El Salvador has now reportedly offered to take deportees of any nationality from the United States, including American citizens who are currently detained and would be housed in the nation’s maximum-security prison, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday.
Whether the United States would accept the offer was unclear. Regarding what such a plan could involve, a State Department official declined to comment.
Legal issues would very definitely arise if U.S. nationals were to spend their sentences in an El Salvadorian prison.
According to Betsy Ginsberg, a professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School, prisoners are entitled to medical treatment, basic hygienic living conditions, and protection from excessive force under the Constitution.
The Bureau of Prisons, which is in charge of federal prisoners, is required by another federal law to keep the majority of those behind bars within a few hundred miles of their principal residence.
The Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), the world’s largest jail, was constructed to house 40,000 criminals, and Bukele said he had given the United States “the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system.”
Photos of the shiny prison with rows of tattooed gang members without shirts holding their hands above their heads were featured in his statement on X.
Rubio visited Bukele’s lakefront home on the beaches of Lago de Coatepeque earlier Monday to talk about steps to increase security cooperation and stop illegal immigration.
Later, in an effort to deepen strategic ties between the two nations, he also signed a memorandum of understanding for civil nuclear cooperation.
Since 2022, Bukele has ruled under emergency powers, suspending fundamental basic liberties, including as due process, in order to combat gangs.
With a population of 6.3 million, the highest incarceration rate in the world currently stands at one in 57 Salvadorans.
However, these actions have also made Bukele extremely popular both domestically and internationally, making a nation that was once the murder capital of the world safer than Canada.
[READ MORE: Trump Admin Begins Flying Migrants to Guantanamo Bay]
