The last time his family heard from him was on March 9, 2025, when he called them from an immigration detention center in Texas. Irvin Jeovanny Quintanilla García, 24, was arrested in December 2024 in a parking lot in the city of Irving.
According to his lawyer, he was arrested for carrying a small amount of marijuana. The investigation into this incident was never concluded, and it was never determined whether the marijuana was for personal use —which is not a crime— or for sale. That distinction fell by the wayside when his deportation process began.
Irvin faced a deportation order from October 2024, after failing to appear for an asylum hearing. On March 5, he was taken from one prison to another, passing through Prairieland Prison in Alvarado, Texas, before his removal to El Salvador, his country of birth.
During his last call with family on March 9, Irvin was waiting for relatives in San Miguel, in eastern El Salvador, to obtain a birth certificate needed for his deportation. Irvin had to give his family the email address to receive the certificate. In previous calls, his relatives had concluded that if Irvin was deported, it would be best for everyone to reunite in El Salvador, from where they had left in 2016.
On March 15, 2025, Irvin was put on a plane and deported to the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT), Bukele’s highly publicized mega-prison. The last time he spoke to his mother was on March 9. Since then, his lawyer and family consider Irvin to be missing.
Crucially, on October 2, the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) ordered El Salvador to “adopt the immediate measures necessary to determine the situation” and whereabouts of Irvin, finding him to be at serious risk of harm since his deportation over seven months ago.
The Commission gave the state of El Salvador until October 18 to provide information on the measures taken to find him, as well as to contact his family in order to reach an agreement on how to uphold the IACHR order. But the government failed to uphold that deadline, the family’s attorney told El Faro English.
Despite missing the deadline, El Salvador is still obliged to find Irvin, according to two former employees of the IACHR consulted by El Faro English. “The state violated the timetable to find Irvin, but that does not mean the Commission has ruled there was a human rights violation in this case,” said one of the experts.
Not a Gang Member
Earlier this year, on March 16, 31, and April 13, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the deportation to El Salvador of 288 Venezuelans suspected of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang, as well as around three-dozen Salvadorans accused by the U.S. and Salvadoran governments of being members of the Mara Salvatrucha. The United States gave two names of MS-13 leaders and said only that the others were “among the most wanted.”
Irvin Quintanilla is not a gang member. His family fled the El Brazo neighborhood of San Miguel Centro in 2016, due to threats from the two main gangs of El Salvador, MS-13 and 18th Street. Irvin and his brother, who were entering adolescence, were being harassed by both criminal groups, which tried to recruit them while also pressing them to not join the opposing gang, according to their mother.
Since then, the family has endured a bureaucratic ordeal of requests for information, contradictory answers, and official silence. Neither the United States nor El Salvador have provided any information on Irvin’s whereabouts, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
On October 2, the Inter-American Commission granted Irvin precautionary measures ordering the Salvadoran state to protect his physical safety and his life.
The IACHR resolution requests that El Salvador take immediate measures to determine Irvin’s situation and whereabouts, and to investigate the chain of events that led to the complaint before the Commission, “and thus prevent a recurrence” of new cases like Irvin’s.
“What I want to know is where they’re holding him and why they are detaining him, because he already paid for his drug crimes there [in the United States],” his mother, Sonia García, told El Faro. “Why should he be imprisoned here in El Salvador when he was a minor when we left for the United States?” She and other relatives returned to El Salvador for the first time since 2016 to reunite with Irvin there.
Unlike the media attention generated by the Venezuelans deported to CECOT, very little is known about the 36 Salvadorans, among them Irvin. The complete list of names remains unknown.
In July, Venezuelans deported to CECOT were repatriated under a political agreement between the United States and El Salvador. The Venezuelans were removed from CECOT and sent to Venezuela in August, in an exchange for U.S. prisoners held by the Nicolás Maduro regime. The United States thanked El Salvador and Bukele for their role in the negotiations.
