WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is paying roughly $6 million for El Salvador to jail the 238 Venezuelan gang suspects deported Sunday, in accordance with the White Home.
“It was approximately $6 million to El Salvador for the detention of these foreign terrorists,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated at her common 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 track “Closing Time,” saying the Venezuelans “don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
The deportees are suspected of being concerned with Tren de Aragua, a felony group that Trump designated final month as a international terrorist group. Their flight closed in on its vacation spot as a federal choose tried 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 airplane to face detention in his nation.
“The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us,” wrote Bukele, who has for 3 years used harsh techniques to imprison and punish alleged criminals, together with these related to Salvadoran gang MS-13.
Trump on Saturday invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — its first use since World Conflict II — to deport the migrants.
Trump thanked Bukele in a Reality Social publish, 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 additionally has mused about deporting Americans to locations like El Salvador, particularly mentioning New York subway shovers for instance of the kind of home felony he’d prefer to ship overseas if legally permissible.
