Kilmar Abrego Garcia Reveals He Was Tortured in El Salvador Megaprison
Lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia revealed gruesome details about his treatment at the notorious Salvadoran prison where Donald Trump has exiled more than 280 deportees.
In a 40-page amended complaint filed Tuesday as part of his civil case in Maryland, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys said their client reported being “subjected to severe mistreatment” upon arrival at Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, “including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.”
Lawyers for Abrego Garcia said that their client, who was deported as the result of an “administrative error,” was told upon his arrival at the notorious foreign gulag: “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.”
Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip and was beaten for not changing his clothes fast enough. His head was shaved, and he was frog-marched to his cell and struck with wooden batons, leaving him with “visible bruises and lumps all over his body.”
Abrego Garcia and his cellmates were then “forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion,” the lawyers wrote. “During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.”
“While at CECOT, prison officials repeatedly told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that they would transfer him to the cells containing gang members who, they assured him, would ‘tear’ him apart,” the filing stated. Abrego Garcia had repeatedly observed prisoners that he understood to be gang members “violently harm each other with no intervention from guards or personnel.”
These are the horrific conditions which the Trump administration has willfully inflicted on deportees it claims are gang members. But officials at the notorious prison could tell that not everyone fell into that category. According to the filing, after about a week, the group of detainees sent by the U.S. were divided based on who had gang-related tattoos. It was then that “prison officials explicitly acknowledged that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia’s tattoos were not gang-related, telling him ‘your tattoos are fine.’”
Trump had previously made the outlandish claim that Abrego Garcia’s hand tattoos indicated gang membership, referring to a photoshopped image of his hands with “MS-13” written on them.