One of the more than 250 Venezuelan migrants kidnapped by the United States to the so -called terrorism confinement center in El Salvador, filed a civil lawsuit against the US government claiming that he was arrested and expelled without due legal process.
Adrián León Rengel, who was released last week and taken back to Venezuela after spending more than 4 months detained at the CECOT, denounces having suffered “physical, verbal and psychological” abuse and asks for 1.3 million dollars in remuneration for damage refers to EFE.
The demand, filed with the support of the Liga Liga de Ciudadanos Unidos (LULAC), is the first one of the Venezuelans who were expelled to El Salvador.
«Federal officials lied to Rengel, telling him that he would be sent to his country of origin, Venezuela. However, it spent more than four months in El Salvador – a country that is not its place of origin or where it has personal ties – where it suffered abuses, ”reads the document.
The 27 -year -old Venezuelan worked as a barber in Irving, on the outskirts of Dallas (Texas) and was arrested by agents of the Immigration and Customs Control Service (ICE) in the parking lot of his apartment.
He entered the US through the CBP One application, a program promoted by the government of Joe Biden (2017-2021) so that migrants could appear on the southern border and had also requested a temporary protection status (TPS).
The authorities, detail the document, curtured him as a member of the extinct Venezuelan gang Train of Aragua and sent him to El Salvador under the law of foreign enemies, invoked by Trump as a strategy to expel Venezuelans.
In the CECOT, Rengel supported “inhuman and deplorable” conditions, according to the complaint: “It was held along with 18 or 19 more Venezuelan detainees in a cell of just three by three meters. Most of the days they stayed there 24 hours, with few or no chance to leave ».
The security guards of the prison hit him “in his chest and his stomach” with fists and canes and, on one occasion, they took him to a prison area without cameras where he was “brutally assaulted,” the complaint continues.
From Lulac, the executive director Juan Proaño, says that the history of Rengel is a «Attention call for all Americans who believe in the promise of the Constitution and the rule of law.
“The case of Mr. Rengel is a parody of justice that deserves national attention,” said Proaño in a statement.
Washington and Caracas announced an agreement last Friday to send the more than 250 Venezuelans back to their country, in exchange for the release of ten citizens and permanent American residents who had been tried in Venezuela for crimes committed in the country.
The migrants, who mostly did not have a criminal record, spent incommunicado months, in which human rights organizations described as “forced disappearances.”
Donald Trump’s government had reached an agreement with Nayib Bukele to pay around six million dollars per month for their arrest.
