T remembers the fear she felt when she was deported to her home country of El Salvador from the U.S. late last year.
"It was traumatizing, I was so scared," she told NPR in Spanish. T, who is back in immigration detention in the U.S. now, asked to be identified only by her first initial out of fear for her safety from Salvadoran officials.
T fled her country nearly five years ago, because as a transgender woman, she says she was constantly harassed and threatened by men in her neighborhood. Now T says she felt harassed again by Salvadoran authorities at the airport who asked her to strip naked as they checked her for tattoos.
"They told me that if my tattoos made reference to gang affiliation, we were going directly to CECOT," T said, referring to the notorious maximum security mega-prison in El Salvador.
Authorities, she said, also checked if she had a criminal record, or affiliations with any gangs. She did not.
She was allowed to go to her parents' home but was told local officers could stop and question her at any time.
"I worried I was going to be detained," T said.
She barely left her parents' home for a month out of fear of being harassed, or questioned and detained again by local authorities.
T is not alone in her situation.
Since Trump took office in January 2025, more than 9,000 Salvadorans have been deported from the U.S. to El Salvador, according to a March 2026 report by Human Rights Watch.
NPR's reporting reveals that migrants deported from the U.S. routinely disappear into El Salvador's prisons the moment they land or in the weeks that follow. Many are held incommunicado, cut off from family and lawyers for months, even years.
State of exception
The growing numbers of detainees are a result of a March 2022 edict by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. He implemented a temporary suspension of rights, known as the state of exception, after a weekend killing spree by gangs in the country.
The emergency order was only supposed to last 30 days, according to the Salvadoran constitution. But Bukele has renewed it every time it's about to expire, effectively creating a police state that has now lasted four years.
The crackdown has taken El Salvador from being the murder capital of the world, to a country with a lower homicide rate than the U.S. It has also led El Salvador to become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Tens of thousands have been arrested since the state of exception was imposed in 2022. The Spanish newspaper El País, citing official data, estimates it's nearly 92,000 people. 64% of those arrested had been identified as gang members by El Salvador's intelligence before the emergency power was implemented.
Salvador Eduardo Dubon Miranda didn't have a criminal record, but was accused by Salvadoran police of associating with gangs weeks after being deported from the U.S. in 2023, by the Biden administration.
His wife, Jennifer Kesselberg Dubon, told NPR that her husband wasn't affiliated with any gangs. She is a U.S. citizen living in Nebraska. She said she hasn't been able to communicate at all with her husband since he was imprisoned.
"My husband was really scrawny when he went in there … and mentally he doesn't do well being confined," Kesselberg Dubon said, holding back tears. "In all honesty, he may be dead."
Human rights organizations have decried the state of exception, which they say has led to widespread human rights violations of detainees, opposition members and others, including returning migrants.
According to the San Salvador-based human rights organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitiario, at least 517 Salvadorans have died in prisons during the state of exception.
Bukele, an ally of President Trump, has supported the U.S.' aggressive crackdown on immigration, even temporarily housing hundreds of Venezuelan deportees from the U.S. in CECOT as part of a $6 million agreement with the Trump administration.
A spokesperson for Bukele did not respond to NPR's requests for comment regarding the allegations of human rights abuses, and other violations under the state of exception.
Deportees who aren't imprisoned face challenges
Even those who are not immediately jailed face huge challenges, including economic ones, upon their return to their home country.
"It's hard to get work. Sometimes potential employers are suspicious of deportees," says Sarah Bishop, a professor at Baruch College who researches the post-deportation experiences of Salvadorans. She says some of the deportees still owe money and struggle to pay off their debt to smugglers who helped them cross the border illegally into the U.S.
"Some of the individuals that we have spoken to who have been returned to El Salvador during the state of exception are afraid to leave their homes for fear of police violence," Bishop said.
Professor Bishop is following 25 men who have been sent home from the U.S. over the last four years. The vast majority, 19 in all, she says "were incarcerated upon or following their arrival."
Bishop said it's important to note that the U.S. and Salvadoran governments share information regarding the criminal records of deportees, the arrest history, and even unverified suspicions of gang involvement.
"A deportee in El Salvador may be arrested for nothing more than having been arrested before in the United States or El Salvador," Bishop said.
'I don't know where they are'
Under the state of exception, incarceration often means losing contact with the outside world, including family members.
This is way too familiar for Grace, a woman whose brother was detained upon his deportation to El Salvador in 2025. He had been charged with statutory rape years earlier in El Salvador, before he moved to the U.S. However, he was acquitted in 2021, according to court documents from El Salvador.
Grace asked NPR to identify her by her nickname because she still lives in El Salvador and fears for her safety.
She said her brother is now being accused of collaborating with gangs, though she said her brother has no involvement with gangs.
"They are detained under the pretext that they are under investigation, but there are no charges," Grace said in Spanish.
She said she last saw her brother as he was being processed into prison in October, and has not heard or seen from him since.
Jonathan Levy, an attorney and the director of pro bono programs at the immigrant rights organization American Gateways, represents about half a dozen Salvadoran deportees.
He says the U.S. government must evaluate the likelihood a detainee will be tortured if they are sent back to a specific country. In the case of El Salvador, Levy said, if they are thrown in jail by the government, there is "evidence that some people who are sent there are only getting out deceased."
The Department of Homeland Security declined to respond to questions about whether it is aware of the disappearances or concerned about the state of exception, and referred all questions to the government of El Salvador.
Levy said under the Trump Administration, decisions made by the Board of Immigration Appeals have made it really hard for him to prevent his clients from being deported to El Salvador.
"I'm certainly not in contact with any of them, I don't know how they are doing, I don't know if they are alive, I don't know where they are," Levy said.
Levy says their cases are still fighting for "in the hope of winning the case and creating some good precedent for future cases."
If an appeal in U.S. courts is won, the federal government must bring the deportee back. That's the case with T, the transgender woman who is now back in a U.S. detention center appealing her deportation order.
Human rights groups and attorneys representing deportees, as well as their family members, say their only hope at this point is for Bukele to restore due process in El Salvador.
Only then, they say, will they have a chance to learn where their loved ones are and how they are doing.
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