A professional soccer player who protested Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s repressive regime. Another man who claims he fled torture there to New York, where American police allegedly deemed his tattoos memorializing his grandmother as gang-related. And a third who cried “uncontrollably” during his rushed deportation last week and “begged officers for food and water” as they “laughed.”
Late Wednesday, detailed accounts were filed in federal court by attorneys for several of the people whom the Trump administration whisked to El Salvador’s “Terrorism Confinement Center” under dubious legal authority. It’s the latest revelation in an ongoing legal battle that has become the center of a dramatic showdown between President Donald Trump and the nation’s courts.
The sworn testimony of these lawyers directly contradict the assertions made by the Trump administration, which is seeking to strip the migrants of legal rights under what amounts to a state of exception.