Podcast: Trump and Bukele Leave Venezuelans in CECOT in Legal Limbo

The following is a transcript of episode 36 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

FAGOAGA: It’s not fiction, it’s not the past, it’s now. To the world, we tell you: Look at El Salvador. While irrational power becomes emboldened, the free press resists with dignity and irreverence to make the powerful uncomfortable.

GRATTAN, HOST: Join us in applauding independent Salvadoran outlet Revista Factum and Mexico’s Sonoro Media for receiving the Ondas Globales podcast award in Madrid. Find their winning podcast, HUMO: Murder and Silence in El Salvador, in English on Spotify.

Whose jurisdiction?

GRATTAN: Today, we take you first to El Salvador’s megaprison CECOT, where the U.S. and Salvadoran governments are playing ping-pong over who is legally responsible for the 238 Venezuelan men rendered there in March.On Monday, a document sent by Salvadoran authorities to the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances asserted, for the first time since their deportation, that it is only holding the men as temporary custodian. The Bukele regime named the U.S. legal system as having sole authority over the men.

Which is interesting because the U.S. government — which reportedly paid El Salvador millions of dollars to hold the men— claims exactly the opposite: Here is American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt, part of the legal team challenging the Venezuelan deportations, on MSNBC on Monday:

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GELERNT: The United States government has told every court — district court, court of appeals, and the Supreme Court: ”We don’t have legal responsibility for these men, El Salvador does. And therefore, they need to continue languishing there.”

On Tuesday, a Maryland federal judge gave the Trump administration one week to explain who is responsible for one of the Venezuelans, “Cristian”, who has been stuck in apparent legal limbo for four months now.

In May, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to give Venezuelans more time to fight deportation — even though they had already been removed. The U.S. government faced another setback in June when D.C. Judge James Boasberg found Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a law not used since the second world war, to be unlawful and mandated that they give the deportees habeas corpus relief.

The same Judge has described the case as Kafka-eque and that the Venezuelan men were “spirited away” on “frivolous accusations”. An investigation by CBS News found that out of the 238 men deported, 75 percent did not have criminal records — contrary to both governments’ initial claims.

In El Salvador, where mass trials under the state of exception have dismantled the presumption of innocence, that wide margin of error is perhaps not far beyond the norm.

Trump rolls back TPS

GRATTAN: Within the next two months, about 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans will lose Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, the program that allowed them to be part of the labor force in the United States and prevented their deportation while not offering a path to citizenship.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stated that TPS “was designed to be just that — temporary” and claimed that both countries are in a better condition to receive their citizens than when the status was issued for the two countries in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch.

In the Americas, the Trump administration has also cancelled the statuses of Haiti and Venezuela, but has yet to touch El Salvador, whose status was extended for 18 months by Biden in January, just days before leaving office.

In Nicaragua, the Ortega-Murillo regime has said nothing publicly about TPS. According to Confidencial, Ortega briefly acknowledged in March and June that they were receiving deportation flights, but has said nothing more — even as a military flight landed in Managua carrying deportees on June 29.

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As for Honduras, President Xiomara Castro expressed on X that “we will maintain an open and frank dialogue with the United States, seeking a humane way out, in order to avoid a massive expulsion, and appealing to the mutual interest of preserving a close relationship and the validity of the different international agreements.”

Her administration has walked a tightrope with Trump on migration: In January, they came out swinging, threatening to revoke U.S. military bases in response to Trump’s deportation policy. But as we covered in episode 30, they have cut out the confrontation, stressing increased cooperation with the United States for the military and drug extraditions.

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As for the thousands of migrants from the two countries who will no longer have legal status in the United States, DHS reports that it will offer a paid plane ticket and $1,000 dollars cash in exchange for self-deportation.

According to the Honduran National Commissioner for Human Rights, TPS recipients have until September 6 to use family ties, asylum applications, or work permits to stay in the country or prepare for a possible return to Honduras.

A rift in Guatemala

Last, we turn to Guatemala, where the party of President Bernardo Arévalo has now split in two. At the end of May, Semilla’s most visible legislator, Samuel Pérez, introduced a new political initiative called Raíces.

This showed a rift between legislators aligned with Arévalo and with Pérez. El Faro English sought to understand this rupture by speaking with an actor who knows the party well, but is not involved. On Monday, our colleague Yuliana Ramazzini published an interview with Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, a Maya K’iche anthropologist and co-founder of Movimiento Semilla.

VELÁSQUEZ: Inside the party, there is a struggle for power, for spaces. There are sectors who joined to negotiate job positions, and the president has shown little ability to sit down with the organic sector of Semilla to re-think how to form his cabinet.

GRATTAN: Dr. Velásquez Nimatuj is a renowned Guatemalan academic who has taught classes at Brown, Duke, and Stanford. Citing one of the most prominent founders of the party, Edelberto Rivas Torres, she says that “political parties in Central America have a short life. It is deeply saddening to know that his words came true for the project he put his heart and soul into.”

Edward Grattan, Leyrian Colón Santiago, and Yuliana Ramazzini wrote today’s episode, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.