The United States has confirmed that it wants Salvadoran infrastructure, institutions, and resources to receive migrants that the Trump administration will send as part of the hardline deportation policy ordered on January 20, the first day of the new U.S. administration. Accords of this type are called “asylum cooperative agreements” or “safe-third-country” accords because migrants who arrive at the U.S. border seeking asylum are sent to a country of transit to request asylum there instead.
The agreement will be on the agenda of Secretary of State Marco Rubio during his meeting with President Nayib Bukele, scheduled for the afternoon of Monday, February 3 in San Salvador, as part of his first tour of duty, U.S. Special Envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone said on a Friday press call. Rubio’s tour includes Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. Only El Salvador and Costa Rica, for now, are seen by the United States as countries that could receive migrants from different parts of the world, Claver-Carone said.
The agreement is identical to the one that El Salvador signed in September 2019 with the United States during Donald Trump’s first term (2017-2021). That year, after the emergence of migrant “caravans,” Trump succeeded in getting El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to also become third-party “safe countries.” On that occasion, too, Claver was in charge of announcing it in a telephone call with the press. However, the plan was fully implemented only in Guatemala. In El Salvador, other expressions of alignment with Washington included the creation of border patrols.
Six years later, with Trump back in the White House and Bukele still in the Salvadoran presidency, the agreement is back on the table and the cycle is repeating itself: Washington avoids calling it a safe third country agreement, even though in practice it is one. The Salvadoran government has not issued any official communication on the matter.
“In the first (Trump) administration we had an asylum cooperation agreement. We want to revive it, and we are committed to reviving that agreement, and also to include, since President Bukele has had so much success with the members of the MS-13 gang, the members of the Tren de Aragua gangs,” Carone said in the press call, which El Faro attended.
Tren de Aragua is a criminal group of Venezuelan origin that has been designated by Trump as an international terrorist structure. Some of its members have been detained in the United States. Faced with the possibility that the Nicolás Maduro regime will refuse to receive them, Claver confirmed that they are seeking for El Salvador to imprison them.
On Saturday, February 1, Trump said on the social network he created, “Truth Social”, that Caracas had agreed to receive all the Venezuelans it deports, but the Venezuelan government has not confirmed this statement.
So far, El Salvador has not explained its position on Trump’s request or on the deportation plan. Members of the U.S. Congress and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum have mentioned the Trump administration’s intention to turn El Salvador into a country that receives members of Tren de Aragua and asylum seekers. Sheinbaum said in one of her regular press conferences that she understood that El Salvador had agreed to be a safe third country. Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar said in an interview on January 28 that she had information and “knew” that “if Caracas does not accept those from the Tren de Aragua, Bukele will receive them. I'm sure Bukele knows how to deal with gangsters and criminals, and Bukele's prisons are very big.” Officials from the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry have avoided the subject, despite inquiries made by this newspaper.
Capacity in doubt
While an agreement is being considered whereby El Salvador would receive people of different nationalities, deportations of Salvadorans have not stopped: Since Trump's return to power, hundreds of deported Salvadorans have landed at San Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez Airport.
The big question is whether El Salvador is prepared to receive a greater flow of deportations — not only of undocumented Salvadorans who are detained on U.S. territory, but also of asylum seekers. In 2024, the United States was the country with the highest number of asylum applications in the world, according to United Nations data, with more than 3.1 million petitioners. Of these, 115,460 were applications from Salvadorans, which places it in fourth place in Central America in terms of the number of petitioners, after Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Three specialists consulted by El Faro doubt the country’s capacity to take in more people. The most pessimistic say that there are no social or economic conditions to absorb more population, among other reasons because poverty has increased from 22.8 percent in 2019 to 27.2 percent in 2023, according to the Multi-Purpose Household Survey. This means that 21.1 percent of the population does not have sufficient income to purchase an expanded basic food basket. Furthermore, almost 600,000 Salvadorans live in extreme poverty, lacking the money to buy a basic food basket. The World Bank also confirms this: “The proportion of people in extreme poverty has been increasing for four consecutive years,” reads a report from December 2024.
Indicators measuring hunger and food insecurity have also increased. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, almost half of the population, 46.9 percent, suffers from some degree of food insecurity, whether moderate or severe.
Rommel Rodríguez, a macroeconomic specialist at the National Foundation for Development (FUNDE), explained that the state’s capacity to care for more people is limited by the significant cuts to social earmarks, such as health and education, in the budget approved for 2025 by the Legislative Assembly. He also recalled that the Bukele government agreed with the International Monetary Fund on a fiscal adjustment to cut spending by 600 million dollars (1.5 percent of gross domestic product). “Remember all the associated problems when migrants accumulate in a developing country like ours. We can see it in countries, especially in South America, where people arrive and there is a need to incur more expenses in healthcare and decent housing so that they can be accommodated,” said Rodríguez.
