Inside the 'Tropical Gulag' in El Salvador where US detainees are being held

When Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md, tried to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia on Thursday in a notorious prison in El Salvador, the lawmaker was turned back by soldiers. Authorities instead delivered Abrego Garcia to the senator's hotel in San Salvador.

There, Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia, who had been mistakenly deported from Maryland and is at the center of a contentious legal battle between the Trump administration and US courts, sat at a restaurant table to talk.

El Salvador's public-relations-savvy president, Nayib Bukele, immediately posted photos of the meeting on the social platform X and wrote that Abrego Garcia was "now sipping margaritas in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!" Van Hollen has said they did not have cocktails.

Here's what we know about the prison where Abrego Garcia had been held since March, the Terrorism Confinement Center, before he was moved to a separate detention center in Santa Ana, El Salvador, according to Van Hollen at a news conference Friday.

What is the Terrorism Confinement Center?

The Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, which lies about an hour outside of San Salvador, the capital, opened in 2023. It was originally meant to be a low-security rehabilitation site (built in part with U.S. funds), but was transformed into Bukele's signature "megaprison" -- an emblem of his crackdown on gangs.

It is a sprawling compound with eight hulking cell blocks -- each can hold around 3,000 prisoners. Inside, the prison appears orderly and clean to the point of sterility; and it has sophisticated surveillance and other equipment, according to videos and the accounts of people who have been inside.

The prison has become well known because of highly stylized videos and photos from inside posted by the government on social media. They show thousands of tattooed prisoners forced into submission. It now also holds nearly 300 Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees accused by the U.S. administration of having ties to the criminal gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13 and sent to El Salvador in the last month.

As part of its gang crackdown, Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022 that suspended normal due process rights and ordered mass arrests. Since then, around 85,000 people have been detained, human rights groups say. The country's other jails and prisons teem with people who in some cases are being held without trial, according to the groups.

CECOT holds convicted inmates, according to Salvadoran officials and the rights groups. Life sentences and capital punishment are forbidden in El Salvador, but some inmates in CECOT have been handed sentences amounting to hundreds of years, and so will never get out alive.

What are the conditions in the prison?

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, visited CECOT last month, and told The Wall Street Journal that the detainees "have mattresses; they have full meals." She also said, "They receive time for exercise and are getting medical checks on a regular basis."

This may be the case for detainees sent from the United States, but not for CECOT's other inmates, according to interviews with human rights experts and several journalists who have been inside the complex.

Those men are held for more than 23 hours a day in cells with only metal bunks, where they can be seen from above by guards who patrol on catwalks. They have no mattresses or sheets. Forbidden to use utensils, they eat paltry meals -- tortillas, rice, beans, instant pasta -- with their hands.

They are released from their cells for half-hour a day for exercises or biblical study indoors, according to prison officials. They don't have access to books and cannot receive mail. Some inmates appear extremely thin, according to some videos made by journalists or YouTube creators.

Bukele has suggested he would double the number of people kept in every cell to expand the prison's capacity to 40,000 from about 20,000.

Extreme isolation, and 'a huge silence.'

Part of what makes CECOT unlike other prisons is the extreme isolation in which its inmates are kept, denied even virtual visits and blocked from access to lawyers, according to rights groups.

Steven Dudley, an expert on El Salvador and director of InSight Crime, a nonprofit and media organization focused on organized crime in Latin America, said, "You are set apart in a space without due process and you are completely incommunicado from your legal defense, your family and any access to any sort of constitutional or legal reprieve."

He added, "It is the Salvadoran version of going to Siberia."

Lucas Menget, a French journalist and filmmaker, called it a "tropical gulag." He visited CECOT in order to make a TV documentary for ARTE, a European public service channel, the week before the United States sent the first flights of detainees in March as part of President Donald Trump's deportation campaign.

Menget said the silence of the inmates was the most disturbing thing.

"I thought that it would be very noisy like in every other jail in the world," he said. "When we arrived inside, it was a huge silence. Nobody's talking."

All media gets the same view.

Journalists and officials permitted inside CECOT are given the same tour, videos show. They are often allowed to talk to an English-speaking inmate, alias "Psycho," who shares his story of joining a gang as a child in the United States and expresses regret for a life of crime.

Visitors are shown a solitary-confinement cell, where, prison officials say, detainees can be kept for up to 15 days in complete darkness with only a small air hole.

The Salvadoran government has recently given access to CECOT to young influencers, YouTubers (like the host of "How to Survive," a channel with nearly 2 million subscribers) and right-wing media outlets.

Menget, the French filmmaker, says he believes his crew was allowed in because he was exploring the "Bukele model," in light of the Salvadoran president's growing popularity among members of the European right.

'High risk of abuse.'

Deaths and physical abuse in CECOT remain undocumented because of a lack of access to inmates or anyone who has been released, said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.

But, she added, "Based on the torture and mistreatment we have documented in other prisons in El Salvador, we have every reason to believe that people sent to CECOT are at high risk of abuse."

The U.S. government itself spotlighted atrocities in El Salvador's prisons in 2023.

At El Salvador's two dozen other jails, rights groups have documented systematic torture, forced confessions and what Noah Bullock, the executive director of the Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal, calls "the intentional denial of access to basic necessities like food, water, health care, hygiene."

"The physical abuse combined with that systematic denial of basic necessities, according to our research," Bullock said, "has caused the deaths of at least 368 people. We think that it's probably many more."

He added: "CECOT is sold as a facility whose very design is cruelty, right? Like the whole prison itself is designed to reduce human life to not dying -- but likely the conditions in the other prisons are worse."