El Salvador’s Prisons Are Notorious. Will They House Trump’s Deportees?

A day after President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador offered to imprison convicted criminals from the United States, including U.S. citizens, the question of whether such a plan could actually be accepted and implemented was still unanswered.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who stopped in El Salvador while visiting Central America this week, said on Tuesday that the Trump administration would have to “study” the offer from Mr. Bukele to jail convicts from the United States, for a fee. “But it’s a very generous offer,” he said.

Mr. Rubio himself said it was unclear if the United States could legally send convicts, including Americans, to a foreign prison.

But the proposal has drawn attention to the prisons that Mr. Bukele has used in recent years to cripple the gangs that once ran rampant in El Salvador. They have become symbols of his strength and popularity, including with Mr. Trump — even as human rights groups say the crowded prisons are holding pens for tens of thousands of people rounded up in arrests that have ensnared innocents.

Analysts say it is unlikely such a plan would hold up in court, particularly where it concerns U.S. citizens.

But whether or not Mr. Bukele’s offer is ever actually acted on, analysts said it serves as a way for both nations’ governments to project a shared vision of a tough approach to lawbreakers.

“The announcement is a P.R. win,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University who specializes in Latin America. It allows Mr. Bukele to show he is all-in for Mr. Trump, and bolsters the Trump administration, “which is looking to dissuade undocumented migration by raising the stakes if apprehended.”

And yet, whatever its chances of being put into practice, Mr. Bukele’s announcement immediately sparked concern among human rights groups in the United States and beyond, which warned that the Bukele administration’s anti-gang crusade has come at the expense of human rights.

“While the gangs no longer constitute a threat, a system of terror and repression has emerged in the country,” said Ana María Méndez Dardón, the Central America director at the Washington Office for Latin America, a nonprofit human rights group.

At a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in July 2024, Alexandra Hill Tinoco, El Salvador’s foreign minister, said the country is “meeting all international standards” for prisoners and added that reports of human rights violations are “baseless accusations and far from our reality.”

What has Bukele’s approach to crime looked like?

El Salvador was once known as the hemisphere’s murder capital — with one of the highest homicide rates anywhere in the world.

But in 2022, Mr. Bukele declared a state of emergency to quell gang violence, and sent the military into the streets, arresting tens of thousands of people around the country, accusing them of gang ties or other crimes. More than 25,000 were imprisoned in the first weeks of Mr. Bukele’s crackdown.

Nearly three years later, the state of emergency has yet to be lifted.

In that time, the nation has undergone a remarkable transformation. Homicides have sharply decreased, and extortion payments that gangs demanded from businesses and residents also declined.

As a reminder of the government’s zero tolerance, tough-on-crime policies, photos and videos are often circulated that show scores of inmates, sometimes shirtless and clad only in boxers, bending over with their hands on their shaven heads.

Mr. Bukele earned adulation from leaders in the region and beyond, and most Salvadorans support him, not in spite of his strongman tactics but because of them.

In November, his approval rating was 91 percent, according to a CID Gallup poll, one of the highest in the world for a world leader — although support for him dwindled recently after his government reversed a landmark mining ban.

Still, Mr. Bukele’s approach eroded civil rights in the country, human rights experts say: Mass arbitrary arrests, extreme overcrowding at prisons, reports of torture and at least 261 prison deaths between 2022 and 2024 were documented by several groups.

How has Bukele used the prison system?

Mr. Bukele’s prisons are not typical penitentiaries. El Salvador’s gangs once used jails as operational hubs to issue orders, extort businesses on the outside and recruit new members — something also seen inside prisons across Latin America.

That no longer seems to happen “because of the extreme measures taken to control prisoners,” according to a 2023 report by Insight Crime, an organized-crime research group.

The star of Mr. Bukele’s strategy is his so-called mega prison: the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, a hulking detention center that opened in 2023 an hour outside the country’s capital, San Salvador. The facility is big enough to hold up to 40,000 inmates, some of them as young as 12.

The vast majority of the 85,000 Salvadorans apprehended under the 2022 state of emergency — which allows for mass arrests with no due process — have essentially disappeared into the prison system, where many have been held for years without trial and without their families even knowing if they are alive.

While the imposing CECOT has garnered international attention, most prisoners are held in other, smaller facilities where “they have been subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment,” said Noah Bullock, the executive director of the Salvadoran advocacy group Cristosal, which has interviewed hundreds of detainees arrested under the state of emergency.

Cristosal and Human Rights Watch have reported that inmates were being tortured and deprived of food. Many inmates’ fates were decided in mass trials with judges whose identities were kept secret.

Who could end up in Bukele’s prisons?

The State Department said in a statement that Mr. Bukele offered to take undocumented migrants from any country, not just El Salvador, who have been convicted of crimes, including members of the MS-13 and the Tren de Aragua gangs.

And in what the State Department called “an extraordinary gesture, never before extended by any country,” it said Mr. Bukele had offered to house “dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.” Analysts say that such a move is likely to be challenged, even if it were to be embraced by the Trump administration.

“I do not think that it will stand up in the courts,” Mneesha Gellman, an associate professor of political science at Emerson College, said, citing multiple domestic and international laws that govern the treatment of both undocumented people in the United States and U.S. citizens.

However, the two governments could reach an agreement that would allow the United States to deport large numbers of people to El Salvador, including non-Salvadorans, Ms. Gellman said. The United States is eager to find places to deport migrants whose countries do not accept regular U.S. deportation flights, such as Cubans and Nicaraguans.

Whether in or out of prisons, migrants would find themselves extremely vulnerable in El Salvador.

“They would not have citizens’ rights in that country,” Ms. Gellman said, noting that migrants in El Salvador have reported experiencing abuses at the hands of criminal groups as well as state actors, such as the police and the military.

Is there any precedent for El Salvador’s offer?

In 2019, El Salvador signed an agreement with the first Trump administration to receive non-Salvadoran migrants who had been detained in the United States after U.S. officials cut off some aid to El Salvador, accusing the country of not doing enough to curb illegal migration.

It also agreed to process asylum requests to keep migrants from heading north to the United States.

Known as a “safe third country” agreement, the deal was never implemented because of the coronavirus pandemic and was eventually terminated by the Biden administration. Mr. Bukele referred to it on Monday, saying his new proposal was “more important and of a much broader scope than the agreements made in 2019.”

What could Bukele get out of this deal?

Mr. Bukele has appeared eager to strengthen his ties to the Trump administration, and the latest offer “clearly helps to consolidate this relationship between the MAGA world and El Salvador,” said Manuel Meléndez Sánchez, a Salvadoran political scientist and researcher at Harvard University.

But relations between the two government have not always been close.

In 2022, Mr. Rubio criticized Mr. Bukele during a Senate hearing, accusing him of “very openly” mocking U.S. institutions.

During his presidential campaign, even Mr. Trump took an out-of-nowhere dig at Mr. Bukele, saying he was sending “all of his criminals, his drug dealers” to the United States, and adding: “He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country — well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job.”

In addition to currying favor with the new administration, there is also a financial incentive in El Salvador’s offer, with its approach to prisons costly to maintain.

“There’s an expense that needs to be addressed. It’s not sustainable for the Salvadoran people to maintain 2 percent of its population in prisons indefinitely,” said Mr. Bullock.

Gabriel Labrador contributed reporting from San Salvador and Michael Crowley from San José, Costa Rica.