“What worries me most in terms of resources is the institutional framework. There are no institutions prepared to receive migrants with rights or the minimum assistance, whether or not these migrants have committed crimes,” says economist Tatiana Marroquín, a former legislative advisor to the Finance Committee.
Both Marroquín and Rodríguez conclude that one possibility is that the United States will offer economic aid to El Salvador to help it implement the deportation plan. Trump said on Tuesday, January 28, that his government could pay small amounts of money to countries that decide to receive “repeat offenders in the United States,” whether they are foreigners or U.S. citizens.
In the case of migrants accused of crimes, Marroquín recalled that the Salvadoran judicial system “is already overwhelmed, and it was already overwhelmed before the state of exception” approved in March 2022, which has imprisoned more than 84,000 Salvadorans, adding to the 30,000 people who were already detained, making El Salvador the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Around two out of every 100 Salvadorans are in prison.
“Without institutionality, it doesn't matter how much money the United States gives to Nayib Bukele's government; we would be guaranteed institutional chaos and violations of rights,” concluded Marroquín.
Return of the Bukele-Trump alliance
Bukele often boasts about his closeness to Trump, his son, and officials such as Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State who has visited Bukele on at least two occasions, in March 2023 and June 2024. As relations with the Biden administration chilled and then thawed, Bukele remained close to Trump during those years.
In 2023, the Salvadoran government paid an average of $100,000 a month to lobbyists to get closer to politicians in Trump’s sphere. Many of them attended Bukele’s unconstitutional inauguration in June 2024, including Trump Jr., Matt Gaetz (who was Trump’s first pick for attorney general but backed down under pressure from sexual abuse allegations), Florida Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, and former news anchor Tucker Carlson. Rubio said on that occasion that Biden had made a mistake in sanctioning officials such as Director of Prisons Osiris Luna and his subordinate Carlos Marroquín.
Ambassador to Washington Milena Mayorga says Rubio’s appointment is good news for the Bukele government. “It's not like he’s starting to build relationships from scratch, because Marco Rubio was already here (in El Salvador), and he sat down with the president. As a senator, they had intelligence meetings because he was on the Senate intelligence committee, and he is someone who knows our region. It is now very easy to get access to the Secretary of State-to-be,” Mayorga said in December 2024 in an interview on the radio program La Tribu.
Rubio, however, was not always entirely in favor of Bukele. In July 2022, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to interview the future ambassador to El Salvador William Duncan, Rubio showed suspicion of Bukele. “Bukele’s view of the United States has deteriorated rapidly in the last couple of years, to the point where it’s in a really troubling situation,” he said. “He doesn’t seem to care a lot about what our foreign policy is. He very openly criticizes and mocks the U.S. and other Western institutions (...) and we have to contend with the fact that his popularity remains very high and that his party has enjoyed electoral gains as a result.”
During the session, Rubio then expressed doubts about how the United States should approach El Salvador. He asked Duncan: “How do we balance our national interest and desire to have not just stability, but some relationship, with this campaign that’s being carried out, that I think has led to pretty open diplomatic hostility?” Willian Duncan arrived at the embassy in San Salvador in February 2023.
The first major change in Rubio’s attitude became apparent after his visit to Bukele in March 2023. Rubio traveled to El Salvador accompanied by former Ambassador Ronald Johnson, who by then had already left office and is now the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Both met with Bukele, according to Prensa Comunitaria.
After the visit, Rubio said in a statement: “It is important that we support the democratic leaders of our hemisphere who are leading the fight against the murderous and criminal gangs in Central America. For the future of our bilateral relations, it is essential that the democratic institutions in El Salvador remain strong.” At that time, Rubio was already saying that Bukele had to be kept close, because otherwise he could ally himself with China.
After Bukele won the unconstitutional election of February 2024, Rubio published an article entitled, “El Salvador: a point of optimism in our region”. In that article, Rubio praised Bukele's security policy and said that this was why migration had fallen, citing Border Patrol reports from 2023, comparing it with 2021 and 2022.
In the Friday press call, Trump’s envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone followed Rubio’s lead and called Bukele “the most consistent leader for the United States in Central America.”
“That's why the first call to a leader in the region last week was to President Bukele. Just think, ten years ago San Salvador was the murder capital of the world, and today it is the safest city in the world. These security issues, which are so important, have obviously made President Bukele a regional leader,” said Claver-Carone.
