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Notes -
From what I remember from reading on Kilmar - when you apply for asylum, you generally also apply for 2 other forms of protection. One is based on torture, one is based on nonrefoulment (dont return peoole to dangerous counties). But basically when you apply for asylum, you can also say "dont return me to my home country becauase theyll torture me". And sometimes you are able to get orders to not be deported to a certain country, even while being denied asylum. Which basically means (until recently, maybe?) they get to stay. So it might be that as much as home country not taking them.
I think what was happening with both Kilmar and CERCOT was that Trump admin was basically playing hardball. People were getting a bunch of nonrefoulment type protections from being returned to their home country, the bar to get that was lower, and then they could more or less just stay. And trumps response was to say "ok, maybe we cant send you back to Venezuela, but instead we can send you to a third counry, like South Sudan or El Salvador." The chance of being sent to south sudan or rwanda or whereever would nuke incentives to apply for certain protections.
In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he was sent back (deported) with a bunch of other El Salvadorans who were sent back to El Salvador. He had a nonrefoulment order that was not respected, which was a fuckup on the part of DHS. If they'd done it by the book he's likely have been detained in the US until the US came up with the Guatemala idea. The Venezuelans, as far as I can tell, were not deported -- they were sent to CECOT to be detained there (still titularly in US custody), seemingly as part of some sort of hardball the US was playing with Maduro, and after Maduro agreed to take them back they were sent from CECOT to Venezuela.
As for CECOT being a torture prison, who knows? There's stories from prisoners, but you could interview prisoners in any maximum security US prison and get similar ones. Some of them would likely even be true, because prison sucks, prisoners suck, and prison guards generally suck too.
At the very least, I don't think it's disputed that prisoners in CECOT are in horribly crowded cells and do not have any right to visitation or communication with the outside world.
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