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On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that El Salvador’s president has agreed to accept people of any nationality who are deported from the U.S — a proposal that experts have said would likely violate international laws regarding the rights of migrants.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele also agreed to allow the U.S. to deport incarcerated people to El Salvador, even if they are U.S. citizens, Rubio said during a state visit to the country.
Rubio, who was meeting with Bukele to sign an unrelated nuclear agreement, called the deal “the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world.” He said that the deal would allow the U.S. to deport to El Salvador “dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentence in the United States even though they’re U.S. citizens or legal residents.”
The Trump administration indicated that it has no plans to deport U.S. citizens who are currently incarcerated, but celebrated the deal nonetheless.
Bukele confirmed the deal on his X account, writing that the agreement included the U.S. paying a “relatively low” fee to transport immigrants and citizens to the country.
Legal and civil rights experts decried the plan, noting that it wouldn’t stand up to legal scrutiny.
“The US is absolutely prohibited from deporting U.S. citizens, whether they are incarcerated or not,” University of California-Berkeley law professor Leti Volpp told CNN.
Emerson College international politics professor Mneesha Gellman agreed, calling the proposal “bizarre and unprecedented,” and saying that the deal was “being made potentially between two authoritarian, populist, right-wing leaders seeking a transactional relationship.”
“It’s not rooted in any sort of legal provision and likely violates a number of international laws relating to the rights of migrants,” Gellman added.
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) president Roman Palomares also panned the proposal, saying that the organization “opposes treating deported non-criminal migrants like cattle who can be shuttled from one country to another without regard to their home of origin.”
Bukele’s government has been internationally condemned for its authoritarianism and glaring violations of human rights. Amnesty International has warned of the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence” under Bukele’s presidency, for example.
The U.S. State Department has also recognized that El Salvador has seen a number of civil rights diminish under Bukele’s tenure, including rights for incarcerated people, writing on its website in 2022 that:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, forced disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including censorship and threats to enforce criminal laws to limit expression; serious government corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for gender-based violence; significant barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services; and crimes involving violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.
The agreement between El Salvador and the U.S. comes as President Donald Trump has enacted a series of inhumane immigration standards since taking office, leading to widespread racial profiling and a multitude of cases in which U.S. citizens have been detained without probable cause.
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