Families and activists say deportees signed documents to return to Venezuela but were sent to Salvadoran jail instead

Venezuelans deported from the US to El Salvador in a case that has become a legal flashpoint for Donald Trump’s US administration had signed documents agreeing to be returned to their home country, according to families of some of the deportees and a campaign group.

Two families of men on the now notorious Saturday flights to El Salvador told the Financial Times their relatives had signed what appeared to be voluntary deportation orders in exchange for returning to Venezuela sooner.

But their families later spotted them in videos posted by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele that showed them in his country in chains, claiming they were violent gang members.

Kelvi Zambrano, co-ordinator for the US-based Venezuelan non-profit Coalition for Human Rights and Democracy, said his organisation represented three more Venezuelans who signed agreements to return home and were now missing. Their names all appear on a US government list of deportees sent to El Salvador that was published by CBS News.

It is not clear how many of the 238 Venezuelans flown to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador from Texas on Saturday had signed the papers to return to their home country.

So they think they’re going home to Venezuela? And instead they get de facto one-year prison sentences in a Salvadoran jail with no hearing, no due process whatsoever?

Venezuelans sent by Trump to El Salvador had signed paperwork to go home