U.S. Pays El Salvador to Jail Deportees in Mega-Prison

Starting in March 2025, the Trump administration began transferring migrants facing deportation, including more than 200 Venezuelans, to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a mega-prison built to hold up to 40,000 people. The U.S. agreed to pay President Nayib Bukele's government roughly $6 million for a year of housing detainees under an arrangement that drew immediate scrutiny from human rights organizations.

Conditions at CECOT are severe: detainees receive no visits, are never allowed outdoors, and have no access to educational or rehabilitation programs, with many held without individualized charges or judicial review. Human Rights Watch and other groups documented a broader Salvadoran pattern of mass arrests without warrants alongside the CECOT transfers.

Critics said the arrangement effectively outsourced due-process protections unavailable domestically, using a foreign facility to detain people removed from the United States under contested legal authority, including the Alien Enemies Act.