A gay makeup artist from Venezuela who entered the U.S. legally last year only to be deported to El Salvador’s notorious prison for gang members in March says he was sexually assaulted by guards during his 125-day stay, according to a harrowing account he shared with The Washington Post.
Andry Hernández, whose brutal journey through the U.S. immigration system has been widely documented by the media and human rights groups, says that prison officers at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, took him to an isolation cell, where four officers put their clubs between his legs and one forced him to perform oral sex on him.
“It’s a nightmare. I thought it would never end,” Hernández said of his time in CECOT upon returning to Venezuela last month as part of an international prison swap.
The crime he was being punished for was bathing in an attempt to cool down.
JOHNNY PARRA via Getty Images
Hernández, now 32, entered the U.S. legally last year with an immigration appointment, and a U.S. border agent at the California crossing determined he had credible fear of persecution as a gay man living in Venezuela. But he was immediately detained in a migration center, still run by the Biden administration, and questioned because of his snake and crown tattoos, which U.S. authorities have linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
That was the only evidence they had against him, his friends and family told CNN earlier this year. He told them that lawyers and a judge handling his case indicated things were progressing favorably for him, and he’d soon be released into the U.S., away from the homophobic harassment he was facing while working at a government-affiliated TV network.
Instead, he became one of the hundreds of migrants that the Trump administration loaded up onto planes in March and brought to CECOT, a prison the Salvadoran government opened in 2023, where Trump officials boast they’re sending the “worst of the worst illegal criminals.”
Hernández told the Post he pleaded with the guards as he cried out for his mother.
“Why are you shaving my head?” he said he asked them. “I’m a makeup stylist, I’m gay, I’m not a gang member.”
Hernández is one of 16 former CECOT inmates who spoke to the Post about their time in CECOT, where they were taken after the U.S. paid Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s government $6 million to hold them and other Venezuelans.
According to their accounts, they were “subjected to repeated beatings that left them bruised, bleeding or injured,” and the “prison staff restricted medical care for detainees suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure or kidney failure.” They were kept in a crowded room with no windows, forced to sleep in metal bunkbeds, usually without any cushioning. They had no access to lawyers.
CECOT “seemed like it was for animals,” former detainee Julio Fernández Sánchez told the Post. “It was designed for people to go crazy or kill themselves.”
Arun Nevader via Getty Images
Another, Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas, described what he called “the most perverse form of humiliation” from medical staff. “The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile,” he recalled.
He was living in the U.S. with temporary protected status, working legally in restaurants to send money home for his mother’s breast cancer treatments, when he was taken to CECOT.
Those who spoke to the Post recalled some detainees attempting suicide “by tying sheets around their necks or using rusted pipes to cut their veins.”
Damian Merlo, a U.S.-based lobbyist for Bukele, told the Post that their claims are “baseless.” Tricia McLaughlin, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, insisted that the detainees were members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.