This week’s White House meeting between President Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele offered a crucial opportunity. It should have marked an era of renewed US engagement with our allies in Latin America, while recognizing pro-US leadership in the region and highlighting a key success story amid rising hemispheric instability.
Yet, leading Democratic politicians and their media allies sought instead to turn the occasion into a political cudgel against President Trump’s deportation policies. In doing so, Democrats have revealed a dangerous hypocrisy and a lack of seriousness toward both the safety of the American people and US engagement with Latin America.
The fury of Democratic politicians like Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen focused on the administration’s deportation to El Salvador of illegal immigrants with criminal records and ties to designated foreign terrorist organizations like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua.
Democrats have become particularly obsessed with the case of the illegal migrant, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose criminal record and gang ties were publicly revealed while Van Hollen traversed El Salvador to attempt to return him to the US. But if Democrats were truly concerned about human rights, they would have spent more time getting their facts straight while focusing on actual victims.
Indeed, while Van Hollen and the mainstream media ceaselessly attempted to falsely portray Abrego Garcia as an innocent “Maryland man,” they shamefully ignored actual victims of the migration crisis, such as Rachel Morin, killed by illegal Salvadoran migrant Victor Martinez-Hernandez in 2023.
Even worse, Van Hollen’s efforts to prevent the deportation of violent criminals and gang members illegally residing in the United States threaten to create more victims like Morin, while continuing the cycle of mass illegal migration.
While Democrats and the media try to paint El Salvador as a repressive dictatorship, they ignore the actual Latin American dictators who are actually weaponizing criminal migration against the US. Indeed,
Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega have stoked the illegal migration crisis, most notably by flooding our nation with criminal groups like Tren de Aragua. But rather than salute Bukele and sanction our enemies, Democrats and the Biden administration have actively reduced accountability and pressure on despotic regimes like Maduro’s
Meanwhile, leaders in El Salvador and elsewhere are working with Washington to restore order and stability. President Bukele’s leadership has undoubtedly reduced victimization and increased protection of human rights.
Yet during this week’s frenzy, US media obsessively zeroed in on El Salvador’s Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT, a prison constructed by Bukele’s government where some criminal illegal migrants were deported by the Trump administration.
While news organizations and social media described the CECOT as a repressive gulag, the facility actually offers a vastly better environment for prisoners than just about any other facility in Latin America.
Indeed, prisons across the region are dens of impunity, corruption, and violence where guards often lack even basic control and effectively cede authority to prison gangs. Latin American prisons also suffer from severe overcrowding, with inmate populations reaching 150% of capacity on average, and many countries exceeding 200%.
By comparison, CECOT has a population under 50% of the prison’s capacity. Guards also maintain effective control of CECOT, keeping it free of massacres and mass prison violence. Even human rights activists in El Salvador concede that CECOT offers far better conditions than other facilities.
Equally important, the CECOT has been a tool in El Salvador’s dramatic restoration of security and stability under Bukele. Yet this dramatic transformation and the vastly improved well-being of the Salvadoran people have been glossed over by a frenzied US media and a disconnected activist class.
Indeed, as recently as 2015, El Salvador had the unfortunate distinction of being the most violent place on Earth, as criminal groups like MS-13 operated with impunity, victimizing the public on a massive scale.
Bukele launched a proactive campaign to confront the gang threat — bolstering police and military operations, empowering security forces, and incarcerating tens of thousands of gang members.
The results have been striking. In the two years following this crackdown, El Salvador has become the second-safest country in the Western Hemisphere, trailing only Canada. Annual homicides have collapsed to fewer than 150 homicides — a figure that a decade ago would have been eclipsed in just a few days.
El Salvador has also shifted from being a nexus for criminal gangs destabilizing the US and the hemisphere to being a crucial partner in helping the US restore stability over migration.
With criminal groups from Mexican drug cartels to Colombian guerrillas resurgent across the region, El Salvador’s security model and support are invaluable to the Trump administration’s efforts to bolster hemispheric security.
At the same time, the US must work with El Salvador and across Latin America to extract the malign presence of China.
These should have been the focus of this week’s coverage and political discourse surrounding Trump’s meeting with Bukele.
Instead, Democrats and the media opted to turn the US-El Salvador relationship into a one-dimensional caricature, overshadowing a crucial opportunity for a regional strategic win.
Andres Martinez-Fernandez is a senior policy analyst for Latin America at the Heritage Foundation