Deported by Trump, disappeared in Bukele’s jails

José Osmín Santos’s sister was last in contact with her brother on April 9 during a phone call from the immigration detention center in New York State, where he had spent a couple of weeks. “‘I think they’re going to move me,’ he says. ‘We’re going to talk quickly, because we may not talk again, because I don’t think they’ll give me my right to a phone call again. We’re headed to El Salvador. Tell everyone there, Jovelina, to be waiting for me around noon.’ ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘I will call her, I’ll tell her.’ But we didn’t finish saying goodbye because the call suddenly ended,” his sister recounts nearly six months later, speaking via video call from her home in the town of Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. She prefers to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the U.S. or Salvadoran governments.

The flight that supposedly brought Osmín to El Salvador landed two days after that brief conversation. She thinks about their last exchange every day, like a thread that connects her to a past in which her brother was a flesh-and-blood 40-year-old man in her life, and not the memory he is today. Osmín never came out to embrace their other sister at noon as he had been hoping. After she watched other deportees come out, one after the other, their families receiving them relieved and smiling, she was told that her brother’s name was on the list that also included several Venezuelans accused without evidence of belonging to the Tren de Aragua cartel. But his name was crossed out. He’d never boarded the airplane, they told her. When the family contacted U.S. authorities, they were told the opposite, that Osmín had indeed been deported on that flight. Since then, they’ve been met with a wall of silence.

Given this official hush, “enforced disappearance” may well be the only apt terminology to describe what has happened to Osmín. The United Nations defines the term as “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.” the case of José Osmín Santos, along with those of Brandon Sigaran and William Martínez — also allegedly deported on the same flights that carried more than 250 Venezuelans, accused without evidence of being gang members, to the cells of Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the infamous maximum-security prison of Nayib Bukele’s regime — has been brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

But for now, there has been only silence. None of the three men have been officially accused of belonging to a gang. The only documentation of the situation has been their deportation orders. The Salvadoran authorities did not answer questions from EL PAÍS about their whereabouts. And lawyer Kelvi Zambrano, who has taken on their international court cases pro bono, says that “all the families have initiated search processes, have approached all the relevant state institutions, and have even filed habeas corpus petitions, the appropriate legal remedy in this circumstance, but no information has been provided at any time.”

Their families have been left to cling to rumors and the little information that they have been able to gather independently. Martínez’s mother, who prefers not to give her name out of fear of U.S. immigration authorities in Donald Trump’s second term, has seen photos of her 21-year-old son in the last six months. Although she has received no official information about his whereabouts or status and has not been able to speak to him, she is sure he is in El Salvador.

In June, Salvadoran President Bukele shared a video after Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran who was “wrongfully” deported, returned to the United States. Abrego García has become a symbol of the cruelty of Trump’s anti-immigration crusade. In the series of images meant to show the good conditions in which he was held at the Santa Ana prison—where he was transferred after political pressure from the U.S. opposition and which focuses on the rehabilitation and reintegration of inmates not convicted of serious crimes — Martínez was also there. It was a ray of hope.

Martínez’s mother wrote to Abrego García’s wife on TikTok. “She told me when she spoke with Kilmar, she would call me back. And she did. She called me and told me that Kilmar says that William is OK, that they were only at CECOT for 20 days and then they were transferred to Santa Ana,” she says from her home in Texas. According to Abrego García, there were 23 Salvadorans with the Venezuelans who were sent to CECOT, but only two were active gang members. The other 21 were separated from the group and of them, the six that did not have tattoos, including Kilmar and William, were brought to Santa Ana.

There is a massive difference between being incarcerated at CECOT and Santa Ana. Martínez’s mother has been breathing easier since finding out her son was at the latter, and that he can go outside, be in the sunshine and work in a carpentry studio or at painting schools. Now, every day she waits for an unknown number to appear on her cell phone screen, to answer a call and hear the voice of her son, free at last, on the other end.

She clings to that illusion to keep at bay the guilt that surfaces when she recounts the circumstances of her son’s detention. Her eyes well up with tears, and her throat tightens as she tells the story. William arrived in the United States to reunite with his mother about seven years ago and started high school, but at 17 he dropped out when his girlfriend became pregnant and began working to support their child, who is now four years old. He also helped his mother with the household bills.

