San Salvador, El Salvador (AP) – U.S. Foreign Minister Marco Rubio left El Salvador on Tuesday with an agreement by the President of this country to accept deported from the United States, including violent American criminal, which are now detained in the USA.
President Nayib Bukele “approved the most unusual, extraordinary and extraordinary migration contract all over the world,” said Rubio, after having met bubel in his lakeside country house outside of San Salvador.
“We can send them and he will put them into his prisons,” said Rubio about migrants of all nationalities held in the United States. “And he also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals who are currently in custody and serve their punishments in the United States, even though they are US citizens or legal residents.”
Rubio visited El Salvador to push a amiable government to do more to meet President Donald Trump’s demands after a great action against immigration.
Bukele confirmed the offer in a position on X and said that El Salvador “offered the United States the opportunity to outsource part of his prison system”. He said his country would only accept “convicted criminals” and raise a fee that “would be relatively low for the USA, but is important for us what makes our entire prison system sustainable”.
Elon Musk, the billionaire who worked with Trump to redesign the federal government, replied on his X platform “Great idea !!”.
After Rubio had spoken, a American official said Trump’s Republican administration had no current plans to deport American citizens, but called Bukele’s offer. The US government cannot deport American citizens, and such a step would be set with considerable legal challenges.
The Foreign Ministry describes the crowded prisons of El Salvador as “hard and dangerous”. On its current website of country information it says: “In many facilities, provisions for sanitary facilities, drinking water, ventilation, temperature control and lighting are inappropriate or not available.”
El Salvador has lived under a state of emergency since March 2022 when the mighty street gangs of the country went a killing killing spree. Bukele replied by suspending fundamental rights such as access to lawyers, and the authorities have arrested more than 83,000 people with little or no proper procedure.
In 2023, Bukele opened a massive modern prison with capacity for 40,000 gang members and praised to serve only one meal a day. Prisoners do not get visits there, and there are no programs that they prepare according to their sentences and no workshops or educational programs for resolution to society.
El Salvador, once one of the most unsafe countries in the world, concluded last year with a record of 114 murders, a newly discovered security that Bukele’s high -striving popularity in the country promoted around 6 million inhabitants.
Rubio arrived in San Salvador shortly after watching a deportation flight financed by the USA with 43 migrants from Panama to Colombia. This came a day after Rubio Panama warned that the United States would act if the government did not immediately remove China’s presence in the Panama Canal.
However, migration was the main problem of the day because it will be five-nation-central American tour through Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic to Panama and El Salvador for the next stations on Rubios.
His tour takes place in a time of turbulence in Washington about the status of the government’s most essential foreign development agency.
Trump’s administration prioritizes priority to prevent people from traveling to the USA and has worked with the regional countries to enhance the enforcement enforcement at their limits and accept deported from the United States.
The agreement that Rubio has described for El Salvador, which in the United States to accept for violations of US immigration laws, is referred to as a “safe third country”. Officials have proposed that this could be an option for members of the Venezuelan gangs who are convicted of crimes in the United States should Venezuela refuse to accept them, but Rubio said that Bukele’s offer was a nationality for prisoners.
Rubio said Bukele then went on and said that his country was ready to accept and detain the US citizens or legal residents who were convicted of violent crime.
Human rights activists have warned that El Salvador lacks a consistent policy for the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees and that such an agreement may not be constrained to violent criminals.
Manuel Flores, the general secretary of the left opposition party Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, criticized the “safe third country” plan and said it would signal that the Washington region “back yard to drop the trash”.
After the meeting with Bukele, Rubio signed a memorandum of understanding with his Salvadoranian counterpart to promote the civil cooperation between US-EL Salvador. The document could lead to a more formal agreement on cooperation in nuclear power and medicine that the United States have with numerous countries.
While Rubio was from the United States, on Monday it was instructed to commission employees of the US Agency for International Development to keep the agency from the Washington headquarters after Musk announced that Trump had agreed to close the agency.
Thousands of USAID employees had already been released and programs were closed. Rubio said reporters in San Salvador that he was now the incumbent administrator of USAID, but delegated this authority so that he would not do his daily operations.
The change means that USAI is no longer an independent government agency, as it was for decades – although its modern status is likely to be challenged to court – and is not triggered by the foreign ministry by department officials.
In his comments, Rubio emphasized that some and perhaps many USAID programs would continue in the modern configuration, but the switch was necessary because the agency had not become accountable for the executive and the congress.
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AP Warriter Marcos is San Salvador and contributed to this report.
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