Trump and Bukele: The Few Repressing the Many

By Margaret Knapke |

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – On March 15, President Trump’s rendition of immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador stunned the world. They include 23 alleged members of MS-13 and 238 Venezuelans allegedly belonging to another notorious gang, Tren de Aragua.

Trump’s accomplice, autocratic buddy, and likely mentor in this maneuver is Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, known for calling himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” Certainly, he shares Trump’s contempt for due process, as shown by his own reckless imprisonment of the guilty and the innocent.

Trump’s immigrants are crammed into Salvadoran prisons already holding thousands detained during Bukele’s state of exception, which began in March 2022. As he waged his war against the gangs, Bukele was happy to build the largest prison in the Americas, the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). And now he’s glad to share it with Trump—for a $6 million fee.

During Bukele’s recent White House visit, Trump was caught on a hot mic. “I said homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places,” he said to Bukele.

This sweetheart deal is a collaboration between two arrogantly anti-democratic authoritarians. Each tries to help himself by helping the other, mutually bolstering their inherently insecure political positions. “Inherently insecure” because their illicitly expansive, abusive powers depend upon the relative few effectively conning or outright repressing the many.

An Administrative Error (Perhaps)

The Trump administration acknowledged an “administrative error” by sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT.

An April 2025 court document reveals that Abrego left El Salvador in 2012, fleeing gang violence. He entered the United States illegally and eventually married a U.S. citizen. In 2019, he was accused of gang membership but not deported. In fact, he received a “withholding of removal” status saying he couldn’t be deported because an immigration judge had noted “a clear probability of future persecution” should he return to El Salvador. Subsequently, Abrego checked in with ICE every year, “without fail and without incident.” He has never been convicted of a crime, anywhere.

Senator Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador to see Abrego. “My whole point here is that if you deprive one man of his constitutional rights, you threaten the constitutional rights of everybody,” Van Hollen later stated on Fox News. “I’m not vouching for the individual, I’m vouching for his rights.”

Abrego is now in a smaller, lower-security prison in Santa Ana. The U.S. Supreme Court maintains that Trump must “facilitate” his return to the United States.

But Trump demurs; hell has yet to freeze over.

Disappeared Venezuelans

Of the 238 Venezuelans who were sent to CECOT, about a dozen of them have committed violent crimes. However, 75 percent of them appear to have no records of criminal charges or convictions at all. Nevertheless, Trump is using a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act, which, during wartime or invasion, would allow him “to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation . . . [and] to target these immigrants without a hearing and based only on their country of birth or citizenship.”

ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt explains, “The administration is saying, ‘Not only are we [going to] use [the Alien Enemies Act] against a criminal organization, but . . . the courts have no role. You cannot tell us that we’re violating the law or stop us.’”

Kerry Kennedy, a U.S. human-rights lawyer who leads Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, traveled to El Salvador in late April to consult with 10 Venezuelan clients held in CECOT. She reported: “Despite the right of our clients and thousands of Salvadorans to be attended by their lawyers, the government of El Salvador . . . denied us, their lawyers, access to our clients.” And she observed that Trump has been “following the same script that President Bukele has used against his own people, the label of terrorists, the gang members, without any shred of evidence and any semblance of due process.”

Subsequently, Kennedy and RFK Human Rights, along with three other legal organizations, have brought a lawsuit to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They are asking the commission to order the release of the Venezuelans held in CECOT, pointing out that these prisoners have been unable to communicate with their families and lawyers.

Rampant Prisoner Abuse

But the prison problem is bigger than CECOT. Salvadoran lawyers and human-rights defenders have maintained that prisoners in the older prisons, too, such as Mariona and Izalco, have sustained cruel and unusual punishments and the violation of their human rights. Leslie Schuld of the CIS says that, in addition to isolation from family and legal counsel, many prisoners are forced to walk on their knees across hot gravel as part of their prison initiation, denied food and water, denied adequate healthcare and medications, tortured, and more.

But the world sees only CECOT, Bukele’s super-macho state-of-the-art mega-prison. Schuld believes CECOT serves “propaganda purposes, featuring recognized gang members covered with tattoos, symbolizing that Bukele is tough on crime.”

Very tough. Beyond tough. Justice Minister Gustavo Villatoro said, “We . . . will ensure that the penalties are severe enough so that no one who enters CECOT will ever walk out; they will only be able to leave in a coffin.” So far, Abrego is the only known exception.

Good-bye, Peace Accords

Many Salvadorans wondered about Bukele’s political intentions in 2020, when he denigrated the 1992 Peace Accords and went on to undermine the democratic gains they were delivering, including judicial reform and a limited military mandate. By now, his Nuevas Ideas supermajority has effectively removed the separation of powers and helped Bukele wrangle a second presidential term.

The state of exception—an emergency measure that many expect to be permanent under Bukele—suspends constitutional rights, including the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial. It has been in effect for 38 long months. All the while, Bukele’s police and soldiers have been wildly indiscriminate in the way they seek out gang members. Most innocents are arrested in poor communities, and other “undesirables” are also vulnerable, such as activists, unionists, journalists, alcoholics, and people with mental illness. Lawyers, too. Ingrid Escobar directs the Socorro Juridico Humanitario (SJH or Humanitarian Legal Aid), and she acknowledges being surveilled and threatened.

SJH works to get unjustly imprisoned people released. Of the 85,000 people who have been arrested during the state of exception, at least 25,000 are completely innocent. (Late in 2024, Bukele claimed to have released 8,000 innocents.)

El Salvador, via Pixabay

SJH has documented 393 deaths within El Salvador’s prisons under the state of exception, largely due to torture and medical negligence, but they estimate the actual number to be much larger. More than 90 percent had no criminal record or links to gangs.

Schuld sees Trump mimicking Bukele in how he violates the rule of law to disempower (and disenfranchise) his own undesirables. Their assaults on human rights can be seen abstractly as undermining constitutional rights, or as personally as ink on skin. Schuld points out that both administrations arrest people for having perfectly innocent tattoos. Tattoos as innocent as a mother’s name or an autism-awareness symbol are enough to get hard, life-threatening time in Salvadoran prisons.

Still, Bukele won his second term easily, with most voters choosing their safety from the gangs over their constitutional rights.

Noah Bullock of Cristosal cautions, “This deceptive bargain between security and rights will only take the American people down a pathway of loss of rights for all people. . . . A leader who offers that bargain to their population doesn’t do it out of a concern for security, rather to concentrate power and to capture institutions.”

Here and in El Salvador, it is important to vigorously call out the erosion of democratic norms and insist upon a default respect for human rights.