US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived in El Salvador Wednesday to tour the notoriously hellish prison housing alleged gang members deported by the Trump administration — and she’s expected to ask the South American country’s president to make more room.
Noem, 53, arrived at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), where 250 suspected Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gang members were shipped from the US by President Trump earlier this month.
They joined 15,000 inmates already held at the infamous lockup — which is known for deliberately dehumanizing conditions intended to serve as the ultimate deterrent in El Salvador’s years-long battle against gang violence.
There she viewed rows of tattooed inmates standing obediently along the bars of their massive but crammed cells and got a glimpse of the arsenal of heavy weaponry — including assault rifles — the prison’s army of guards use to maintain order.
“No one expects that these people can go back to society and behave,” said Gustavo Villatoro, El Salvador’s minister of justice and public security, as he led Noem on a tour through the sweltering prisoner barracks, according to a press pool report.
Several of the inmates Noem was shown were the suspected gangbangers Trump shipped south, and like the rest of the prisoners, they stood silent in their uniforms of white T-shirts and shorts.
True to her nickname — ICE Barbie — Noem put her flowing hair on display under her Immigration and Customs Enforcement baseball hat as she was led through the facility.
After the tour, Noem will meet with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and is expected to discuss increasing the number of US deportees bound for CECOT, Fox News reported.
Her visit to El Salvador is the first stop in a three-day tour of Latin American countries to discuss organized crime that’s been spilling beyond their borders and pouring into the US. She is expected to travel to Colombia next and then Mexico, where she’ll meet with each nation’s president.
“We are in several other countries around the world with a message right now that’s saying if you are thinking of coming to America illegally, don’t do it. You are not welcome,” she said on Monday.
Noem’s tour flies in the face of efforts back home to block Trump’s deportations to CECOT, which he initiated after invoking 1798 Alien Enemies Act to drag the alleged gangbangers out of the country without a trial.
The wartime act dates back to an 18th-century naval conflict and allows the president to deport non-citizens without the due process typically required. It was last used in World War II to hold Japanese and German Americans in internment camps.
Since Trump declared Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization in January, it allows him to use the Alien Enemies Act against them.
But within hours of the flights departing for CECOT, a federal judge blocked the order and placed a 14-day hold on its use.
The White House ignored that order, arguing that since the planes were already in the air and over international waters they had no bearing on the operation.
As Noem arrived in El Salvador, a federal appeals court upheld the block in a 2-1 vote.
“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here,” Judge Patricia Millett said during a heated hearing.
Trump has vowed to fight the block to get his way.
The deal to keep Tren de Aragua deportees at CECOT was struck in February between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Bukele. El Salvador is charging the US a “relatively low” fee for the usage, Rubio has said, though the number has not been disclosed.
CECOT is located 47 miles south of capital city San Salvador and was opened in 2023 as Bukele launched a major offensive against organized crime in the country.
Inmates spend 23 and a half hours a day in cells that hold up to 70 people, where they eat, bathe and go to the bathroom.
Meals consist of nothing more than beans and pasta, and they use one communal basin for drinking, and another for bathing. Their bunks – metal beds which pile four levels high – have no sheets, mattresses or pillows.
Prisoners are only allowed out of their cells for 30 minutes of exercise, which is done indoors — inmates serving at CECOT are not allowed outdoors, and few will ever see the sun again.
Most inmates are serving life sentences, and have been described by prison director Belarmino Garcia as “psychopaths who will be difficult to rehabilitate.”
During Noem’s tour, she was shown one man serving 465 years for homicide and terrorism.
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