Human rights organizations sue El Salvador over migrants held in secretive prison

Hundreds of migrants were sent to a detention center in El Salvador from the U.S. in March. In nearly all cases, no one has heard from them since.

Four human rights organizations have sued El Salvador for information about the detainees.

Julio Henríquez, a human rights and immigration lawyer at Boston university, joins WBUR's All Things Considered to discuss the lawsuit.

Highlights from this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.

Why are you appealing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights?  Why this international body?

“ So the Inter-American Human Rights Commission plays a very important role in the human rights system of the Americas. And many countries in Latin America pay a lot of attention and have a lot of respect for the decisions of this body.”

“One of the problems that we face with the detainees in El Salvador is that in El Salvador, there are really no opportunities to challenge their detention in court. We have tried through local partners to file writs of habeas corpus and we're simply ignored.”

“For the last three years, Salvadorian courts have ignored writs of habeas corpus systematically. So we needed to go to an additional recourse  and that was the Inter American Human Rights Commission.”

What is the role of El Salvador here?

“So if you ask authorities in the United States, they will tell you that the detainees were sent to El Salvador under the custody of a sovereign country, and that the U.S. cannot make any requests to El Salvador on what to do with them.”

“But if you ask El Salvador, what they will tell you is that they have an agreement with the United States and that they are not really making any decisions on the legal status of the detainees — that they're simply providing a service on behalf of the United States.”

You're in touch with the families of the detainees. What’s it like to represent clients that you have no communication with?

“It's tremendously frustrating and complicated, not only for the lawyers, but mostly for the family members. There are multiple decisions that are very relevant to the outcome of the case [such as] if they are released from detention and there's an agreement to send them to a third country,  what third countries this person sent to? And if someone has claimed that they are afraid to return to Venezuela, can you, in good faith, engage in an agreement to send these individuals to Venezuela without even checking with them if they're afraid to return or not?”

What's next in this case?

“El Salvador has not provided any information. What we expect is that the commission will [demand that] El Salvador release these individuals, or to at least indicate their whereabouts, their conditions, and give them access to legal counsel and access to talk to their families.”

A key legal decision came down this week affecting the hundreds of Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador. A federal judge ordered that the detainees have the right to challenge their detention. How does this affect your case?

“It doesn't necessarily change what we are doing because we're not attacking the US with our request … it’s only against El Salvador.”

“But for the clients, this changes things significantly. They didn't have an opportunity to file a writ of habeas corpus and …  now they're gonna have the opportunity to challenge their designation in the US. And that's very relevant and we'll see how it develops. This could be appealed, it probably will be … but yeah this is a significant change.”