WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is paying roughly $6 million for El Salvador to jail the 238 Venezuelan gang suspects deported Sunday, according to the White House.
That works out to roughly $25,000 per detainee — a 43% discount on average US prison costs.
“It was approximately $6 million to El Salvador for the detention of these foreign terrorists,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at her regular briefing Monday.
“I would point out that is pennies on the dollar in comparison to the cost of life and the cost it would impose on the American taxpayer to house these terrorists and maximum security prisons here in the United States of America.”
Leavitt quoted the lyrics of the hit song “Closing Time,” saying the Venezuelans “don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
The deportees are suspected of being involved with Tren de Aragua, a criminal group that Trump designated last month as a foreign terrorist organization. Their flight closed in on its destination as a federal judge attempted to order it to return to the US with the inmates on board.
El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele wrote on X Sunday that the 238 suspects “were immediately transferred to CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, for a period of one year (renewable)” and shared footage of them being hustled out of the US plane to face detention in his country.
“The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us,” wrote Bukele, who has for three years used harsh tactics to imprison and punish alleged criminals, including those associated with Salvadoran gang MS-13.
Trump on Saturday invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — its first use since World War II — to deport the migrants.
Trump thanked Bukele in a Truth Social post, writing: “These are the monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats. How dare they! Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele, for your understanding of this horrible situation, which was allowed to happen to the United States because of incompetent Democrat leadership. We will not forget!”
The president also has mused about deporting American citizens to places like El Salvador, specifically mentioning New York subway shovers as an example of the sort of domestic criminal he’d like to send abroad if legally permissible.
