WASHINGTON (AP) — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday will visit the high-security El Salvador prison where Venezuelans who the Trump administration alleges are members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang have been held since their removal from the U.S.
Noem’s trip to the prison — where inmates are packed into cells and never allowed outside — comes as the Trump administration seeks to show it is deporting people it describes as the “worst of the worst.”
Since taking office, Noem has often been front and center in efforts to highlight the immigration crackdown. She took part in immigration enforcement operations, rode horses with Border Patrol agents and was the face of a television campaign warning people in the country illegally to self-deport.
Noem’s Wednesday visit is part of a three-day trip. She’ll also travel to Colombia and Mexico.
In El Salvador, she’ll visit the prison, called the Terrorism Confinement Center, and meet with President Nayib Bukele, according to a Homeland Security statement.
The Venezuelans were removed from the U.S. this month after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and said the U.S. was being invaded by the Tren de Aragua gang. The Alien Enemies Act gives the president wartime powers and allows noncitizens to be deported without the opportunity to go before an immigration or federal court judge.
A central outstanding question about the deportees’ status is when and how they could ever be released from the prison, as they are not serving sentences. They no longer appear in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online detainee locator and have not appeared before a judge in El Salvador. The U.S. government has acknowledged that many do not have criminal records.
Flights were in the air March 15 when a federal judge issued a verbal order temporarily barring the deportations and ordered planes to return to the U.S.
The Trump administration has argued that the judge’s verbal directions did not count, that only his written order needed to be followed and that it couldn’t apply to flights that had already left the U.S.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that about 261 people were deported on the flights, including 137 under the Alien Enemies Act.
Bukele opened the prison in 2023 as he made the Central American country’s stark, harsh prisons a trademark of his fight against crime. The facility has eight sprawling pavilions and can hold up to 40,000 inmates. Each cell can fit 65 to 70 prisoners.
Prisoners can’t have visitors. There are no workshops or educational programs.
El Salvador hasn’t had diplomatic relations with Venezuela since 2019, so the Venezuelans imprisoned there do not have consular support from their government. On Monday, lawyers in El Salvador hired by the Venezuelan government said they had filed habeas corpus petitions seeking the Venezuelans’ release.
Video released by El Salvador’s government after the deportees’ arrival showed men exiting airplanes onto an airport tarmac lined by officers in riot gear. The men, who had their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down.
They were later shown at the prison kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform — knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs — and placed in cells.
For three years, El Salvador has been operating under a state of emergency that suspends fundamental rights as Bukele wages an all-out assault on the country’s powerful street gangs. During that time, some 84,000 people have been arrested, accused of gang ties and jailed, often without due process.
Bukele offered to hold U.S. deportees in the prison when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited in February.
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Associated Press journalist Marcos Alemán in San Salvador, El Salvador, contributed to this report.
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