A hacker found more than 40 people not previously acknowledged by the Trump administration on the list of migrants deported to CECOT, according to 404 Media.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center CECOT in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 26. (DHS/Flickr/Tia Dufour)
Dozens of people who have never been acknowledged by the Trump administration were listed on flight manifests for three deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador in March.
404 Media reports that a hacker in May targeted the airline that operated the flights, showing more than 40 men and women listed on flight manifests for planes the Trump administration sent on March 15 who aren’t included on a list of migrants deported that day, according to CBS News.
The network reported on just 238 people who had been sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) without due process under a $6 million deal Trump made with El Salvador’s far-right President Nayib Bukele.
The hacked list compiled from the flight manifests instead puts the total number of deported people at at least 281.
The March 15 flights landed in El Salvador despite a federal judge blocking them. The flights have been challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Democracy Forward and other rights groups.
Michelle Brané of the immigrant rights group Together and Free told 404 Media:
“We have this list of people that the U.S. government has not formally acknowledged in any real way and we pretty much have no idea if they are in CECOT or someplace else, or whether they received due process.”
“I think this further demonstrates the callousness and lack of due process involved and is further evidence that the U.S. government is disappearing people,” said Brané. “For almost all of these people, there’s no records whatsoever. No court records, nothing.”
President Donald Trump with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele at the White House on April 14, 2025. (White House / Flickr)
It is unclear whether all the people on the flight manifests were actually on the planes, but if “they were indeed on the flights, it is unknown where they currently are,” 404 Media reported on Thursday.
The outlet said the family of one of the men who is listed on the flight manifests — but whose name has never been reported or acknowledged by the Trump administration — has been protesting his disappearance in his home country of Venezuela.
“It is unclear whether all the people on the flight manifests were actually on the planes, but if they were indeed on the flights, it is unknown where they currently are, 404 Media reported.”
Keider Alexander Flores Navas’ mother, Ana Navas, said in a TikTok video in March that she suddenly stopped hearing from him the day the deportation flights took off — and then saw him in a photo of prisoners at CECOT.
“He was not on any list. But this photo is from El Salvador,” Navas told the Venezuelan outlet Diario VEA.
@diariovea ? Ana Navas: Mi hijo no figura en la lista de secuestrados, sé que está en El Salvador por una foto. ? Keider Flores Navas es uno de los venezolanos trasladados a El Salvador. Su madre sabe que está allá por una fotografía en la que lo reconoció. ? Señaló que tiene más de dos semanas y media sin poder hablar con su hijo. #elsalvador #eeuu #venezuela #migrantes #fyp
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, called the news of the flight manifests “a horror story.”
404 Media‘s story “provides the first public confirmation of the identity of some of the people who were disappeared by the Trump administration on March 15,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
“Many of the people we sent to CECOT entered the U.S. legally at ports of entry after fully identifying themselves to the government,” he added. “But if they did enter illegally, nothing justifies disappearing people to life imprisonment without trial. It’s un-American.”
The news of the flight manifests comes days after a court filing revealed that Salvadoran officials said the U.S. has jurisdiction over the people being held in CECOT, in response to a United Nations Human Rights Office inquiry about the “involuntary disappearances” of four Venezuelans.
The Trump administration, like Bukele, has denied having the power to return CECOT detainees to the United States.
Lee Gelernt, lead counsel in the ACLU’s case regarding the deportation flights, told 404 Media that it is “critical” for the public to know who was on the March 15 flights.
“These individuals were sent to a gulag-type prison without any due process, possibly for the remainder of their lives, yet the government has provided no meaningful information about them, much less the evidence against them,” said Gelernt. “Transparency at a time like this is essential.”
Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
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Meanwhile, white collar crooks like Epstein and Trump get awaw with almot anything.
It should be coming increasingly clear that the behaviors of governing entities (I choose this form rather than governments because these entities are less and less the representatives of the populations over which they rule) are standardizing around principles that recognize the needs and desires of an oligarchy and respond to the masses with an instrumental disdain— instrumental because of the mechanisms designed and needed to control them: from carrots to sticks…of which dangling the possibility of being randomly disappeared is more method than than accident, although accidents work just as well as intention for purpose. I fear that it is a mistake to try to see the US administration as somehow any different than other coercive governing entities that run rough-shod over human needs and humanitarian values.
4th Amendment to the US Constitution.
“No person…shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”
——–
Notice that the word “citizen” does not appear. The revolutionaries that founded America thought in terms of “all people.” If America follows a Rules Based Order, then the above is one of the fundamental Rules. Historically, it was a ‘deal-breaker’, as the Constitution was rejected until such items were added in the form of the Bill of Rights. The America People did not trust this form of powerful central government unless specific protections of important rights were made a part of the deal.
Long before Madison Avenue and a car company started telling everyone what the American Dream really was all about, the American Dream was about free people living in Liberty in a place where the government did not have the right to take away their life, liberty, or property without a transparent and fair process. Its a shame that nowadays one has to be asleep to believe in this dream.
I agree with you unreservedly. But the United States is no longer a democracy and has not been one for a couple of generations. The country has been taken over by corporate fascists and belligerent warmongers.