El Salvador says it will take America’s deportees and criminals — of any nationality

Over the course of just a few years, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele transformed his country with a tough-on-crime approach from the “murder capital of the world” into one of the safest nations in the Western Hemisphere, closing out last year with the lowest homicide rate on record.

In 2015, nearly four years before Bukele took office, the country saw 6,656 people murdered. Last year, there were only 114 homicides recorded.

Having both effectively neutralized the gangs that once terrorized El Salvador and built a gargantuan prison complex to accommodate his country’s criminal elements, Bukele is apparently keen now to onshore America’s problems, specifically its deportees and criminals — of any nationality.

After meeting with Bukele on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated that “the president, in an act of extraordinary friendship to our country, knowing the challenges we face in the U.S., has agreed to the most unprecedented and extraordinary agreement anywhere in the world.”

Extra to repatriating Salvadorans found illegally dwelling in the U.S., Rubio said that Bukele has agreed to accept for “deportation any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal from any nationality, be they MS-13 or Tren de Aragua, and house them in his jails.”

A senior official in the Trump administration told reporter Bill Melugin that this would mean El Salvador would even accept American deportations of Chinese nationals.

Rubio noted further that Bukele has also volunteered to throw “dangerous American criminals” into his jails, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.

‘No country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this.’

El Salvador, which has a population of roughly 6.3 million people, reportedly had over 111,800 people in detention as of June 2024, leaving the nation with the highest prison population rate in the world.

The country is now home to multiple mega-prisons, such as the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca. The maximum-security prison, built in 2022, had 14,532 inmates as of summer 2024, but has capacity for 40,000 inmates.

“No country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this,” stressed Rubio. “We are just profoundly grateful.”

Bukele clarified on X that there are some strings attached, tweeting, “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.”

The Trump administration has not yet indicated whether the U.S. government will take Bukele up on taking American criminals. Critics have suggested, however, that doing so is a legal no-go.

Leti Volpp, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley, told CNN, “The U.S. is absolutely prohibited from deporting U.S. citizens, whether they are incarcerated or not.”

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