El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has offered to US President Donald Trump that the Central American nation is willing to accept convicted criminals of any nationality, including American citizens.

“We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” President Bukele said in a statement on X on Tuesday, as the US seeks to ramp up deportations, Bloomberg reported. 

Bukele said that he’d accept the deportees “for a fee” and house them in a mega prison known for hosting gang members.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not say whether the Trump administration would accept it but praised the offer as unprecedented.

He did not even say that it would be legal to do so in the case of US citizens.

“There are obviously legalities involved. We have a constitution, we have all sorts of things, but it’s a very generous offer,” Rubio said at a news conference in Costa Rica on Tuesday.

“No one’s ever made an offer like that, to outsource, at a fraction of the cost, at least some of the most dangerous and violent criminals that we have in the United States,” he added.

Trump has been negotiating with countries across Latin America to accept people removed from the US as part of the administration’s deportation campaign.

Analysts including Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that there would be serious legal hurdles to sending American citizens abroad.

“I don’t care what Bukele says, the United States cannot legally banish Americans — such authorities died centuries ago,” Reichlin-Melnick said in a social media post.

But the broader offer to host deportees who hail from other nations would be welcomed by the new US administration.

Trump has announced an expansive directive granting federal authorities the ability to deport up to 30,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records to a designated detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Bukele’s offer could help alleviate the need for that.

In a memorandum from the White House, Trump instructed the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security to initiate the process of detaining “criminal migrants” in order to “halt the border invasion, dismantle criminal cartels, and restore national sovereignty.”

The administration clarified that the deported migrants would not be placed in the military prison at Guantanamo, which has gained notoriety for holding foreign terrorism suspects and has faced intense scrutiny from human rights organizations.

Instead, the plan involves utilizing a separate section of the naval station historically employed as a temporary detention site for migrants intercepted at sea, particularly from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.

Trump’s announcement coincided with his signing of the Laken Riley Act, which mandates that undocumented immigrants arrested for theft or violent crimes be held in jail while awaiting trial, further underscoring the administration’s tough stance on immigration issues.