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Illegal immigrants: El Salvador offers to pack the US deportees in jail—for a fee

Illegal immigrants: El Salvador offers to pack the US deportees in jail—for a fee

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Virendra Pandit

 

New Delhi: El Salvador has offered to incarcerate American convicts and illegal migrants of any nationality deported from the United States at Latin America’s largest maximum security prison.

However, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s offer comes with a price tag and legal challenges—the ones that US President Donald Trump’s administration is considering tackling, the media reported on Wednesday.

After meeting the visiting US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday, President Bukele offered to lock up convicts “of any nationality,” expelled by the US, at the mega-facility known as CECOT, where prisoners live crammed in windowless cells, sleeping on metal beds with no mattress, forbidden from having visitors and kept under watch round-the-clock.

President Bukele, who enjoys high approval ratings for his sweeping crackdown on violent gangs, said that El Salvador wanted to give the United States a chance to “outsource part of its prison system.”

Reacting to it, US President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed El Salvador’s offer despite clear legal problems with such an outsourcing under American law. “If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.

“It’s no different than our prison system, except it would be a lot less expensive, and it would be a great deterrent,” Trump added.

He said he would negotiate payment, which would decrease costs for the United States but help fund El Salvador’s own mass incarceration.

President Trump said that shipping criminals to El Salvador would be “a very small fee compared to what we pay to private prisons.”

“Frankly, they could keep them, because these people are never going to be any good,” Trump said.

Rubio said the Trump administration would review the proposal but acknowledged legal issues. “We’ll have to study it on our end. There are obviously legalities involved,” Rubio told reporters in Costa Rica, where he headed after El Salvador.

“We have a Constitution, we have all sorts of things, but it’s a very generous offer,” Rubio said. He welcomed the offer saying, “No one’s ever made an offer like that.”

Explaining Bukele’s offer, Rubio said apart from Salvadoran deportees who illegally entered the US, El Salvador 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”– referring to two notorious transnational gangs with members from El Salvador and Venezuela.

Besides, Bukele “offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of US citizenship and legal residents,” Rubio said, according to the media.

El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, commonly referred to as CECOT, is the country’s largest prison which opened in 2023, with a maximum capacity of 40,000 inmates. It is made up of eight sprawling pavilions. Its cells hold 65 to 70 prisoners each, who do not receive visits.

Prisoners in boxer shorts are reportedly marched into prison yards and made to sit nearly atop each other. They are packed into cells without enough bunks for everyone. Moreover, there are no programs preparing these prisoners to return to society after their sentences– no workshops or educational programs– as they are never allowed outside.

Bukele’s rule has reduced gang violence in the Central American country since launching a sweeping crackdown in 2022 that has seen the imprisonment of over 80,000 people. But while the crime rate has fallen, the treatment of those imprisoned has triggered outrage among human rights organizations.

Meanwhile, as part of his administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, President Trump has already announced that the United States will hold migrants at the notorious Guantanamo military detention facility in Cuba that was opened in January 2002. But that prison is built on a US naval base leased from Havana under a treaty dating back to 1903.

The detention facility was set up after the 9/11 (11 September 2001) attacks to deal with prisoners who were termed “enemy combatants” and denied many US legal rights. Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden both sought to close the facility, but the US Congress has opposed efforts to shut Guantanamo and it remains open to this day.

Ahead of Rubio’s visit this week, Washington had touted El Salvador as a possible “safe third country” for expelled migrants whose countries do not accept US deportation flights.

On Tuesday, the United States began flying detained migrants to the notorious military base in Cuba, where hundreds of terrorism suspects were held for years after the 9/11 attacks, many without formal charges.

 

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