Washington DC - Human Rights Watch and Cristosal released a new report on Wednesday detailing the systematic violations faced by Venezuelan nationals deported by the US to El Salvador.

The 81-page report – entitled "You Have Arrived in Hell": Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison – is based on interviews with 40 Venezuelan migrants who were locked up in El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison after getting deported by the Trump administration.

"When we arrived at the entrance of CECOT, guards made us kneel so they could shave our heads," an interviewee named Gonzalo recalled. "One of the officers hit me on the legs with a baton, and I fell to the ground on my knees."

"The prison director told us, 'You have arrived in hell.'"

Gonzalo said he and the other detained Venezuelans faced regular abuse.

"The guards beat me many times, in the hallways of the prison module and in the punishment cell," he said. "They beat us almost every day."

Human Rights Watch and Cristosal say the Venezuelan nationals suffered arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture, inhumane detention conditions, and sexual violence during their time in El Salvador.

"The Trump administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to arbitrarily detain Venezuelans who were then abused by Salvadoran security forces on a near-daily basis," Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

"The Trump administration is complicit in torture, enforced disappearance, and other grave violations, and should stop sending people to El Salvador or any other country where they face a risk of torture."

The 252 Venezuelan men deported from the US to El Salvador were released and returned to Venezuela on July 18.

Some of them were removed from the US in the midst of their asylum process despite having passed an initial screening that they faced a "credible fear" of persecution or harm should they return to Venezuela.

The US sent the men to El Salvador despite credible prior reports of torture at CECOT.

The men said they were regularly beaten in the prison hallways and in a solitary confinement cell in a section of CECOT known as "the Island."

People interviewed for the report said CECOT guards brutally attacked them for such excuses as bathing at the wrong time, refusing to eat breakfast, singing, or laughing with people held in the same cell.

HRW and Cristosal determined that the reports of abuse were not isolated incidents but rather systematic violations that occurred repeatedly throughout the men's detention.

"We are not terrorists, we were migrants," one of the people interviewed said.

"We went to the United States to seek protection and the chance at a better future, but we ended up in a prison in a country we didn’t even know, treated worse than animals."