El Salvador offers to take US criminal deportees of any nationality for a fee

El Salvador’s president has made an extraordinary offer to Donald Trump as the US seeks to ramp up deportations: the tiny Central American nation is willing to accept convicted criminals of any nationality, including American citizens.

“We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” President Nayib Bukele said in a statement on X. He added that he’d take the deportees “for a fee” and house them in a megaprison known for hosting gang members.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on a tour of Latin America, praised the offer as unprecedented without saying whether the Trump administration would accept it - or whether it would even be legal to do so in the case of US citizens. “More details will be forthcoming,” he said.

The development comes as Trump has been seeking deals with countries across Latin America to accept people removed from the US as part of the administration’s deportation campaign. They include a vow made last week by Venezuela to allow flights carrying its citizens, despite a lack of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries.

There would be serious legal hurdles to sending American citizens abroad, according to analysts including Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

“I don’t care what Bukele says, the United States cannot legally banish Americans - such authorities died centuries ago,” Reichlin-Melnick said in a social media post.

But the broader offer to host deportees who hail from other nations would be welcomed by the new US administration.

Trump has promised to accelerate deportations, announcing that he’d even send thousands of detained migrants to an expanded facility at the American military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before sending them home. Bukele’s offer could help alleviate the need for that.

Government officials told Bloomberg in late 2023 that the vast jail complex Bukele said convicted deportees would be housed at has a capacity for 40,000 inmates. At the time, only 12,000 people were imprisoned there, with parts of the facility still under construction. A government spokesperson would not give updated figures on Monday.

As the leader of a country of about 6.4 million, Bukele has helped attract outside attention to El Salvador through his sweeping crackdown on gang-related crime, leading his country to have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, his embrace of Bitcoin and other unusual policy moves.

Those efforts have won Bukele support with many of Trump’s backers, and the US president - who railed against Central American gangs like MS-13 during his campaign - praised the El Salvadoran president’s leadership in a Jan. 23 call.

“A country that was once known for violence and for the inability to live openly and freely with one’s family and enjoy life has now become one of the most secure in the hemisphere thanks to his leadership, to the difficult decisions that had to be made,” Rubio said alongside El Salvadoran Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill in the capital, San Salvador, on Monday.

While Bukele’s anti-crime strategy transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America to among the safest, his strategy has attracted criticism from human rights groups.

In 2022, Amnesty International said “El Salvadoran authorities have committed massive human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, as well as torture and ill-treatment.”

Separately, the US and El Salvador also agreed Monday to cooperate more closely on a civilian nuclear energy programme, though it appears such an effort is in only the initial stages.