El Salvador will house American criminals in its prisons.

El Salvador will not only accept migrants deported from the U.S. but also dangerous American criminals. This proposal was announced by the country's president, Nayib Bukele, during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as reported by BBC.

“We offered the U.S. the opportunity to outsource part of the prison system. We are ready to accept only convicted criminals, including U.S. citizens, in our mega-prison Cecot in exchange for compensation. This compensation will be relatively small for the U.S. but significant for us, and will help make our prison system sustainable,” Bukele wrote on social media platform X.

Nayib also promised to accept deported migrants from the U.S. who have been convicted of crimes, regardless of their citizenship.

“We are deeply grateful,” Marco Rubio replied to this proposal, adding that “no other country has ever offered such a friendly gesture.”

Cecot, or the Center for the Detention of Terrorists, is a prison that opened in El Salvador in 2023. It can hold up to 40,000 inmates.

As of June 2024, there were fewer than 15,000 people in Cecot, leaving plenty of available space.

The practice of renting prisons and migration centers has already been implemented in Europe and Australia.

From 2009 to 2016, Belgium rented cells in a prison in the Dutch city of Tilburg near the border. At that time, the inmate facilities in Belgium were overcrowded, while in the Netherlands, they were, conversely, empty.

Norway followed Brussels' example and in 2015 agreed to send some of its inmates to the Netherlands. This agreement lasted for three years, until 2018.