238 suspected Venezuelan gang members were taken to El Salvador’s mega-prison for a minimum of a year, according to Bukele.
The president of El Salvador said on Sunday that the United States has deported more than 200 suspected members of a Venezuelan gang and transported them to a high-security prison in El Salvador.
On Friday, US President Donald Trump used the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport suspected members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal group connected to contract killings, organized crime, extortion, and kidnapping.
One day later, a federal judge in Washington, DC, issued a 14-day ban on the law’s implementation, citing “hostile acts” committed by another nation that are “commensurate to war.”
In a post on the social media platform X, President Nayib Bukele of Ecuador announced that 238 suspected members of the Venezuelan gang had arrived in his nation and were being moved to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a massive prison that can house up to 40,000 inmates, for a one-year sentence that could be extended.
Although it was unclear when the aircraft carrying the accused gang members left the United States and landed in El Salvador, Bukele’s X post implied that the flights were in route before to the U.S. judge’s ruling.
In reaction to the directive, Bukele posted, “Opsie…too late.”
In an X post, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that over 250 suspected Tren de Aragua members had been deported to El Salvador.
Requests for comment were not immediately answered by the Salvadoran administration, the State Department, or the US Department of Homeland Security.
The administration of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said it opposed the deportation of suspected gang members under the “anachronistic” U.S. law, claiming it infringed on the rights of migrants.
Bukele and Rubio both claimed that 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 had also been transported to El Salvador by the United States.
The United States agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to arrest 300 suspected Tren de Aragua members for a year, according to an Associated Press story on Saturday.
The Trump administration would be able to quickly remove the migrants by circumventing US immigration courts by using the Alien Enemies Act, which is most famous for being used to support the incarceration of persons of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry during World War Two.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has received an appeal from the Trump administration over the court’s ruling on Saturday.
