El Salvador Offers Prison Space to Private Prison Shill Marco Rubio
In a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on February 3, 2025, Salvadoran Pres. Nayib Bukele offered to house American prisoners in his country’s lockups “for a very small fee.” A week later, with much less fanfare, El Salvador admitted there was more to the bargain: Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill Tinoco announced a cooperation agreement that would bring U.S. nuclear power technology to the Central American nation.
As PLN reported, Bukele championed construction of the world’s largest prison, which now holds 40,000 people arrested in a crackdown on gangs, including MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. [See: PLN, July 2023, p.62.] As a result, El Salvador has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet, with one of every 100 residents behind bars. The $115 million cost of the lockup represented almost 1.2% of the country’s annual budget, though this is the first time El Salvador has broached the subject of renting out any of the prison’s massive 65-man cells.
The U.S. constitution prohibits imprisoning citizens outside the country, a point not completely lost on Rubio; he admitted there were “legalities involved” in sending anyone other than immigration detainees. He further limited that group to “violent criminals”—though a March 2024 study found that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S. citizens. See: Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-Born, 1870–2020, Nat’l Bur. of Econ. Research (March 2024).
Rubio’s boss, Pres. Donald J. Trump (R), was enthusiastically on board with shipping both migrants and citizens to El Salvador: “Let them be brought to a foreign land and maintained by others for a very small fee,” he said. His administration is aggressively rounding up undocumented migrants and pushing allies to act as “third-country” detention hosts for those from nations like Venezuela and Cuba, which have refused to accept their citizens when the U.S. attempts to deport them.
Even without the quiet exchange with El Salvador of prisoners for nuclear power technology, Rubio has long championed monetized prisons. When running for the U.S. Senate from Florida in 2016, he took huge donations from the private prison industry—$80,400 in a single month from The GEO Group. That was after the firm had already donated $100,000 that year to Rubio’s failed bid for the GOP nomination for President, which he lost to Trump.
Less well-documented is Rubio’s financial relationship with brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia, who was convicted of a $15 million cocaine distribution scheme in 1989; in 2002, Rubio wrote on letterhead from his then-office in the Florida House of Representatives to urge the state Real Estate Commission to grant the ex-felon a sales license—while neglecting to mention that they were related or that Cicilia was living in the same Miami home as Rubio’s parents.
Rubio’s grandfather, with whom he claimed to be close, first immigrated from Cuba before that country’s 1959 revolution and when detained after a return in 1962 was ordered deported. He was eventually granted residency under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act.
Additional sources: NBC News, NPR News, Sunday Times, Tampa Bay Times, Washington Post
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