“We thought we were already the living dead,” says Luis Muñoz Pinto after arriving in shackles at CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security prison. Muñoz Pinto was a college student in Venezuela who hoped to seek asylum in the United States. In 2024, he says he waited in Mexico until his scheduled appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. During that interview, he says, he was detained and later deported, one of 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT between March and April of 2025. The White House claimed the men were part of a violent gang and designated them as terrorists. ICE data shows that Muñoz Pinto has no criminal record in the U.S. “When we got there, the CECOT director was talking to us. The first thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again. He said ‘Welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave,’” Luis Muñoz Pinto recalls. Since November, 60 Minutes has made several attempts to interview key Trump administration officials on camera...