In early February, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele made an unprecedented and controversial offer: to incarcerate U.S. citizens in El Salvador. The move came as President Donald Trump has ramped up his mass deportation plans during his first two months in office.
In this episode, host Maria Hinojosa sits down with journalists Roman Gressier, editor of El Faro English and host of the podcast “Central America in Minutes,” and Lilia Luciano, CBS News 24/7 anchor and correspondent, to discuss the growing relationship between the United States and El Salvador.
Bukele, who entered politics from the ranks of the leftist FMLN Party, won the presidency in 2019 promising to crack down on gangs and violence.
Part of that approach included the opening of a mega-prison in 2023, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, also known as CECOT.
“It’s clear that Nayib Bukele is a professional marketer. He’s a publicist,” Lilia Luciano told Latino USA. “And I think the pinnacle of his brand and the hemisphere is this prison.”
The prison, which was built to hold up to 40,000 inmates, is notorious for human rights violations. And after Bukele enforced a national state of exception in El Salvador that suspended constitutional liberties like due process, many prisoners remain incarcerated without trial or visits.
CECOT is where U.S. citizens convicted of crime and deported to El Salvador could potentially end up if Bukele’s offer was ever accepted and implemented. But it’s an offer that would likely face extraordinary legal challenges.
“Part of it was rhetorical, in the sense that it’s probably legally impossible for [President Donald Trump] to send U.S. citizens to be incarcerated in El Salvador,” said Roman Gressier. “But on the other hand, in a very concrete way, they were resuming the migration cooperation that dated back to Trump’s first term.”
So while it’s not likely to move forward, the offer itself signals a new chapter in the long history between the two countries, and in the political landscape of the broader region.
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Produced by Nour Saudi and edited by Andrea López-Cruzado. It was mixed by Leah Shaw Dameron.
Featured image by AP Photo/Evan Vucci.
