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UPDATE (Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2024, 10:45 a.m. ET): This post has been updated with additional quotes from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced an offer from the Republican Party’s favorite self-described dictator that could land American citizens in one of the world’s most brutal and inhumane prisons.
On Monday, Rubio announced that El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, the illiberal leader who has referred to himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,” had offered to receive people incarcerated in American prisons — undocumented people as well as American citizens — to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, also known as CECOT. CECOT is the largest prison in Central America and has been widely decried by human rights groups for the deadly human rights abuses that occur there.
Bukele’s so-called gang crackdown in El Salvador has faced condemnation from human rights groups, who’ve reported more than 60 minors who have been swept up in the crackdown and subjected to mistreatment — including torture (El Salvador has denied its prisons are being used for torture). Nonetheless, Bukele has gained a cult following among conservatives, as I’ve highlighted over the past year.
As I wrote in November, former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who Trump previously nominated to serve as U.S. attorney general, once recorded a propaganda video in which he toured CECOT with Bukele and praised the prison as a model for American prisons. “There is a lot more discipline in this prison than we see in a lot of the prisons in the United States,” Gaetz said.
Online, journalists and other civil rights experts have noted that Bukele’s proposal seems blatantly illegal, particularly the idea of sending American citizens to a foreign prison.
“There are obviously legalities involved. We have a Constitution, we have all sorts of things,” Rubio said Tuesday at a press conference, “but it’s a very generous offer.”
The proposal comes after Trump recently suggested that American criminals be imprisoned abroad. At the time, Trump — who is himself a felon who recently pardoned violent insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol at his instigation — framed such an arrangement as necessary to stemming violent crime and to lowering the cost of private prisons for the government. And Trump was pretty excited about Bukele’s offer, saying Tuesday that “we’ll have to find that out legally. I’m just saying if we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat.”
One way to avoid incarceration costs would be to avoid policies, like mass deportation, that contribute to mass incarceration. To cite cost-cutting seems more like an effort to obscure Trump’s other priorities: appearing draconian in the punishment of crime while propping up an illiberal ruler and MAGA celebrity.