The ‘Secret’ Behind Bukele and Trump’s Controversial CECOT Deal

Three months after President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025 and began his major immigration crackdown, he held a White House sit-down with a popular Latin American leader who had once called himself the world’s coolest dictator.

That leader, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, built his reputation on being extremely tough on his country’s gangs and reducing homicide rates. “Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands,” Bukele told Trump at the April 14, 2025, meeting as cameras rolled. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.”

“That’s very good,” Trump said to laughter in the room, adding, “Do you think I can use that?”

What the two leaders were exchanging went well beyond a punchline.

Related Content

Documentary

The Deal

April 7, 2026

As the new documentary The Deal: Trump, Bukele & the Gangs of El Salvador explores, Bukele opened the doors of the notorious Salvadoran prison known as CECOT to planeloads of mostly Venezuelan U.S. deportees that the Trump administration had swept up and accused of being gang members. Later reporting would reveal that most of the men had no criminal convictions in the U.S. or proven gang affiliations.

“It was pretty obvious what Trump was getting out of this deal,” T. Christian Miller of ProPublica says in the opening scene of the documentary, embedded above. “It was much less obvious what Bukele was doing.”

That lack of transparency was familiar to Carlos Martínez and Óscar Martínez, reporters at the El Salvador investigative news outlet El Faro who have covered Bukele and his administration for years.

“The nature of Bukele’s government is to keep things secret,” Carlos says in the above video.

FRONTLINE and El Faro’s documentary, releasing April 7, pierces that veil to investigate what underpinned Bukele’s controversial CECOT deal with the Trump administration.

“The reality,” Óscar says in the video, “is that Bukele is trying to cover up his past.”

The film chronicles how the brothers and their colleagues discovered evidence that ran counter to Bukele’s tough-on-gangs image: Bukele’s government had previously negotiated with MS-13 and other violent gangs it publicly claimed to be cracking down on, El Faro found. Those negotiations, documents showed, involved offering privileges to gang leaders in prison, in exchange for a reduction in homicides and voter support in territories the gangs controlled.

“There was a pact between Bukele and the gangs. That is the main reason behind the huge drop in homicide rates” in El Salvador, Carlos Dada, El Faro’s co-founder and editor in chief, says in the documentary. “It was also an electoral pact. Part of the deal was to control the inhabitants of the communities the gangs controlled to vote for Mr. Bukele. The gangs guaranteed Mr. Bukele that Salvadorans would vote for him in exchange of some benefits.”

Following the revelations, Bukele, who had vowed to end government corruption and crush gangs, claimed “El Faro lied” and said the documents showing his administration’s dealings with gang leaders were “fake.” The Martínez brothers now live — and report — in exile.

“Bukele wants us in prison for having revealed something that upset him,” Óscar says.

Through the brothers’ story, as well as the perspectives of other reporters, former U.S. officials and insiders, The Deal shines new light on Bukele’s tangled history with the gangs the U.S. is fighting. The documentary examines why Bukele offered to imprison U.S. deportees in CECOT — and why, in exchange, he asked for a number of gang leaders in U.S. custody to be returned to El Salvador, in what one reporter in the documentary calls “a deal within a deal.”

Bukele has said the Trump administration’s return of MS-13 members will help El Salvador “finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants” of the gang. But some observers suspect he had another motive: preventing gang leaders in U.S. custody from exposing the details of their past dealings with Bukele’s administration.

Bukele “needs the U.S. to help cover up his past,” Óscar says. “And that’s a story we haven’t finished telling yet.”