Relatives of Venezuelan migrants deported from the U.S. to a maximum security prison in El Salvador attend a vigil in front of El Salvador embassy in Caracas, Venezuela on April 2, 2025. (Photo: Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images)
“The cruelty of the U.S. and Salvadoran governments has put these people outside the protection of the law and caused immense pain to their families,” said one human rights advocate.
Human Rights Watch on Friday accused the governments of the United States and El Salvador of “a grave violation of international human rights law” over the deportation more than 230 Venezuelan nationals by the Trump administration to a megaprison in El Salvador last month.
The actions taken against the deportees constitute both enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention, according to a statement from the group released Friday.
The governments of the United States and El Salvador have subjected more than 200 Venezuelan nationals to enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention.
“The cruelty of the U.S. and Salvadoran governments has put these people outside the protection of the law and caused immense pain to their families,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.
The group said that since their removal, the Venezuelans “have been held incommunicado” and that the United States and Salvadoran officials have not released a list of the people who were removed, though CBS News last month published a list of names the outlet obtained.
The administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law that gives the president broad authority to detain or deport non-citizens during times of war, to justify dozens of the deportations—triggering a fierce legal battle.
The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act in response to an alleged “invasion” by “Tren de Aragua,” a Venezuelan gang, but the government has produced scant evidence that the people removed had ties to Tren de Aragua. One hundred and one of the deportees were removed under regular immigration procedures.
According to Human Rights Watch, the Salvadoran government has failed to offer a legal basis for detaining the Venezuelan deportees and has not indicated when or whether they will be released.
“It appears that their detention is wholly arbitrary and potentially indefinite; a grave violation of El Salvador’s human rights obligations,” the group said.
Enforced disappearance, according to Human Rights Watch, is when officials deprive someone of their liberty and then conceal the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person. The violation is “especially serious” because it means they are outside the protection of the law.
The group is calling on U.S. authorities to publicly identify the Venezuelans who were removed to El Salvador and is urging the Salvadoran government to “confirm their current whereabouts, disclose whether there is any legal basis for their detention, and allow them contact with the outside world.”
The statement from Human Rights Watch also detailed the struggle that family members of the deported individuals have faced getting information about them.
The group has interviewed 40 relatives of people “apparently” removed to El Salvador, and all of them told Human Rights Watch that U.S. immigration authorities initially informed their relatives, who were in U.S. immigration detention, that they would be sent to Venezuela. They were not told they would be sent to El Salvador.
“Nobody should be forced to piece together bits of information from the media or to read into the authorities’ silence to find out where their relatives are being held,” Goebertus said. “Salvadoran authorities should urgently disclose the names and locations of all detainees transferred from the US, and allow them to contact their families.”
In addition to the Venezuelans who were deported in March, the Trump administration also deported a smaller number of Salvadoran nationals. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has admitted that one of the men sent to El Salvador was deported in “error.” On Thursday, the Supreme Court instructed the Trump administration to take steps to retrieve the man it had wrongly deported.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Incoming White House ‘border czar’ Tom Homan speaks during Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 22, 2024. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
“Decent people all over the world will hate this country… and they should,” said one critic.
Adding to alarm over U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration plans, his “border czar” told The Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the administration plans to return to detaining migrant families with children.
Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, said that ICE “will look to hold parents with children in ‘soft-sided’ tent structures similar to those used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges,” the Post summarized. “The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up.”
Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican’s first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 campaign pledges, from mass deportations to attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Homan—who oversaw the so-called “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of migrant kids from their parents—said: “Here’s the issue… You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”
Incoming "border czar" Tom Homan on shipping U.S.-born children out of the country with their undocumented parents: “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child.”"Chose"? That's an odd word choice. The right wants to force women to give birth, not give them a choice.
Harris and President Joe Biden have come under fire for various immigration policies, but their administration did stop family detention—and when it was reported last year that the White House was weighing a revival of the practice, 383 groups urged the president to keep the pledge he made when he took office “to pursue just, compassionate, and humane immigration policies.”
Under Biden, the government ended mass worksite immigration raids and—eventually—the “Remain in Mexico” policy that stopped asylum-seekers from entering the United States. Homan told the Post that the next Trump administration should bring them back.
