The deal with Bukele comes with significant strings attached, it turns out.
The deal with Bukele comes with significant strings attached, it turns out.
W hen foreign criminals commit serious crimes in the United States, and particularly if they are leaders of violent transnational organizations who orchestrate the execution of heinous crimes in the United States, it has long been Justice Department policy to seek the arrest and prosecution of those criminals, including by extradition.
Sometimes our government has to make compromises the carry out this objective. As a young prosecutor in the 1980s, I was part of the Pizza Connection case team that agreed to cap the potential sentence of Gaetano Badalamenti, the head of the Sicilian mafia. Under Italian law, he’d have faced no more than 30 years for the drug trafficking and money laundering conduct we’d charged. To convince Rome to extradite him, we had to accept that as a ceiling even though many of our other defendants faced life sentences if convicted on the same charges. The Justice Department made such deals, though, to make certain that dangerous foreign criminals got significant incarceration sentences for harming Americans. That can’t be ensured unless they are prosecuted in the United States.
This is one reason I can’t fathom Monday’s blockbuster report in the New York Times that the Trump Justice Department has quietly dismissed the narco-terrorism indictments against two top leaders of MS-13, enabling them to avoid American justice and be repatriated to El Salvador. Far from making extraordinary efforts to bring high-ranking criminals to the United States to face federal prosecution, the administration is sending high-ranking criminals who are in American custody back overseas so they can avoid federal prosecution.
This was done at the insistence of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Going back to the first Trump administration, our government has documented a corrupt agreement between Bukele’s government and MS-13 leadership, part of which involves shielding the gang’s leaders from American law enforcement. The Times maintains that the two MS-13 leaders were shipped back to El Salvador with charges dropped as part of the Trump administration’s much touted deal with Bukele: For a reported $6 million U.S. payment, El Salvador agreed to take custody of about 300 illegal aliens, including scores whom the administration alleges are members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang and deportable under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA).
The more we learn, the more it seems like a deal with El Diablo.
The 300 detention spaces rented from Bukele do not scratch the surface of our 20-million-plus illegal immigrant population. Only Congress can meaningfully address this problem; even if we assume for argument’s sake the progressive claim that serious criminals make up just a small percentage of the total “migrant” population, we’d need well over a million detention spaces to process their deportations (as opposed to the fewer than 50,000 Congress funds). Yet by dealing with Bukele, the administration has, in the eyes of the courts and much of the public, sullied its vital reinvigoration of immigration and border-enforcement law with the atrocious reputation of Bukele’s anti-terrorism prison and his historically corrupt relations with Salvadoran gangs, very much including MS-13.
For what? It increasingly appears as if a large percentage of the over 200 aliens thus far deported to El Salvador will be ordered returned because the administration violated the law. (The application of the AEA to the aliens is legally tenuous, and even if it is upheld, the aliens were denied what even the Trump DOJ now concedes was their right to challenge their deportations in habeas corpus proceedings.) Now the Trump administration is colluding with Bukele to shield some of the worst MS-13 monsters from federal trial, conviction, and heavy sentencing. And it has done so while cutting deals with other MS-13 gangsters to gain testimony against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration foolishly turned into a cause célèbre even though his connection to MS-13 is ambiguous, the crimes charged against him are comparatively minor, and his conviction would not solve the problem that he cannot legally be deported to El Salvador unless the Trump DOJ gets a 2019 immigration court order reversed (which, curiously, there is no indication it has done).
In marked contrast to Abrego Garcia, the two men against whom the Justice Department has dropped charges are alleged to be top-echelon MS-13 leaders complicit in the orchestration of murder, massive drug-trafficking, and other serious crimes in the United States – which include a conspiracy (thankfully unsuccessful) to murder an FBI agent in El Salvador.
During the first Trump administration, because of the murderous violence of MS-13, the Justice Department set up a task force, called “Vulcan,” to lead investigations of the gang. MS-13 had already been designated during the Obama administration as a “significant transnational criminal organization,” in order to trigger prohibitions on transactions involving American persons or property.
El Salvador had been plagued by gang crime for decades. Four unnamed former U.S. officials told the Times there had been concerns that Bukele had unsavory ties to Salvadoran gangs going back to his 2015–18 stint as mayor of San Salvador — claims that Bukele vigorously denied whenever they surfaced publicly.
