El Salvador has agreed to house violent US criminals and receive deportees of any nationality, officials from both countries announced Monday, in an unprecedented deal with the Trump administration that has alarmed critics and rights groups.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled the agreement after meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Monday, 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.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with President Nayib Bukele at his residence at Lake Coatepeque in El Salvador, Monday, February 3, 2025. – Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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.
It’s unclear whether the US government will take up the offer, with questions around the legality of deporting US nationals.
Rights groups condemned the move, with critics warning that such a plan could be part of democratic backsliding.
A prominent Latino advocacy group said it was “a sad day for America” in a statement to CNN following the announcement Monday.
Roman Palomares, National President and Chairman of the Board of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), said the group “opposes treating deported non-criminal migrants like cattle who can be shuttled from one country to another without regard to their home of origin.”
“These are human beings, and their lives are being destroyed,” Palomares said.
Speaking to CNN before the announcement, Emerson College professor Mneesha Gellman said the US was “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.”
“It is a bizarre and unprecedented proposal being made potentially between two authoritarian, populist, right wing leaders seeking a transactional relationship,” said Gellman, an international politics scholar. “It’s not rooted in any sort of legal provision and likely violates a number of international laws relating to the rights of migrants.”
Manuel Flores, general secretary of El Salvador’s leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front party, also decried the move on Monday. “What are we? Backyards, front yards, or garbage dumps?” he said at a press conference, referring to both El Salvador and other Central American countries receiving migrants expelled by the US.
El Salvador’s mega-prisons
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.
The State Department’s travel advisory for El Salvador also warns that those imprisoned in the country face “harsh” prison conditions, without access to due process.
But Bukele’s vast and violent crackdown on gangs has earned admiration from the Trump administration – which has targeted both MS-13 and Tren de Aragua in recent raids.
Prisoners at Cecot, El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, during an exclusive CNN visit in 2024. – Evelio Contreras/CNN
Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that violent transnational gangs were taking over American cities, using both gangs as a frequent talking point to justify hardline immigration policies and border security.
The president signed an executive order last month specifically naming MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, citing their “campaigns of violence and terror in the United States and internationally” as threats to “the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.” The orders included a recommendation that the State Department start the process of designating Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization.
On Friday, the US special envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone hinted at the agreement between the US and El Salvador, saying Tren de Aragua members “will want to go back to Venezuela rather than having to share the prison with the Salvadorean gangs like MS-13. It’s part of what we want to discuss and how President Bukele can help us.”
Trump’s immigration crackdown
The move comes amid a swift immigration crackdown, with wide swaths of the federal government mobilized to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants in the US, and to strip protections for migrants already in the country.
The agreement described by Rubio and Bukele for El Salvador to allow the US to send asylum seekers who are not Salvadoran to El Salvador is known as a “safe third country” agreement.
Trump has threatened action against nations that will not accept flights of their nationals coming from the US, and briefly walked back from the brink of a damaging trade war with Colombia over the repatriations.
On Friday, Trump said Venezuela had agreed to receive Venezuelan deportees including gang members – a shift in policy after the country’s President Nicolás Maduro had also previously refused to take Venezuelan nationals back. The US had also generally been unable to send Venezuelans back due to frosty relations.
The announcement came as Richard Grenell, the White House envoy for special missions, met with Maduro in Caracas – notable since Washington does not officially recognize Maduro’s presidency, with opposition leaders accusing the strongman leader of stealing last year’s elections.
The Trump administration has also moved forward in removing protections for 348,000 Venezuelans already residing in the US — revoking a temporary protected status that shielded Venezuelans from deportation and allowed them to remain in the US with work permits.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Ruben Correa and Lex Harvey contributed reporting.
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