Washington, DC | During the first two weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump unleashed a wave of executive orders and policies aimed at criminalizing and scapegoating migrants. These actions have been coupled with foreign policy efforts to externalize United States deadly detention and border policies. While other leaders in Latin America have denounced Trump’s attacks on their citizens, El Salvador’s authoritarian president Nayib Bukele is positioning the country as the U.S.’s principal partner in Trump’s campaign of criminalization. Bukele remains in office in violation of the Salvadoran constitution, which prohibits consecutive terms.

Following a phone conversation with Trump on January 23 and a visit from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on February 3, the U.S. has struck “multiple agreements” with Bukele, who, according to the State Department, “promised to accept and incarcerate violent illegal immigrants, including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, but also criminal illegal migrants from any country.”

Furthermore, the State Department reports that “Bukele offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents,” echoing an idea Trump floated in January.

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told NPR that there are Congressional safeguards in place regarding the deportation of non-citizens that require an agreement with a third country and guarantees for their safety, while deporting U.S. citizens is a “non-starter.”

During the first Trump administration, the U.S. brokered such an “asylum cooperation agreement” with El Salvador in 2019, though it never took effect, as well as with Honduras and Guatemala. The agreement with El Salvador would have allowed the U.S. to send non-Salvadoran asylum seekers to El Salvador and force them to apply for asylum there. Legal, human rights and faith groups widely condemned the policy on the grounds that El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were not safe for asylum seekers and would violate U.S. obligations regarding asylum protection. The Biden administration ended the agreements in 2021.

The new proposal on the table for El Salvador, however, would appear to do away altogether with any pretense of asylum protections. Instead, the U.S. is proposing something altogether new and terrifying: to outsource the incarceration of any migrants it may deem “violent” or “criminal.”

Salvadoran human rights experts and El Salvador’s lone progressive elected official responded to the announcements to lament that protecting Salvadoran migrants in the U.S. is “not a priority” for Bukele despite migrants and their families living in “anguish [and] uncertainty.”  In a recent statement, the Popular Resistance Bloc, a coalition of workers, students, and rural communities said, “While the government of Donald Trump violates the rights of our fellow Salvadorans and other migrant populations, Bukele bows down before it […] What the people want is for the rights of our compatriots in the U.S. to be respected and for our country to free the thousands of victims of the state of exception and end political persecution.”

Notably, following Rubio’s visit, the State Department announced that the U.S. would resume various U.S. security cooperation efforts with El Salvador amidst the universal freeze on foreign assistance.

In response to the announcements, religious, human rights defense, and international solidarity groups released the following statement: 

Regarding the announcements made following U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s February 3 visit to El Salvador that El Salvador will “accept and incarcerate … criminal illegal migrants from any country” who are deported from the U.S.:

First, we affirm our commitment to upholding universal human rights and dignity for all and we echo the communities and organizations in El Salvador and the diaspora who oppose Bukele’s acquiescence to the U.S. to further criminalize and endanger Salvadoran and other migrants.

Second, we denounce any agreement that the U.S. is negotiating in the region that violates the internationally protected right to asylum and the notion that El Salvador is a reliably “safe” destination for asylum seekers or migrants of any status. The world’s leading human rights organizations and institutions have documented the Bukele government’s widespread abuses, including as a result of suspension of due process and militarization of communities. The U.S. State Department’s own 2023 human rights report described “significant human rights issues included credible reports of: torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention.”

Feminist and human rights groups continue to report high numbers of disappearances, femicides, and violence against women and the LGBTQ population. Under Bukele’s State of Exception, foreign nationals, including citizens of the United States, Colombia, and elsewhere have also been subject to arbitrary arrest and remain in pretrial detention for years without due process.

Meanwhile, Salvadoran citizens continue to leave their country due to unemployment, fear of arbitrary arrest, and political persecution. Human rights organizations like Cristosal, Servicio Social Pasionista (SSPAS) and the Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la UCA (IDHUCA) have documented a troubling increase in cases of forced displacement related to state violence. In 2020 and 2022, 12.8% of the cases of internal forced displacement to which SSPAS attended cited the National Civil Police as the reason for their displacement. In their 2024 report “Silence is not an Option,” Cristosal reported that an astounding 42.7% of forced internal displacement cases attended cited the National Civil Police as the cause, compared to only 36.4% that cited the gangs.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency's (UNHCR) Refugee Data Finder, the number of displaced Salvadorans assisted by UNHCR in 2023 totaled 405,464, up from 332,383 in 2022 and 250,619 in 2018. This increase in the number of Salvadoran asylum seekers and refugees casts serious doubt on the Salvadoran government’s ability or willingness to protect foreign nationals who may be sent there.

Third, we reject the extreme cruelty, dehumanization, and injustice exemplified by El Salvador’s prisons, conditions to which neither citizens of El Salvador nor any other country should be subjected. We reject any suggestion that El Salvador’s is a model to be emulated, as right-wing voices close to Trump have claimed. Since March 2022, when the Bukele regime suspended constitutional rights under the State of Exception, the prison population has skyrocketed; El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Under this emergency measure, which remains in place in violation of El Salvador’s constitution, the vast majority of the more than 85,000 people arrested without warrants have languished in inhumane prisons for years without trial, let alone conviction, and without access to attorneys or communication with relatives. Salvadoran human rights organizations have documented between 261 and 366 deaths in prison during this period, many showing signs of torture, physical abuse, lack of medical care, and/or malnourishment.

The proposed Trump-Bukele agreements are driven by racist logic and aim to further the dehumanization, vilification, and criminalization of migrants. Since Trump’s first presidential run, he has used gangs to justify anti-immigrant policies. His latest boogeyman is Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, much as the MS-13 gang has been employed in the public imagination for decades. Bukele’s authoritarian and anti-democratic regime follows a tradition of right-wing leaders in El Salvador being complicit in the constant association of Salvadorans with criminality and violence.

The implications go far beyond the real danger posed to migrants. Bukele’s frequent deployment of images of tattooed gang members on social media, for example, aims not only to justify state violence against them but against the entire population as a part of a broader project of social control and criminalization of poverty. Bukele’s announcement that El Salvador would incarcerate U.S. citizens illustrates how anti-immigrant rhetoric serves to expand state violence to non-migrants, especially people of color and other marginalized and targeted groups, and how migrants are being used as a political tool to further the militarization of communities across the Americas. This alarming escalation confirms that defending immigrants’ rights is a fight for everyone’s rights.

Lastly, we reject the growing Trump-Bukele alliance, which only promises to escalate and institutionalize punitive carceral states in both countries, and we oppose the long-standing U.S. financial and political support for militarization, repressive policing, and prison infrastructure in El Salvador and throughout the region.

Alliance for Global Justice
American Friends Service Committee
Centro de Relaciones Internacionales Mira: Feminismos y Democracias, CDMX
Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
Friendship Office of the Americas
Latin America Working Group
Nación Salvadoreña en el Exterior
Network in Solidarity with Guatemala
Presbyterian Church, (U.S.A.), Office of Public Witness
Sisters of Mercy of the Americas – Justice Team
U.S.- El Salvador Sister Cities

February 12, 2025, Washington, DC

###

Media Contact: [email protected]