Lockup currently houses thousands of members of gangs that terrorized the Central American country for decades

Inmates in a cell during a January press tour organized by the Salvadoran presidency. Photo: Marvin RECINOS/AFP/Getty Images

Feb. 5, 2025 5:30 am ET – By Santiago Pérez – Wall Street Journal

My cmnt: There is no question that criminal illegal aliens in our prisons should be immediately transferred to this prison in El Salvador. Having the American taxpayer feed and house these people is beyond stupid and something only democrats could think up. You break into our country and then break our criminal laws and then expect us to feed and house and medicate you for the rest of your miserable life is just absurd. Even our own citizen criminals should be housed there if they are violent and have been in and out of prison multiple times. That would be a great incentive to go straight if you knew continued violent, criminal activity would wind you up in El Salvador!

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador—No visits from wives, girlfriends or children. Sleeping arrangements are stainless-steel cots stacked several layers high in large cells packed with dozens of inmates. And roommates include some of the senior leadership of Latin America’s most notorious gangs.

The harsh conditions of El Salvador’s Confinement Center for Terrorism, a mega-prison opened in 2023, are currently reserved for thousands of gang members who terrorized the country for decades. If President Nayib Bukele and President Trump have their way, America’s worst criminals are destined for El Salvador’s biggest prison as well. 

Bukele offered the U.S. use of the prison, known as CECOT, during a visit this week from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the Trump administration would be open to deporting to El Salvador both criminal migrants and American citizens. Rubio said the legal basis for sending U.S. nationals to a foreign prison would need to be studied, something Trump acknowledged to reporters.

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele offers to house deportees of any nationality from the U.S., including incarcerated American citizens, in the country’s maximum-security prison. Photo: Mark Schiefelbein/Reuters

“If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Trump said in the Oval Office Tuesday. “I don’t know if we do or not. We’re looking at that right now, but we could make deals where we’d get these animals out of our country.”

Sending Americans to serve their sentences in a foreign prison would prompt court challenges, according to legal experts. The U.S. Constitution entitles citizens to medical care, basic hygienic living conditions and protection from excessive force. A federal statute requires incarcerated individuals to be placed within a few hundred miles of their primary residences.

However the legal fights play out, Trump’s push to deport migrants has given Bukele another chance to highlight his crime-fighting efforts and the prison that many experts have said helped transform a country once known for having the world’s highest murder rate into one of the safest in Latin America, in just a few years.

Regarded as the world’s largest correctional facility, the mega-prison was intended to hold up to 40,000 members of the street gangs that long held sway in this Massachusetts-size country of 6.3 million. Before CECOT, gangs largely controlled the prisons. Some facilities were called crime universities and command centers for rackets.

When CECOT opened, Bukele, who cut his teeth at his family’s advertising firm, posted videos on social media showing convoys of buses arriving at dawn at the facility, a labyrinth of concrete and steel watched by armed prison guards and soldiers from towers almost 50 feet high.

The video recordings showed guards in riot gear corralling the handcuffed inmates, barefoot, shirtless, their heads shaved and their torsos and faces covered with gothic-style tattoos as a tenebrous soundtrack played in the background. There are now close to 15,000 convicted gang members there.

A guard standing watch at the Salvadoran prison in February 2024. Photo: Alex Peña/Getty images

“They will spend the rest of their lives in prison,” Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said at the time. Most of the imprisoned gang members were responsible for more than 80,000 deaths in the past 30 years, he said.

Bukele warned that if gangs moved to retaliate, “I swear to God they won’t eat a grain of rice, and we’ll see how long they last.”

The huge, gleaming prison has captured the imagination of hard-line conservatives around the globe—especially in the U.S. A host of Trump’s allies have visited the center and posed for photos in its halls, hailing Bukele’s aggressive crackdown as a model to be emulated.

Bukele said any fees for holding American prisoners would be easy for the U.S. to handle, and a boon to his smaller country. 

Trump had floated the idea before, in language that Bukele appeared to echo on Monday. “Let them be brought to a foreign land and maintained by others for a very small fee,” Trump said at a conference in Miami last month.

Human-rights groups said the new facility was another step toward authoritarian rule under Bukele, who took office in 2019 and began arresting suspected gang members en masse in 2022. Since then, he has ruled under emergency powers that suspend civil liberties including due process. El Salvador now has the world’s highest incarceration rate—about triple that of the U.S., according to World Prison Brief, which tracks security and prison data.

Activists accused the Bukele administration of thousands of arbitrary detentions. At CECOT, a ban on jail visits meant that many children were unable to see their parents, causing psychological damage, rights groups said.

An officer monitoring prisoners at the Confinement Center for Terrorism. Photo: Alex Peña/Getty Images

“El Salvador wants everyone to think we’re a first-world country now, the most secure place in the world,” said Alfredo Mejía, head of the rights group Movir, which advocates for families of detainees. “But we have no guarantees, no rights.”

While Mejía said he supported locking up hardened gangsters like those at CECOT, Bukele’s security push has come at a great cost to families, including his own. For 33 months, Mejía said, his 25-year-old daughter, Carla Mejía, has been detained at a separate women’s facility and hasn’t been able to consult a lawyer or her family, which maintains that she is innocent. Each month, Mejía said, he has to deliver a box of basic food and hygiene products to the prison, supplies that set him back about $125, a hefty toll in a country where people on average make less than $500 monthly. 

Movir has received scores of complaints from detainees’ families over the unpaid labor that prisoners are forced to perform—such as sewing police and school uniforms. Families said they are asked to pay bribes of up to $500 to visit their loved ones for 20 minutes. “They turned it into a business,” Mejía said. “I call it exploitation.”