Feb. 4 (UPI) — El Salvador has agreed to take deportees from the United States and violent criminals from U.S. prisons in an “extraordinary migratory agreement.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the deal Monday following a meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in Central America.
“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.
“He has offered his jails so we can send them here and he will put them in his jails,” Rubio said. “And he’s offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentences in the United States, even if they’re U.S. citizens or legal residents.”
President Bukele said El Salvador was offering the United States the chance to “outsource part of its prison system.”
“We are willing to take in only convicted criminals into our mega prison CECOT in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the United States but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable,” Bukele added.
Rubio, who is on his first international trip as the United States’ top diplomat, is meeting this week with Central American leaders in Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic to promote President Donald Trump‘s immigration agenda and America First foreign policy.
Bukele shared a video of his visit with Rubio, before meeting in private, in a post on X.
During their meeting, President Bukele agreed to take back all Salvadoran MS-13 gang members who are in the United States illegally.
Bukele also agreed to incarcerate violent illegal immigrants, including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, as well as criminal illegal migrants from any country.
And in what the State Department called an “extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country,” President Bukele offered to jail dangerous U.S. criminals, “including those of U.S. citizenship and legal residents.”
Before Monday’s announcement, critics warned the plan could violate international law.
“The United States is 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,” Mneesha Gellman, an international politics scholar and professor at Emerson College, told CNN.
“It is a bizarre and unprecedented proposal being made potentially between two authoritarian, populist, right wing leaders seeking a transactional relationship,” Gellman added. “It’s not rooted in any sort of legal provision and likely violates a number of international laws relating to the rights of migrants.”
El Salvador boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, but Amnesty International and other human rights groups claim many of the more than 80,000 people jailed under the state of emergency are innocent.
In exchange for deporting prisoners to El Salvador, Rubio said the United States would unfreeze assistance to help support operations at the country’s Border Security Information Group. It would also support El Salvador’s vetted units working with U.S. law enforcement and help detect suspicious travelers at El Salvador’s National Passenger Analysis Center.
During Monday’s meetings, Rubio and Bukele also concluded a civil nuclear cooperation MOU, which was signed by Rubio and Salvadoran Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill Tinoco hours later.
“The Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Civil Nuclear Cooperation lays the foundation for a broader strategic relationship that allows for building ties between nuclear energy experts, the industry and cutting-edge researchers in the United States and El Salvador,” the U.S. Embassy wrote Monday in a translated post on X.
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