WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed an offer by El Salvador to take in prisoners — including US citizens — despite clear legal problems with such an outsourcing under American law.

“If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

“It’s no different than our prison system, except it would be a lot less expensive, and it would be a great deterrent,” Trump said.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who has carried out a sweeping crackdown on crime, offered the use of a maximum-security prison, Latin America’s largest, when he met Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday.

Rubio said Tuesday that the Trump administration would review the proposal but acknowledged legal issues.

“We’ll have to study it on our end. There are obviously legalities involved,” Rubio told reporters a day afterward in Costa Rica, where he headed after El Salvador.

“We have a constitution, we have all sorts of things, but it’s a very generous offer,” Rubio said.

The US Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment” and promises due process.

There is little precedent in modern times for a democratic country to send its own citizens to foreign prisons.

Rubio again welcomed the offer by Bukele, saying, “No one’s ever made an offer like that.”

– ‘They could keep them’ –
Bukele said that El Salvador wanted to give the United States a chance to “outsource part of its prison system.”

He said he would negotiate payment, which would decrease costs for the United States but help fund El Salvador’s own mass incarceration.

Trump said that shipping criminals to El Salvador would be “a very small fee compared to what we pay to private prisons.”

“Frankly, they could keep them, because these people are never going to be any good,” Trump said.

It would be a sharp break with historical practice for the United States not to take back its own citizens.

The United States under successive administrations has pushed European allies to take back their citizens who fought for the Islamic State extremist group, in hopes of ending long-term imprisonment in Syria.

Trump has sought to end the principle that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, which is enshrined in the Constitution. Most European nations have more leeway in revoking citizenship.

Bukele has carried a sweeping crackdown on crime that includes rounding up people without warrants.

He last year opened the “Terrorism Confinement Center,” or CECOT, where he has now offered to jail Americans.

Designed to house 40,000 inmates, the vast prison lies behind huge concrete walls on the edge of a jungle, with inmates allowed out of their cells only for 30 minutes a day of exercise and for virtual court appointments.

Bukele has faced criticism from human rights groups but enjoys sky-high approval ratings from a public grateful for the sharp reduction of crime in what was once one of the world’s most violent countries.

Bukele, who has courted American conservatives, has offered to jail not just Americans but nationals from third countries, along with Salvadorans.

Trump quickly after taking office stripped roughly 600,000 Venezuelans in the United States of protection from deportation.

Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden had refused to deport them due to the security and economic crises in Venezuela, led by leftist Nicolas Maduro.

Some 232,000 Salvadorans enjoy similar protections in the United States which Trump has not touched.

The Trump administration has also begun to fly detained migrants to the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.