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In the days before the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the president of that country demanded something for himself: the return of nine MS-13 gang leaders in U.S. custody.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13 phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation. But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.
To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.
Rubio’s extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele’s demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump’s early months in office. While the outlines of the quid pro quo have been public for months, the Trump administration’s willingness to renege on secret arrangements made with informants who had aided U.S. investigations has not been previously reported.
The deal between Rubio and Bukele granted the administration access to a sprawling foreign prison dubbed the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, that would be integral to Trump’s ongoing efforts to conduct the “largest deportation in American history.”
The deal would give Bukele possession of individuals who threatened to expose the alleged deals his government made with MS-13 to help achieve El Salvador’s historic drop in violence, officials said. For the Salvadoran president, a return of the informants was viewed as critical to preserving his tough-on-crime reputation. It was also a key step in hindering an ongoing U.S. investigation into his government’s relationship with MS-13, a gang famous for displays of excessive violence in the United States and elsewhere.
But 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.
“The deal is a deep betrayal of U.S. law enforcement, whose agents risked their lives to apprehend the gang members,” said Douglas Farah, a U.S. contractor who worked with federal officials to investigate and help dismantle the MS-13 gang.
Nixing the agreements also threatens to damage the credibility of the Justice Department, which routinely relies on informants to build cases against high-level criminals, officials said. Informant agreements are based on assurances the cooperators will be protected by the United States. Reneging on promises made in exchange for information could hinder the ability of U.S. law enforcement to develop relationships with potential cooperators in the future.
“Who would ever trust the word of U.S. law enforcement or prosecutors again?” Farah said.
At least three of the MS-13 leaders Bukele requested had divulged incriminating information about members of his government suspected of cutting deals with the gang, officials said. One of them — César López Larios, whom U.S. prosecutors charged last year with directing MS-13’s activities in the United States — was sent back to El Salvador two days after the Rubio-Bukele phone call. The others remain in the United States, waiting to learn whether they, too, will be handed over to the very government they were cooperating against.
The State Department dismissed criticism of Rubio’s dealmaking, saying the secretary’s diplomacy allowed the United States to deport hundreds of alleged members of the gang Tren de Aragua, or TdA, to El Salvador before they were later transported to Venezuela, where the group was founded.
“The Trump Administration’s results speak for themselves,” said Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman. “Hardened TdA gang members are back in Venezuela … MS-13 gang members are being prosecuted in the U.S. and El Salvador. And Americans are safer as a result of these incredible efforts.”
Justice Department spokesperson Gates McGavick said the department is “proud” to collaborate with the State Department on dismantling MS-13. “This administration has investigated, prosecuted, and taken custody of key foreign terrorists with unprecedented success,” the official said.
The government of El Salvador did not respond to requests for comment. Damian Merlo, a lobbyist for the Bukele government, defended the Salvadoran president’s pursuit of the MS-13 leaders.
“These are Salvadoran terrorists and he wants them to do time in El Salvador,” Merlo said. “There’s a terrorism center and that’s where they should be, not in what would be considered a posh detention facility in the U.S.”
This article is 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. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive law enforcement matters.
The deal
Rubio’s central role in brokering the deal highlights his evolution from a onetime Trump critic to a dogged implementer of the president’s agenda, exploiting his Spanish fluency and rapport with Latin American leaders to supercharge Trump’s most hard-edged policies.
As Rubio was finalizing the deal with Bukele in March, he was on a multiday trip to Saudi Arabia and Canada and had received multiple phone calls from Trump about the status of the deal, said two political appointees. The White House was concerned that if the Venezuelans weren’t deported immediately, a federal judge could order their release in response to challenges to their detention.
The trade that Rubio brokered helped both Trump and Bukele tackle issues core to their political ascendancy. Trump, who campaigned on ridding the country of undocumented immigrants, needed a foreign partner to accept deportees regardless of nationality or legal considerations.
Bukele, who cultivated a reputation as a crime-fighting visionary, needed the U.S. justice system to help ward off threats to that image. The Central American leader — and self-described “world’s coolest dictator” — is enormously popular in El Salvador for his aggressive crackdown on organized crime and record reductions in homicides.
But his curtailment of civil liberties, sweeping accumulation of executive power and oversight of a prison system beset by abuse allegations have earned condemnation among human rights advocates.
Those criticisms have been brushed aside by Trump, who hailed his leadership during a high-profile meeting at the White House in April.
“You’re doing incredibly for your country, and we appreciate working with you because you want to stop crime and so do we,” Trump told Bukele in the Oval Office.
“We’re very eager to help,” Bukele replied. “You have a crime problem, a terrorism problem, that you need help with.”
