The Trump administration has warmly greeted an offer from El Salvador to detain both deported undocumented migrants and criminal U.S. citizens in a sprawling high-security prison that human rights experts have dubbed a “tropical gulag.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited El Salvador and its president Nayib Bukele on Monday as part of a Central American tour.
Rubio called the highly unorthodox and potentially illegal scheme an “act of extraordinary friendship to our country.”
The following day, Rubio continued to praise the “generous offer,” though he admitted “there are legalities involved” that might hinder the idea.
“We have a Constitution,” he said at a news conference in Costa Rica. “But it’s a very generous offer. No one’s ever made an offer like that — and to outsource, at a fraction of the cost, at least some of the most dangerous and violent criminals that we have in the United States. But obviously, the administration will have to make a decision.”
(The U.S. cannot deport U.S. citizens in almost all cases, though it has anyway in the past.)
Regardless of whether the U.S. and El Salvador reach an agreement, the offer is bringing renewed attention to the Central American country’s flagship prison, the 40,000-inmate capacity Centro de Confinamente del Terrorismo, one the key tools in Bukele’s crackdown on criminal gangs in the country that has resulted in El Salvador having the highest prison rate in the world.
Inside the facility, which was completed in 2023, prisoners are cut off from virtually all communications with the outside world, packed in cells holding up to 70 people, and not provided with family visitation or allowed into fresh air.
Cells have no sheets, pillows, or mattresses, and inmates are held inside them for 23.5 hours a day, with the lights turned on 24/7.
Those held in the prison’s solitary confinement wing reportedly sleep on concrete beds and sit in pitch black rooms, but for a small hole in the ceiling.
Human rights officials have accused the facility of scores of abuses, part of a larger campaign against crime that’s seen Bukele and his allies suspend constitutional rights including due process as part of a 2022 state of emergency that remains ongoing.
Investigators from Human Rights Watch said last year they were aware of “deaths in custody, finding evidence of potential torture, ill-treatment, and failure to provide necessary medical care” inside the facility.
“In some cases, authorities buried deceased detainees in mass graves without informing families or conducting adequate investigations,” the group wrote in a July report about the larger Salvadorian prison system.
“Quien perdona al lobo, sacrifica a las ovejas.”
— Macarena Olona (@Macarena_Olona) January 31, 2025
Presidente @nayibbukele 🇸🇻🇪🇸 pic.twitter.com/J3hSKoZHJM
Bukele and his officials have described the prison crackdown as something of a living execution, sending inmates, many thousands of whom critics say were arbitrarily arrested, to facilities from which they have little hope of return.
“We don’t have a death penalty, so we have to imprison them all,” Bukele said last year.
His security minister told CNN last year it would be “stupid” to ever release inmates serving in the terror prison.
El Salvadorian human rights organization Cristosal found last year that at least 261 people had died in the country’s prisons since the 2022 emergency began.
“People have died in El Salvador’s prisons and jails because of torture, a lack of food, unhealthy conditions, an inhuman lack of attention and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” Zaira Navas, who authored a report from the group on the deaths, told The Associated Press. “There is a deliberate policy of not protecting the rights of incarcerated people.”
Great idea!! https://t.co/7924xQYiun
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025
Such hard-line tactics seem to be part of the appeal for the Trump administration and its allies, despite Secretary Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, being a longtime critic of oppressive Latin American regimes.
An X post from Bukele about the prisoner deal showed slick promotional images of the prison, featuring shirtless prisoners with tattoos kneeling before heavily armored prison guards.
“Great idea!!” Elon Musk responded on Monday.
Even if the El Salvador deal falls through, the Trump administration has eyed other ways to outsource the immigration detention required to support its campaign of mass nationwide deportations. On Tuesday, the first military flight was set to depart for the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the administration plans to house immigration detainees. As The Independent has reported, that facility has also been accused of scores of human rights abuses.
Since Bukele took office and implemented his gang crackdown, homicides in the country have fallen considerably, and he remains popular domestically.
