El Salvador has agreed to house violent US criminals and receive deportees of any nationality, in an unprecedented deal that has alarmed critics and rights groups.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the agreement on Monday after meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, as he visits several Central American countries to drive forward the Trump administration’s agenda on migration.
“In an act of extraordinary friendship to our country … (El Salvador) has agreed to the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Rubio told reporters.
The country will continue accepting Salvadoran deportees who illegally entered the US, he said. It will also “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,” he said – referring to two notorious transnational gangs with members from El Salvador and Venezuela.
In addition, Bukele “has offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of US citizenship and legal residents,” Rubio said,
Bukele confirmed the agreement on X, saying in a post, “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,” he added.
Ahead of the announcement, critics had warned that such a plan could be part of democratic backsliding.
“The US is essentially proposing to send people to a country that is not the country of origin nor is it necessarily the country that they passed through,” said Mneesha Gellman, an international politics scholar and professor at Emerson College.
One of the most striking aspects of the deal is that Salvadorean law doesn’t differentiate between alleged gang members and people found guilty of a crime. Under the draconian state of emergency that has ruled the Central American country since 2022, authorities can detain anyone simply on the suspicion of being members of a gang.
Bukele has boasted a high incarceration rate as a recipe for security – El Salvador now boasts the highest such rate in the world – but human rights organizations such as Amnesty International believe many of the over 80,000 people jailed under the state of emergency are innocent.
This is a developing story.