The El Salvador Model and the U.S. War on Migrants

“No country has ever made an offer of friendship such as this.” These were the words of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio upon receiving an unprecedented offer from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during their meeting in early February. Like his Central American neighbors, Bukele had offered to receive deportees from the United States. But the self-described dictator went one step further: he offered, “for a fee,” to “house in his jails dangerous American criminals.”

Rubio is correct; experts have struggled to find a modern example of a country sending its own citizens to a foreign jail. Sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador — or any citizen to another country’s prisons — would represent a major violation of international human rights law.

Legal formalities aside, in the wake of the announcement, rights groups such as Cristosal and Amnesty International denounced the plan. They argued that it would only exacerbate the ongoing human rights abuses in Salvadoran prisons — this time, for profit. They also pointed out that it would be hypocritical for the U.S. State Department to send its citizens to prisons that it has itself described as places of torture, with “harsh and life-threatening conditions.”

Rights groups also fear that the Trump administration’s ongoing violent conflation of migrants convicted of criminal offenses with those who have simply entered the U.S. unlawfully — a civil violation, not a criminal offense — will result in more innocent people being imprisoned. It may also result in trumped up charges against vulnerable migrants, as the turn toward housing deportees in sites meant for “terrorists,” from El Salvador to Guantánamo Bay, has already so harrowingly revealed.

The world’s largest jailer and the world’s largest prison

The Salvadoran prison system has garnered much attention since the start of the country’s state of exception in March 2022. That month, the country’s two major gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, went on a killing spree that left 87 people dead. In response, the Bukele government meted out a swift response: it declared a state of exception that suspended all constitutional guarantees and incentivized the detention of anybody with even the slightest suspicion of gang affiliation.  

The results of the crackdown have been stunning. Between 2022 and 2024, over 80,000 Salvadorans were detained in the government’s war on “gangs.” Very quickly, El Salvador became the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 1,086 per 100,000 as of June 2024, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

The crackdown has devastated families and swept up thousands of innocent men. Santiago, who asked to remain anonymous, recounted how his son was “captured” during the military’s siege of Soyapango in December 2022. His son, who was 20 at the time, was taken during a military operation in which troops went door-to-door in search of “gang members.”  After threatening to detain his wife when she begged them not to take her son, the officials said they were going to take him to the police station for investigation. No evidence was ever provided to justify his arrest.

According to Samuel Ramírez, the coordinator of the Movement for Victims of the Regime, this story is all too common. Ramírez said that many of the 80,000 people were detained without investigation or evidence before their capture. After their capture, those unlucky enough to be swept up in a raid have no guarantees of due process and often languish for months or years in jail with no progress on their case.

“The prosecution cannot prove their guilt, so they keep asking for extensions for provisional detention. Meanwhile, people are dying in prisons from illnesses, lack of food or mistreatment. There are also women captured while pregnant — it’s a serious human rights violation,” Ramírez said. In mid-February, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly approved a law that will transfer children to adult prisons.

Human rights groups have reported that at least 265 people have died in custody. Many of these deaths occurred in the country’s new Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a facility with a capacity of 40,000 that is specifically designed to house terrorists. By capacity, it is the world’s largest prison. It is precisely to CECOT that Bukele has offered to send convicted criminals from the United States.

While Bukele has acknowledged that some detainees may be innocent, Ramírez’s work with victims and their families makes him believe that this is a significant understatement. “People who were victims of the gangs, extorted by them, now have family members captured by the regime,” he said.

Torture and mistreatment ‘by design’

El Salvador’s prisons are notoriously brutal. According to Santiago, his son was treated like a slave. Over the course of 25 months, his son was put to work in three prisons across the country with no pay and limited food. He was recently released, with help from Ramírez.

In Salvadoran prisons like CECOT, prisoners do not receive visits and are never allowed outside. Excluding 30 minutes for indoor exercise, prisoners spend all day in cells holding 65 to 70 prisoners. There are no workshops or educational or rehabilitation programs.

These bleak conditions have been confirmed by scores of human rights organizations. Amnesty International has sent five missions to El Salvador since 2022 to document human rights abuses in the country’s prisons. “We have heard horrific accounts in terms of mistreatment, torture and different forms of punishment,” said Ana Piquer, the Americas director at Amnesty International. “It’s a system that by design is mistreating and torturing people.”

