El Salvador Perspectives

Data from the US and Salvadoran governments show the impact which the mass deportation regime and anti-migrant rhetoric of Donald Trump is having on Salvadorans living in the US.   Many more people are being arrested in the interior of the US so they can be deported to El Salvador, while there was a dramatic drop in the number of Salvadorans caught crossing the southern US border.  Official statistics from ICE show that immigration arrests of Salvadorans in the US increased sharply in 2025 after Donald Trump took office.  Data produced to the Deportation Data Project from Freedom of Information Act requests record 10,698 arrests of Salvadorans from January 1 through October 15, 2025, in comparison to 4,967 arrests the year before.  This represented a more than 100% increase in 10 1/2 months compared to the full year 2024 arrest figures. Deportation flights to El Salvador have likewise surged.  According to the ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First, 175...

The March 15, 2025, US deportation flights, which brought hundreds of Venezuelans and a few dozen Salvadorans to El Salvador's CECOT prison, continue to be in the news.  The Washington Post disclosed more details about the deal between Washington and Bukele, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio's promise to undo agreements with cooperating witnesses from MS-13 who were ready to testify about bargains between the Salvadoran government and the gang.   Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal  (Washington Post, Oct. 20, 2025) --  "in promising to terminate the informant arrangements, current and former Justice Department officials say Rubio threatened to undercut years of work by U.S. law enforcement to apprehend and secure the cooperation of high-ranking members of one of the world’s most deadly gangs." Rubio's deal had its origins in earlier dealings with El Salvador led by then-ambassador Ron Johnson:  An American ...

Family remittances sent to El Salvador set a monthly record in May of almost $900 million. The flow of dollars into El Salvador from those living abroad during the first five months of the year was 16% higher than the same five month period in 2024, a very significant increase according to El Salvador's Central Reserve Bank . Remittances are already one fourth of El Salvador's economy.  The dollars earned abroad, overwhelmingly in the US, have lifted families out of poverty and are one of the chief engines of any economic growth in the country.   Economists interviewed in La Prensa Grafica pointed to Donald Trump's deportation policies as a main driver of the surge in remittances.  Families are sending money out of the US into bank accounts in El Salvador out of fear of being deported and losing access to their assets in the US. "If we look at the behavior of deposits in the financial system, they have grown enormously. The acceleration in remittance sending has oc...

Today we have a collection of links from the international press, covering topics from US deportations to E Salvador, to the hotel industry, to the State of Exception and MS-13. Man wrongfully deported to El Salvador must be returned to US, court rules (The Guardian, June 24, 2025) -- An appeals court has ordered the Trump administration to return a man wrongfully deported to El Salvador to the US and to explain how it is complying in a ruling apparently designed to break a pattern of apparent government defiance of judicial orders. Trump administration says ICE could deport Abrego Garcia to country other than El Salvador if he's released from jail (CBS News, June 26, 2025) -- At a hearing in Maryland federal court on Thursday, Justice Department attorney Jonathan Guynn said that once Abrego Garcia is released from detention, Immigration and Customs Enforcement intends to begin removal proceedings to send him to a "third country," rather than El Salvador. Kidnapped ...

Donald Trump has put in place his campaign promise of massive deportation of undocumented persons in the US.  Those expulsions included 1600 Salvadorans in the month of May, and that number is on an upward trajectory.  The number of Salvadorans living in the US is estimated at 1.4 million.  Of these, 741,000 lack legal immigration status in the US according to data from the Migration Policy Institute . Contrary to narratives coming out of Washington which paint the deportees as gangsters and criminals, several stories of Salvadorans sent back to the country of their birth provide a different reality. This week Yessenia Ruano and her twin daughters arrived in El Salvador. Yessenia had found herself forced to self deport after living the last 14 years in the US. Her options for relief from the immigration court system had ended. Her young girls are both US citizens. Yessenia had made a life for herself as a teacher's aide in a public school in the Milwaukee area. She ...

Throughout his presidency, Nayib Bukele has craved the media spotlight and has wanted to be portrayed as one of the world's visionary leaders.  He has found that images of cruelty to persons alleged to be gang members get him publicity around the world, and lots of it. In April 2020 , the global media shared images of half-naked prisoners stacked together like sardines in the very early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Bukele vowed revenge for a surge in homicides. The media spotlight would turn back to El Salvador in 2022 to report on the State of Exception and squadrons of heavily armed police and military seizing tens of thousands of persons of the streets with little regard to the innocent persons among them. In 2023 to much fanfare, Bukele announced that he was opening the largest prison in the world. The Center for Confinement of Terrorists or "CECOT" would hold the worst of the worst so they could never terrorize El Salvador again he told his country, and the glo...

