Bukele is opening his country’s prisons to house Venezuelans and Salvadorans

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele became a MAGA icon with a crackdown on violent crime, locking up tens of thousands of gang members after imposing a state of emergency that suspended civil and constitutional rights.

Now, the former advertising executive is President Trump’s main Latin American ally in carrying out mass deportations of Venezuelans and Salvadorans that the U.S. asserted were criminal gang members.

On Saturday, the Salvadoran government accepted three planes carrying 238 Venezuelans accused of being members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, along with another 23 men alleged to belong to El Salvador’s nearly extinct MS-13 gang. A U.S. federal judge tried to halt the flights, but senior administration officials, opted to go ahead, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

“Oopsie…too late,” Bukele posted about the judge’s ruling on X with a laughing emoji, a message that was reposted by a White House official who shared it with a meme that said “Boom!”

With Bukele’s acceptance of the deported migrants, all of whom were jailed in the country’s maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center, the 43-year-old leader has cemented himself as a trusted partner for Trump in a region that is bristling at the way the U.S. is handling deportations.

Trump’s plans depend in part on third countries taking in flights of people expelled from the U.S., among them Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama.

“He’s good friends with Trump and Musk and (Secretary of State Marco) Rubio—all the different factions within the Trump administration,” said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Washington policy group, Inter-American Dialogue.

“Everyone likes Bukele.” Bukele doesn’t need pressure to take in migrants. He is a full-throated advocate of Trump’s approach. On X he said the operation was “advancing the fight against organized crime,” while forging an alliance with Washington.

El Salvador’s cooperation was laid out in a February meeting at the Salvadoran president’s lake house with Rubio. Bukele described the deportation agreement as a way for the U.S. to “outsource part of its prison system” to El Salvador’s mega-prison for a “relatively low” fee.

The transfer of Venezuelans to El Salvador drew rebuke from Venezuela’s authoritarian government, which has been a fierce rival of Bukele. Jorge Rodríguez, a senior aide to Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, on Monday urged his countrymen not to travel to the U.S. More than eight million Venezuelans have fled Maduro’s reign.

“It’s not a safe country in the current moment,” Rodríguez said of the U.S.Washington is paying Bukele’s government $6 million to take the deportees over the weekend, the White House said. “That is pennies on the dollar in comparison to the cost it would impose on the American taxpayer to house these terrorists in maximumsecurity prisons here,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Monday.

A former nightclub owner who cut his teeth at his family’s advertising firm, Bukele became mayor of the capital for the dominant leftist political movement, the FMLN, before launching New Ideas, his own political party, and becoming El Salvador’s youngest president in 2019.

Seeking to transform a country of six million that had long lived on remittances sent by Salvadorans in the U.S., Bukele adopted bitcoin as legal tender in his bid to make El Salvador a regional hub for tech and crypto—a Central American Singapore, he said.

But what has made him wildly popular was his hard-line crusade that has led to the detention of more than 80,000 suspected gang members.

Criminal groups had long made El Salvador a murder capital and stunted economic growth, while driving compatriots to migrate to the U.S. Business has begun to flourish in town plazas and street markets where gangs and extortion had prevailed.

To push through his measures, Bukele strengthened his hold on the state, taking control over the judiciary and legislature. He defied a constitutional ban on re-election, winning another term in 2024 with 84% of the vote. Polls show his approval ratings remain above 80%.

Rights groups say citizens have been rounded up without due process and remain behind bars three years after the start of the anti-gang campaign.

Each month since March 2022, Bukele’s allies in Congress have renewed an emergency decree that suspends civil liberties, allowing authorities to arrest anyone they suspect of gang ties. Many families of detainees say their loved ones were swept up just for having tattoos.