President Trump said on Tuesday that he was open to an offer by El Salvador’s president to jail convicted criminals, including American citizens, in the Central American nation’s notorious “megaprison.”
“If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Mr. Trump said.
He almost surely does not have the legal right to do it, legal experts say, and any attempt to carry out President Nayib Bukele’s plan would probably be challenged in court.
But Mr. Bukele’s proposal to essentially turn El Salvador into a penal colony for the United States showed how far he is willing to go to define himself as Mr. Trump’s primary ally in a region that the American president has disparaged. And for Mr. Trump, even musing over the proposal signaled his willingness to embrace extreme measures to show he is tough on crime and illegal immigration.
“It’s quite extraordinary and unprecedented and alarming in many ways,” said Michael E. Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue research institute in Washington. “I know a lot of experts have raised questions about the constitutionality and legality of this deal, but Bukele is a leader who has absolute power in El Salvador and it seems Trump seems to be moving in a similar direction in trying to reduce or eliminate any checks on his power.”
Mr. Bukele, who has reshaped his country by cracking down on both gangs and civil liberties, said he would be open to imprisoning the deportees in the Terrorism Confinement Center, a prison built to house 40,000 people that has sparked concern from human rights groups over extreme overcrowding and reports of torture by guards.
Despite questions over its legality, the proposal prompted praise from Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, as well as Elon Musk, the billionaire and powerful Trump adviser who has set about remaking the government. It would also involve jailing for a fee undocumented migrants from any country, not just El Salvador, who had been convicted of crimes.
“There’s obviously legalities involved. We have a Constitution,” Mr. Rubio told reporters in Costa Rica on Monday. “But it’s a very generous offer.”
But experts said that those “legalities” virtually precluded the basic premise of the deal.
“It is illegal to send U.S. prisoners to another country,” said Andrea Flores, vice president of immigration policy at the advocacy group FWD.us and a former National Security Council official. “It would likely be in violation of the Constitution and the protection against cruel and unusual treatment.”
While legal and immigration experts said the proposal to jail Americans was most likely just an effort by Mr. Bukele to placate Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump and his aides view El Salvador as a key partner for immigration enforcement. El Salvador signed what is known as a “safe third country” agreement in 2019 to receive non-Salvadorans detained in the United States. That deal was never implemented because of the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Trump’s immigration advisers, however, are interested in expanding such agreements throughout the region now that he is back in office, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Mr. Bukele stands out in Latin America as a leader who will jump at the opportunity to reinforce his ties with Mr. Trump, even if it means collaborating on his aggressive immigration policies. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Bukele has sought to forge an image of an iconoclast willing to crack down on crime while upending traditional government institutions.
While El Salvador once had one of the world’s highest murder rates, killings have plummeted as Mr. Bukele has used a state-of-emergency declaration and the military to arrest tens of thousands of people around the country, mostly without due process.
When Mr. Bukele offered the United States what he called “the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system” to El Salvador, he included images showing scores of shirtless tattooed prisoners bending over with their hands on their heads as armed guards in ballistic gear stood watch.
When he expressed support for Mr. Bukele’s proposal on Tuesday, Mr. Trump ranted about “hardened criminals” in the United States, a frequent complaint as he has sought to cultivate a law-and-order image. The numbers, however, have not neatly lined up with the image he seeks to project. Homicides rose during his first term before falling under his successor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“This is an administration where there’s a lot of show and a lot of fear, and nobody in Latin America is better at that than Nayib Bukele,” Mr. Shifter said. “I would expect to see a lot more show between Bukele and Trump and his administration.”
Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Costa Rica, and Hamed Aleaziz from Washington.
