In the prison deal, Bukele got his MS-13 friends back from the U.S. [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/us/politics/trump-deportations-venezuela-el-salvador.html

Behind Trump’s Deal to Deport Venezuelans to El Salvador’s Most Feared Prison
New details deepen questions about the deportations, showing that El Salvador’s president pressed for assurances that the migrants were really members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz, Alan Feuer, Devlin Barrett, Julie Turkewitz, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Annie Correal
April 30, 2025

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Mr. Bukele had his own request: a list of MS-13 leaders that he wanted released from U.S. custody and sent to El Salvador, where he said they could be interrogated by his security officers.

Some U.S. law enforcement officials were alarmed over the prospect of sending back leaders of MS-13 now facing charges for alleged crimes in the United States. Both the Treasury Department and Justice Department have accused Mr. Bukele’s government of making a secret pact with MS-13, offering its leaders behind bars special privileges to keep homicides down in El Salvador. Mr. Bukele has denied the claims.

“What Bukele is desperate for is to get these guys back in El Salvador before they talk in U.S. court,” said Douglas Farah, an El Salvador expert who between 2018 and 2022 collaborated with the Justice Department “Vulcan” task force, which targeted MS-13, as a U.S. military contractor.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials agreed to send El Salvador around a dozen senior members of MS-13, including a high-ranking leader named César Humberto López-Larios, who had been in U.S. custody awaiting trial on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges. Mr. Bukele has so far not received everyone he sought, but U.S. officials say they still intend to send additional gang leaders he has requested.

For Mr. Trump and his aides, the unconventional swap — getting a foreign country to take a group of Venezuelans migrants, along with Salvadoran-born MS-13 members — was a bargain price to pull off the kind of deportations they sought, even with the millions the United States agreed to pay to house the Venezuelans.

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