Julie Turkewitz

So I think that so many listeners remember back in March when these 250 or so Venezuelan men were put on planes to this foreign prison in El Salvador, accused summarily without trials of being terrorists.

And then...

in a very, very public way, taken off the planes, bent at the waist, shackled, shaved, and put in this maximum security prison in El Salvador.

Absolutely.

And I think that it was meant to send a message.

This is what will happen to you if you come to the United States illegally.

And after that, the men disappeared.

They did not have access to lawyers.

They did not have access to family members.

There were family members in Caracas, in the United States, marching, asking for some kind of information.

about their loved ones.

You had courtroom tussles in the United States with lawyers trying to get these folks back to the U.S.

or at the very least try and find some kind of information about what had happened to them.

Absolutely.

And we as journalists asked over and over again, please give us information about these men.

Give us their names.

Their names were never released.

And we also asked for information about their criminal histories.

But the Trump administration refused to give us sort of a list describing the different alleged crimes that had been committed by all of these men.

The only ways that we found out who they were was through leaks.