Frengel Reyes, 25, said he still has trouble sleeping with the lights off.
Ever since returning to his parents' home in Zulia, Venezuela, in July, Reyes said he's haunted by the four months he spent in El Salvador's maximum-security prison, where at night, guards beat the detainees in the dark.
"Their treatment was inhumane," Reyes said in Spanish, "I didn't understand it at all."
In March, Reyes, an asylum-seeker living in Tampa, was among more than 200 Venezuelans deported to the Terrorism and Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The mega-prison was constructed in 2023 as part of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele's crackdown on organized crime in the country.
The U.S. government accused Reyes and the others of having ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and fast-tracked their deportations by invoking the rarely-used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
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Many of the accused deny the gang association, and multiple news and human rights organizations found that most have no criminal record in the U.S. or abroad. And, according to an analysis by the CATO Institute, at least 50 came to the U.S. through legal means.
Reyes and his wife, Liyanara Sanchez, maintain he has no criminal history, information outlined in the documents used to deport him.
A lawsuit Reyes is a part of alleges the Trump administration skirted due process and failed to follow a federal judge's order to stop the deportation flights to El Salvador.
Since the men were freed in a prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela, they've spoken out about the extreme conditions they endured in CECOT.
Detained at his asylum check-in appointment
Reyes worked as a painter in the Tampa Bay area. He, his wife and her 10-year-old son, Daniel, came to the U.S. in 2023 through the southern border and sought asylum.
The couple wanted a better life for Daniel in place where he could have a future, Sanchez said.
"He always put our son first," she said in Spanish.
On Feb. 4, Reyes was detained at his scheduled appointment for his pending asylum application at the Tampa Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office.
Sanchez recalled an immigration officer knocking on her car window in the parking lot, telling her that Reyes was arrested as part of "regular protocol" under the new administration.
That Tuesday was the last day Sanchez saw Reyes in person.
In the following weeks, he was transferred to county jails and detention centers in Georgia, Florida and eventually Texas. During that period, Sanchez said she hired a lawyer, and they tried to bond Reyes out.
His bond was denied. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is accusing Reyes of possibly being a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the Department of State designates as a terrorist organization.
Documents DHS used as evidence, shared with WUSF, named someone called "Ortiz Morales" several times. And another section of the document referred to Reyes with the pronoun "her." The incorrect A-number, a unique ID for foreign nationals, was listed, too, Sanchez pointed out.
"The lawyers laughed," Sanchez said, "They thought it was absurd."
A DHS spokesperson told WUSF they were "confident in our law enforcement's intelligence."
"Many of the illegal aliens that the media counts as 'noncriminals' are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don't have a rap sheet in the U.S. It is not an accurate description to say they are 'noncriminals."
On March 15, Reyes called Sanchez from the El Valle Detention Center in Texas, about 50 miles north of the border town of Brownsville. He told her to notify his parents in Venezuela. He thought he was being deported back home.
'Cemetery for the living'
When the plane landed, Reyes said he realized he wasn't in Venezuela when he saw the signs for "San Salvador," the capital of El Salvador. Then, he watched as guards violently removed people off planes.
"We were handcuffed on our wrists and ankles, and couldn't walk, but they beat us when we fell," Reyes said.
He said he was kicked in the ribs and saw others being kicked in the face. He said he still feels the pain in his abdomen months later.
Every morning, guards woke the prisoners at about 3 or 4 o'clock, he said, and made them kneel on the floor for hours. The food made people sick, but they were beaten if they didn't finish their meals, he said.
"You were beaten for practically everything," Reyes said.
READ MORE: Venezuela's returning migrants allege abuses in El Salvador's 'hell' prison where US sent them
They slept on metal planks. Sometimes, they were given bed sheets for bruises and sores, Reyes said. But some used the linens to try to hang themselves. When that happened in his cell, Reyes said, he and others held the person down.
"They told us we were being treated like this because we were criminals," Reyes said. "They told us we'd never leave, that we were in the cemetery for the living."
Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit, documented the extreme conditions in CECOT.
In the years before the Venezuelans were imprisoned, the group found "killings within jails, cases of torture, ill treatment, cases of lack of access to adequate medicine and adequate food within the El Salvadoran prison system," said Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas Division for Human Rights Watch.
Goebertus said her group is in the process of interviewing about a hundred detainees of the prison and will publish the findings in October.
Reyes said his faith is what kept him sane. He and other Venezuelan prisoners believed they would, one day, leave.
"I didn't commit any crime. I had faith my family was fighting for me," he said.
Two months after his imprisonment, Reyes said detainees received a message from inmates at another El Salvadoran prison who were serving lunch at CECOT.
"They told us people were fighting for us on the outside. That's when we gained more courage," Reyes said.
An uncertain future
Through the computer screen, Reyes says he misses his family in Tampa.
He's grateful to be with his relatives again in Venezuela, but he worries about Sanchez, Daniel and the future they envisioned in the U.S.
"I thought the United States was a place of justice," Reyes said, "but I think I saw a side that almost no one sees."
Sanchez said she feels the same. She has a pending asylum case with her son. But without Reyes, she's working long hours as a cleaner and driving for Uber on the weekends. It's a difficult life, she said.
"We came to the U.S. for a better future," Sanchez said, "but there isn't a life if we're not together."
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