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence of violations, rights groups say that the Salvadoran government has met their findings with silence, indifference and a lack of transparency. But it is not just human rights organizations that have criticized the country’s prisons.

In 2023, the U.S. State Department described the country’s prisons as “severely overcrowded” and found that they have “significant human rights issues.” These included the limiting of inmates to “two tortillas, one spoonful of beans and one glass of water per day,” as well the prevalence of “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, or punishment.”

Nevertheless, the United States is taking seriously the possibility of sending deportees and American citizens to El Salvador’s prisons. That is no surprise to Mneesha Gellman, a professor at Emerson College who sees the proposed policy as emblematic of the wider contradictions at the heart of U.S. foreign policy under the Trump administration. By sending deportees to a prison that it knows regularly subjects people to egregious acts of violence, Gellman said, the United States is showing a willingness to be hypocritical to serve a particular political agenda, something it has done “time and time again.”

Guantánamo and the criminalization of migration

While Bukele confirmed in a post on X that El Salvador will only take “convicted criminals,” experts are worried that having irregular immigration status in the United States has become a criminal offense. The labeling of all migrants as criminals has become a key tactic to garner popular support for Trump’s mass deportation plan.

Human rights groups fear that without due process and clear distinctions between these labels, innocent people targeted for deportation may end up in CECOT. “Trump has talked about doubling down on criminalizing irregular immigrants. So would that mean that people might end up in a terrorism facility just because they don’t have their papers in order?” said Piquer.

The Trump administration’s policy of sending deportees to the military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, seems to suggest that is already the case. In late January, Trump signed an executive order calling for the expansion of the “migrant operations center” at Guantánamo Bay. The base, best known for housing suspected terrorists during the U.S. “War on Terror,” has held migrants stopped at sea trying to cross into the United States from Haiti and Cuba for the past two decades. Trump called for the transfer of upward of 30,000 migrants to the detention facilities on the island.

The detention center is nearly empty after it was cleared of most deportees in the face of civil rights lawsuits on Feb. 19. Those lawsuits have so far limited the number of deportees held at the detention center — as of last count there were 17 men at Guantánamo Bay. Nevertheless, it may not remain so sparsely populated. In addition, the early results of the administration’s experiment reveal the dangers of criminalizing irregular migration status.

Of the nearly 180 deportees sent to Guantánamo last week, almost a third had not been convicted of any crime beyond crossing the border illegally. Contrary to claims made by the Department of Homeland Security of supposed gang membership, no solid evidence has been provided to substantiate this claim. In the face of pushback, a senior Homeland Security official told CNN that all deportees sent to Guantánamo were considered to have “committed a crime by entering the United States illegally.”

This is the first time that the U.S. government has taken people detained on U.S. soil to an overseas detention facility. Moreover, the U.S. military has been tasked with guarding the detainees, a role typically done by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

A shared anti-Democratic agenda

The criminalization of migration in the United States is an extension of the same right-wing populism that is being used to justify mass crackdowns and the criminalization of alleged gang members in El Salvador. It is a much more politically popular project in El Salvador. Still, the project to label both “migrants” and “gang members” as “terrorists,” as well as to justify widespread false imprisonment on the grounds of “national security,” links both of these right-wing authoritarian projects.

They are also linked by the myopia of their visions. Rights groups and analysts say that Trump’s response to migrants and Bukele’s response to gangs do more than violate the human rights of tens of thousands of vulnerable people. Their “tough on crime” approaches fail to address the larger issues. Such short-term solutions, warns Piquer, do “not attend to the root causes: they cause more harm than good.”

The illusion of peace that these governments have established is really a “mirage that pretends to conceal a repressive system,” said Piquer. In reality, Trump and Bukele have constructed “structures of control and oppression” that “disregard the rights of those who were already invisible — people living in poverty, under state stigma and marginalization — all in the name of a supposed security.”

When asked if they believe the international community will step in to condemn these systems of abuse, neither Piquer nor Gellman were optimistic. The recent threats of U.S. economic sanctions against intransigent leaders serves as a warning to those countries that dare challenge the new status quo.