On Monday morning, El Salvador’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, visited Donald Trump in the White House in a symbolic show of strengthening the link between the two countries. Bukele is the first Latin American president to receive such an invitation since Trump’s election.

The visit comes as the two leaders have identified how they can be useful to each other. Trump needs Bukele to skirt US laws and enact a cornerstone of his agenda, mass deportation. Bukele needs Trump to sustain El Salvador’s massive, unsustainable prison population.

On March 16, 2025, El Salvador received a US deportation flight of 238 Venezuelans along with Salvadorans of various documentation statuses. They were incarcerated in El Salvador’s megaprison, the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), placing them in legal limbo. The conditions of those incarcerated in El Salvador are notorious and likely violate a number of human rights under international law. The United States is paying El Salvador a fee of $6 million per year to house some three hundred deported people.