An Ex-Ecuadorian Official Said He Was in Political Danger. The U.S. Deported Him.

Last Friday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents hauled José Serrano Salgado onto a poshly decorated jet in South Florida bound for Ecuador — even though there had been a judge’s order in May temporarily pausing his deportation for fear of torture back home.

That torture is what a source told NOTUS is happening to him now. Ecuadorian jailers are now smashing his fingernails, denying him food and subjecting him to loud and unceasing noise, according to a person who got a phone call Monday about Serrano’s situation.

A flight manifest obtained by NOTUS shows that Serrano — once a top Ecuadorian security official — was the lone deportee on the flight aboard a Challenger 350 owned by the self-described “luxury private jet charter” Reliance Jets.

Serrano, a former interior minister in the old leftist administration who ended up in the United States after a rightward political swing in the country, was formally charged with murder last year by the Ecuadorian attorney general’s office on allegations he was the mastermind behind a political assassination.

Juan Pablo Segura, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, posted a statement on X that claimed Serrano was “wanted by INTERPOL” and “will now face justice in Ecuador.” However, Serrano is not among the 6,417 public “red notices” listed by INTERPOL.

Instead, he was sent back through the immigration system. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Serrano was arrested and detained because he was illegally in the country, and the U.S. told a federal judge he was removed pursuant to a final administrative order.

The high-profile ICE deportation marks the latest step in the increasingly cozy martial relationship between the United States and Ecuador, which includes an expanding war against drug cartels and the creation of a southbound deportation pipeline.

Segura, in his post, wrote that under President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “the United States will never again be a safe haven for foreign criminals and thugs” and put the emoji flags for the two countries side by side.

But that partnership has raised human rights concerns. That includes the American military’s extrajudicial killings of sailors at sea accused of drug-running without public presentation of evidence, and the decision to make the dangerous Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil the final stop for U.S. deportees who aren’t even from that country, as NOTUS reporting on the ground showed.

Serrano’s deportation has all the markings of a formal extradition on criminal charges but without the typical legal assurances that a prisoner will be treated fairly.

His lawyers raced to file an emergency petition before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to keep him from being rushed to Ecuador, but Serrano was still removed. Miami immigration judge Romy Lerner on May 13 had granted him a “deferral of removal under the Convention Against Torture.”

That ruling previously halted what ICE itself admitted would have been a mistaken deportation back in June, as laid out in court filings related to Serrano’s habeas corpus lawsuit in his monthslong attempt to be released while in the United States.

According to that court docket, which remains largely inaccessible to the public, the Justice Department notified the judge on Monday that ICE had “executed” a warrant of removal. U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore dismissed the lawsuit on Wednesday, noting that Serrano had already been deported “pursuant to a final administrative order” — however, it’s unclear when that order was filed or why.

It’s also unclear who paid for the private jet that took Serrano from the Miami suburbs to Guayaquil, because Reliance Jets has not been known to be an ICE contractor. (The charter company did not respond to NOTUS questions sent Wednesday.)

Serrano was once president of Ecuador’s legislative branch. In 2016, he traveled to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s headquarters to personally receive an award for “strong leadership” in the international fight against narco-traffickers.

But then the country swung from left to right, and the new administration pulled his security detail. He fled to Miami in 2021. And it’s while living there that he was accused of helping orchestrate the 2023 assassination of an Ecuadorian presidential candidate.

President Daniel Noboa, the young conservative president of Ecuador whose militant approach to crime has drawn comparisons to the right-wing Salvadoran head of state Nayib Bukele, posted pictures of Serrano being escorted into a prison cell by masked police.

“Hecho,” he wrote, the Spanish equivalent of simply stating, “done.”

The criminal investigation has captivated the South American nation, as a political conspiracy with sprawling tentacles whose fallout is still being felt today.

The ultimate conclusion of that investigation could align neatly with the Trump administration’s hard-right approach to international relations, as it presents an opportunity to target leftist former President Rafael Correa and his associates — and expand conservative U.S. influence in South America by striking a blow to the broader Chavista political movement in the region.

The current Ecuadorian president indicated as much in a post on X that called Serrano the “new guest” at El Encuentro, a maximum-security prison modeled after El Salvador’s notorious CECOT.

“Now it’s your turn,” Noboa publicly warned Correa, who now lives in exile in Belgium.

There are already signs that the Trump administration is poised to nudge the Ecuadorian investigation forward. Last year, federal agents, an hour before dawn, raided the Miami home of Xavier Jordan, an Ecuadorian businessman whom Ecuadorian investigators have tied to the assassination plot.

Jordan sued the anti-corruption politician Fernando Villavicencio for defamation in Miami-Dade County in 2023, in a complaint that said he had been falsely accused of ties to a narco-financier named Leandro Norero.

This week, Jordan told NOTUS how “special tactical teams” and officials from the Department of Justice, FBI, ICE and even the State Department entered his home, where two young children were present, and confiscated documents he collected that he said “alleged corruption involving Ecuadorian government officials.”

“They did not ask me about my immigration status. I believe they realized that they had been misled by false information provided by the Ecuadorian government and that disproportionate force had been used to conduct the raid,” he said.

Jordan said he never communicated with Norero, who is now dead.

In some ways, the United States has been a driving force from the start of the investigation into the plot to kill Villavicencio, a journalist-turned-legislator who exposed the relationships between narco-traffickers and high-ranking government officials.

Villavicencio was fatally shot by contracted Colombian sicarios days before the initial round of presidential elections in 2023. The Ecuadorian government managed to catch six members of the seven-person hit team and immediately requested American assistance.

According to two people familiar with the investigation who spoke to NOTUS on condition of anonymity, the FBI helped the Ecuadorian National Police unlock almost 100 seized phones, interviewed every member of the Colombian death squad and recorded one of them giving a detailed confession that claimed the authors of the plot ran straight to the highest levels of the ousted Correa government.

After that confession, the FBI and U.S. embassy urgently recommended multiple times that the assassins be transferred from the jail where they were being held — but those requests were ignored and all the men were strangled to death, these sources told NOTUS.

The investigation, dubbed “Metástasis,” has become Ecuador’s largest ever anti-corruption case to reveal links between top government officials and drug traffickers.

Serrano vehemently denies his involvement and claims that his name appears nowhere in the massive trove of evidence uncovered by investigators. But he was nonetheless formally charged with murder last year by the Ecuadorian attorney general’s office, which alleged he was the mastermind behind the political assassination of Villavicencio.

Serrano’s case portends the strengthening of U.S.-Ecuador security ties. President Noboa’s requests that the United States arrest Serrano in Miami went ignored for years. But just days after then-Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem met with Noboa in Ecuador in July, he was arrested by four ICE agents as he neared his mailbox outside his Miami home, according to a source who knows about the encounter who requested to remain anonymous fearing political reprisals.

Serrano stayed in ICE detention at Miami’s Krome North Service Processing Center for most of his yearlong detention, court records show. A source told NOTUS Serrano lost approximately 25 pounds and saw his prediabetes progress into full-blown diabetes.

The Ecuadorian embassy did not respond to NOTUS questions about how Serrano’s prisoner transfer was arranged nor offer an update on his current condition.

The Department of Homeland Security did not answer NOTUS questions about what legal authority permitted Serrano’s deportation, nor why the U.S. chose to deport him rather than criminally charge him here if he did indeed plot a murder while living on U.S. soil.

Instead, the department sent a statement noting that there was no federal court order barring the government from deporting Serrano: “The Department of Homeland Security does not conduct immigration enforcement on behalf of foreign political interests, nor does it target individuals for protected political speech. What makes someone a target of ICE is being in the country illegally.”