On the night of Saturday, March 15, three planes touched down in El Salvador, carrying 261 men deported from the United States. A few dozen were Salvadoran, but most of the men were Venezuelans the Trump Administration had designated as gang members and deported, with little or no due process. I was there to document their arrival.
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00:00My name is Philip Holsinger. I'm a photojournalist and a writer. I am working on a book about
00:15the transformation of El Salvador. This event was, you know, top secret. Nobody knew it
00:20was coming. But because I'm already embedded, I was invited to come along. But I didn't
00:27expect what I saw when I saw them. I needed to show this story, not to condemn anybody
00:34or to make a judgment, but to bring people into the story. Because I had questions. I
00:41have questions. Which is, you know, who are these guys? There is a process for handling
00:48extremely dangerous people. And it's there's a process of how you fold a body, how you
00:53shackle a person for the protection of everyone around them. Part of that is it's both wrists
00:59are shackled, both ankles are shackled. And then there's a, you know, a chain between
01:04the two. That's pretty common. It makes it very difficult for people to walk. So they're
01:08shackled on the plane, but they're not actually chained to anything. Because these are commercial
01:14craft. And the way they do it is they're shackled. And then the El Salvadorans make a radical
01:21body posture, which is for security. But they, they add a lot of force to it on purpose.
01:28And in theory, this is to shock the person into submission, so that they won't misbehave.
01:37You can decide for yourself if it's just or unjust. They physically handle them, then,
01:43you know, walk them like frogs off the gangway stairs into the, you know, onto the tarmac.
01:50And then they walk them through a gauntlet of soldiers, and then they bring them to other
01:53guards on the, on the bus. Once everything is, once everybody's on the buses, I think
01:59they had 22 buses to carry everybody. It's a, it's a massive convoy of armored vehicles
02:05and police and military. And then they drive them to the Supermax Cicotte. The Cicotte
02:11is the center of terrorism confinement, total austerity. It's just unpainted concrete and
02:18steel. The philosophy of Cicotte is, is minimal friction, meaning almost nobody comes in
02:25contact with anybody else. They never go outside. For 30 minutes a day, I'm told that every
02:34day 30 minutes, they come outside the cell in front of their cell to do Bible study or
02:40exercise. But I've never witnessed a 24 hour period. But on policy, they will never leave
02:46the building. They will never have a visitor. There are no phone calls. There's no books.
02:52There's no TV. There's nothing. There are no blankets. There's no pillows. They sleep
02:57on steel racks. But the philosophy behind that is minimal contact. So they're not allowed
03:04to speak. They're not allowed to talk to guards. They can't talk to each other across cells.
03:10They monitor them 24 hours a day. The lights never go out. They dim, but there are guards
03:16above them looking down through a cage and guards in front of them looking through the
03:19bars and film their cameras and a control room monitoring those 24 hours a day. And
03:27the effect of that is, it's unsettling. I've been in prisons around the world and you walk
03:32into Cicotte and it's total silence. On the night of the Venezuelans, they were actually
03:37taken to a separate block. And they may have been moved. I don't know. But my understanding
03:43is they're treated differently. They're housed separately. I think they have to. I mean,
03:49they can't mix them in with the population because they're technically only there for
03:53a year until, you know, some other arrangement happens.
03:56First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted.
04:17But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you
04:21commit crimes against the American people.
04:36Again, I think it's not just unusual in this moment. I just think it's unusual. It's that,
04:41you know, a country outsourced, you know, incarceration. I've seen El Salvadorans
04:49brought to this prison, but I've never seen a foreigner brought to this prison. I mean,
04:53it's very unusual. These are outsiders. I mean, that's why I wrote what I wrote,
04:58that it felt like watching people become ghosts. I mean, at least the El Salvadorans,
05:03they don't have any communication, but they know what's coming, you know. And their families,
05:09you know, know where they are. I mean, but these guys, it's like, where are they?
05:14I wrote this. I wrote, they entered their cold cells, 80 men per cell with steel planks for
05:21bunks, no mats, no sheets, no pillow, no television, no books, no talking, no phone
05:27calls and no visitors. For these Venezuelans, it was not just a prison they had arrived at,
05:31it was exile to another world, a place so cold and far from home, they may as well have been
05:37sent into space, nameless and forgotten. Holding my camera, it was as if I watched them become
05:44ghosts. The reason that that sort of came out of me is that the working title for my
05:50story on this, my big story is called A Photographer of Ghosts. And it's got,
05:56you know, sort of a double meaning. And that is, when you photograph pain, you know, it's like
06:04you're, you know, photographing something invisible. And even though I don't think they're
06:08being disappeared, that's what it felt like. It felt like, holy crap, I, I, you know, even if
06:17they're wicked people, the chance that maybe one of them is innocent, and there's no way anybody
06:24can talk to them, was like seeing people become ghosts.