GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was exploring whether he can move forward with El Salvador's offer to accept and jail violent American criminals in the "most severe cases" even as he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both say it raises clear legal issues.
Rubio reached an unusual agreement with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele a day earlier that the Central American country would accept U.S. deportees of any nationality, including American citizens and legal residents who are imprisoned for violent crimes.
“I’m just saying if we had a legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Trump told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office. “I don’t know if we do or not, we’re looking at that right now.”
At a news conference earlier in San Jose with Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves, Rubio said there were “obviously legalities involved. We have a Constitution.”
But Rubio noted that it was “a very generous offer. No one’s ever made an offer like that — and to outsource, at a fraction of the cost, at least some of the most dangerous and violent criminals that we have in the United States.”
Immigration — a Trump administration priority — was again the topic of the day during Rubio's first foreign trip as America's top diplomat. On his five-country Central America tour, he has faced major upheaval at the U.S. Agency for International Development, leaving many at the aid agency and the State Department fearful for their jobs.
While Rubio has been overseas this week, USAID staffers and Democratic lawmakers were blocked from its Washington headquarters after Elon Musk, who is running a budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, announced Trump had agreed with him to shut the aid agency.
Thousands of USAID employees already had been laid off and programs worldwide shut down after Trump imposed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance after taking office. Rubio later offered a waiver for life-saving programs, but confusion over what is exempt from stop-work orders — and fear of losing U.S. aid permanently — is still freezing aid and development work globally.
“I would say if some organization is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization," he said. “Or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point.”
Rubio also said he has “long supported foreign aid. I continue to support foreign aid. But foreign aid is not charity.” He noted that every dollar the U.S. spends must advance its national interest.
Amid the turmoil back home, Rubio and Chaves spoke of immigration and security challenges that Costa Rica faces as it has become not just a transit country for migrants headed to the U.S. but also a destination as thousands of Nicaraguans since that country cracked down on opposition starting in 2018.
Costa Rica also has struggled against soaring drug-related violence during the past two years. “We also understand that we need to strengthen our fight against international organized crime,” Chaves said, adding that Rubio had offered to continue U.S. support through waivers to allow that foreign assistance to continue flowing.
Rubio went from Costa Rica to Guatemala City to meet with President Bernardo Arévalo.
That is after meeting in San Salvador on Monday with Bukele, who confirmed the deportation offer in a post on X, saying El Salvador has “offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system.”
Bukele said his country would accept only “convicted criminals” and would charge a fee that “would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”
The State Department describes El Salvador’s overcrowded prisons as “harsh and dangerous.” Its country information webpage says, “In many facilities, provisions for sanitation, potable water, ventilation, temperature control, and lighting are inadequate or nonexistent.”
El Salvador has lived under a state of emergency since March 2022, when the country's powerful street gangs went on a killing rampage. Bukele responded by suspending fundamental rights like access to lawyers, and authorities have arrested more than 83,000 people with little to no due process.
In 2023, Bukele opened a massive new prison with capacity for 40,000 gang members and cut prisoners’ meals to twice a day. Prisoners there do not receive visits, and there are no programs preparing them for reinsertion into society after their sentences and no workshops or educational programs.
El Salvador, once one of the most dangerous countries in the world, closed last year with a record low 114 homicides, newfound security that has propelled Bukele’s soaring popularity in the country of about 6 million residents.
Migration has been the top issue for Rubio on his trip spanning Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. But he was dogged by other changes that the Trump administration has been making soon after taking office.
Rubio told reporters in San Salvador that he was now the acting administrator of USAID but had delegated that authority so he would not be running its day-to-day operations. In a letter Rubio sent to lawmakers that was obtained by The Associated Press, he said the State Department would work with Congress “to reorganize and absorb certain bureaus, offices and missions of USAID.”
He said the processes at the agency, which has been hit by Trump's freeze on all foreign assistance, are not well coordinated and that “undermines the President's ability to carry out foreign relations.”
“In consultation with Congress, USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law,” Rubio wrote.
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AP reporters Michelle L. Price, Zeke Miller and Farnoush Amiri in Washington and Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed.
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