Bukele was elected president in 2019, vowing there would be a drastic reduction in homicides. In September 2020, Osiris Luna Meza (Luna), a top Bukele confidant with a corrupt reputation who ran the Salvadoran prison system, twice visited the U.S. embassy in San Salvador. Luna explained to U.S. diplomats that Bukele had made a deal with MS-13: The gang would reduce violence in El Salvador in exchange for various accommodations. Luna showed the Americans security camera images of masked men he said were MS-13 leaders, whom he had escorted into a prison to meet with their imprisoned confederates — although he claimed not to know what they had discussed.
The American officials were wary of Luna, because he both appeared to be minimizing his own role in the regime’s negotiations with MS-13 and tried to convince them to grant him what the Times describes as “asylum in the United States — with luxurious accommodations — in exchange for testifying against the Bukele government.” Far from cutting a deal with Luna, the DOJ in Trump’s first administration put him under the Vulcan microscope. By 2021, the Biden Treasury Department was announcing sanctions against both Luna and another top Bukele regime official, Carlos Amilcar Marroquin Chica (Marroquin). According to our government, Luna and Marroquin had
led, facilitated, and organized a number of secret meetings involving incarcerated gang leaders, in which known gang members were allowed to enter the prison facilities and meet with senior gang leadership. These meetings were part of the Government of El Salvador’s efforts to negotiate a secret truce with gang leadership.
In 2020, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s administration provided financial incentives to Salvadoran gangs MS-13 and 18th Street Gang (Barrio 18) to ensure that incidents of gang violence and the number of confirmed homicides remained low. Over the course of these negotiations with Luna and Marroquin, gang leadership also agreed to provide political support to the Nuevas Ideas political party in upcoming elections. Nuevas Ideas is [Bukele’s] party and won a two-thirds super majority in legislative elections in 2021. The Bukele administration was represented in such transactions [with MS-13 and other gangs] by Luna, the Chief of the Salvadoran Penal System and Vice Minister of Justice and Public Security, and Marroquin, Chairman of the Social Fabric Reconstruction Unit. In addition to Salvadoran government financial allocations in 2020, the gangs also received privileges for gang leadership incarcerated in Salvadoran prisons, such as the provision of mobile phones and prostitutes.
The Treasury Department further alleged that Luna was complicit (along with his mother) in various fraud schemes involving diversions of Covid-19 pandemic aid and prison funding. While Bukele himself was not sanctioned, the Times reports that he had become a subject of the U.S. government’s criminal investigation.
In the interim, at the tail end of the first Trump administration, the Justice Department indicted 14 men alleged to be top MS-13 members in a vast narco-terrorism conspiracy. The allegations, returned in U.S. district court for the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) on Long Island, included conspiracies to murder U.S. nationals and to kill and maim persons outside our country. Included among the charges was a conspiracy to murder an FBI agent who had been working on the investigation in El Salvador; while not killed, the agent and his family had to be evacuated from the country.
The 2020 indictment did not mention Bukele, Luna, or Marroquin, but it cryptically alleged that MS-13 had “continued” its practice, begun long before Bukele’s presidency, of influencing the Salvadoran government by controlling the level of violence in the country.
Among the defendants charged in the case was César Humberto López-Larios (López). As the indictment relates, he is a member of the “original leadership body” of MS-13, known as the “Twelve Apostles of the Devil,” which ran the organization’s transnational criminal enterprise. The “Twelve Apostles of the Devil” allegedly ordered murders in the United States of rivals, gang members suspected of cooperating with law enforcement, potential witnesses, and others. López was also a member of MS-13’s subsequently formed Ranfla Nacional. The indictment recounts that this was “the highest level of leadership” of MS-13. It approved all major decisions for the organization — which has a rigidly hierarchical structure to oversee and profit from the criminal activities tens of thousands of members internationally.
López was apprehended last year. But nearly four months ago, on March 11, in a sealed submission that has since been made public, the Trump Justice Department quietly asked EDNY Judge Joan M. Azrack to dismiss all the charges against him. The government maintained, “The evidence in this case is strong,” but should nevertheless be dismissed for “substantial reasons of geopolitical, national security, foreign policy, or related reasons” — translation: The Trump administration’s deal with Bukele necessitated that the charges be dropped. Judge Azrack granted the motion to dismiss, and the administration quickly whisked López back to El Salvador, where he is believed to be in custody.