Less than a month before Trump’s inauguration, Biden is now facing pressure to “use the power of the pen to protect those seeking sanctuary from the coming deportation machine that will crush the human rights of our immigrant neighbors and those who have dreams of finding refuge here,” as Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O’Brien put it earlier this month.
The Post reported that “of all the border hard-liners in the incoming administration, Homan is perhaps the most cognizant of the limits of the government’s ability to deliver on promises of mass deportation—and the potential for a political backlash.”
Those hard-liners include dog-killing Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security; family separation architect Stephen Miller, the president-elect’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy; and Caleb Vitello, the next acting ICE director whom Miller previously tried to install at the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Homan told the newspaper. However, he also said: “We need to show the American people we can do this and not be inhumane about it… We can’t lose the faith of the American people.”
Critics of the next administration have suggested that—although Trump won the Electoral College and the popular vote last month—pursuing the GOP immigration policies, including “concentration camps” for migrant families, will anger the public.
Maximum cruelty is the goal https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2024/12/26/immigration-border-tom-homan-trump/
“Decent people all over the world will hate this country… and they should,” media columnist and Brooklyn College professor Eric Alterman said on social media in response to the Post‘s reporting.
Author and New York University adjunct associate professor Helio Fred Garcia said: “Trump’s next border czar previews performative cruelty. In the first term it included kidnapping of children from their parents and returning the parents to their home countries, with no record of which kids came from which parents. A crime against humanity.”
Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney who has argued many major immigration cases, told the Post that “the incoming administration has refused to acknowledge the horrific damage it did to families and little children the first time around and seems determined to once again target families for gratuitous suffering.”
“The public may have voted in the abstract for mass deportations,” he added, referring to the November election, “but I don’t think they voted for more family separation or unnecessary cruelty to children.”
Pope Francis before the “Nativity of Bethlehem 2024” in the Paul VI Hall. Photo: Vatican News
Israel continues to commit massacres in Gaza, and has launched attacks on Pope Francis for speaking up in defense of the Palestinian people.
Pope Francis issued a sharp condemnation of the ongoing Israeli genocidal aggression on the Gaza strip this past weekend, just ahead of Christmas. His statements came after the Gaza Civil Defense rescue agency reported the killing of 12 people from the same family, including seven children, in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza’s northern city of Jabalia on Friday, December 20.
The Pontiff lamented the bombing of children in Gaza with deep sorrow during his traditional address to the cardinals, bishops, priests and lay people of the Roman Curia at the Vatican on Saturday, December 21.
“This is cruelty. This is not war. I want to say this because it touches the heart,” Pope Francis said. He also pointed out that the airstrikes had prevented the highest representative of the Catholic church in the Holy Land, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from entering Gaza the previous day.
Following Pope Francis’s Saturday address, the Israeli authorities allowed Pizzaballa to enter Gaza on Sunday, December 22, where he celebrated mass in the small Christian community of the Holy Family parish in Gaza City.
During a midday Angelus on Sunday, December 22, Pope Francis reiterated his repudiation of Israel’s continuous massacring of children in Gaza. “With sorrow I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty; of the children machine-gunned, the bombing of schools and hospitals…So much cruelty!”, the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State said.
On December 8, Pope Francis had issued an appeal addressing political leaders and the international community to reach a ceasefire on “all war fronts” by Christmas. “I appeal to Governments and the International Community that a ceasefire may be reached on all war fronts by the Christmas celebrations,” the appeal reads.
One day earlier, Pope Francis unveiled the annual nativity scene at the Vatican featuring baby Jesus draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, which highlighted the Holy Family’s connection to the occupied Palestinian city of Bethlehem and served as a poignant nod to the Palestinian struggle.
Last November, Pope Francis urged that allegations of a genocide in Gaza should be “carefully investigated”. “According to some experts…what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the Pontiff writes in a forthcoming book. “It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies,” he writes.
Pope Francis also calls the leader of the Catholic Church in Gaza every night to check on them and hear news of how they are surviving which inevitably gives him an intimate look into the immense suffering and difficulties faced by the Palestinian people in Gaza.
The nativity scene and Pope Francis’s call for an investigation into the Israeli genocide in Gaza were slammed by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and “Combating Antisemitism” Minister Amichai Chikli, who accused the Catholic leader of “deliberately adopting the Palestinian narrative.”
