El Faro English translates Central America. Get our reporting in your inbox.
After months of stonewalling between institutions in El Salvador, the Bukele government acknowledged that Irvin Quintanilla, a Salvadoran national deported from the United States, has been imprisoned for a year and a half in El Salvador despite facing no criminal charges.
Last month, in a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights dated August 12, the Salvadoran government claimed that his ongoing detention is due to “sovereign collaboration and cooperation between states.”
El Faro obtained the letter, which El Salvador marked as “confidential, privileged” and addressed “exclusively to its recipient.” The government “notified” the Commission that “any unauthorized use, disclosure, or copying of this information is prohibited under current law.”
In the letter, El Salvador did not directly mention the United States, instead repeatedly referring to a “requesting state.”
“By virtue of this international mutual assistance, El Salvador acts solely as a receiving state to provide infrastructure and material detention facilities, while ownership, the original legal cause, and criminal jurisdiction over the individual belong exclusively to the requesting state,” reads the letter.
Marco Rubio Wants El Salvador to Receive Tren de Aragua Deportees and Asylum Seekers
El Salvador also asserted that it has no knowledge of “the criminal proceedings, cases, or determinations” that led to Quintanilla’s deportation — and that it has no authority to access that information.
“The absence of criminal proceedings, charges, or a court order issued by local [Salvadoran] authorities regarding Mr. Quintanilla stems from the very nature of the applicable framework for sovereign cooperation,” the government wrote.
They also stated that Irvin Quintanilla was unable to receive visitors “due to the state of exception.” Prison visitations have been prohibited in El Salvador since 2019, when Nayib Bukele took office.
Yet El Salvador also claimed to be “the guarantor” of Quintanilla’s “life, overall health, nutrition, and physical and psychological well-being.” They said he has access to agricultural activities and industrial workshops for metal fabrication. They also stated that he is in good health, plays soccer, lifts weights, and is emotionally stable.
The government noted that the Santa Ana prison farm is an “open facility” with less restrictive security measures. They did not explain why he must be held in prison rather than at a hotel, at home, or another setting.
His case “exemplifies what can happen when the U.S. deports people without sufficient legal safeguards,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.
Quintanilla’s imprisonment without charges amounts to arbitrary detention, she added, by a government that “makes people disappear within the prison system with impunity.”
Government stonewalling
Irvin Quintanilla, now 26, was detained by U.S. immigration authorities in Irving, Texas, and deported on March 15, 2025, alongside 252 Venezuelans and dozens of Salvadorans.
Hours later, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt the expulsion. “Oops, too late,” Bukele wrote with a laughing-crying emoji.
On the heels of his deportation, Quintanilla’s family received word from the Salvadoran consulate that he had been deported. They moved back to San Miguel, El Salvador to rejoin him, but could not find him.
The family petitioned the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court for habeas corpus. A judge was appointed to investigate.
By December 2025, prison and customs agencies had refused to report his whereabouts despite multiple requests. “These requests are not mere suggestions,” wrote the chamber, “but rather binding orders.”
The Attorney General’s Office activated a missing-persons alert and ordered a police inquiry. But prosecutors told the Chamber that they received no information from an internal records system query and an Interpol request.
Prosecutors concluded that “if [Quintanilla] had been the victim of a criminal act, it was not committed on Salvadoran territory; therefore, the case was definitively closed.”
Yet in an apparent contradiction, they also stated in the habeas corpus proceedings that “the investigation remains active.”
The Inter-American Commission proved able to obtain information after granting precautionary measures to Quintanilla and four Salvadorans deported with him.
In October 2025, even while agencies stonewalled the Bukele-controlled Constitutional Chamber, the government told the Commission that Quintanilla had been transferred from CECOT to a prison farm in Santa Ana.
In the same August 2026 letter admitting to holding Quintanilla without charges, the government asked the Commission to “consider closing or lifting these precautionary measures, given that there is no grave, urgent, or imminent risk of irreparable harm to the beneficiary’s rights as protected under Salvadoran jurisdiction.”
Salvadoran Authorities Stonewall Each Other on Whereabouts of Missing CECOT Deportee
The government wrote that “any duly accredited person may request information by submitting a written request to the Bureau of Prisons, or may use institutional mechanisms to request information on the location of individuals held in correctional facilities.”
In April 2026, President Nayib Bukele’s brother Ibrajim revealed that an “independent” team from the Executive Branch was reviewing arrests under the state of exception, despite lacking the legal authority to do so.
Under the state of exception, enacted in March 2022, petitions for habeas corpus have reached levels unseen since the end of the civil war.
The government told the Commission that the existence of habeas corpus proceedings points to a healthy democracy. “Constitutional checks and balances exist,” they wrote.
This article first appeared in the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here for more journalism translating Central America.