Salvadoran Authorities Stonewall Each Other on Whereabouts of Missing CECOT Deportee

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Irvin Jeovanny Quintanilla García was deported to El Salvador in March 2025, but nearly 16 months later, his whereabouts remain a mystery. It’s unclear whether he is in any of the country’s prisons, according to a judge appointed by the Constitutional Chamber, the highest court in El Salvador.

Quintanilla is an undocumented immigrant who fled with his family to the United States in 2016 to escape El Salvador’s gangs. In December 2024, at age 24, he was arrested in Irving, Texas on unsubstantiated drug charges, after failing to attend an asylum hearing.

In March 2025, he was one of three-dozen Salvadorans deported with 252 Venezuelans as part of a deal between U.S. and Salvadoran Presidents Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele.

While the largest group was sent to Venezuela last July, Quintanilla and 35 other Salvadorans were admitted to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Very little is known about them, apart from the high-profile case of Kilmar Ábrego, who was returned to the United States.

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As for Irvin Quintanilla, what little the government has alleged about his whereabouts is owed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In October 2025, the government initially admitted to the Commission that he had been transferred from CECOT to a prison farm in western Santa Ana.

Since then, his whereabouts, condition, and grounds for detention in El Salvador are unknown. Authorities have not said whether he is facing legal proceedings in El Salvador.

The IACHR granted precautionary measures to Quintanilla and four other Salvadorans deported alongside him. But unlike the others, Quintanilla’s family filed an ongoing habeas corpus petition in El Salvador in May 2025 to the Constitutional Chamber.

On December 3, 2025, the habeas corpus process led the Chamber to call on authorities responsible for his custody to provide information on his whereabouts, and to defend themselves against allegations of human rights violations. The Chamber appointed Evelyn Escobar as the presiding judge.

Seven months later, these efforts have yielded little result. The Bureau of Prisons and Santa Ana Sentence Enforcement and Rehabilitation Center failed to comply with two requests for information from the Chamber in December 2025 and June 2026.

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Last month, faced with this lack of cooperation, the Chamber issued this second order to prison and customs officials. They had three business days to respond, but the deadline expired on Monday, June 15.

The Constitutional Chamber laid its failure to guarantee Quintanilla’s constitutional rights at the feet of the other institutions. “These requests are not mere suggestions,” wrote the chamber on June 10, “but rather binding orders.”

An open case “definitively closed”

Of all the institutions queried by the Chamber, only the Attorney General’s Office provided information. In April 2025, prosecutors launched an investigation into a complaint filed in San Miguel by Quintanilla’s family. El Faro obtained this information through the habeas corpus proceedings.

While the prison system has rebuffed the Constitutional Chamber, Director of Prisons Osiris Luna told prosecutors that he had no record of Quintanilla’s admission to any prison. The Directorate of Migration and Foreigners likewise responded that they had no record of Quintanilla’s entry into the country, nor of a passport issued in his name.

The Secretary General of the Attorney General’s Office, Miguel Ángel Iraheta Joachín, activated the Urgent Action Protocol (PAU) and the Strategy for the Search for Missing Persons in El Salvador on April 10, 2025, one month after Quintanilla’s deportation.

Iraheta added that an official directive was issued to the head of the San Miguel Police Investigations Division to conduct inquiries.

Prosecutors found no information in an internal records system, the Automated Information and Management System for Prosecutorial Proceedings (SIGAP). They received nothing from Interpol as to whether Irvin “has been arrested or brought before any national authority.”

The Attorney General’s Office concluded that “the alleged facts did not constitute the crime of disappearance” and that, “if he had been the victim of a criminal act, it was not committed on Salvadoran territory; therefore, the case was definitively closed.”

At the same time, in an apparent contradiction, the prosecutors’ filings in the habeas corpus proceedings state that “the investigation remains active” and that they informed Irvin Quintanilla’s family of these decisions.

The last time Irvin Quintanilla spoke with his family in the U.S. by phone was on March 9, 2025, four months after his arrest. Authorities had asked for a Salvadoran ID to check his criminal record, and his mother promised to email him a copy of his birth certificate. Six days later, he was deported.

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“I kept waiting for him to call me with the email address where I was supposed to send the copy of his birth certificate,” his mother, Sonia García, told El Faro last October.

“My other son would log into his account, and it showed that he was [in detention] in the city of Alvarado, Texas, but then he disappeared from all the systems,” she said. Then the Salvadoran consulate in Texas told the family that he had been deported in the same flight as the Venezuelan group.

On April 29, 2025, García and three other children —two of whom were born in the United States— moved back to El Salvador to reunite with their son. “We left everything to come look for him,” she said, “but to this day we haven’t gotten any answers.”

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