“Two weeks ago, you took part in a display that echoes the Palestinian narrative, portraying Jesus as a Palestinian Arab,” Chikli wrote in a strongly-worded letter sent to Pope Francis on Thursday, December 19. “Had this been a one-time matter, I would not have written. However, in a more severe expression, you recently insinuated that the State of Israel ‘might be’ committing genocide in Gaza,” the Israeli minister added. Chikli even went further by saying: “It is a well-known fact that Jesus was born to a Jewish mother, lived as a Jew and died as a Jew.”
Chikli’s statements once again reveal the paradox of the Israeli rhetoric, as people of the Christian community were among the first civilians to be crushed by the Israeli war machine in Gaza. In October 2023, St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City, which is believed to be the third oldest church in the world, was bombed by Israeli warplanes while providing shelter for an estimated 500 Palestinians, most of whom were Christians. 16 Palestinian Christians were killed and dozens others injured in the assault, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip.
In May 2024, the Palestinian State Minister of Foreign Affairs Varsen Aghabekian Shahin revealed during her meeting with a delegation from Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) that 3% of Gaza’s Christians were killed in the Israeli genocidal aggression on Gaza since October 7, 2023.
“The Israeli war has resulted in the death of 3% of Gaza’s Christians and the destruction of churches amid restrictions (on Christians) in the West Bank,” Shahin stated. Meanwhile, Gaza’s government media office estimated that at least three churches were destroyed in Israeli attacks in Gaza during the ongoing genocide.
Israel’s targeting of Christians and their holy sites is yet another evidence of its systematic ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous Palestinian people regardless of their faith.
For the second year, Palestinians are canceling Christmas celebrations to show solidarity with Gaza. “We chose to restrict Christmas celebrations to prayers as a stand against the oppression faced by Gaza and all of Palestine”, Bethlehem Mayor Anton Salman said a couple of days prior to the Christmas eve.
Having an under-funded legal aid system can ruin lives | Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Extra £20m of spending should be celebrated, but it pales in comparison to funding for hostile environment policies
Navigating the UK’s Kafkaesque immigration system is incredibly challenging. One ‘wrong’ turn – a delay in an application, an incorrect form – can quite literally risk a person’s life.
This is deliberate; the system is designed to be hostile. If you’re someone with an immigration or asylum problem, you’ll probably need a lawyer for specialist advice. But what happens if you can’t afford one?
In theory, everyone claiming asylum in this country has the right to access legal aid if they can’t afford it themselves – which is the case for most people seeking asylum, who are not allowed to work. In practice, though, decades of chronic underfunding have left the system in crisis and many people without the necessary legal support. This year only 43% of people claiming asylum had access to a legal aid lawyer, down from an estimated 73% in 2020.
Last month, after years of concerted organising by communities and legal workers, we received a glimmer of hope. Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood announced an extra £20m of funding for the civil legal aid system – the first increase since 1996.
We’ve seen almost 30 years of stagnating salaries for legal workers, legal aid providers shutting down, and more people being forced to face injustices without support. Now, we need to see much bolder action from the new Labour government if we are to get out of the downward spiral that legal aid is in.
How did we get here?
The UK’s legal aid system was created in 1949, on the post-war principle that wherever you are, whatever problems you face and however much money you have, you should be able to have legal advice and representation if you need it.
But while it has never actually been that easy for migrants to access legal aid, the last few years have made it particularly punishing.
In the 2010s, as successive governments’ austerity regimes violently stripped away safety nets for working-class people – migrants and UK citizens alike – legal aid was cut drastically. The appropriately named ‘hostile environment’ policies also meant people whose immigration claims fell through faced losing access to healthcare, housing and jobs.
Legal aid workers, meanwhile, have not just had their salaries slashed, but their public value degraded. Immigration lawyers in particular have been demonised, denigrated by ministers and in the press as ‘lefty lawyers’ – leading to them becoming targets of violent hate crimes.
We are now seeing the predictable and painful impacts of this on the people whom we at Migrants Organise, a charity supporting refugees and migrants, work with every day.
A person seeking asylum who doesn’t have access to legal advice is far less likely to be able to put together the evidence and testimony needed to ‘meet’ the Home Office’s stringent burden of proof.
If their case is refused, they’ll face an even more byzantine appeal system and be expected to represent themselves in front of a judge – still without getting any advice on the regulations that they’re expected to meet. But several large immigration firms have also stopped taking on asylum appeal cases because they don’t get paid enough to do so, forcing many people to tackle gruelling and complex immigration procedures without ever speaking to an adviser.
