President Donald Trump’s recent Oval Office photo-op with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator”, was staged to unveil a shiny new “alliance” against crime. Both leaders congratulated each other for achieving something U.S. courts forbid at home: rounding up alleged gang members (including longtime U.S. residents with pending protection orders) and locking them away offshore. When pressed about a Maryland man who had been deported in defiance of a court ruling, Bukele shrugged off the case, implying he couldn’t risk letting a “terrorist” back into the United States—and Trump nodded in approval. The exchange distilled a stark message: Human rights are expendable when the political spectacle is good television.
Since March 2022, El Salvador has operated under a rolling “state of exception” that suspends basic constitutional rights. In just three years, more than 110,000 Salvadorans—nearly 2 percent of the country’s population—have been put behind bars. This draconian crackdown gives El Salvador the highest incarceration rate in the world. Official homicide rates have indeed plummeted by over 80 percent under Bukele’s campaign, but that drop has come in tandem with the collapse of due process. Mass arrests are often indiscriminate, mass hearings process hundreds of defendants at once, and detainees meet lawyers only fleetingly, if at all. At least 261 prisoners perished inside Salvadoran prisons during the crackdown, according to the human rights group Cristosal. Reports have emerged of abuse, torture, and medical neglect of those swept up in Bukele’s anti-gang dragnet.
El Salvador’s flagship “mega-prison,” the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), epitomizes President Bukele’s hardline approach. Built to hold 40,000 inmates in eight fortress-like pavilions, CECOT keeps prisoners in near-total isolation. Inmates receive no family visits and are never allowed outdoors; there are no workshops or educational programs to rehabilitate offenders. Bukele’s own justice minister once remarked that those sent to CECOT will never return to their communities—that the only way out is in a coffin. Harsh images of tattooed prisoners hunched together, shuffling in shackles, are routinely broadcast on government social media. These dystopian visuals have become Bukele’s calling card in the name of “security.”
What began as a Salvadoran experiment in iron-fisted policing has now mutated into a formal bilateral program. The U.S. government is actively funding and facilitating the offshoring of detainees to Bukele’s prison state. U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who recently visited the country, said that the Trump administration had quietly offered to wire about $15 million to El Salvador to underwrite the costs of warehousing U.S. deportees (with at least $4 million already spent). News reports have also confirmed an initial $6 million agreement for the first year of this arrangement. Custody of detainees effectively shifts the instant a charter plane lifts off U.S. soil—once airborne, shackled migrants become Bukele’s prisoners, placed beyond the reach of American courts or oversight.
Bukele’s “iron fist” security model is not contained to El Salvador—it’s becoming a regional export. Honduras has announced plans to build a 20,000-bed mega-prison of its own, explicitly citing Bukele’s success as inspiration. In Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa boasts that mirroring Salvadoran tactics (mass detentions and emergency measures) helped shave dozens of percentage points off the murder rate in Guayaquil, and arguably helped him secure reelection. Analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies warned of a “due process contagion.” Once mass incarceration and militarized crackdowns become the go-to metric for public safety, governments across the region begin normalizing states of exception, purging high courts, and erasing judicial oversight in the name of fighting crime. In other words, democratic erosion becomes contagious.
Far from acting as a brake on this trend, the United States has become an accelerant. By bankrolling El Salvador’s excesses and broadcasting the dramatic footage for domestic political gain, Washington is sending a signal that rights-free “security” can be not only tolerated but internationally legitimized. Each cash transfer tells regional leaders that outsourcing mass detention is a billable service; each made-for-TV deportation convoy gives authoritarians a propaganda boost. This feedback loop reinforces ever-harsher tactics and sidelines voices (judges, journalists, human rights defenders) that insist on constitutional limits. American credibility on the rule of law erodes when taxpayer dollars subsidize abuses that even the U.S. State Department has condemned.
This extraordinary deportation-to-CECOT pipeline might sound like a distant foreign affair, but Texas is directly entangled in its operation, and stands to bear some of the fallout. The logistics of these renditions run straight through the Lone Star State. In mid-March, immigration officials quietly shuttled hundreds of detainees from across the country to a small airport in Harlingen as part of the first mass transfer to El Salvador. Charter flights carrying Venezuelan and Central American migrants departed from Dallas, El Paso, Phoenix, and other cities, all converging on Harlingen as a staging ground. Within 24 hours, multiple jets then took off from the Texas border city to El Salvador, delivering planeloads of shackled men into Bukele’s custody. Such Saturday deportation flights are highly unusual, as is the covert route through Harlingen, according to a watchdog advocacy group that tracks ICE Air charters.
On the ground, Texas families are feeling the human toll. Many of those swept up have deep roots in U.S. communities, and their sudden removal leaves broken homes behind. Children come home from school to find a parent gone, with no prospect of visitation, given that their loved one is now locked in a foreign prison thousands of miles away. Families and legal advocates are left scrambling, often with scant information—the detainees essentially disappear into CECOT, their fate largely in the hands of Salvadoran guards.
There are tangible economic stakes for Texas. Our state hosts one of the country’s largest Salvadoran communities—roughly 15 percent of the entire U.S.-Salvadoran diaspora—and their Texas paychecks flow south week after week. In 2023, Salvadorans living abroad sent a record $8.18 billion home—about 24 percent of El Salvador’s GDP—and an estimated $1.1 billion of that originated in Texas alone, largely from the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas. Those Texas-earned dollars stock neighborhood tiendas, pay school fees, and keep household budgets afloat from San Salvador to La Unión. When breadwinners in Houston’s Gulfton district or Dallas’s Oak Cliff are yanked from their jobs and diverted to a Salvadoran cell, that lifeline snaps—impoverishing relatives abroad while simultaneously draining spending power and local tax revenue from communities across Harris, Dallas, and Hidalgo counties.
Texans should understand that this isn’t just someone else’s problem. Our state has a stake in this drama. It’s our tax dollars helping pay for secret flights out of our airports, our neighbors and coworkers who are disappearing into overseas prisons, and our nation’s credibility on the line. We know from history that democracies endure by rejecting the false choice between security and freedom. A durable social contract protects both.
By contrast, outsourcing constitutional constraints for short-term optics is a tempting shortcut—but one whose costs will boomerang. The longer the United States bankrolls and applauds this “iron fist” illusion, the faster that illusion will spread across a region already battered by insecurity and disillusionment with democracy. Ultimately, sacrificing the rule of law for a made-for-TV spectacle is a devil’s bargain. It may offer momentary political gain, but it leaves behind broken families, weakened institutions, and a more dangerous hemisphere for everyone, including here in Texas.
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