Another Venezuelan migrant has filed a complaint against the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador's infamous CECOT prison.
In this case, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) filed an administrative complaint with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on behalf of Leon Rengel, claiming he was deported without reason or due process.
Speaking to the Miami Herald, Rengel detailed his ordeal inside the facility, noting that guards routinely threatened and beat him. "He was beaten in his chest and stomach by guards, who used fists and batons to inflict pain," reads a passage of the complaint.
"On one occasion, he was taken to an area of the prison without cameras, where guards routinely brought detainees to assault them without leaving a video record. There, Rengel was viciously beaten," the document adds.
Rengel added that prisoners also "beaten badly" if they complained about prison conditions, which included sleeping on bare metal bunks and toilets in the open. He went on to say that a guard told him "he was going to die there or spend 90 years in prison."
Rengel's is one of many such accounts from Venezuelans who were released from the prison as part of an agreement that also involved Nicolas Maduro's authoritarian government and the Trump administration.
Another man, Andry Hernandez Romero, recently told NBC News that he experienced sexual abuse while held at the prison. He detailed that he was taken to solitary confinement and forced to "kneel, perform oral sex on one person" while others "groped" him and touched his "private parts."
Romero said he could not identify the guards because their faces were covered and lights were dim. After the incident, he said, he didn't want to "eat" or "do absolutely anything." "The only thing I did was stay laying down, look at the toilet, remember my family, asking myself a million questions," he added.
Another man, Andry Blanco Bonilla, said he repeatedly feared for his life. "You will not be leaving here. Your days are over," an official told him after arriving at the center, he recalled. "When they made us get on our knees, they would step on our toes with their boots. They hit us with batons, they hit us on the head."
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