🇸🇻 Erik Prince’s Offshoring Plan for U.S. Immigration Detention Prince’s Proposal: A U.S.-Run “Mega-Prison” in El Salvador Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince has spearheaded a plan to privatize and offshore U.S. immigration detention by using El Salvador’s new mega-prison complex. The proposal obtained by POLITICO, calls for transporting up to 100,000 detainees from U.S. custody to El Salvador. Under the plan, Prince’s new entity (called “2USV”) would partner with El Salvador to round up “100,000 of the worst criminal offenders” currently in U.S. prisons, hold them initially at a 10,000-bed camp for processing, and then fly them to a Salvadoran prison for long-term incarceration. The targeted population is described as “criminal illegal aliens,” meaning non-citizens with criminal convictions, though Prince has also pitched involving U.S. citizens in some scenarios. Under the proposal, private contractors would handle nearly every step of the operation. Prince’s team (comprised of military and defense contractors) seeks a lucrative government contract to locate, capture, detain, and deport these individuals on behalf of the U.S. To do this, 2USV asked for access to federal law enforcement and immigration databases to help identify deportable inmates across U.S. prisons. The contractors even want a role in immigration court proceedings: If a detainee lacks a final deportation order, 2USV would “facilitate a hearing before an immigration judge” to resolve any asylum claims. They also propose negotiating plea deals with U.S. prosecutors – offering prisoners reduced sentences if they agree not to fight deportation and accept removal orders. In effect, Prince’s group aims to replace or augment parts of ICE and immigration courts with a privately run enforcement arm, expediting removals outside the normal system.

2. Designating Salvadoran Soil as “U.S. Territory” – The Treaty of Cession A centerpiece of the plan is a legal maneuver to circumvent U.S. legal constraints on deportation. Prince’s proposal includes sample language for a “Treaty of Cession” that would turn part of El Salvador’s prison complex into U.S. sovereign territory. In practical terms, El Salvador would cede a portion of the mega-prison to U.S. ownership, which the U.S. would then lease back to El Salvador to operate. Prince’s document argues that if this enclave is legally U.S. soil, then transferring prisoners there “would not be an extradition nor a deportation.” In other words, the inmates could be physically removed to El Salvador without legally classifying it as a removal to a foreign country. This attempt to exploit a jurisdictional loophole aims to avoid the legal hurdles that normally apply when deporting or extraditing individuals. By declaring the facility U.S. territory, Prince contends the transfer would be akin to moving a prisoner between domestic prisons – sidestepping requirements of extradition treaties or immigration removal proceedings. Critically, the proposal urges the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to “suspend the ICE detention standards” for this facility. This indicates an intent to bypass U.S. regulations on the treatment of detainees once they are in El Salvador. If the enclave is U.S. territory but run by El Salvador, detainees might fall into a grey zone: U.S. custody in name, but without the usual oversight on conditions that ICE-run centers require. Indeed, the plan explicitly seeks to avoid “questions about detention standards” set by ICE and the Bureau of Prisons, presumably allowing far harsher conditions under the Salvadoran prison regime. Such an arrangement is unprecedented – effectively creating an offshore extraterritorial detention camp under U.S. jurisdiction but outsourced management. Prince’s team and Salvadoran officials have already taken steps toward this plan. In August 2024, Prince toured El Salvador’s new Counter-Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) mega-prison and met with President Nayib Bukele. By March 2025, El Salvador’s Minister of Justice and Public Security, Gustavo Villatoro, signed a letter treating Prince’s group as an official “trade agent” for negotiating use of Salvadoran prisons to hold “foreign criminals.” . That letter touted the prison complex’s capacity to hold 40,000 prisoners immediately, with expansion up to 100,000 “criminal aliens” in the near future. In early 2025, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (under a new Trump administration) visited El Salvador and confirmed Bukele’s “extraordinary gesture” – offering to accept deportees of any nationality, even violent U.S. citizens, into Salvadoran prisons. (The administration later insisted there is “no current plan” to deport U.S. citizens, which would plainly be illegal.) President Trump himself remarked he would “love” to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador’s prison if it saves money. These developments show significant political will – at least among certain U.S. officials – to use El Salvador’s prisons as an arm of U.S. immigration enforcement.

