The New Yorker:

Right-wing ideologues have long fantasized about the prospect of mass self-deportation: the Trump Administration is attempting something far more radical.

By Jonathan Blitzer

Three years ago, in El Salvador, after the MS-13 gang killed eighty-seven people in a span of seventy-two hours, President Nayib Bukele called on his loyalists in the legislature to declare a “state of exception.” The government could arrest anyone it deemed suspicious, and those taken into custody lost their right to a legal defense. Since then, in a country of six million people, eighty-five thousand have been jailed, many without credible charges; according to the human-rights group Cristosal, three hundred and sixty-eight of them have died. The gangs have been decimated, but the “state of exception” remains in effect, something that has earned Bukele plaudits from the magamovement and, last week, an invitation to the White House.

The Trump Administration is now paying El Salvador six million dollars to hold deported immigrants—among them more than a hundred Venezuelans removed under the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act of 1798—in a supermax prison that Bukele built for his crackdown. He has proudly advertised his services as “outsourcing.” He has also offered to house American citizens convicted of crimes, and Donald Trump appears to be considering it. “Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands,” Bukele told the President and members of his Cabinet in the Oval Office. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.” “Who gave him that line?” Trump said. “Do you think I can use that?”

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