Thus far, Bukele has held up his end of the bargain, housing roughly 250 deportees in the CECOT prison before they were sent to Venezuela in the subsequent deal brokered between Washington, San Salvador and Caracas.
The same cannot be said of the Trump administration, which has returned only one of the nine men Bukele demanded: López Larios. Prosecutors moved to dismiss the case against him, citing “geopolitical and national security concerns” and he was deported to El Salvador in mid-March.
The other eight remain in U.S. custody. It is unclear if the Trump administration still intends to send them back and if so, whether it can prevail over legal hurdles that could prevent their deportations.
The administration began the process for deporting Vladimir Arévalo Chávez, an alleged MS-13 leader known as “Vampiro,” in April — but the effort has drawn scrutiny from a federal judge in New York, who imposed a delay.
Such obstacles were top of mind for Bukele during his mid-March calls with Rubio, said officials familiar with the conversations.
The Salvadoran president worried his request would get bogged down in the U.S. legal system, and he repeatedly pressured Rubio to guarantee all nine MS-13 leaders would be returned, these officials said. He promised to incarcerate hundreds or even thousands more immigrants from the United States if that helped sweeten the deal. And he vowed that no physical harm would come to the MS-13 leaders members once in his custody.
Rubio assured Bukele he would get his men and stressed that the American public cared little about the fate of Salvadoran gang members, officials said.
Each of the eight men who remain in U.S. custody could be removed to El Salvador at a moment’s notice, putting them at immediate risk of potential reprisal from MS-13 members or the Bukele government.
“My life is in very danger if I’m deported,” Arévalo Chávez wrote in June in a letter to the judge overseeing his case. “I will be tortured and [disposed] of.”
The investigation
The investigation that brought the nine men into U.S. custody was among the most significant gang prosecutions undertaken by the Justice Department in years.
Late in Trump’s first term, the Justice Department convened a special team of investigators and prosecutors from across the country known as Joint Task Force Vulcan. Its goal was to target not just low-level MS-13 gang members believed to be responsible for kidnappings, drug trafficking and murders in the United States but also more senior gang members directing the gang’s activities from El Salvador.
When the task force announced its first high-profile indictment in 2021, more than a dozen alleged MS-13 leaders were named as defendants, including López Larios.
The charging document detailed how a council of top gang leaders, many of them incarcerated in El Salvador, maintained an iron grip in that country through acts of violence and a lucrative trade in drugs and weapons throughout Central America, Mexico and the United States.
A second indictment followed a year later, laying out striking allegations about MS-13’s ties to the Bukele government. Though the prosecutors did not charge — or even name — Bukele or any specific officials in El Salvador, they alleged unidentified members of his administration had secretly met “numerous times” with MS-13’s leaders in prison in El Salvador.
Bukele’s government, the U.S. indictment said, had agreed to give them financial benefits and less restrictive prison conditions in exchange for their promise to reduce the number of MS-13’s “public murders,” so it would appear the country’s homicide rate was decreasing — a development Bukele’s subordinates had hoped would boost him and his party at the polls, court documents allege.
The gang leaders also demanded that El Salvador refuse to extradite them to the United States, according to the indictment.
Bukele has repeatedly denied negotiating with gang members. “How can they put out such an obvious lie without anybody questioning it?” he tweeted after the Treasury Department under the Biden administration sanctioned two Salvadoran officials for their roles in alleged gang negotiations.
But in the months following Task Force Vulcan’s first MS-13 indictment, the Salvadoran government released from prison at least four of the gang’s charged leaders.
One of those men — Elmer Canales Rivera, also known as “Crook de Hollywood” — was among the lead negotiators of MS-13’s pact with the Bukele government, according to the Justice Department’s 2022 indictment. A Bukele official arranged for his release in an attempt to show the gang his “loyalty,” according to recordings obtained by the investigative news outlet El Faro.
U.S. prosecutors allege that “high-level Salvadoran government officials” personally escorted Canales Rivera from prison, housed him in a luxury apartment, provided him with a gun, and drove him to the Guatemalan border to be smuggled out of the country.
After the Justice Department made public its allegations about the Bukele government’s role in Canales Rivera’s escape, he was apprehended in Mexico in November 2023 and authorities in that country quickly agreed to send him to the United States.
Once in U.S. custody, Canales Rivera offered to hand over recordings, photos, videos and other documentation, according to three people familiar with the matter, that would implicate the Salvadoran government in dealmaking with MS-13.
He agreed to a confidential plea deal, and provided investigators information central to an investigation they had been building for years — one aimed at exposing how the deals struck between MS-13 and the Bukele government used U.S. resources and put Americans in harm’s way, several people familiar with the matter said.
