By Vera Bergengruen and Michelle Hackman
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele plans to double the size of the maximum-security prison where his government is holding U.S. deportees.
Bukele plans to expand the Terrorism Confinement Center, the sprawling compound known as Cecot that is already the largest prison in the world, he told Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem when she visited last month, people familiar with the discussion said.
Opened in 2023 to house up to 40,000 inmates during Bukele’s crackdown on El Salvador’s gangs, the facility currently holds roughly 15,000 people, including hundreds of alleged gang members the Trump administration has recently deported from the U.S. Doubling the prison’s capacity would create space for a total of 80,000 inmates.
“We have no plans to bring them back, this is a long-term solution,” Noem told The Wall Street Journal after her visit with Bukele. “He has plans to double the size. He has 80-plus acres there that he’s going to continue to build on.”
In mid-March, the U.S. deported more than 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador—most of them Venezuelan—after President Trump invoked a rarely used wartime law. The U.S. is paying Bukele’s government $6 million to incarcerate them at the facility for a year.
Among them is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a sheet-metal laborer who lived with his family in Maryland and was deported in what the Trump administration acknowledged was an “administrative error.”
Bukele and Trump said during a meeting in the Oval Office on Monday that they don’t intend to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S., despite a Supreme Court ruling last week that the administration must facilitate his return after his illegal deportation.
Trump told Bukele during the meeting that “you gotta build about five more places.”
“We’ve got space,” Bukele said.
“It’s not big enough,” Trump replied.
Bukele has become a top ally in Trump’s deportation agenda, eagerly offering to detain alleged criminals from the U.S. The young, media-savvy president’s crackdown on Salvadoran gangs earned him admirers in Trump’s inner circle including Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson. The prison has become a popular destination for GOP lawmakers, many of whom have posed for selfies showing inmates behind bars.
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