Marco Rubio was going to secure a deal for President Donald Trump—even if it meant betraying U.S. informants.
The secretary of state made a secret agreement with the president of El Salvador to hand over legally protected U.S. “informants,” so the Trump administration could deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in the country, a new Washington Post report revealed on Sunday.
The backroom deal, officials told the Post, undermined years of work from an ongoing U.S. investigation aimed at apprehending high-ranking members of MS-13, one of the world’s most violent gangs, whose acts of brutality have been on display in the U.S. and beyond.
“The deal is a deep betrayal of U.S. law enforcement, whose agents risked their lives to apprehend the gang members,” Douglas Farah, a U.S. contractor who worked with federal officials to investigate and help dismantle the MS-13 gang, told the outlet.
On March 13, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele told Rubio he would grant the U.S. access to El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison—only if the U.S. returned nine MS-13 gang leaders currently in custody.
Rubio agreed, despite some of those men being protected under U.S. law, sources familiar with the conversation told the Post. To fulfill the deal, Rubio said Attorney General Pam Bondi would terminate the Justice Department’s cooperation agreements with the informants.
Meeting Bukele’s demands would give him access to individuals who threatened to expose his own secret deals with MS-13, deals that helped lower El Salvador’s violent crime rate. It would also preserve Bukele’s image as a tough-one-crime strongman, even if it meant derailing years of U.S. investigations into his administration’s ties with the gang.
Officials told the Post that at least three of the MS-13 leaders Bukele wanted returned had disclosed details of those arrangements. One of them, César López Larios, was deported to El Salvador just two days after the Rubio-Bukele phone call. U.S. prosecutors had previously charged him with directing MS-13’s operations in the United States. As of now, the others reportedly remain in U.S. custody.
Officials fear that the U.S. reneging on protections for its own informants could cripple ongoing investigations—and make future cooperation with informants far less likely.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the State Department for comment. The State Department told the Post that, “The Trump Administration’s results speak for themselves.”
“Hardened TdA gang members are back in Venezuela … MS-13 gang members are being prosecuted in the U.S. and El Salvador,” said Tommy Pigott, a state department spokesman. “And Americans are safer as a result of these incredible efforts.”
Rubio’s unprecedented promise underscored just how far Trump officials are willing to go to execute the president’s sweeping mass deportation agenda.
Two days after the call, Trump declared he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime statute that targets anyone seen as an enemy of the American people.
Then, the president abruptly moved to send about 250 Venezuelan migrants to the El Salvadoran megaprison, leading to a flurry of legal challenges.
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