Meetings between President Donald Trump and foreign leaders can be tense or bruising affairs. But when Trump invited Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to the White House in April, it was all smiles as they joked about mass incarceration.

“Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands — I like to say that we actually liberated millions,” Bukele told reporters, referring to his so-called war on gangs in El Salvador.

Trump responded glowingly to Bukele’s remarks. “Who gave him that line?” he said. “You think I could use that?” — which drew scattered laughter from the room.

“And in fact, Mr. President, you have 350 million people to liberate,” Bukele responded, in reference to the U.S. population. “To liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some.”

In Bukele, Trump has found a partner for his anti-immigrant agenda — and also a world leader similarly willing to not just normalize the deprivation of rights and suspension of the rule of law, but also celebrate it. As Trump flouts court orders and floats ideas like reopening San Francisco’s Alcatraz, the former prison island, for “the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering,” it’s hard not to see Bukele’s influence.

Bukele, in March 2022, declared a state of emergency in El Salvador, suspending most civil rights, including due process to imprison at least 85,000 people who the government accused of being gang members. While the crackdown greatly reduced homicide rates and the decadeslong grip of gangs on Salvadorans, thousands who had no association with gangs were dragged into custody. Many have been beaten, tortured, or even killed. Even so, Bukele’s popularity soared. He has used this moment to further erode El Salvador’s democratic institutions, expanding his grip on power. In 2024, Salvadorans reelected Bukele to an unconstitutional second term.

Central to Bukele’s ability to justify his war on gangs to the public has been the opening of the Terrorism Confinement Center, a megaprison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, with an inmate capacity of 40,000. When the prison, known by its Spanish acronym CECOT, received its first 2,000 inmates in 2023, Bukele released polished promotional videos of guards rushing shirtless, shackled, tattooed men into the megaprison’s massive cell blocks. Once imprisoned, people incarcerated there are denied any access to the outside world.

On March 15, the Trump administration used a wartime powers law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deny due process rights for more than 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants, flying them to El Salvador to be imprisoned in CECOT. Both Trump and Bukele have claimed the men are members of gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13.

The move drew widespread outrage with criticism coalescing around the case of one of the disappeared men, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident and father of three, who the Trump administration had accidentally sent to El Salvador because of an apparent administrative error. The Supreme Court ordered Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. in a rare 9-0 ruling. Democratic lawmakers conducted trips to El Salvador to push for his release, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who was granted an unlikely one-hour meeting with Abrego Garcia last month.

Trump doubled down, promising that Abrego Garcia would never be allowed a return to the U.S., making the dubious claim that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, despite having fled El Salvador as a teenager out of fear of violence from the gang. The Trump administration said it still hopes to imprison immigrants in CECOT and has even floated the idea of incarcerating U.S. citizens there.

Bukele has framed his $6 million deal with the White House to imprison immigrants in CECOT as a way to help a strong ally in the U.S. But he has also seized the moment for his own political gain, continuing to champion his anti-gang narrative within El Salvador.

Hours after the transfer, Bukele once again promoted his megaprison with a similarly dramatized video documenting the men’s arrival from the U.S. “This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13,” Bukele wrote alongside the video. “As always, we continue advancing in the fight against organized crime.”

“Not unlike Trump, he starts a fire to distract you from the fire he just started.”

Like other megaprisons, such as the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay detention center where 9/11 suspects have been abused and tortured for more than two decades, Bukele uses CECOT to project power over Salvadorans. Unlike at American black sites, however, Bukele eagerly shares images of prison guards dehumanizing men incarcerated there. But what the public can see — men covered head to toe in tattoos forced into tight rows with their heads bowed — are intended as a distraction from the more everyday cruelty of disappearing thousands of innocent civilians into El Salvador’s shadowy prisons, said Salvadoran human rights activists and journalists who have documented and opposed Bukele’s rise to authoritarian power.

Bukele has referred to the men incarcerated in CECOT as “terrorists” pulled from El Salvador’s streets, even as many of those shown in government images of the prison were likely arrested prior to Bukele’s presidency, rights activists said. They said that while Abrego Garcia’s case and the cases of those transferred from the U.S. to CECOT deserves attention, they are just a small slice of an unfathomable number of people deprived of due process and disappeared within El Salvador’s prison system.

While CECOT has been the most visible prison in the country, the majority of those arrested in the past three years under the state of emergency have been imprisoned at other facilities, according to human rights groups. CECOT is one of 22 facilities within the country’s vast network of prisons that have been expanding over the past decade. While the government has opened up CECOT to international media and American conservative lawmakers, Bukele has kept most of his prisons out of sight.

“CECOT is what the Bukele regime wants you to see, because they will not show you the images of Mariona, they will not show you the images of Izalco, they will not show you the images of Apanteos,” said Salvadoran journalist Nelson Rauda Zablah, listing the country’s older prisons rife with documented cases of torture, abuse, and death.

“When you’re paying attention to his narrative, that’s not a game you want to be playing, because, not unlike Trump, he starts a fire to distract you from the fire he just started,” he added.

El Salvador’s Other Prisons

In 2021, Bukele upended El Salvador’s judicial system by replacing top Supreme Court judges and hundreds of lower court judges with loyalists and ousted the country’s attorney general who had opposed his policies. To the public, Bukele framed the moves as........

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