Judges, Attorneys Face Trump’s Salvadoran Black Hole

There’s a real risk that hundreds of people sent to a brutal prison camp will never be free.

Henrry Jose Albornoz Quintero was scheduled to attend an immigration court hearing in El Paso Thursday. He didn’t. The immigration judge presiding over his case was not happy.

“He just disappeared? What happened?”

The Trump administration lawyer either could not say — or would not.

“All I can disclose at the moment is that he’s no longer in ICE custody,” the lawyer said, according to the notes of Albornoz Quintero’s attorney, who attended the hearing.

The attorney believes his client is languishing at Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), the Salvadoran mega-prison where the United States sent hundreds of migrants last month. The Trump administration has sent some people to the prison under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime power; Trump claims alleged Tren de Aragua gang members are the equivalent to an invading army.

Others were sent to CECOT after receiving standard deportation orders from immigration judges.

Albornoz Quintero’s attorney John Dutton believes the government has removed him to CECOT as an “alien enemy” on the basis of his tattoos alone, a troubling trend that other attorneys and family members of detainees have flagged as well.

The Trump administration has not provided any updates on Albornoz Quintero’s status, Dutton told HuffPost. But Albornoz Quintero’s name is among those on a government list of Venezuelan detainees sent to El Salvador that was published by CBS News.

“He doesn’t even know that his child’s been born,” Dutton said of Albornoz Quintero, whose wife gave birth a few days ago in the U.S. “His wife is doing all this on her own in a foreign country, doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t have any family here. She’s struggling.”

On Thursday, the judge in Albornoz Quintero’s case stressed that he didn’t blame the government attorney personally for the lack of information about Albornoz Quintero’s whereabouts. But he called the situation “ridiculous,” according to Dutton’s notes and said, “This is really irritating me.” The government attorney said he could “elevate” the court’s request for more information. And he said he would seek a “continuance” of the case, effectively kicking the can down the road. The hearing ended.

Ever since the Trump administration shipped hundreds of migrants to CECOT, bizarre episodes like Albornoz Quintero’s hearing Thursday aren’t unusual; the same thing played out in a hearing for Albornoz Quintero earlier this month, and other attorneys who spoke to HuffPost described similar scenes. And with the government refusing to even acknowledge what’s happened to their clients, attorneys dealing with CECOT cases have expressed frustration and despair at what they see as the lack of legal options to get their clients out of El Salvador.

The U.S. State Department has for years said the Central American country is plagued by human rights concerns, including credible reports of “unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces,” and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”

The fact pattern of the detainees sent to El Salvador “fits every definition of an enforced disappearance under international law,” said Denise L. Gilman, who co-directs the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. Gilman said the description of the hearing Thursday “was exactly what I’ve heard from others about what’s happening.”

“It fits every definition of an enforced disappearance under international law.”

– Denise L. Gilman, co-director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law
“Black site” isn’t a legal term, but “I would call this a black site, absolutely,” she added of CECOT.

“It’s a place where people are being held in torturous conditions without any clear legal authority for their detention, and also without any structure or proceeding or authority charged with looking at the situation,” Gilman said.

Now, weeks after the Trump administration arguably defied a judge’s order and flew several planeloads of detainees to El Salvador — where a video released by the country’s president showed them being manhandled and having their heads shaved at CECOT — their future is uncertain.

‘Not In ICE Custody’
“The system’s not really designed for the executive branch to just flout the laws,” said attorney Joseph Giardina, whose client Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo Pulgar is believed to be in CECOT.

Cornejo Pulgar came into the United States legally, making an appointment on the government’s since-discontinued CBP One app, Giardina told HuffPost. He doesn’t have any criminal history, and his apparent expulsion to CECOT is “obviously based on tattoos,” Giardina said.

At Cornejo Pulgar’s own immigration court hearing Thursday, “the government didn’t know anything, they certainly weren’t prepared to do anything. They didn’t say anything. They asked for a continuance,” Giardina said. His client wasn’t there, and government attorneys similarly would only say “your client is not in ICE custody,” he recalled.

“No one wants to defend an indefensible position,” Giardina said. “And obviously, there’s pending litigation. So everyone’s terrified, no one wants to lose their job on [the government’s] end, so they’re just giving the company line: ‘Not in ICE custody, that’s all we’re willing to confirm.’”

“It’s fucking absurd,” he added.

Attorneys like Giardina and Dutton, the latter of whom said the Trump administration was carrying out “government-sponsored kidnapping,” don’t see many viable options to get their clients out of one of the world’s most notorious prisons, even though they’ve never been convicted of a crime, and even though the United States government says it paid millions of dollars for the detention space.

The Supreme Court ordered Thursday that the Trump administration work to facilitate the return to the U.S. of one man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who the Trump administration has admitted should not have been sent to El Salvador. But even in that case, the government seems to be dragging its feet, saying in a filing Friday that “Foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines.” In court Friday, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign said he did not have any information to provide the court on Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts and that the administration was “not yet prepared” to share information on anything it had done to facilitate his release.

