“These were disappearances,” said one immigrant rights expert of the revelation that dozens of people who have never been acknowledged by the Trump administration were listed on flight manifests for three deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador in March.
404 Media reported Thursday that in May, a hacker targeted the airline that operated the flights, which have been challenged in court by groups including the ACLU and Democracy Forward.
The data retrieved by the hacker showed that in addition to people whose names had been previously included on a list of deported migrants deported to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), published by CBS News, more than 40 men and women were listed on flight manifests for planes that the Trump administration sent on March 15
The CBS News story reported on 238 people who had been sent to CECOT without due process, under a $6 million deal with far-right President Nayib Bukele, but the list compiled from the flight manifests puts the total number at at least 281.
The flights landed in El Salvador despite a federal judge blocking them, and now, Michelle Brané of the immigrant rights group Together and Free told 404 Media, “we have this list of people that the U.S. government has not formally acknowledged in any real way and we pretty much have no idea if they are in CECOT or someplace else, or whether they received due process.”
“I think this further demonstrates the callousness and lack of due process involved and is further evidence that the U.S. government is disappearing people,” said Brané. “For almost all of these people, there’s no records whatsoever. No court records, nothing.”
It is unclear whether all the people on the flight manifests were actually on the planes, but if “they were indeed on the flights, it is unknown where they currently are,” 404 Media reported.
The outlet reported that the family of one of the men who is listed on the flight manifests but whose name has never been reported or acknowledged by the Trump administration, has been protesting his disappearance in his home country of Venezuela.
Keider Alexander Flores Navas’ mother, Ana Navas, said in a TikTok video in March that she suddenly stopped hearing from him the day the deportation flights took off—and then saw him in a photo of prisoners at CECOT.
“He was not on any list. But this photo is from El Salvador,” Navas told the Venezuelan outlet Diario VEA.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called the news of the flight manifests “a horror story.”
404 Media’s story “provides the first public confirmation of the identity of some of the people who were disappeared by the Trump administration on March 15,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
“Many of the people we sent to CECOT entered the U.S. legally at ports of entry after fully identifying themselves to the government,” he added. “But if they did enter illegally, nothing justifies disappearing people to life imprisonment without trial. It’s un-American.”
The news of the flight manifests comes days after a court filing revealed that Salvadoran officials said the U.S. has jurisdiction over the people being held in CECOT, in response to a United Nations Human Rights Office inquiry about the “involuntary disappearances” of four Venezuelans.
The Trump administration has denied having the power to return CECOT detainees to the United States, as has Bukele.
Lee Gelernt, lead counsel in the ACLU’s case regarding the deportation flights, told 404 Media that it is “critical” for the public to know who was on the March 15 flights.
“These individuals were sent to a gulag-type prison without any due process, possibly for the remainder of their lives, yet the government has provided no meaningful information about them, much less the evidence against them,” said Gelernt. “Transparency at a time like this is essential.”
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