The Trump administration struck a $4.8 million deal with El Salvador to imprison 238 migrants just days after D.C.’s chief federal judge had barred it from expediting their deportations in March — and just as the government mulled how to invoke a “state secrets privilege” to keep details out of the public’s view.
The four-page “grant agreement” was revealed as part of an ongoing lawsuit in which human rights groups are trying to block the State Department from making such deals, citing “documentation of severe abuses in Salvadoran prisons.”
The revelation concerns President Donald Trump’s decision earlier this year to sign an executive order declaring members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were “alien enemies,” giving law enforcement wide latitude to engage in fast-track deportations under a 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act.
After the executive order was issued, the Department of Homeland Security kick-started an operation in which people were loaded onto planes and sent to El Salvador.
Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on March 15 blocked the Trump administration from expelling Venezuelan migrants it alleged to be gang members from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act. While Boasberg ordered the federal government to immediately return all planes that were in the air carrying detained migrants, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele revealed that 238 Venezuelan migrants had arrived in the country just hours after the ruling — in defiance of the court order — while the DOJ said the flights left American airspace before a written order was issued.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the time that the administration did not violate the order, arguing that Boasberg’s ruling “had no lawful basis” and that “a single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil.”
The newly revealed documents, dated March 22, show that the State Department closed the deal with El Salvador to detain the 238 migrants at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, commonly known as CECOT, after the court directed the administration to halt deportations. The federal government gave El Salvador a $4.76 million grant to cover “costs associated with the detention,” according to the agreement.
It also shows that the Trump administration had not yet finalized the agreement by the time Boasberg had begun to probe the exact details of the operation in an attempt to figure out whether federal officials had willfully disobeyed his orders halting the flights. On March 24, two days after the deal was signed, the Trump administration told Boasberg in court that “no further information will be provided … based on the state secrets privilege.”
In an affidavit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had claimed that any talks with El Salvador were “nonpublic, sensitive, and high stakes negotiations” that, if exposed, “could likewise make that foreign state less likely to work cooperatively with the United States.”
The Supreme Court later weighed in to say that even migrants deemed “alien enemies” deserve more notice than they’d gotten from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but the high court concluded Boasberg’s D.C. courtroom was the wrong venue to hear cases that sprang up from detainees at Texas jails. The hundreds of migrants who were detained at CECOT were eventually released in July to Venezuela, where several claimed they had been beaten, denied enough food and sexually assaulted.
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which is representing the human rights groups in the case, said in a statement that the March 22 correspondence “confirms what we have long suspected: the Trump-Vance administration did nothing to meaningfully ensure that individuals disappeared from the U.S. to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison were protected from torture, indefinite confinement, or other abuses.”
The timing of the agreement, however, also shows that federal prosecutors in a separate court case were actively casting doubt about the existence of any such monetary deal — just a day after the Trump administration had signed the paperwork.
The March 22 deal between the U.S. State Department and El Salvador’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs lays out its terms and conditions, which include agreements that the small Central American country will identify any security force unit that receives the funds and won’t allow any of the money to be used to assist migrants in obtaintaining reproductive health care, accessing abortions or help them with claims seeking asylum in the United States.
However, nine days later, the Justice Department, in a related case — this time concerning what the government itself admitted was the erroneous deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to CECOT — wouldn’t admit that any such deal existed. Instead, federal prosecutors treated it as a hypothetical, merely entertaining the idea of “any promise of payment that might exist” to make a legal argument against a judge intervening.
“There is no showing that any payment made to El Salvador is yet to occur; no showing that El Salvador is likely to release CECOT detainees but for any such payment; no showing that El Salvador is even inclined to consider a request to release a detainee at the United States’ request,” prosecutors wrote on March 31.
This document is the latest evidence that undermines the Trump administration’s many assertions about CECOT. In July, after months of White House claims that the United States no longer had any power to compel El Salvador to release the jailed migrants, Democracy Forward also surfaced in court United Nations official records that showed El Salvador’s position was quite the opposite, with the nation claiming that “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities,” referring to the United States.
The DOJ declined to comment, referring NOTUS to the State Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.