Separately, the high court has temporarily allowed Trump to resume Alien Enemies Act expulsions, though the court said people targeted under the president’s declaration have a narrow right to make a habeas corpus claim in a conservative Texas court — a challenging argument in a challenging venue.

Habeas petitions, which require authorities to justify a person’s detention, generally depend on a given defendant being physically present in a given judicial district. What about all those already in CECOT? No court has addressed the issue head-on.

“I don’t know exactly what needs to happen. The problem is, [the Supreme Court didn’t] address what happened to the people that already got deported … What about the toothpaste that’s already out of the tube?” Giardina asked.

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“Habeas petitions go to the federal district courts where somebody is housed, or where they’re physically located,” Giardina said. “Convincing a district court [judge] in Texas that he still has jurisdiction over a habeas claim for a body that’s no longer in his jurisdiction — probably going to be a tall order. The argument would be that he was in your jurisdiction when his rights were violated, but again, never happened before.”

The attorney said “higher level action” was needed, potentially including video hearings in El Salvador. But the next steps are far from clear.

“Even if we’re successful in a habeas petition, which will be the next step, what’s the guarantee that they can come back?” Dutton said.

“You’d think that if the government is paying El Salvador to keep these people, they still have some control over their ability to return them. But I don’t know.”

‘Brute Authority’
The problems with CECOT don’t stop with people accused by the Trump administration of being “alien enemies.” In addition to that group, over 100 people have been sent to CECOT in the course of the standard deportation process. That means an immigration judge in the United States deemed them “removable,” or deportable. While some deportees were Salvadoran, others were not — and were sent to the country nonetheless.

One of those people is believed to be Victor Andres Ortega Burbano, a 24-year-old Venezuelan citizen with muscular dystrophy affecting his right arm. Ortega Burbano and his wife arrived in the United States in 2022, and he was eventually granted “temporary protected status” last year. A few months later, an immigration judge ordered him removed to Venezuela, according to a court declaration filed by Michelle Brané of Together & Free, a nonprofit that supports families seeking asylum in the United States. The group has set up a WhatsApp hotline for the relatives of Venezuelans believed to have been sent to El Salvador.

After receiving his removal order, Ortega Burbano was released from immigration detention. Months later, on March 11, he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested while checking his mailbox. After being taken to an ICE detention facility in Texas for a couple weeks, he told his wife over the phone on March 28 that he had been informed by ICE agents that he was to be deported to Venezuela, according to the declaration. Instead, he went to Guantánamo Bay. Then, “on March 31, 2025, his family learned that he was on the March 30 flight to El Salvador through a social media post,” the declaration said.

Brané said CECOT was “basically known as a black hole.” She worried about the lack of medical care for people with preexisting conditions like Ortega Burbano.

“Even if they had a removal order, sending you to a prison where you’re going to die in El Salvador is insane,” said Brané, who was previously the immigration detention ombudsman at the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration, and prior to that, the executive director of the department’s Family Reunification Task Force.

Together & Free has tracked just under 100 of the people who were sent to El Salvador, around half of whom had removal orders, Brané said.

“I don’t think anybody, unless they were told at the very last minute, was told they were going to El Salvador,” she said.

That’s an important point, because a federal district court in Boston is currently handling a case concerning the deportation of people to so-called “third countries.” On March 29, a federal judge paused all third-country removals nationwide unless detainees had received written notice and an opportunity to pursue a legal case based on their fear of going to a given country.

The next day, March 30, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in a memo that the DHS “third country removal” policy involves receiving “diplomatic assurances that aliens removed from the United States will not be persecuted or tortured.” If such assurances are not received — or if the State Department does not find them to be “credible” — only then must DHS inform someone of the country to which they are being removed, according to the policy. What’s more, under the policy, immigration officers do not ask if someone has a fear of being sent to a given country. Rather, they must bring up that fear on their own accord in order to be screened for protections under the Convention Against Torture.

On March 31, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced “a successful counter-terrorism operation with our allies in El Salvador” targeting 17 people who he called “violent criminals from the Tren de Aragua and MS-13 organizations, including murderers and rapists.” And Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele published a video showing several detainees being taken off of a plane in El Salvador and to CECOT the night prior, arms twisted behind their backs.

The timeline Brané and others have laid out suggests the administration may have violated the judge in Boston’s restraining order with the latest El Salvador flight. On Monday, an appeals court declined the Trump administration’s request to stay the district court’s restraining order, writing that the administration had “made a moving target of their removal policy.”

The Trump administration did not answer a detailed list of questions for this story.

“Nothing about what the administration is doing is in compliance with U.S. statute, with international obligations, or any other legal norm,” said Gilman, of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law.

“It’s a new paradigm of brute authority.”