US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will discuss the possibility of deporting suspected Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador in an upcoming meeting with Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele, according to State Department Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone.
“We’re looking to do a new agreement that might include the members of the Tren de Aragua, who will want to go back to Venezuela rather than having to share the prison with the Salvadorean gangs like MS-13. It’s part of what we want to discuss and how President Bukele can help us…” Claver-Carone told reporters on Friday, praising Bukele’s security efforts in recent years.
Since taking office in 2019, Bukele has launched a security crackdown in El Salvador, detaining tens of thousands of people on suspicion of gang membership.
Once suffering from the highest murder-rate of any country outside a war zone, El Salvador has now fewer murders than the United States according to government figures.
But human rights activists say the Bukele administration’s approach is overbroad – new legislation introduced as part of the crackdown allows police to detain citizens without proof.
Last year, El Salvador opened a controversial new maximum security prison for alleged gang members, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
The news comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 20 recommending that the State Department start the process of designating the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang as a foreign terrorist organization.
The executive order specifically named Tren de Aragua and the Salvadoran MS-13 gang, citing their “campaigns of violence and terror in the United States and internationally” as threats to “the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.”
Rubio begins his tour of Central America this weekend, and is expected to arrive in San Salvador on Monday.
Trump has made stemming migration to the United States a top priority and has enacted a slew of directives meant to crack down, including ordering thousands more troops to the US southern border.
Tens of thousands of migrants from the three Northern Triangle countries that Rubio plans to visit – Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras – attempt to travel into the US each year. However, according to Customs and Border Protection data, the number of border encounters with people from these three countries dropped in 2024.
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