More than 200 people the United States has sent back to El Salvador have been killed or seriously abused — including sexually assaulted and tortured — according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
The group’s investigation found that from 2013 to 2019, 138 people were killed and more than 70 others were beaten, sexually assaulted, extorted or tortured after they were sent back to the Central American country.
The report, released Wednesday, highlights the risks Salvadorans face when sent back to a country facing a humanitarian crisis, racked by extreme levels of violence. It emphasizes how efforts in the last few years by the Trump administration to restrict legal immigration — particularly asylum — have hit Salvadorans especially hard.
“This has been a brick-by-brick erection of a legal wall by the Trump administration in an attempt to effectively end asylum in the U.S.,” the report’s co-author, Alison Leal Parker, told NBC News. “Salvadorans are by no means the only nationality, but they are one of the populations that will suffer greatly from this.”
“A living hell”
Juana, who requested that her real name not be used because of safety concerns, is a Salvadoran woman who suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of her partner and fled for the U.S. border with her 2-year-old daughter in 2015.
But Juana and her daughter are back in San Miguel — one of El Salvador’s most violent areas — in the same neighborhood they fled nearly five years ago.
Eight percent of all homicides in El Salvador in 2018 happened in San Miguel, making it the second deadliest municipality in the country, according to the State Department‘s Overseas Security Advisory Council.
“This is a very dangerous place. There’s no safe place here because people get killed all the time,” Juana told NBC News in Spanish. Gang members “left me all beaten” at work in April, she said, adding that it’s been difficult to hold a steady job since criminals are always looking to extort and assault her.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/hundreds-deported-u-s-el-salvador-have-been-killed-or-n1126906