Free Republic

A Salvadoran human rights organization says at least 500 people have died in state custody since President Nayib Bukele launched his anti-gang offensive four years ago, with the vast majority having no ties to criminal groups. Socorro Jurídico Humanitario released the findings Friday as the state of emergency that underpins the crackdown reached its fourth anniversary. The group, which works with families of detainees, based its tally on testimonies, medical records and other unofficial sources. It said 94 percent of those who died were not gang members. The state of emergency began March 27, 2022, after a spike in gang...

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Inmates had complained for weeks they were being threatened by gang members at a women's prison in Honduras. The gang fulfilled those threats, slaughtering 41 women, many of them burned, shot, or stabbed to death.

At a shadow hearing held by Congressional Democrats on Monday, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) reacted to a ruling from Chief Justice John Roberts to hold a judge's ruling order the Trump administration to return a Maryland man deported to El Salvador.

The Justice Department states that the judge who ruled Kilmar Abrego Garcia had to come back to the U.S. overstepped authority. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block a lower court order to return a Maryland resident, who is also a Salvadoran national, mistakenly deported last month to El Salvador. The Justice Department is arguing before the high court that the judge who ruled the deportee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, must be returned overstepped his authority. The administration also argued since Garcia was no longer in U.S. custody there was no way to get him back, according...

Sunk deep into shaven and elaborately tattooed skulls, a hundred pairs of eyes – hollow and dark –are boring directly into mine. The men they belong to have committed crimes evil almost beyond comprehension. Members of two of the most savage rival gangs the world has seen, El Salvador’s Ms-13 and Barrio 18, they raped and tortured, murdered and mutilated, cut bodies to pieces and strewed them around the streets to strike terror in the neighbourhoods they controlled. On my journey to the world-renowned prison that holds them, the Latin American country’s new Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), my government escorts...

San Salvador, El Salvador - It's not every church service that includes homilies about Pablo Escobar and Al Capone. But at a church in El Salvador, the message of sin and redemption is tailored to a different kind of parishioner: reformed members of the notorious gangs in the Central American nation. All the men are former members of Barrio 18 or the 18th Street gang, which, along with MS-13, began in Los Angeles but is now responsible for much of El Salvador's widespread violence. The Trump administration announced last week that in 18 months it will revoke Temporary Protected Status...