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.