Bypassing Legal Constraints: Wartime Powers and “Not Deportation” The driving motive behind the treaty-of-cession gambit is to exploit gaps in immigration and international law that normally protect detainees. Under standard practice, deporting someone from U.S. soil requires due process and a removal order. Extraditing a prisoner for punishment abroad requires a formal treaty and judicial process. Prince’s plan attempts to avoid both. By asserting the detainees haven’t technically left U.S. territory, officials could argue that court orders permitting removal from the U.S. aren’t needed at the point of transfer. In Prince’s own words, “transferring a prisoner to such a facility would not be an Extradition nor a Deportation” – it becomes a mere “relocation” of a U.S. held prisoner. This is meant to prevent detainees (and their lawyers) from invoking protections that would normally apply if the government tried to send them to a foreign country. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that even under wartime powers (discussed below), noncitizens must be given “an opportunity to challenge their deportations before removing them from the country.” If detainees are whisked to El Salvador, the administration might argue they have not yet been “removed from the country,” because they remain on a legal patch of “U.S. soil.” This hair-splitting could be used to delay or complicate judicial oversight – effectively creating a legal black hole like past U.S. extraterritorial detention sites. Human rights observers have noted that the Venezuelan migrants already sent to CECOT are in “legal limbo” – the U.S. claims they are no longer in its custody, yet El Salvador hasn’t charged them with any crime, leaving them with no clear legal jurisdiction to appeal to. As Noah Bullock of the NGO Cristosal describes it, “they’re in a judicial black hole.” This is precisely the kind of outcome the plan is designed to achieve for a much larger population. Prince’s proposal also invokes extraordinary executive powers to justify mass transfers. It explicitly references President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a centuries-old wartime law giving the president authority to detain or deport nationals of hostile countries during armed conflict. In late 2024 and early 2025, the Trump administration tried to repurpose this Act to rapidly expel groups of migrants (for instance, labeling hundreds of Venezuelans as members of a criminal gang aligned with a “foreign enemy”) . Prince’s team argued that the El Salvador scheme would help the administration “get around potential legal hurdles” with using the Alien Enemies Act in peacetime. Shipping detainees to CECOT was seen as a way to alleviate logistical and legal challenges that arose when trying to house them at Guantánamo Bay or remove them to countries that refused to accept them. Notably, Guantánamo was already being readied to hold up to 30,000 migrants under separate Trump plans, but a federal judge blocked at least one transfer of Venezuelan detainees to Guantánamo, forcing their deportation back to Venezuela instead. El Salvador’s prisons thus became Plan B for a transnational detention system. Prince’s document claims “this contract will solve the legal issues pertaining to removing criminal aliens” while enhancing the government’s capacity to locate and deport them. Despite these maneuvers, serious legal challenges are expected. The proposal itself acknowledges it is “highly likely that this effort will be tested judicially. Constitutional and international law experts have already raised red flags. For instance, deporting U.S. citizens to a foreign prison would be flatly unlawful, effectively a form of banishment or exile, which is barred by the U.S. Constitution. Even President Trump and Secretary Rubio have conceded there are “legalities” and “We have a constitution” that prevent simply expelling Americans. The U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff urged the administration to reject Bukele’s offer outright, warning that “even entertaining this offer”abandons core legal principles. Furthermore, U.S. law (the First Step Act of 2018) requires federal inmates to be held in facilities “as close as practicable” to their home, generally within 500 miles. Sending U.S. prisoners to El Salvador, thousands of miles away, would violate this law meant to preserve inmates’ access to family and counsel. Finally, the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment would almost certainly be invoked if Americans were forced to serve sentences in the notoriously harsh conditions of Salvadoran prisons. In short, while the plan tries to exploit jurisdictional loopholes, it faces a gauntlet of legal barriers, from constitutional rights to statutory mandates, that courts and advocates are already preparing to enforce.

