El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele has offered to "house in his jails dangerous American criminals" and accept deportees of any nationality, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday night.
“We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” President Nayib Bukele said in a statement on X.
He added that he’d take the deportees “for a fee” and house them in a megaprison known for hosting gang members.
"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."
Rubio called Bukele's offer "an act of extraordinary friendship", adding that:
"No country's ever made an offer of friendship such as this."
Of course, there are plenty who dislike this idea - our 'most dangerous criminals' deserve better... apparently?
There would be serious legal hurdles to sending American citizens abroad, according to analysts including Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
“I don’t care what Bukele says, the United States cannot legally banish Americans — such authorities died centuries ago,” Reichlin-Melnick said in a social media post.
A State Department advisory says El Salvador's prison and detention center conditions are "harsh and dangerous," while overcrowding "constitutes a serious threat to prisoners' health and lives."
Latino advocacy group the Board of the League of United Latin American Citizens called the deal "a sad day for America," per CNN.
LULAC "opposes treating deported non-criminal migrants like cattle who can be shuttled from one country to another without regard to their home of origin," added Roman Palomares, the group's national president and chair.
While Bukele’s anti-crime strategy transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America to among the safest, his strategy has attracted criticism from human rights groups.
In 2022, Amnesty International said “El Salvadoran authorities have committed massive human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, as well as torture and ill-treatment.”
“A country that was once known for violence and for the inability to live openly and freely with one’s family and enjoy life has now become one of the most secure in the hemisphere thanks to his leadership, to the difficult decisions that had to be made,” Rubio said alongside El Salvadoran Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill in the capital, San Salvador, on Monday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on a tour of Latin America, praised the offer as unprecedented without saying whether the Trump administration would accept it - or whether it would even be legal to do so in the case of US citizens.
“More details will be forthcoming,” he said.