There are many developments regarding the US removal of 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador where they were imprisoned in Nayib Bukele's CECOT mega-prison.  Here is a summary with links to news articles: The US government admits that many of them had no criminal records. ( ABC ) A US photo journalist was at the airport and later at the prison to see the arrival of the Venezuelan prisoners and published photos of how they were handled. ( Time ) CBS News obtained a leaked copy of a list of the names of all the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there.  ( CBS ) Venezuelan families shared the stories of their loved ones who had actually fled from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua, rebutting any suggestion they were part of a criminal gang. ( Beyond the Border ) ( NPR ) ( BBC ). At least two of them were refugees who arrived in the US after extensive vetting by the government and refugee organizations. ( Miami Herald ) Eight women on the flight were not allowed to disembark a...

The weekend of March 15-16 saw the first implementation of Nayib Bukele's offer to the United States to act as the offshore jailers of persons Donald Trump wants to expel from the country. During the visit of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to El Salvador in February, Bukele offered to not only to take back Salvadorans from the US, but also to accept deportees from other nations, and even to imprison US citizen criminals for a fee. From the State Department press statement  at the time: Multiple agreements were struck to fight the waves of illegal mass migration currently destabilizing the entire region. President Bukele agreed to take back all Salvadoran MS-13 gang members who are in the United States unlawfully. He also promised to accept and incarcerate violent illegal immigrants, including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, but also criminal illegal migrants from any country. And in an extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country, President Bukele offe...

Source: FlightAware.com After Nayib Bukele offered to receive not just citizens of El Salvador, but persons from other nations expelled from the US by the Donald Trump deportation machine, Salvadorans have wondered what this offer, coupled with Trump's promise of "massive" removals, portends for their country.    A government spokesperson told reporters yesterday that so far El Salvador has yet to see a large increase in deportation flights, and that levels of returnees since Trump took office have been typical of recent time periods. Today another deportation flight arrived at El Salvador's international airport shortly after 10 in the morning.   The flight had left a US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) air removal  staging facility in Alexandria, Louisiana  a few hours earlier. Friday's arriving flight from Louisiana, like those from a similar facility in Harlingen, Texas, was not an anomaly.  There were eight deportation flights to ...

Donald Trump's advisor Stephen Miller said a short time ago that president Nayib Bukele was offering the US "tremendous levels of cooperation" on immigration, and now we know what he meant.  During the visit of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to El Salvador this week, Bukele offered to sign an agreement not only to take back Salvadorans from the US, but also to accept deportees from other nations, and even to imprison US citizen criminals for a fee. From the State Department press statement : Multiple agreements were struck to fight the waves of illegal mass migration currently destabilizing the entire region. President Bukele agreed to take back all Salvadoran MS-13 gang members who are in the United States unlawfully. He also promised to accept and incarcerate violent illegal immigrants, including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, but also criminal illegal migrants from any country. And in an extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country, Pres...

Measures the Legislative Assembly passed for Nayib Bukele On January 29, El Salvador's Legislative Assembly gave the second vote to adopt  a constitutional amendment to allow the Constitution to be amended in the future by a single supermajority vote by the legislature.  Up until now, amendments had to be approved by two successive legislatures with a national election in between. That requirement gave the public the chance to vote out of office legislators who supported an amendment before they had a chance to give it final approval in the next term.  Since Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party today possesses such a supermajority in the congress, he can now amend the Constitution anytime he wants by submitting it to a single vote in his rubber stamp legislature. For example, those pesky provisions that limit how long a president can serve in office, can be eliminated with a quick vote and no debate. The constitutional amendment passed with no prior announcement that it would be o...

As the world now knows, Donald Trump will again be president of the United States after a major victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday's election. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele tweeted his congratulations: What does the return of Trump to the White House portend for El Salvador? Nayib Bukele enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration during 2019 and 2020, and in particular with the US Ambassador Ronald Johnson. Bukele   met Donald Trump   on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 and famously called the American president "nice and cool."  Trump was pleased with Bukele’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to control migration and sent multiple high level officials to meetings in the country.  Bukele assisted on migration despite Trump’s attempts to cancel Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") which protects 195,000 Salvadorans from removal, and despite Trump calling El Salvador ...