U.S. Deportation Law and International Treaty Obligations U.S. immigration law provides a structured process for removing non-citizens, with built-in protections that Prince’s plan seeks to bypass. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), most individuals can only be deported (removed) after formal proceedings in immigration court. They must be found deportable under law (for example, due to criminal convictions or unlawful status) and given a chance to apply for relief (such as asylum or other protection). Due process is required, especially once a person is inside the United States, meaning the individual can contest their removal and cannot be expelled arbitrarily. U.S. law explicitly forbids deporting U.S. citizens; an American cannot be stripped of citizenship or expelled “for a crime,” and any attempt to exile a citizen would be unconstitutional. (Citizenship can only be lost by voluntary acts like treasonous wartime desertion or formal renunciation, none of which apply to penal exile.) Even lawful permanent residents and other non-citizens have the right to a hearing before removal, and if they fear persecution, they must be allowed to seek asylum or protection under U.S. and international law. Ordinarily, when a non-citizen is ordered removed, the U.S. can only send them to a country that agrees to accept them– usually the person’s country of nationality or last residence. International law recognizes every country’s obligation to receive its own citizens, but problems arise if the home country refuses or if the individual is stateless. U.S. law (after the Supreme Court case Zadvydas v. Davis) prevents ICE from detaining a person indefinitely if their deportation cannot be affected in the foreseeable future due to lack of a receiving country. In such cases, the person is typically released under supervision after about six months. Prince’s plan is partly meant to solve this problem by using El Salvador as a willing third-country destination for otherwise “undeportable” prisoners. Indeed, officials saw Bukele’s offer as a type of “Safe Third Country” agreement. Safe Third Country agreements (previously used by the U.S. with countries like Guatemala in 2019) allow the U.S. to transfer asylum seekers or other migrants to a third country deemed “safe.” In this case, El Salvador would accept non-Salvadoran deportees from the U.S. – for example, Venezuelans, or others – even if it’s not their homeland. Such an arrangement is highly unusual because it involves sending people not for immediate release or asylum processing, but for open-ended detention in a foreign prison. International treaties and human rights law impose key restrictions on deportation practices. The United States is bound by the 1967 U.N. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which enshrines the principle of non-refoulement– no deportation of a refugee or asylum-seeker to a country where they are likely to face persecution. Similarly, the U.N. Convention Against Torture (ratified by the U.S.) prohibits transferring anyone to a country where they would more likely than not face torture or cruel, inhuman treatment. These obligations mean that before deporting or expelling someone, U.S. authorities must ensure they are not sending them into harm’s way. In the case of the Venezuelan detainees sent to El Salvador, advocates argue the U.S. violated non-refoulement, since those individuals – some of whom may have valid asylum claims – were sent directly into the hands of a repressive prison system without any protection screening. Amnesty International bluntly called these transfers “arbitrary expulsions” that violated international law, urging the U.S. to “guarantee the right to asylum and the principle of non-refoulement” for all migrants. If Prince’s plan proceeded, the wholesale bypassing of asylum procedures (by moving detainees offshore before they can ask for protection) would likely breach these treaty-based duties. Additionally, international law prohibits enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention. By holding detainees incommunicado in El Salvador (as has been the practice – families and lawyers cannot reach them), the U.S. could be complicit in enforced disappearance. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the U.S. has ratified, protects the right to due process and prohibits arbitrary deprivation of liberty. The OAS American Convention on Human Rights (to which El Salvador is party, though the U.S. is not) likewise forbids sending people to face likely abuse. Human rights experts emphasize that “the US government has an obligation under international law to ensure its policies do not place immigrants and people seeking safety at increased risk of human rights abuses.” By offloading prisoners to a system notorious for abuse, the U.S. would be outsourcing violations it could not legally commit on its own soil. Even in the context of criminal extradition – which this scheme tries to avoid – treaties typically include protections (for example, one cannot be extradited to face torture or political persecution). In summary, normal deportation law requires individualized process and safeguards, whereas this plan attempts to use a treaty loophole to conduct collective expulsion in a manner that collides with fundamental legal protections.

El Salvador’s Prison System & the CECOT Mega-Prison El Salvador’s willingness to host U.S. detainees cannot be understood apart from its notorious prison system, which is currently the most overburdened in the world. President Nayib Bukele’s hardline anti-gang campaign, begun under a state of emergency in March 2022, has led to over 85,000 arrests in a country of 6.5 million. Thousands are jailed without formal charges or trial, thanks to suspended due process rights during the state of exception. The result is an incarceration rate of roughly 1.4% of the population, the highest in the world. El Salvador’s existing prisons were notoriously overcrowded and violent even before this crackdown. To absorb the surge of inmates, Bukele’s government constructed the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a gargantuan new prison complex in Tecoluca. Opened in early 2023, CECOT is Latin America’s largest prison, sprawling over 23 hectares (57 acres) and originally touted with a capacity of 40,000 inmates. (It was initially announced for 20,000, then doubled to 40,000). The complex features multiple cell blocks, each guarded by heavily armed security forces, and high-tech surveillance; it is explicitly designed to hold gang members and “terrorists” under maximum security conditions. Despite its modern infrastructure, CECOT has become synonymous with draconian conditions and human rights abuses. Bukele himself has reveled in its brutal reputation, often posting videos of mass prisoner transfers: detainees