Canales Rivera’s lawyers declined to discuss details of his cooperation. But three officials with knowledge of the matter said Vulcan investigators had been pursuing two top Bukele officials who allegedly facilitated the deals to benefit the gang.
Reuters reported in late 2021 that U.S. authorities were preparing indictments against Carlos Marroquin, who ran the government’s social welfare agency, and Bukele’s deputy justice minister Osiris Luna. Marroquin and Luna did not respond to requests for comment. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to answer questions about that investigation.
U.S. authorities suspected Bukele’s government had used U.S. Agency for International Development programs to benefit MS-13’s leaders, according to three people familiar with the investigation, though it is unclear how much evidence investigators found to back up those claims.
“We were trying to follow the money, to locate who was involved in moving money and how the gang received money, and that’s where we started to find the connections to the political figures,” said Chris Musto, a former Homeland Security Investigations agent who worked on Vulcan until 2021.
A former State Department official said the U.S. government believed Canales Rivera could “provide a mountain of evidence that DOJ needed to pursue these indictments.”
If he were returned to El Salvador, as Rubio promised Bukele, “the entire case could fall apart,” one current U.S. investigator said.
On March 11, the U.S. took its first formal steps to comply with Bukele’s requests. Justice Department lawyers asked a federal court to dismiss the case against López Larios, one of the men whose return Bukele had demanded.
Prosecutors provided little explanation for that request, which was initially filed under seal and made no mention of any deal struck with Bukele. They wrote that while they believed the evidence against the gang leader was “strong,” the United States had determined that “sensitive and important foreign policy considerations” outweighed the value in bringing López Larios to trial.
Like Canales Rivera, López Larios had provided at least some information to U.S. investigators as had a third defendant, according to three people with knowledge of the investigation. At the time of Rubio’s promise to Bukele, neither López Larios nor the third defendant had cemented a formal plea agreement with U.S. prosecutors as Canales Rivera had done, the three people said.
Within four days of the Justice Department’s request, U.S. District Judge Joan Azrack had signed off and López Larios was flown out of the country on one of the first flights the Trump administration launched as part of its deal to ship Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.
A video posted by Bukele showed authorities loading a shackled López Larios onto a military vehicle bound for CECOT where he was told to say his name on camera as he was shorn of his beard on bended knee. Now he resides at what one Salvadoran official described as a “safe house,” a measure that could be aimed at protecting him from gangs seeking to kill him in prison.
López Larios’s lawyer, Jeffrey G. Pittell, declined to comment. Attorneys for the third defendant did not respond to multiple requests made over months to discuss his case.
In early April, U.S. prosecutors asked to drop charges against another of the alleged MS-13 leaders — Arévalo Chávez, who had been in U.S. custody since early 2023 but, according to his attorneys, is not among those who have been cooperating with U.S. authorities.
But this time, in a remarkable ruling, Azrack acknowledged that she now regrets taking the government at its word and so quickly agreeing to its requests for secrecy amid López Larios’s removal, given details that have since emerged in the news media. She questioned the propriety of some aspects of the U.S. agreement to return López Larios, Arévalo Chávez and the other men to Bukele’s control.
For now, the judge has refused to grant an immediate dismissal of Arévalo Chávez’s case while she presses for more details on the Trump administration’s deal with Bukele and whether the accused gang leader should be granted an opportunity to challenge his deportation on grounds he could be “tortured or ‘disappeared’” should he be returned to El Salvador.
Still, Azrack ultimately has little legal latitude to deny prosecution requests to withdraw charges against any of the alleged gang leaders or to stop the government from eventually deporting them — a fact that’s left the remaining MS-13 leaders in U.S. custody wondering if they could be next.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which is prosecuting the cases, referred all questions to the Justice Department, which declined to discuss its plans.
Bukele, as recently as July, expressed frustration that the U.S. hadn’t delivered the MS-13 leaders that Rubio promised to send, according to a Salvadoran official.
Some Justice Department officials, meanwhile, have bristled at attempts to deport people the U.S. spent years trying to arrest and persuade to cooperate.
“It would be very disheartening if I worked my butt off for a year to collect that evidence … to get him into custody, to bring him to justice, just for the Department of Justice or the State Department to turn around and say, ‘Okay we’re going to drop all charges,’” said Daniel Brunner, a former FBI agent who worked on Vulcan. “It would gut me as a case agent.”
While the Justice Department’s investigation formally continues into the alleged agreements between MS-13 and the Salvadoran government, current and former officials said resources have been redirected to boost efforts elsewhere.
“No one is wanting to investigate anything related to El Salvador or Bukele, because the Bukele administration right now has a direct line to the White House,” said one former State Department official who was in El Salvador. “No one is touching that.”
