Democratic Rep. Mark Takano plans to introduce legislation Thursday that would block future U.S. payments to the maximum security prison in El Salvador that holds some of the Trump administration’s highest-profile deportees.
The California lawmaker’s bill, first shared with NOTUS, stands little chance of becoming law. But it signals how central a role El Salvador has taken in President Donald Trump’s efforts to enforce a sweeping immigration agenda, and how Democrats are viewing that as a problem.
The bill aims to cut off all U.S. funding for the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a mega prison that’s faced allegations of human rights abuses. It’s also where the Trump administration admitted it mistakenly sent Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was returned to the U.S. from the country’s prison system to face charges, as well as Daniel Lozano-Camargo, a Texas man also deported despite a previous court order barring his removal.
“At a time when Republicans are trying to cut foreign assistance, we cannot allow our tax dollars to bankroll a foreign facility that violates the very values we claim to stand for,” Takano said in a statement to NOTUS.
The Trump administration said the State Department paid El Salvador “approximately $6 million” to imprison people removed from the U.S., even as that same department is facing sweeping cuts to its international aid and global health programs.
“We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a March post hailing the deal.
The arrangement with El Salvador has drawn questions from other lawmakers about its legality because of laws that prohibit the U.S. from funding “foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”
The deal has landed the administration in at least one lawsuit arguing the agreement is unconstitutional because deportees don’t receive due process while facing potentially indefinite detention.
And Congress never signed off on the spending.
Meanwhile, CECOT has become a hotspot for conservative photo-ops, receiving visits from high-ranking officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. It has played a key role in Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gang violence in the country. Opened in 2023, the prison can hold up to 40,000 inmates and held over 14,500 men this time last year.
Now, it holds more than 250 Salvadorans and Venezuelans deported from the U.S. too.
“The United States should not be in the business of funding torture,” Takano said in the statement. “CECOT is a mega-prison with a well-documented record of human rights abuses — electric shocks, beatings, and degrading conditions. Yet the Trump Admin made a deal to send millions of taxpayer dollars to fund it. That is unacceptable.”
A ProPublica report released Thursday also found that the U.S. was investigating Bukele’s ties to MS-13 gang members in 2021. To target the gang, Trump created the multi-agency law enforcement team Joint Task Force Vulcan in 2019, which reportedly found evidence that Bukele’s government had been preventing the extradition of gang leaders to impede U.S. investigations into Bukele and his allies.
For months, Trump has publicly stood by his relationship with Bukele and his administration’s agreement with El Salvador.
“He’s made it a very safe place. People go, and they feel very secure and safe. He’s also built, one but other also prisons. Very big ones that we’re using his system, because we’re getting rid of our criminals from out of the United States that were allowed to come in by Biden,” Trump said during a Fox News interview in April.
Trump even boasted about the arrangement at a Michigan political rally celebrating his administration’s first 100 days.
“Democrats have vowed mass invasion and mass migration. We are delivering mass deportation, and it’s happening very fast,” Trump said to a crowd that responded with cheers. “The worst of the worst are being sent to a no-nonsense prison in El Salvador.”
Takano’s bill would also require Rubio to send a report to Congress detailing how much money the administration has spent to detain deported migrants in CECOT.
The Democrat represents a district not far from Los Angeles, an area serving as the backdrop of Trump’s tests of executive power after he sent National Guard troops there this weekend — followed by hundreds of Marines, and then more Guardsmen — to quell protests that had been sparked after a series of Trump-directed immigration enforcement raids.
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS — a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute — and NEWSWELL, home of Times of San Diego, Santa Barbara News-Press and Stocktonia.
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