Rubio says El Salvador offers to accept deportees from US of any nationality
Mr Rubio was visiting El Salvador to press a friendly government to do more to meet Trump administration demands for a major crackdown on immigration.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio said late on Monday that El Salvador’s president has offered to accept deportees from the US of any nationality, including violent American criminals now imprisoned in the United States.
President Nayib Bukele “has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Mr Rubio said at a signing ceremony for an unrelated civil nuclear agreement with El Salvador’s foreign minister.
“He’s also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentence in the United States even though they’re US citizens or legal residents,” Mr Rubio said. He had just met with Mr Bukele at his lakeside country house outside San Salvador for several hours.
After Mr Rubio spoke, a US official said the Trump administration had no current plans to try to deport American citizens, but said Mr Bukele’s offer was significant. The US government cannot deport American citizens and such a move would be met with significant legal challenges.
Mr Rubio was visiting El Salvador to press a friendly government to do more to meet Trump administration demands for a major crackdown on immigration amid turmoil in Washington over the status of the government’s main foreign development agency.
Migration, though, was the main issue of the day, as it will be for the next stops on Rubio’s five-nation Central American tour of Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic after Panama and El Salvador.
President Donald Trump’s administration prioritises stopping people from making the journey to the United States and has worked with regional countries to boost immigration enforcement on their borders as well as to accept deportees from the United States.
The agreement Mr Rubio described for El Salvador to accept foreign nationals arrested in the United States for violating US immigration laws is known as a “safe third country” agreement. That would mean the US could deport non-Salvadorean migrants to El Salvador.
Officials have suggested this might be an option for Venezuelan gang members convicted of crimes in the United States should Venezuela refuse to accept them, but Mr Rubio said Mr Bukele’s offer was for detainees of any nationality.
Mr Rubio said Mr Bukele then went further and said his country was willing to accept and to jail US citizens or legal residents convicted of and imprisoned for violent crimes.
Human rights activists have warned that El Salvador lacks a consistent policy for the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees and that such an agreement might not be limited to violent criminals.
Manuel Flores, the secretary general of the leftist opposition party Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, criticised the “safe third country” plan, saying it would signal that the region is Washington’s “backyard to dump the garbage”.
The deportation flight Mr Rubio watched being loaded in Panama City was carrying migrants detained by Panamanian authorities after illegally crossing the Darien Gap from Colombia.
“Mass migration is one of the great tragedies in the modern era,” Mr Rubio said, speaking afterward in a nearby building. “It impacts countries throughout the world. We recognise that many of the people who seek mass migration are often victims and victimised along the way, and it’s not good for anyone.”
Monday’s deportation flight came as Mr Trump has been threatening action against nations that will not accept flights of their nationals from the United States, and he briefly hit Colombia with penalties last week for initially refusing to accept two flights.
Panama has been more cooperative and has allowed flights of third-country deportees to land and sent migrants back before they reached the United States.
“This is an effective way to stem the flow of illegal migration, of mass migration, which is destructive and destabilising,” Mr Rubio said.
“And it would have been impossible to do without the strong partnership we have here with our friends and allies in Panama. And we’re going to continue to do it.”
His trip comes amid a sweeping freeze in US foreign assistance and stop-work orders that have shut down US-funded programmes targeting illegal migration and crime in Central American countries.
The State Department said on Sunday that Mr Rubio had approved waivers for certain critical programmes in countries he is visiting, but details of those were not immediately available.
