T remembers the fear when she was deported from the U.S. to El Salvador late last year. A transgender woman who asked to be identified only by her first initial for safety, she says she fled nearly five years ago after repeated harassment and threats. At the Salvadoran airport, she says authorities forced her to strip and checked her tattoos for gang references, warning that any sign could send her straight to CECOT, the country’s notorious maximum-security mega-prison.
She was allowed to go to her parents’ home but was told local officers could stop and question her at any time. She barely left for a month, terrified of being detained again.
T’s experience is far from isolated. A March 2026 Human Rights Watch report says more than 9,000 Salvadorans have been deported from the U.S. to El Salvador since President Trump took office in January 2025. NPR reporting and interviews with families, attorneys and rights groups show many deportees disappear into El Salvador’s prison system upon arrival or in the weeks that follow, often held incommunicado and cut off from lawyers and relatives for months or longer.
The mass detentions stem from a March 2022 decree by President Nayib Bukele that imposed a temporary suspension of rights — the so-called state of exception — after a weekend of gang killings. Though the Salvadoran constitution limits such emergency orders to 30 days, Bukele has renewed it repeatedly, effectively extending a police-state framework for four years. The crackdown has coincided with a dramatic drop in homicides but has also produced the world’s highest incarceration rate and tens of thousands arrested. Spanish newspaper El País, citing official data, estimates nearly 92,000 arrests since 2022; 64% of those arrested had been identified as gang members by Salvadoran intelligence before the emergency measures began.
Human rights organizations say the state of exception has enabled widespread abuses, including arbitrary detention, lack of due process and mistreatment in custody. San Salvador–based Socorro Jurídico Humanitario reports at least 517 deaths in prisons since the emergency powers began. Bukele, an ally of President Trump, has cooperated with the U.S. on immigration enforcement; the Salvadoran government temporarily housed hundreds of Venezuelan deportees in CECOT under a $6 million agreement with the U.S., though many Venezuelans were later released while many Salvadoran nationals remain detained.
Families of deportees describe anguish and silence. Jennifer Kesselberg Dubon, a U.S. citizen in Nebraska, said her husband, Salvador Eduardo Dubon Miranda, was deported in 2023 and jailed on suspicion of gang association — an allegation she rejects. He had no criminal record in the U.S., and she says she has had no contact with him since his imprisonment. “He was really scrawny when he went in there … and mentally he doesn’t do well being confined,” she told NPR. “In all honesty, he may be dead.”
Grace, who also asked to be identified by a nickname, said her brother was detained when he returned in 2025. He had been charged years earlier in El Salvador with statutory rape but was acquitted in 2021. Grace says authorities have accused him of collaborating with gangs despite no evidence, and the family has not heard from him since he was processed into prison.
Attorneys and researchers warn U.S. deportation decisions are complicated by information-sharing between U.S. and Salvadoran authorities. Sarah Bishop, a Baruch College professor who studies post-deportation experiences, says deportees can be re-arrested because of prior arrests recorded in U.S. or Salvadoran databases, or even on unverified suspicions of gang ties. Bishop is tracking 25 men deported from the U.S. over four years; 19 were incarcerated upon or soon after arrival.
Jonathan Levy, director of pro bono programs at immigrant-rights group American Gateways, represents several Salvadoran deportees. He says the U.S. must assess whether deportees face a real risk of torture or death if returned. “There is evidence that some people who are sent there are only getting out deceased,” Levy said. He added that legal avenues for keeping deportees from being returned have narrowed under the Trump administration, noting recent Board of Immigration Appeals decisions make it harder to block removals.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to answer questions about the disappearances or the state of exception and referred inquiries to El Salvador. A Bukele spokesperson did not respond to NPR requests about alleged abuses.
For deportees who are not jailed immediately, the challenges remain severe: job stigma, debt to smugglers, fear of police violence and social exclusion. Bishop noted some deportees struggle to find work and remain isolated, afraid to leave their homes.
Some deportees secure a return to the U.S. through successful appeals; if U.S. courts rule in their favor, the federal government must bring them back. T is now back in U.S. immigration detention appealing her deportation order.
Human rights groups, attorneys and family members say their only hope is for Bukele to restore due process in El Salvador. Without it, they say, families have little chance of learning where deported relatives are, whether they are being charged, and how they are being treated — if they are alive at all.