OPINION – “We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system. We are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted U.S. citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the U.S., but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”
That was President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, in a message in Spanish on X, posted on the evening of February 3, 2025, one day before the arrival of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. One topic for discussion for the Bukele/Rubio meeting was to be a Safe Third [Country] Agreement, which would allow El Salvador to receive prisoners that were detained in the U.S.
Back in February, the Trump administration saw this Bukele offer as an answer to a national security threat in terms of dealing with illegal immigrants and foreign criminal gangs operating within the U.S. – two key Trump campaign issues.
However, that solution has since grown into a major political issue, and created legal and even constitutional problems for President Trump, because of the way he and his officials have handled the issue.
Bukele’s crackdown
The Bukele-Trump relationship appears to have grown out of the way the Salvadoran President, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator,” has handled his own MS-13 gang problem.
A one-time adman, Bukele, 43, was the second world leader Trump called after taking the oath of office on January 20, and the first in the Western Hemisphere, according to a January 31 briefing to reporters by Mauricio Claver-Carone, the State Department’s Special Envoy for Latin America.
What drew Trump to Bukele? It could be, according to Claver-Carone, that the Salvador President is “not only the most popular leader in the Western Hemisphere from an approval ratings perspective,” but “he’s so popular…because of the extraordinary measures that have been taken in the country [El Salvador] on security.”
Bukele’s “hard-line measures, which are credited with dismantling violent gangs and drastically bringing down crime in El Salvador, have earned him soaring approval ratings in his country and admirers around Latin America and beyond,” Claver-Carone said.
Elected in 2019 to a five-year term when El Salvador was a center of criminal gang activity, Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022 after several mass murders. He has since ruled under emergency powers that suspended due process, allowed arrests without warrants, and held mass trials that have resulted in the jailing of some 85,000 Salvadorans.
Bukele and his allies have also fired top judges and packed the Salvador courts with loyalists, which allowed him to ignore a Salvador Constitutional prohibition which barred him from running for a second consecutive presidential term – all with public support.
Not surprisingly, these police-state tactics in El Salvador have limited both freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Any Salvadoran journalist reporting on gang violence can face up to 15 years in prison.
Bukele and Trump
I lay out what Bukele has done in El Salvador over the past six years because his actions clearly caught President Trump’s attention.
In February, when Secretary of State Rubio left El Salvador, he announced an agreement with Bukele under which El Salvador would accept deported persons from the U.S. of any nationality, including violent criminals who had been imprisoned in the United States. Rubio called it “the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world.”
Back in 2023, Bukele had opened the CECOT prison facility, built to hold an extraordinary 40,000 inmates, double its first announced capacity. It is a huge compound with eight separate buildings, each currently containing some 3,000 prisoners. Each building has towering cell blocks, each of which houses more than 45 or more inmates.
The prison’s dining halls, break rooms, gym and board games are reserved for guards. Prisoners get food to be eaten by hand. Bukele himself has told reporters that visitation, recreation and education are not allowed at the mega-prison. Inmates are denied communication with their relatives and lawyers, and only appear before courts in online hearings, often in groups of several hundred detainees at the same time.
After the first U.S shipments of 238 detainees to El Salvador took place, on March 16, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed to reporters that the Trump administration was paying roughly $6 million a year “for the detention of these foreign terrorists.”
Leavitt, ignoring CECOT’s cruel conditions, added, “I would point out that is pennies on the dollar in comparison to the cost of life and the cost it would impose on the American taxpayer to house these terrorists in maximum security prisons here in the United States of America.”
Bukele, in a message that same day, also emphasized the business aspect of the arrangement. “The United States will pay a very low fee for them,” he wrote, “but a high one for us. Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self-sustainable. As of today, it costs $200 million per year…We are also helping our allies, making our prison system self-sustainable.”
What will happen to the detainees?
One issue being ignored is how long the U.S. detainees will remain in El Salvador’s prison system.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who visited CECOT on March 26, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, after talking to Bukele, “We have no plans to bring them back, this is a long-term solution.”
After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) event April 9, Noem said, “We’re confident that people that are [imprisoned in El Salvador] should be there, and they should stay there for the rest of their lives.” She added that Bukele had told her “they [the Salvadorans] will take as many as we want to send.”
One man’s story
I cannot write about imprisonment in El Salvador without adding some information about the current situation involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who had been living for 13 years in Maryland with his wife and three children when he was deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison as part of the first March shipment.
I must point out that a sworn deposition from Robert L. Cerna, the ICE Field Director for that flight stated that “Abrego Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the Title 8 flight to be removed to El Salvador. Rather, he was an alternate. As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. The manifest did not indicate that Abrego Garcia should not be removed.”
However, Cerna added, “ICE was aware of this grant of withholding of removal at the time Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States. Reference was made to this status on internal forms.”
Cerna acknowledged that “through administrative error, Abrego-Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador,” but then added that “this was an oversight, and the removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13.”
As for the “final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13,”that was based on a purported membership in MS-13,” based on a 2019 Prince George’s County, Maryland, Police Department Gang field interview sheet, issued for the limited purpose of showing that the respondent was labeled a gang member by law enforcement, according to court documents.
The evidence was that Abrego Garcia was wearing “his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” and “a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s Western clique in New York, where Abrego Garcia never lived.
An April 2019 Immigration Court hearing found that information credible. However, on October 10, 2019, a second Immigration Judge, David M. Jones in Baltimore, Maryland, found after testimony by Abrego Garcia and his wife that the so-called “withholding” order was warranted, preventing Abrego Garcia from being deported from the U.S.
Yesterday, a new element in all this emerged.
On Sunday, El Salvador President Bukele proposed to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro that El Salvador exchange 252 Venezuelan deportees that had been shipped from the U.S., in return for individuals Maduro had jailed last year during a crackdown against his electoral opponents.
What kind of business has the Trump administration gotten this country into?
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