Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s anti-crime president, has offered to host criminals convicted in the United States in his Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) super prison. Elon Musk, who heads the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has backed the proposal, calling it a “Great idea.”
“We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” Bukele announced on X (formerly Twitter). He added: “We are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted U.S. citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee.”
The Latin American populist noted this fee “would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”
He later reposted an X user claiming, “El Salvador and the United States have agreed on a plan to hold some of America’s worst criminals in El Salvador’s CECOT.” However, this is unconfirmed as of the time of publication.
El Salvador is notorious for birthing the violent MS-13 crime gang and, as recently as 2015, was noted for a ferocious homicide rate of over 100 per 100,000. Following his election in 2019, Bukele enacted an anti-gangs strategy structured around mass incarceration. CECOT, capable of holding 40,000 prisoners, and other new facilities made this possible, ultimately reducing the homicide rate by an astonishing 98 percent.
Former Congressman Matt Gaetz visited CECOT in July 2024, saying of its inmates, “The people in the United States of America are very grateful… that CECOT exists so that these criminals are not harming the people of El Salvador or harming the people of the United States.”
We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system.
We are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted U.S. citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee.
The fee would be relatively low for… pic.twitter.com/HTNwtp35Aq
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) February 4, 2025