But one afternoon last December, driving with a friend in his car, Martínez was pulled over. The friend, who was a minor and a U.S. citizen, had a small amount of drugs on him. Martínez’s mother says the drugs were pinned on Martínez, and in a matter of days, he was deported to El Salvador. Two days later, she spent all their savings so that he could return with a coyote, but he was detained at the border in mid-December. He spent several months at an immigration detention center, until on March 5, he voluntarily accepted his second deportation.

When they last spoke on March 13, he said that they were going to send him to El Salvador. But after a few days without hearing from him, his loved ones began a desperate search in both countries. In El Salvador, a family friend visited offices and prisons asking about his whereabouts, but didn’t manage to find out anything. In the United States, his file in the immigration database had disappeared, so his mother called the last detention center he had been known to be at. A woman answered. “They told us that he had left mistakenly on an airplane with a lot of people who had been unjustly sent, but she couldn’t really tell me anything further,” says his mother.

The journey of 22-year-old Brandon Sigaran began long before. In February 2024, as he was going to work at dawn with his older brother, they were stopped by the police. Agents focused on Sigaran, taking him away while letting his brother go free. A little more than a month went by before the family learned what had happened to him, when at last he called from the Bluebonnet detention center near Dallas. He said he was accused of illegally crossing the border and belonging to a gang, which he has always denied.

At that point, the legal battle began, costing his family $25,000 and forcing them to pawn their trucks to cover the expenses. With that money, they hired three lawyers who were unable to do anything, despite demonstrating that Sigaran had come to the United States when he was nine years old, fleeing precisely from the gang recruitment that had subjected El Salvador to a reign of terror. They also submitted letters from the principals of the schools where Sigaran had studied that said he was a good, honest boy. But the judges ignored these arguments, and his deportation order seemed inevitable.

“The last time we saw him was in September, exactly a year ago,” says Karla Sigaran, Brandon’s stepmother. “My son has an illness that leads to bumps on his skin, and if they don’t give him medicine, those bumps burst. I asked him if they were giving it to him and he just shook him head. By October, he was desperate and depressed and ready to sign his deportation order.”

On March 13, Brandon called his family and announced that the moment had finally arrived. At that point, returning to El Salvador was a relief, one that was difficult to explain. The judge with whom he signed the deportation order told him that since he had committed no crime, when he arrived, he would be set free. But that never happened.

Faced with a total lack of information since that day in March, Sigaran’s family also hired a lawyer in El Salvador, who went to government offices and morgues to little result. Then in May, she was able to confirm that he was at CECOT. “But she told us that she couldn’t continue working the case. That she was very sorry, but she couldn’t work the case because it meant fighting against the government,” says Karla.

A few days later, the Red Cross called the family. They had also managed to confirm that Brandon was at CECOT, but that there was nothing that could be done, as he was part of an arrangement with the U.S. government. “One thing had nothing to do with the other,” recalls a still-desperate Karla.

Brandon has three tattoos. One of them is the word “Bullet,” the name of his old dog. Unfortunately for Brandon, it is also the alias of a well-known Salvadoran gang member. All signs suggest that those six letters having spelled his downfall.

Karla confirms that her son was on the same flight as the Venezuelans who were deported in mid-March. Two of them told her as much after they were returned to Venezuela. But, they said, upon arriving to CECOT, they were separated and didn’t see him again.

As for José Osmín, who was allegedly flown to El Salvador in April with a much smaller group of deportees, no one has confirmed seeing him since the morning in late March when he was detained just a few meters from his front door, on his way to the train station to begin the long trip to Manhattan. He worked on Fifth Avenue as a bricklayer and repairman for several luxury stores, but that day he never arrived.

His siblings in the United States, El Salvador and Sweden have done everything they can, yet still don’t really know where he is. At this point, they assume that the authorities’ deafening silence means he is in CECOT.

According to what Abrego García told Martínez’s mother, there are 17 other Salvadorans in the same situation. For the moment, only these three have been denounced as enforced disappearances. Osmín’s birthday was on October 3, but neither he nor his loved ones celebrated. In the absence of information, unease grips his family, weighing on both mind and heart. And their worst fears never leave them.

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