Then if a person is refused again by the court, because they had a poorly prepared application and no one to advise them, they could be detained and deported to a country where their life is in danger.
Mohammed*, an aspiring barrister and a young migrant advocate at the We Belong charity, has experienced this first-hand. “I waited over five years for a decision on my asylum claim, and then my case got refused and my legal representative dropped me because they’d stopped taking appeals,” he explained. “This was a month into my Masters. It took me almost a year to find another legal aid lawyer, and it was only through the support of community organisations who knew good lawyers and could refer me.
“For people who don’t speak English or have the confidence to seek out support, it’s impossible. Now, after having thought I wouldn’t make it to study anything, I’m able to study law and go into the work that I know will help to fix the problems I myself experienced.”
Pushing back
Having an unsupported legal aid system ruins lives – but it does not need to be this way. Experts, lawyers and the communities who need them have increasingly been speaking out and coming together to document and challenge the impacts of not having access to legal aid.
Organisations and legal aid providers from across the country have been working to have their voices heard. Many contributed to a review of civil legal aid that Sunak’s government launched last year to better understand how well the current system works (or, more to the point, doesn’t). And this year, Young Legal Aid Lawyers and Migrants Organise have run a joint campaign to help those most impacted by the legal aid crisis to educate their MPs on it and demand change.
Researchers such as Jo Wilding, the author of The Legal Aid Market, have also shed light on the extent of the crisis and drawn attention to the expanding ‘legal aid deserts’ where no legal aid is available at all. And legal cases have been brought against the government. Most recently, in June this year, Duncan Lewis Solicitors challenged the government’s violation of its duty to ensure legal aid is available as a result of not increasing fees. The case was settled in September on the basis that the new lord chancellor would decide whether to increase rates in November.
This organised pressure has been impossible for the government to ignore. Finally, the new Labour government has taken heed of the decades of evidence shared, and taken a first step towards positive change by committing new funding.
The additional £20m announced last month, which will be spent over the next four years, is intended to “mark the next step in government plans to rebuild the legal aid sector”. The money will be used to increase legal aid fees for those working in the housing and immigration sectors, with the government saying it is aiming for a 10% uplift in hourly rates, to £65 outside London and £69 in the capital.
Though the final figures have yet to be announced, we at Migrants Organise calculate that the proposed payment fees could increase immigration legal aid work by just over 30%. This, we hope, will open up some capacity amongst legal aid providers to take on cases of people who have been waiting without support.
But in the grand scheme of things, this remains a small injection of cash into two severely neglected areas of legal aid, which will struggle to make any significant indent.
A small uplift in fees isn’t enough to make working in legal aid any more attractive, meaning it won’t address the current crisis in the recruitment and retention of legal aid workers. There is also no sign of a commitment to regularly review funding for legal aid, in order to avoid us ending up in the same position we are now after four more years of inflation.
As successive governments have built a profitable industry out of cruelty, money has been syphoned off to private companies at the expense of public services – housing, transport, legal advice – needed to create better futures for our communities. The hostile environment for migrants remains very much alive, with Labour promising more money for immigration detention centres, increased deportations, and terrorism charges brought against those forced to cross the Channel by boat. Many people still face barriers to accessing justice even with the latest announcement – whether due to language issues, misinformation, or delays.
“Yes, we’re fighting to have more legal aid lawyers. But when will the next increase happen?” asked Mohammed. “We need lawyers now that care, especially when the immigration system is so damaging. Quality work, care and compassion should be the core of legal aid. It’s not just about funding, it’s about the ideology and principle.”
So, whilst we’re celebrating the work that went into this change, we’re under no illusion that for people caught up in the hostile environment – or indeed anyone in the UK in need of a lawyer – life is going to get much easier.
In the short term, we need a legal aid system that is better resourced than the government’s current proposal, for funding to be sustained and raised with inflation (like in many other publicly funded services), and for it to be available to all groups of people who need it.
And ultimately, it is only an end to the hostile environment that will prevent people from being forced into precarious situations in the first place and bring about the dignity and justice that we all deserve.
With renewed hope for change, we need to continue organising with all those impacted by the crisis in legal aid to speak out and call for what’s needed.