From the Bowels of Bukele’s Prisons: Survivors Recount Death, Torture, and Starvation
In July, the U.S. digital media outlet 404 Media published a partial list of names of people who had been deported along with the Venezuelans. The list was obtained by a hacker who extracted flight manifests from the aviation company Global X, which transported the deportees. On that list, the second name was Irvin’s.
404 Media confirmed through social media searches that those names belonged to real citizens and, in some cases, also found posts where families were asking for help in finding the deportees.
The names of the other Salvadorans have been revealed little by little as the Trump administration uses their cases to test the bounds of the U.S. legal system. One is Kilmar Ábrego, another man with no ties to gangs who was illegally deported to El Salvador and then brought back to the United States under court order.
Federal prosecutors quickly brought human smuggling charges against Ábrego in Tennessee. The Trump administration has since unsuccessfully sought to render him to African nations including Uganda, Eswatini, and Ghana.
At Least Four Cases
Irvin’s family filed the complaint with the Inter-American Commission on August 6. In September, relatives of three other Salvadorans, José Santos Robles, Brandon Sigaran Cruz, and William Martínez Ruano, filed complaints with the IACHR for forced disappearance.
Irvin’s disappearance led his family to inquire at the consulate in Texas, where, in March, they were told that he had been deported with the Venezuelans.
Days later, on April 9, they inquired at the Migrant Services Office in the La Chacra neighborhood of San Salvador, where they were told that Irvin had not entered the country because there were no records of him on the lists of returnees. That same day, his relatives filed a missing persons report with the Attorney General’s Office.
In proceedings in August and September before the IACHR, the Attorney General’s Office confirmed that it had opened an investigation, but that it had found nothing because no Salvadoran authority claimed to have any knowledge of him, and because the General Directorate of Migration and Foreigners (DGME) had also found no immigration records.
The Attorney General’s Office reported that it had ordered the Salvadoran National Civil Police to search for Irvin by interviewing family members, trawling social media, and consulting with Interpol, the Bureau of Prisons, and customs authorities. The Salvadoran State did not report the details of the results of these investigations.
On May 13 and 14, the family filed a complaint with the Human Rights Ombudsman (PDDH) and a writ of habeas corpus with the Constitutional Chamber, but received no response. That is why, on August 6, the family’s lawyer filed a complaint with the IACHR alleging that Irvin had been forcibly disappeared.
El Salvador Shifts Responsibility
In the proceedings before the IACHR, the Salvadoran state asserted that it had no reason to investigate the case of a Salvadoran detained in another country, but that it was taking measures as part of its responsibility “to protect citizens even in situations that fall outside Salvadoran jurisdiction.”
El Salvador questioned why it was being held responsible for an “alleged forced disappearance” when Irvin’s original captors were U.S. authorities.
The IACHR seemed to question why the consular authorities of El Salvador in Texas did not take any action. According to the Commission, there is no record of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs having been consulted about Irvin during the proceedings.
Offering US His Torture Prisons, Bukele Wants MS-13 Leaders Back
“There is no information on the extent of consular assistance eventually provided to the proposed beneficiary, given the knowledge that the consular authorities of El Salvador in Texas, United States, allegedly had. The Salvadoran government has not provided information on the steps taken with the United States to confirm or challenge the information indicating that the proposed beneficiary was deported on March 15, 2025,” reads the resolution.
The state, too, appeared to question its own consular authorities in the United States because they did not provide supporting documents when they assured the family that he had been deported.
The IACHR responded that the information either does not exist or is not being provided, despite evidence supporting the veracity of the family’s account, such as the flight manifests published by 404 Media.
The state also said that it had not been proven that Irvin was facing a risk of irreparable harm, and that neither the seriousness nor the urgency of the case had been proven. The IACHR responded that the fact that he remains missing after almost seven months is unequivocal proof that he is in danger.
“The Commission values the commitment of the state authorities to locate the proposed beneficiary,” the IACHR resolution states. “However, [the Commission] warns that to date he is still missing.”