When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Central America in February on his first official trip abroad, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele made him an unusual offer: El Salvador would receive and detain people deported from the United States, as well as U.S. citizens convicted of crimes. Rubio described Bukele’s proposal as an “extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country” and said on X that it would make the United States safer.
Last weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump took Bukele up on his offer. The White House used an oblique 18th-century law written during wartime to deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, violating a federal judge’s ruling to halt the expulsions. The United States reportedly paid El Salvador $6 million to detain the migrants.
The American people must be clear-eyed about the prison system to which their government is sending deported migrants—which, in the worst-case scenario, could one day hold U.S. citizens, too. Although U.S. law prohibits the deportation of U.S. citizens, the Trump administration has shown a repeated proclivity to flout the rules and ignore judicial orders.
El Salvador and its prison system operate under what is known legally as a “state of exception.” In 2022, at Bukele’s request, the Salvadoran legislature authorized an emergency declaration to combat gang violence. The declaration suspended basic due process rights for Salvadorans and foreign nationals whom authorities accuse of being affiliated with gangs. Since then, the police and military have detained at least 85,000 people without judicial warrants, according to El Salvador’s legislature.
El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2 percent of the population in prison. The country’s prison population has exploded from an already overcrowded 38,000 people at the beginning of Bukele’s administration in 2019 to an estimated 120,000 people today. Most prisoners have not yet been convicted of any crime.
There are still no trial dates for the 85,000 people detained without warrants. If trials do materialize, there is little expectation that they will be fair. Salvadoran authorities announced that they will not prosecute the 85,000 people as individuals; rather, there will be mass trials of more than 900 people. Legal reforms to the criminal justice system passed during the state of exception allow Salvadoran prosecutors to seek sentences of 20 to 40 years in courts presided over by judges whose identities are secret.
Former prisoners have told Cristosal, the human rights organization that I work for, that they were greeted at prison gates by guards who beat them and warned that they would not leave the prison walking.
Despite the Bukele administration’s well-documented human rights abuses, the president’s offer to the United States has the backing of a viral marketing campaign. The government brags about its harsh treatment of prisoners and high incarceration rates online. It has produced high-resolution photos and videos of detainees and prisons that are distributed to the media and used in news reports around the world.
At the center of Bukele’s propaganda is El Salvador’s now infamous megaprison, the Terrorist Confinement Center (known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT), which opened in 2023 and can house up to 40,000 inmates. It is still operating at half its capacity. Government handout images and content from choreographed press visits to CECOT have appeared below many headlines about El Salvador’s state of exception in the international press. Prisoners have shaved heads, tattooed faces, and wear all-white outfits—including white Crocs.
Foreign journalists reporting on the state of exception who fixate on CECOT are likely focusing on the wrong prisoners in the wrong prison. The middle-aged faces and full-body tattoos that appear in the footage from the megaprison suggest that they are gang members who have likely been in prison since well before the state of exception began. (Most Salvadoran gangs abandoned the practice of tattooing their faces years ago.)
In a sample of 1,177 people imprisoned under the state of exception, Cristosal’s researchers found that only 54 had tattoos and only nine of that group were linked to gangs. Of the hundreds of family members of people detained under the state of exception whom Cristosal has interviewed, almost all have been told by prison authorities that their relatives are not being held at CECOT. Prisoners’ relatives were instructed to bring monthly packages of food, medicine, and clothing to older prisons in other parts of the country.
If the bodies of the 85,000 people detained without warrants bear any marks, they are more likely those of scabies and torture rather than tattoos. Testimonies gathered by Cristosal from former prisoners describe horrific overcrowding, disease, and systematic denial of food, clothing, medicine, and basic hygiene in El Salvador’s older prisons.
Cristosal and other human rights organizations have documented credible evidence of sexual assault and rape against women and children detained under the state of exception. The combination of harsh conditions and systematic physical torture has caused the deaths of at least 367 people, according to documentary, photographic, and forensic evidence gathered by Cristosal’s investigators. Salvadoran authorities deny that torture and killings occur in the country’s prisons.
In the majority of those cases, our researchers found that detainees had no criminal records and no evidence of gang tattoos. None had been convicted of any crime at the time of their deaths. According to testimonies of people who knew the deceased, the majority had no links to gangs other than the fact that many have themselves been victims of gang violence. Instead, they were poor, surviving on the margins of the economy—often in centers of gang control that became focal points of the government’s mass roundups. They were farmers, unionists, day laborers, and informal merchants; four were newborn babies born in prison to mothers who were pregnant at the time of their arrests.
Cristosal’s testimonial evidence indicates that the death toll in prisons during the state of exception is likely much higher than 367. But the lack of public information about and transparency within the Salvador penal system obstructs more systematic monitoring. Most family members of prisoners don’t know if their relatives are dead or alive.
El Salvador’s prisons have become a focal point for criminality and corruption involving members of Bukele’s security cabinet. Osiris Luna, the director of the prisons and a Bukele loyalist, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2021 for leading secret meetings in prisons in which the Bukele administration provided gangs with financial incentives and protection from extradition if they kept incidents of violence low. In these illicit dealings, “gang leadership also agreed to provide political support to the Nuevas Ideas political party [Bukele’s party] in upcoming elections,” Treasury wrote in its designation of Luna.
In 2021, the Bukele administration released a high-ranking gang member from maximum security prison, despite the fact that he faced U.S. extradition requests to face terrorism charges in a New York federal court. Treasury also accused Luna of conspiring with his mother “in a scheme to steal and re-sell government purchased staple goods that were originally destined for COVID-19 pandemic relief.” According to an El Faro investigation, Luna employed prison labor to repackage the stolen pandemic aid.
Despite international sanctions and credible allegations of acts corruption, torture, rape, and killings in the prisons under his authority, Luna has thus far been immune from prosecution. His authority over El Salvador’s prisons is unrestrained by judicial oversight.
Cristosal has made multiple requests to Salvadoran courts to order alternatives to pretrial detention for people with physical and mental disabilities, chronic illness, and who are pregnant. In the rare case that courts do order a prisoner’s release, prison authorities often block them from being returned to their families. Relatives fear that may be because the prisoners are no longer alive.
Those families have learned—painfully—that the government institutions mandated to protect them now do the bidding of the president rather than the law.
In El Salvador, it often falls on the mothers, sisters, and wives of the thousands of unjustly imprisoned people to knock on the doors of prisons, courts, or the public defender’s office to demand their freedom. In return, the relatives are threatened with prison themselves. Last year, a coalition of family members of people detained under the state of exception made a two-day march from their coastal villages to Bukele’s house in the capital to demand the right to visit their relatives in prison. They just wanted to know if their loved ones were still alive, they told media.
Under the state of exception, El Salvador’s prisons have become a system where undesirables are exiled in the model of penal colonies favored by empires and autocrats. Now that Trump has taken Bukele up on his “generous offer,” as Rubio called it, Americans, and the families of migrants who hoped to call the United States home, should prepare to join their Salvadoran counterparts in the deceptive bargain of security in exchange for rights.
All will learn of the horror and isolation of confronting the repressive power of a state that has declared you an enemy. They will learn to count the sleepless nights of not knowing if their loved ones are dead or alive. To stop it, they will have to become unrelenting in both hope and action to safeguard the lives and freedom of their loved ones—disappeared to Bukele’s penal colony, beyond the reach of rule of law, unprotected from corruption, torture, and killing.
