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July 19, 2024

Who the heck is advising President Trump on El Salvador?

By Monica Showalter

President Trump made a marvelous speech at the Republican National Convention, at times tender, personal, courageous, brave, and on target on pretty much all of the issues.

But there was one little supporting point in his immigration platform that didn't make any sense at all.

It was the time at which he described certain nations emptying their prisons and sending their criminals north to Joe Biden's open border for catch-and-release entry into the U.S. He was right to criticize that.

But one of his supporting points didn't make sense, and if anything, seemed rather hurtful to an important ally.

He described one nation that supposedly had done this prison-emptying, saying its president has touted himself as a crime-fighter, which could only be one person: President Nayib Bukele, of El Salvador, who made his country safe from the gangs that plagued it for decades.

Trump said:

"... crime statistics all over the world are going down because they're taking their criminals and they're putting them into our country. A certain country and I happen to like the president of that country very much but he's been getting great publicity because he's a wonderful shepherd of the country, he says how well the country is doing because their crime rate is down, and he said he's training all these rough people, they're rough rough rough, he's training them, and I've been reading about this for two years and I think oh, that's wonderful, let's take a look at it. But then I realized he's not training them, he's sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he's sending them all to the United States. And he's different in that he doesn't say that. He's trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he does a wonderful job and by the way, if I ran one of the countries, many countries, many, many countries from all over, I would be worse than any of them, I would have had the place totally emptied out already."

It left me, and a lot of us mystified.

I've followed the country for years and not once have I heard a report that President Bukele is emptying his prisons of his country's criminals and releasing them into the United States. We know that's going on with Venezuela and most likely, Cuba, which has done this in the past. It may be going on with Nicaragua, the next country over from El Salvador, which is organizing charter flights from all corners of the Earth with itself as the transhipment point and profiteer for the explicit purpose of sowing chaos in the U.S. I wrote about that here.

But El Salvador? Bukele is putting them in jail and leaving them there. He's jailed 105,000 of them, or 1.7% of his country's entire population. He's even making them earn their keep to force them to make reparations to society.

 

 

Being criminals, they don't like it. There may be cases of uncaught criminals hearing about this crackdown and fleeing to the United States where crime is not enforced and their odds of being deported are very low, heading for the hills, as it were, but this is not the same as emptying prisons and encouraging its denizens to leave for el norte as has been credibly reported from Venezuela.

Illegal immigration from El Salvador has gone to 39,545 Border Patrol encounters on the Southern border (out of 770,043 from all countries in fiscal 2024) since Bukele made his country safe. That's about half a percent of all illegal encounters, and way less than in the past, because people don't want to go north, they're happy to live in safety and security at home. Bukele's even attracting American expats to his country.

What's more, Bukele imposed a severe tax on migrants entering the country to transship northward. This is why they cross through nearby Honduras and not El Salvador on their way to the U.S.-Mexican border. Bukele didn't even want to encourage transit of migrants, not in his country.

It's such a mystery that Trump pinned this on the wrong guy, it would have been so easy to put the finger where it belongs, on Nicolas Maduro and his filthy drug-dealing government in Venezuela, which really does do this, or on corrupt, evil Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua who's making a pretty penny on the illegal migrant trade himself as he organizes more and more charter flights into his country for the journey north. But somehow El Salvador got the Trump salvo.

It makes little sense, because Trump may have met with Bukele as recently as last month, there was a cordial, back-slapping meeting with Don Trump, Jr. in this video clip.

 

 

Did some kind of personal disagreement happen, or was Trump given an intelligence briefing suggesting something that the rest of us don't know about?

Unless I'm wrong, the most likely explanation was bad advice, from an inept advisor, who must have suggested that all Latin American leaders are alike or something like it that would put bad information in President Trump's stack of briefs. Good advisors on Latin America are hard to come by and we already know that Joe Biden certainly doesn't have any. It could as easily be the case with Trump, in which case, he needs some better ones asap.

What I'm hoping is that more clarity can come of this if he's right, and if not, someone like Sen. Marco Rubio or Don Jr. can get Trump the better information, pointing out where the real problem is, which doesn't seem to be El Salvador.

For now, President Bukele is keeping it cool, cryptically tweeting this in a rare use of the English language for him, which could only be in response to Trump's charges.

 

 

My own view is that Trump will fix this once he's aware, and in fact could fix this easily by saying it wasn't Bukele he was talking about.

But he ought to reach out to Bukele to understand more about what he's doing in order to keep him well within the orbit of U.S. allies. Bukele could do a lot of good in countering the leftist clowns still running the shows in so many of these other Latin countries, some of which really are emptying their jails into America when Trump takes office next year.

Allies like that should be encouraged.

Image: Twitter video screen shot

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