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Matt Gaetz visited the El Salvador mega-prison last summer and pitched the idea of sending migrants there to Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, according to a report.
Trump’s failed nominee to lead the Justice Department was invited on a diplomatic visit by El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele in July 2024, TIME reports.
Bukele made Gaetz an offer during a dinner that he would be willing to imprison migrants that Trump wanted removed from the U.S. inside El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, according to the outlet. The next day, Gaetz was given a tour of the facility, which human rights groups have described as a “tropical gulag” rife with abuses.
“The conditions had zapped the inhabitants of any will to fight,” Gaetz told TIME. “It’s tough to see the state of the human condition drained of hope.”
Gaetz then pitched the idea of sending migrants to the mega-prison to immigration hardliner Miller, a source told the outlet, who then presented it to Trump.
“One of the reasons I like it is because it would be much less expensive than our prison system, and I think it would actually be a greater deterrent,” Trump said in an interview with TIME.
The State Department arranged the $6 million deal with Bukele — the self-described “world’s coolest dictator” — in February. It enabled the Trump administration to jail hundreds of immigrants in the country despite U.S. law barring financial support in the form of “units of foreign security forces” that face credible accusations of human rights abuses.
A few days after the deal was agreed, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.
Inside the Oval Office alongside Bukele on April 14, Trump said “homegrowns” should be sent the central American nation next.
The prison, which can house up to 40,000 inmates, in recent weeks began holding hundreds of immigrants. The issue garnered mass media coverage after a Salvadoran immigrant living in Maryland, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported to the brutal prison in his home country despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order preventing removal from the United States for humanitarian reasons.
The Trump administration claim he was a member of trans-national street gang MS-13 — a charge Abrego Garcia and his wife have vehemently denied.
Government lawyers admitted in court documents that Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.”
On April 10, a unanimous Supreme Court wrote that “the United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.”
Abrego Garcia was moved to Centro Industrial prison in Santa Ana after outcry and his still fighting for his day in court.
When TIME’s senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs pressed Trump on if he really wanted there to be “gulags” for American citizens overseas, the president snapped.
“Look, I see where you’re coming from, from the moment this interview started, and it's fine, I don't mind,” Trump said, according to TIME’s transcript of the sit-down. “I've answered every question that can be answered by mankind or womankind, and I see where you're coming from. Rapid fire. You can't even wait for me to give you the answer.”
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