Late in Trump’s first term, the Justice Department convened the Joint Task Force Vulcan to catch senior members of the notorious MS-13 gang who, from their base in El Salvador, were directing the organization’s activities in the US (including kidnappings, drug trafficking and murders). Eventually, nine MS-13 gang leaders were taken into US federal custody.
But now President Bukele of El Salvador wants them back.
Why?
The gang leaders have threatened to exposed Bukele’s alleged deals his government made with MS-13 to help achieve El Salvador’s historic drop in violence. It’s also a key step in hindering an ongoing U.S. investigation into his government’s relationship with MS-13.
Early this year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio brokered a deal to make both Trump and Bukele look good. Trump needed a foreign partner to accept deportees regardless of nationality or legal considerations. Bukele, condemned by human rights advocates for curtailment of civil liberties, sweeping accumulation of executive power and oversight of a prison system beset by abuse, needed to ward off threats to his reputation as a crime-fighting visionary (and “the world’s coolest dictator,” as he describes himself).
The deal between Rubio and Bukele granted the Trump administration access to a sprawling foreign prison dubbed the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, that would become integral to Trump’s ongoing efforts to conduct the “largest deportation in American history.”
Read this compelling article based on accounts from dozens of officials from the United States and El Salvador, lawyers representing MS-13 gang members, prosecutors, diplomats, former Justice Department officials and political appointees. The Trump administration’s willingness to renege on secret arrangements made with informants who had aided U.S. investigations has not been previously reported.