them had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime.
07:2060 Minutes reviewed the available ICE data.
07:23It confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch.
07:26It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the U.S., which could include immigration violations.
07:33We don't know because the Department of Homeland Security has never released a complete list
07:38of the names or criminal histories of the men it's sent to SICOT.
07:43Rapid deportations have been a key part of the Trump administration's immigration overhaul.
07:49The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal.
07:54Illegal crossings are now at a historic low.
07:57But some immigration attorneys say the administration has used flawed criteria to justify deportations.
08:04I have some tattoos.
08:09None of them have anything to do with any criminal group.
08:12I explained to them, saying that I didn't belong to any gang, to which the agent responded,
08:18but you are Venezuelan.
08:2160 Minutes reviewed this document agents used to assess Venezuelans.
08:26A person with eight points was designated as a Trendy Aragua gang member and deportable.
08:32Tattoos and immigration officers suspected of being gang-related earned four points.
08:38But criminologists who study gangs say tattoos are not a reliable way to identify Venezuelan gang members
08:45because, unlike some Central American gangs, such as MS-13, Trendy Aragua does not use tattoos to signal membership.
08:56Venezuelan national William Lozada Sanchez was also deported to SICOT.
09:01He told us the guards there also accused Venezuelans with tattoos of being gang members.
09:07He detailed months of abuse and being forced into stress positions.
09:12So you had to be on your knees for 24 hours?
09:15Yes, because they put a guard there to watch us so that we wouldn't move.
09:19And what would happen if you couldn't make it?
09:23They'd take us to the island.
09:25What's the island?
09:26The island is a little room where there's no light, no ventilation, nothing.
09:33It's a cell for punishment where you can't see your hand in front of your face.
09:38After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour.
09:41And they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there.
09:46The torture was never-ending.
09:47They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days.
09:54Some of the deportees described being sexually assaulted by the guards.
09:59They were hitting your private parts?
10:01Yes.
10:02With a baton?
10:04No.
10:04No, they tugged at them with their hands.
10:06And they did that to multiple people?
10:09To most of us.
10:11The men say they grew weaker by the day.
10:15They claim the prison lights were left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep,
10:20and that food and medicine were often withheld.
10:24Did you have access to clean water?
10:26They never gave us access to clean water.
10:28The same water from our baths and toilets was the same water that we had to drink and survive on.
10:33If we had serious injuries, when the doctors examined us, they told us that drinking water would heal it.
10:41So they're telling the injured prisoners to drink water, and the water's filthy.
10:47Super filthy.
10:50The sicker and more injured we were, the better it was for them.
10:53In late March, about 10 days after the first U.S. deportees arrived, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the prison.
11:04Did they speak to anybody, any of the prisoners?
11:07Never.
11:08Not with any of the detainees.
11:10They never spoke to us.
11:12We only saw the cameras.
11:13At some point, Secretary Noem went to another area of the prison to record this video.
11:19First of all, I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them.
11:27There were men standing behind her, heavily tattooed.
11:31Who are those men? Do we know?
11:33We know that those men in her video are not Venezuelans.
11:36They are Salvadorians, probably accused of being gang leaders, probably people who have been in jail for many, many years in El Salvador.
11:44Human Rights Watch was able to confirm that with the help of this intrepid team of students at UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center.
11:52All the visible men have either an MS on their chest or a 13 or an ES for El Salvador, and all those gangs are associated with El Salvador.
12:01Not the Venezuelans.
12:02To help verify the deportees' stories for Human Rights Watch, the team of students combed through open-source data for weeks.
12:11Students are trained in advanced techniques and follow strict international standards for obtaining digital evidence that can be used in courts.
12:20Analyzing satellite imagery, they mapped the prison and identified the building where the Venezuelans were held.
12:27And remember all those influencers who filmed inside CICOT?
12:31One toured an isolation cell.
12:34These are the rooms of solitary confinement.
12:35That matched the description of the so-called island where the deportees described being tortured.
12:42And they get absolutely nothing to use to sleep or to rest.
12:47Just pure calm.
12:48A show-and-tell of the armory confirmed CICOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards used on them.
12:54What we did see in these videos was the use of the T-batons on prisoners.
13:03Additionally, we also saw the use of painful body positions.
13:07They were showing that off in the videos.
13:09And they do that. It's sort of a practice.
13:12But it was this interview with the prison warden that proved to be most helpful.
13:18The light system is 24 hours a day.
13:20One of the questions that we had was, are the lights on 24-7?
13:24He said, yes, they are.
13:25So he's talking about how hot it can get in the prison.
13:29So there's this sort of pride around the poor conditions and around the suffering.
13:36Using extreme temperatures or light to disorient inmates is also prohibited under UN standards.
13:42I think one of the things that the work of this team has really shown is that a lot of these stories can be believed.
13:49Alexa Koenig is the director of Berkeley's Investigations Lab, which trains students to research war crimes and human rights violations.
13:57And it's those little details that I think then, if you can bring that together with the physical evidence,
14:03I think you have the strongest possible case for accountability, whether it's a court of public opinion or at some point in a court of law.
14:10The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CICOT to El Salvador.
14:19The government there did not respond to our request.
14:24In July, after four months, the 252 Venezuelan men were finally released from CICOT and sent back to Caracas
14:32in exchange for 10 Americans that had been imprisoned in Venezuela.
14:37The Trump administration has arranged more deals, some valued at millions of dollars,
14:43to offload U.S. deportees to other so-called third countries, nations to which they have no connection.
14:51Among them, war-torn South Sudan and Uganda, which have well-documented histories of torturing prisoners.
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