On Monday morning, El Salvador’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, visited Donald Trump in the White House in a symbolic show of strengthening the link between the two countries. Bukele is the first Latin American president to receive such an invitation since Trump’s election.
The visit comes as the two leaders have identified how they can be useful to each other. Trump needs Bukele to skirt US laws and enact a cornerstone of his agenda, mass deportation. Bukele needs Trump to sustain El Salvador’s massive, unsustainable prison population.
On March 16, 2025, El Salvador received a US deportation flight of 238 Venezuelans along with Salvadorans of various documentation statuses. They were incarcerated in El Salvador’s megaprison, the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), placing them in legal limbo. The conditions of those incarcerated in El Salvador are notorious and likely violate a number of human rights under international law. The United States is paying El Salvador a fee of $6 million per year to house some three hundred deported people.
Those incarcerated include a Maryland father, Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran with no criminal record who won a withholding of removal in US immigration court years ago. He was nonetheless illegally detained and deported to CECOT, seemingly by mistake. The Supreme Court issued an opinion on April 10 that Abrego García’s return should be facilitated, but not effectuated, by the United States, because mandating his return would infringe on Salvadoran sovereignty, as he is now under jurisdiction of the Salvadoran state.
Trump could admit the government’s mistake of accusing Abrego García of being an MS-13 gang member and demand his return. Instead, he and his adviser Stephen Miller…
Auteur: Mneesha Gellman
