El Salvador’s offer to take in US deportees and violent criminals is unlike any other migrant deal

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador has offered to take in people deported from the U.S. for entering the country illegally and to house some of the country’s violent criminals — even if they’re American citizens.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after a meeting Monday with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, proclaimed it the most “unprecedented, extraordinary” offer the country has yet received during the ongoing wave of global migration.

Details on the deal are scant, and immigration and constitutional experts question its legality. Here’s what you need to know:

What's El Salvador offering?

Bukele, who took office in 2019, says he’s offering a release valve for America's vast prison system.

Writing on X, he said the Central American nation will allow the U.S. to “outsource” part of its inmate population, but it will only take in convicted criminals.

The U.S. would have to pay El Salvador to house the prisoners, though he did not disclose an asking price.

Bukele said the going rate would be “relatively low” for the U.S., but significant for his country — enough to make its “entire prison system sustainable.”

Where do they want to house U.S. criminals?

Bukele has proposed housing U.S. criminals in the mega-prison his administration opened in 2023 to tame MS-13 and other powerful street gangs.

The maximum-security facility is about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southeast of the capital city of San Salvador and is known as CECOT, a Spanish acronym that translates to “terrorism confinement center.”

The facility can house up to 40,000 people across eight sprawling pavilions, where each cell holds up to 70 prisoners.

Human rights organizations say the bare-bones setting is overly harsh. Inmates are not allowed visitors or time outside.

They are served just one meal a day and are not offered educational or reintegration programs typically found at other prisons, save for the occasional motivational talk or exercise regimen under strict supervision.

The prison’s dining halls, break rooms, gym and board games are for guards only, and administration officials have said inmates will never return to their communities.

Is this even legal?

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their native land is legal, but deporting American citizens is almost certainly not.

Under U.S. immigration law, a country such as El Salvador can accept someone deported from the U.S. who isn’t a citizen of that country if the person’s homeland refuses to accept them, says Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former homeland security official under the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

What’s more, she noted, deportation is a legal term that applies only to someone physically removed from the country because they have violated some provision of the immigration act, which applies only to “aliens.”

So what about American citizens?

Naturalized U.S. citizens, in rare cases, can be denaturalized and revert to green-card status, such as if they lied on their initial immigration forms or committed a serious crime such as funding a terrorist group, according to Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert and retired Cornell Law School professor.

Green card holders can then be deported if they’re convicted of any number of crimes, including murder, assault, burglary, tax evasion, domestic violence and illegal firearms possession, he said.

Natural-born U.S. citizens, however, maintain their citizenship through the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which outlines the rights guaranteed to all citizens, such as due process and equal protection under the law.

“So, just as President Trump can’t eliminate birthright citizenship by himself, so too the U.S. government cannot deport U.S. citizens, even if they have committed crimes,” Yale-Loehr said.

Why is El Salvador doing this?

El Salvador is attempting to turn the page on decades of civil war and violence from MS-13 and other street gangs that long made it one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

Under Bukele, the country of 6 million residents declared a state of emergency in 2022, suspending constitutional rights and launching a fierce crackdown on gangs that’s led to the arrest of more than 80,000 people.

Bukele’s popularity has soared as crime plummeted to a record low of 114 homicides last year, but human rights groups have complained that many people are being unjustly detained without due process rights.

Has this been done before elsewhere?

The U.S. and other nations have reached deals to deal with migrants but nothing quite like what El Salvador’s leader proposes.

Britain has an agreement with Rwanda to send asylum-seekers to the East African country, though the accord has been stymied in the U.K. courts.

Trump also struck agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to take in U.S. asylum seekers in 2019, during his first term as president.

Guatemala was the only one of the three agreements that took effect. More than 900 people from El Salvador and Honduras were sent, but few sought asylum and instead continued on to their own countries in what became known as ” deportation with a layover.”

President Joe Biden canceled the three agreements in 2021.

What are the next steps?

Trump praised the offer Tuesday, saying it would serve as “great deterrent” but acknowledged it might not pass legal muster.

“I’m just saying if we had a legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat," he said in the Oval Office. "I don’t know if we do or not. We’re looking at that.”

Rubio similarly called El Salvador’s offer “generous,” but stressed that the Republican administration will need to study the proposal before making any commitments.

“There are obviously legalities involved,” he said Tuesday at a news conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, with Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves. “We have a constitution. We have all sorts of things.”

That hasn’t stopped Bukele from making the most of the renewed attention.

He’s joked El Salvador would even take in disgraced former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, who was sentenced last week to 11 years in federal prison for accepting bribes of gold and cash and acting as an agent of Egypt.

“Yes,” Bukele wrote on X, “we’ll gladly take him in.”

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Marcelo reported from New York. Associated Press reporters Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Matthew Lee in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this story.

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Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.