Meantime, in February 2023, the DOJ’s Vulcan Task Force, which persisted through the Biden years, had obtained a second MS-13 indictment in the EDNY. This one charged the organization as an international racketeering enterprise allegedly engaged in narco-terrorism, murder, alien smuggling, witness tampering, and money laundering. The second indictment mirrors the first, including its recitation of MS-13’s history.
Some of the second indictment’s most explosive allegations involve Luna and Marroquin. These two afore-described Bukele officials are said to have met numerous times in Salvadoran prisons with top MS-13 leadership. Some of the gang leaders were being detained, while others were at liberty in El Salvador. The latter were escorted to the meetings by the Bukele officials; they were also given official government credentials, falsely identifying them as law enforcement or intelligence officials, in the event any prison guards challenged them as they roamed around the premises.
The indictment alleges that MS-13 leaders agreed with the Salvadoran regime to reduce murders in order to help Bukele maintain and increase public support. In exchange, they were promised “financial benefits, control of territory, less restrictive prison conditions [to] enable . . . MS-13 leaders greater communication to maintain control over MS-13, and legislative and judicial changes” that would result in reduced sentences and early release from prison.
Significantly, the indictment adds that MS-13’s afore-described “Ranfla Nacional demanded that the government of El Salvador refuse to extradite MS-13 leaders . . . to the United States for prosecution.”
When the Justice Department filed its first indictment against MS-13, El-Salvador’s then-attorney general openly supported Biden administration requests that the charged gang members be extradited to the U.S. for prosecution. The second indictment relates that Ranfla Nacional and other MS-13 leaders demanded that Bukele’s government deny extradition. Shortly thereafter, in February 2021, Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party won the February 2021 elections, securing a supermajority in the legislature. When the new legislature took power, it immediately removed the country’s attorney general from office, along with five members of the Salvadoran supreme court.
One of the MS-13 leaders said to have been deeply involved in the negotiations with Bukele’s top aides was Elmer Canales-Rivera (Canales), one of the lead defendants charged in the first indictment. Allegedly, Canales is a member of both the Twelve Apostles of the Devil and Ranfla Nacional, the two top-echelon MS-13 bodies.
According to the second indictment, the Justice Department sought Canales’s extradition after he was charged in 2021. Soon afterwards, the Bukele regime released him from custody. U.S. prosecutors later elaborated that, once it was clear to Bukele’s regime that the Justice Department was seeking to bring Canales to the U.S. for prosecution, he was
escorted from a prison by high-level Salvadoran government officials, housed in a luxury apartment and other locations, provided with a firearm, and then driven to the Guatemalan border, where arrangements were made with a human trafficker to smuggle [him] into Guatemala.”
Canales remained a fugitive for two years until November 2023, when he was captured by Mexican police, who transferred him to American agents in Texas. He is still in federal custody . . . so far.
The same cannot be said for Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez (Arevalo), the lead defendant in the second indictment. Known as “the Vampire” (Vampiro de Monserrat Criminales), Arevalo is alleged to be another MS-13 leader who “participated in negotiations with the government of El Salvador [under Bukele] on behalf of MS-13.”
In 2022, the truce that Bukele’s regime is alleged to have negotiated with MS-13 dissolved, leading to a surge in murderous violence in El Salvador. In response, Bukele declared a state of emergency and mass-arrested tens of thousands of people, accusing them of being either members or abettors of MS-13, based on often flimsy evidence, according to what the Times gleaned from “human rights groups.” In the meantime, MS-13 moved Arevalo to Mexico, where he led the gang’s activities in that country — which, as the Abrego Garcia case reminds us, has included massive alien smuggling into the United States.
The Mexican government finally apprehended Arevalo and sent him to the United States, where he faced prosecution and a likely sentence of life-imprisonment for orchestrating murders and other serious crimes. But now, the Trump Justice Department has sent him back to Bukele. Just as when the DOJ quietly dismissed the case against López, prosecutors said their years’ long effort to apprehend Arevalo to try and convict him in an American courtroom, to get a federal judge to sentence him for heinous crimes — all of this was “outweighed,” they wrote, by the Trump administration’s “sensitive and important foreign policy considerations.” While the Times observes that Arevalo’s lawyers “put up a fight” against what they described as President Trump’s “corrupt deal” with Bukele, DOJ prosecutors assured Judge Azrack that Arevalo agrees with the dismissal of charges and his counsel are not opposing it.
So two major MS-13 leaders are evading American prosecution, and who knows whether there will be more. But don’t worry: We’ve still got Abrego Garcia.