In the United States, the debate over the unjust deportation of Kilmar Ábrego to El Salvador is not about President Nayib Bukele, nor even about the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT). It is about President Donald Trump and his attack on democracy and the rule of law. It is, above all, a protest against the possibility that Trump will send U.S. citizens to El Salvador as prisoners, as the U.S. president himself suggested to his Salvadoran counterpart. In all this, Bukele is perceived by part of the U.S. population as an accomplice. According to a recent poll, a majority of Americans do not believe or doubt that Ábrego is a gang member, as the Trump and Bukele administrations have accused him of being. Another study suggests that, since Ábrego's emergence in the U.S. political debate, the popularity of Trump’s handling of immigration has also fallen.
On Thursday, Apr. 18, 2025, Bukele suffered one of his most embarrassing international media defeats, even though, in El Salvador, he may have celebrated with his chorus of applauders. That day, Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen arrived in El Salvador to inquire about Ábrego’s health. At first, Bukele’s government denied Van Hollen entry to the CECOT, where the U.S. government claimed he was being held.
Hours later, the Salvadoran government relented and Van Hollen met with Ábrego at a hotel in the capital. By then, Van Hollen's visit had set off a whirlwind that turned upside-down the traditional media and outlets aligned with a movement critical of —or that has declared itself in resistance to— the Donald Trump administration.
For many people who had barely heard of Bukele, the Salvadoran president became synonymous overnight with torture and abuse of power. Ábrego was wrongfully deported from the United States, and the Supreme Court has ordered the U.S. government to facilitate his return. Suddenly, the anti-Trump movement found in Van Hollen a cause popular with the vast majority of U.S. Americans and aligned with a base hungry for a fight.
The anti-Trump machine Bukele faces is powerful, having defeated Trump in 2020. Upon returning from his trip, Van Hollen held a press conference with dozens of U.S. journalists in which he revealed that Bukele tried to manipulate the meeting with Ábrego and that the U.S. government paid around $15 million to keep Ábrego and hundreds of Venezuelan migrants detained in El Salvador. On Sunday, April 20, Van Hollen appeared on major talk shows. In all of them, the message was simple: Van Hollen does not defend Ábrego as a person, but his right to a fair trial in the US justice system.
Without knowing it, Bukele activated an enemy like he had never seen before. The anti-Trump movement relies on an intense presence in most traditional media outlets. Traditional leaders from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to progressive Senator Bernie Sanders joined the campaign led by Van Hollen. So did Democrat Maxwell Alejandro Frost, who visited El Salvador a week after Van Hollen, along with three other representatives. Thanks to this blitz, Bukele has become a dictator in the eyes of many, and the CECOT a “gulag” or “concentration camp.”
The anti-Trump machine has left behind the slow pace of information under Joe Biden’s presidency. The “resistance” has energized digital media outlets such as MeidasTouch Network, which has become the most powerful political podcast in the U.S., dethroning pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan. MeidasTouch, which claims to have been viewed at least six billion times, called the CECOT “torture camps.” Among the victims of this movement is Elon Musk, president of electric vehicle company Tesla and Trump official. Since Musk joined the administration, Tesla has lost 70 percent of its profits. In this context, Van Hollen is asking U.S. tourists not to travel to El Salvador and to choose other destinations such as Costa Rica, while Illinois governor and billionaire J.B. Pritzker has launched a boycott of Salvadoran products and companies, among other measures.
The Democratic elite’s relationship with El Salvador has gone from strong criticism of Bukele at the beginning of Biden's presidency to an uncomfortable coexistence at the end of the Biden era, only to rediscover Bukele as Trump’s accomplice. I spoke with Antonio De Loera, former special assistant to former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who explained to me the Biden administration’s calculation for the diplomatic truce with Bukele. “We decided not to create conflict with Bukele. We may not have liked everything he did, but the perspective was that we needed his cooperation to reduce migration, and we also understood the desperation caused by insecurity (in El Salvador),” said the former official.
De Loera also asserts that Bukele, due to his complicity with Trump, “has irrefutably become a problem in the eyes of many Democrats,” and that the Salvadoran could repel half of the U.S. population.
Democrats don’t have to win the presidency in 2028 to help erode Bukele's image even further. If they win one of the two legislative chambers in the 2026 midterm elections, Democrats can initiate legislative delegations to El Salvador that would have the power to investigate and report on human rights abuses. So far, Democrats like Van Hollen have traveled to El Salvador in a personal capacity, and Republican delegations have limited themselves to posing in Bukele’s prisons with tattooed men behind them.
However, potential delegations sent during a Democratic-controlled Congress could have not only a strong political impact but also shape media coverage and public opinion about El Salvador. In the 1980s, bipartisan delegations to El Salvador revealed the extensive human rights violations that Salvadoran governments tried to hide. This helped mobilize millions of people against military aid to El Salvador and force Congress to condition cooperation with the Central American country.
Bukele seeks to stem the damage to his image with cruel tweets, a personal invitation to Republican Rep. Ana Paulina Luna to visit El Salvador, and an offer to exchange political prisoners with Venezuela. The Trump administration has attacked Ábrego without defending Bukele. The Salvadoran has very little electoral value at present, only serving Trump as a place to send people he considers undesirable.
Bukele apparently thinks he can escape this maze by using the same tricks he used when El Salvador was not a domestic political issue in the United States. In reality, little depends on him and his few Democratic allies, such as Congressmen Vicente González and Lou Correa. The anti-Trump movement will change its focus when the issue of Ábrego and other immigrants in El Salvador’s prisons no longer serves its purposes, or appears counterproductive. So far, the fight is popular with the anti-Trump base. This coincides with Trump’s declining popularity and the fact that the U.S. economy is dangerously close to recession in the thralls of a trade war against the world.
By attempting to negotiate a prisoner exchange with Nicolás Maduro, Bukele seems interested in putting out the fire that has spread among many U.S. Americans. If Bukele wants to repair the damage, he must return Ábrego to the United States and release the hundreds of Venezuelans kidnapped in his prisons. Anything less than that will only reinforce the narrative that the anti-Trump machine has communicated to its base. In that narrative, Bukele is merely an accomplice helping Trump destroy U.S. democracy and turn the United States into a country like El Salvador: poor, dangerous, and without democracy.
Ricardo Valencia is an associate professor of communications at California State University, Fullerton. Find him on X: @ricardovalp
