Venezuelan scarred after being sent to maximum security prison by Trump administration

Arturo Suarez cries as he hugs his family for the first time in months.

His sister’s modest home in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital city, is decorated with red, blue and black balloons and banners to welcome him back.

Friends and neighbours fill the living room and the street outside.

He video calls other family members elsewhere in the world. This is the first time they have heard his voice since March.

“I hadn’t felt so safe for a while,” Arturo tells Sky News, “when I hugged my brothers, my uncle, my aunt, that’s where I felt that the nightmare was over, that I had made it home.”

Then the story of what he had endured begins to pour out of him.

The 34-year-old was one of more than 250 Venezuelan men sent by the Trump administration to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, despite having no criminal record in any of the four countries he has lived in.

Last week, he was released as part of a prisoner swap with 10 American citizens and permanent residents detained in Venezuela.

But he is scarred by the four months he spent at the CECOT prison, a terrorism confinement centre, in El Salvador, alongside some of the world’s most dangerous men.

Constantly beaten in prison

“We were constantly beaten,” he says, “we suffered physical, verbal, and psychological abuse.

“There wasn’t a day the wardens didn’t tell us that the only way we’d leave that place was if we were dead. In fact, the first words the head of the prison said to us after the first beating was ‘welcome to hell’.”

Arturo is an aspiring singer. He had moved to the US to escape Venezuela’s authoritarian regime and set up home in North Carolina.

He had a feeling when Donald Trump became president for a second time that there would be a crackdown on immigration, as promised in his campaign.

But, because Arturo had followed all the legal channels to enter the country, he didn’t think he would be caught up in the deportation policy. He was wrong.

While he was filming a music video in a house in North Carolina in March, he was arrested by immigration agents and accused by the White House of being a gang member, although they have provided little evidence publicly to support that claim.

He was then flown to El Salvador – a country he had never even visited – and put in a maximum security prison. His ordeal was under way.

“We were sleeping 19 people to a cell,” he says, “if we spoke loudly, they would take away our mattresses, if they found us bathing more than once a day, they’d take away the mattresses from us.

“The punishment was severe. It was beatings and humiliations and they took away our food.

“I remember we were exercising and a cellmate, very politely, asked the prison head if we could bathe a second time that day, since we were doing exercise.

“His words were ‘that’s your problem, it’s not my problem if you exercise’. We were also made to eat with our hands.

“They tried to take our humanity away from us. They tried to make us lose everything.”

The Trump administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to detain the 252 Venezuelan men, claiming they were part of the notorious Tren De Aragua gang.

Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, visited the prison for a tour and photoshoot in March and Arturo saw her.

“Obviously they did a show of this,” he says, “they had cameras. When she came in, my cellmates and I began to make the help sign, which she disliked a lot. We began to shout freedom.”

Arturo was denied due process to appeal his extradition to El Salvador and was not allowed to speak to a lawyer or any family or friends during his time in prison.

I spoke to Arturo’s brother Nelson in April as he appealed for his release.

He said Arturo’s only crime was having tattoos, which the White House cited as evidence of involvement with gangs.

On a video call, Arturo shows me the tattoos.

Most of them, he says, are in tribute to his late mother. I ask if he thinks that the Trump administration believed he was a gang member.

“I think it was just an excuse to get us out,” he says, “we weren’t taken for having tattoos or belonging to a criminal gang.

“We were taken for being Venezuelans. And today I want to tell the world that being Venezuelan is not a crime.”

When he applied for asylum in the United States, Arturo had hoped to be reunited eventually with his wife, Nathali, and their 10-month-old daughter Nahiara, who are currently in Chile.

“When I was given the opportunity to go to the United States, I was going to go with my wife,” he says, “we found out that she was pregnant but I went anyway because it was for the future, for my daughter’s future.

“Unfortunately, this decision led me to one of the most brutal prisons. What I most long for, is to be with my daughter and my wife.”

He’s now being supported by other family members in Venezuela, but he will never return to the US.

He went for a better life but instead was labelled a criminal. Now, he says, he just wants to clear his name.