with shaven heads, tattooed gang markings, stripped down to shorts and shackled, packed tightly together as they are moved into the facility under armed guard. There are no visits allowed, no family, no lawyers, and no outside oversight beyond carefully stage-managed tours for influencers and the press. Inmates at CECOT are typically held in virtual isolation: according to officials’ own statements, prisoners spend 23 hours a day (or more) locked in their cells, with lights on 24 hours a day, and at most 30–60 minutes of courtyard time. Some are kept in punitive solitary confinement in complete darkness. Food, water, and medical care are reportedly scant. In videos, authorities brag those detainees “only leave the cell for 30 minutes a day”. Overcrowding remains dire even inside this massive prison – cells are filled far beyond international standards for space and sanitation, with limited access to toilets and hygiene. Reports indicate outbreaks of skin diseases like scabies among inmates due to unsanitary, packed conditions. Human rights organizations have condemned conditions in CECOT and the wider Salvadoran prison system as cruel, inhumane, and degrading. Human Rights Watch notes that detainees across Salvadoran prisons (including CECOT) suffer torture and ill-treatment, from severe beatings to deliberate deprivation of food and healthcare. Since the emergency crackdown began, at least 350–368 prisoners have died in custody under suspicious circumstances. Many deaths show signs of violence, suggesting prisoners were beaten to death or left to die from untreated conditions. Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights group, documented systematic abuse: new prisoners are often met with hours-long beatings, and extreme overcrowding means some are forced to sleep standing up or on toilet holes amid filth. In one account, guards at another prison facility dunked detainees into ice-cold water barrels repeatedly (a form of water torture) to coerce information. While CECOT is newer and possibly slightly less overcrowded than older prisons, the same pattern of abuse and lack of due process prevails there. In fact, El Salvador has refused to allow independent monitors into CECOT; no humanitarian organization has regular access, and virtually no prisoner has been releasedfrom CECOT since it opened. Officials openly say that those sent to CECOT “will never leave”. It is against this backdrop that Bukele offered to “make our entire prison system sustainable” by taking in foreign prisoners for a fee. The arrangement is attractive to his government for several reasons. First, the financial incentive is significant. El Salvador would charge the U.S. to hold each prisoner; Bukele described the fee as “relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.” In practice, the Trump administration has already paid $6 million for a one-year pilot program, under which El Salvador agreed to house about 200–300 U.S.-deported alleged gang members in CECOT. That deal, announced in March 2025 after the deportation of Venezuelans, is presumably the down payment Bukele and Prince hope to expand. (Notably, U.S. taxpayers’ money is directly funding this foreign prison. Media reports indicate the funds likely come from the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL). INL normally supports foreign security forces, but U.S. law (the Leahy Law)bars aid to security units that commit gross human rights violations. Former U.S. officials warn that paying for CECOT incarceration, given extensive reports of torture and abuse there “would certainly appear to violate the Leahy Law.”) From El Salvador’s perspective, hosting U.S. prisoners in CECOT means steady revenue and an international legitimization of its hardline approach. Bukele gains political points domestically by appearing to have U.S. backing for his “mano dura” policies, and he has even suggested that such cooperation boosts El Salvador’s global standing as a tough-on-crime innovator. However, international watchdogs are alarmed by this partnership. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and others have issued urgent warnings that the U.S. is effectively outsourcing abuse. Amnesty castigated the “repressive cooperation” between Washington and San Salvador, calling the transfer of detainees an “alarming precedent” that has already resulted in the enforced disappearance of hundreds of Venezuelans who were expelled. Because families have no contact and no information, these individuals have “disappeared” into CECOT’s void, in Amnesty’s view. The United Nations Human Rights Committee was briefed on CECOT in mid-2024 and raised concerns that its massive scale and lack of individualized treatment violate the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the “Nelson Mandela Rules”). Noah Bullock of Cristosal explains that even by Salvadoran standards, transferring U.S. detainees to CECOT is problematic: “Many family members in El Salvador don’t know if their relatives are dead or alive [in CECOT]. And now that situation has been transferred to Venezuelan families.” In other words, the U.S. has now made foreign family’s victims of the same horrors previously suffered by Salvadorans. Critics also point out the legal void: “These people haven’t been convicted of anything [in El Salvador]. They’re being held in a third country where there’s no clear jurisdiction… What judge could oversee their rights while they’re in detention?”. This underscores that the scheme violates basic due process internationally, effectively holding people with no charges and no court to answer to. Even within the U.S. government, there are voices of concern. The State Department’s own human rights experts (privately) and members of Congress have questioned the legality and morality of the arrangement. The Leahy Law issue illustrates the internal conflict: the State Department claims it is following the law in aiding El Salvador, yet the very architects of that law see a breach. Tim Rieser, the former Senate aide who wrote the Leahy provisions, stated that sending uncharged migrants to be held in “cruel and degrading” conditions abroad is “certainly…a violation of the Leahy Law.” Another former State official, Charles Blaha, flatly said “CECOT is a facility that exposes prisoners to torture… under the Leahy Law, this should disqualify CECOT from receiving U.S. assistance.”. In response, Trump officials have doubled down – DHS Secretary Kristi Noem visited CECOT in March 2025 and proclaimed, “This facility is one of the tools…that we will use” to deal with immigrants deemed threats. Rubio praised the U.S.-Salvador alliance as an “example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.” These statements reflect a deliberate shift in U.S. immigration policy, trading human rights compliance for maximal deterrence and punishment.