The El Amparo Foundation will denounce before the International Criminal Court (ICC) to the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and members of its chain of command for the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelans from the United States to Salvadoran territory, accused of allegedly integrating the criminal band of Aragua, announced on Thursday the president of the NGO, Walter Márquez.

«We will resort to the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, for Bukele’s personal responsibility and the chain of command responsible for those arbitrary arrests,» said Márquez at a virtual press conference.

He also said that he will resort to the Inter -American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to request precautionary measures for these Venezuelans who were deported last March, with the objective, he said, that due process is respected and that the «immediate freedom» of migrants be requested from El Salvador.

Márquez indicated that several of the detainees in the Maximum Security prison CECOT (Center for Confinement of Terrorism) have been mistreated, so consider that Salvadoran authorities must open an investigation «ex officio».

Last week, the activist with a group of relatives traveled to El Salvador with the intention of being able to visit Venezuelans detained, but it was not possible.

«We were able to verify on that trip that the migrants deported Venezuelans to El Salvador are fully isolated, incommunicado, without any trial in El Salvador, where they have not committed any crime, without any clarity of their legal future,» he said.

The lawyer said that none of those deported to the Central American country belongs to the Criminal Band of Aragua, born in a Venezuelan prison, and that, in that case, he said that this should have been tested in judicial instances in the United States.

«We went to exhaust the internal route, several individualized corpus habeas have already been introduced, for several of them, and so far, although it must be an expedited procedure, fast, we have no answers,» he added.

Last May, the UN said that this group of Venezuelans can be in a situation of forced disappearance in El Salvador in view of the «complete uncertainty» about its whereabouts and the situation in which they are after being deported from the United States to that country.

The spokeswoman for this agency, Liz Throssell, said that neither the US authorities nor the Salvadorans have published «official listings of the detainees, and their legal situation in El Salvador are still not clear.»