What does Trump's win mean for El Salvador?
As the world now knows, Donald Trump will again be president of the United States after a major victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday's election. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele tweeted his congratulations:
What does the return of Trump to the White House portend for El Salvador?
Nayib Bukele enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration during 2019 and 2020, and in particular with the US Ambassador Ronald Johnson. Bukele met Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 and famously called the American president "nice and cool." Trump was pleased with Bukele’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to control migration and sent multiple high level officials to meetings in the country. Bukele assisted on migration despite Trump’s attempts to cancel Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") which protects 195,000 Salvadorans from removal, and despite Trump calling El Salvador a “shithole country.”
Advancing to 2024, today members of Trump’s political coalition from the “MAGA” wing of the Republican party can be seen repeatedly praising El Salvador and holding up Bukele as a model. Their admiration for El Salvador's strongman leader was highlighted when Bukele was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference - CPAC earlier this year. Right wing TV host Tucker Carlson, Trump's son Donald Junior and Congressman Matt Gaetz all arrived in San Salvador for Bukele’s inauguration to an unconstitutional second term on June 1 and were invited to meet with the Salvadoran president afterwards.
Since then, Gaetz has spearheaded the creation of the El Salvador Caucus in the US Congress filled with several other MAGA Republicans. Its first policy push is to have the State Department change its Travel Advisory for El Salvador from "Level 3 - Reconsider Travel" to "Level 1 - Normal Precautions." *
Trump has also signaled that he wants Elon Musk to play a prominent role in his second administration. Musk has recently become a big fan of Bukele, with the two meeting at the Tesla headquarters earlier this year, and Musk praising Bukele's record in El Salvador.
Thus Bukele can expect a return to a US foreign policy which does not criticize human rights abuses or emphasize the rule of law. Instead of voicing concerns (however weakly stated by the current Ambassador) about the State of Exception, Bukele can expect to be held up as an example for being tough on crime. No one from the US government will lecture Bukele about human rights. No one new from the Salvadoran government will be placed on sanctions lists by the US government.
But these personal relationships will not stave off the impact of Trump's signature policy proposal of a massive deportation of millions of immigrants in the US, which could theoretically include hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans. It is important to understand Trump’s view of the world and migrants. In that worldview, El Salvador is one primary country which sends MS-13 members over the US border to terrorize US citizens. Despite the admiration for Bukele espoused by the MAGA crowd, in his current election campaign Trump has once again returned to his singular view of El Salvador – it produces dangerous migrants.
From Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention in July:
In El Salvador, murders are down 70 percent. Why are they down? Now, he would have you convinced that because he’s trained murderers to be wonderful people, no. They’re down because they’re sending their murderers to the United States of America. This is going to be very bad. And bad things are going to happen.Large numbers of Salvadorans in the US may well face deportation in Trump's plans to expel undocumented immigrants, and Bukele cannot expect that he could persuade Trump and his hardline immigration adviser Stephen Miller not to cancel the TPS program which protects almost 200,000 Salvadorans from removal. In his first term in office, Trump canceled TPS but the cancelation was blocked in the courts because of deficiencies in the process used to cancel the program. Those deficiencies are curable, however, and you can be assured Trump will try.
In addition, there are today 127,000 open cases in US immigration courts against Salvadorans who lack the protection of TPS. They are part of the estimated 741,000 undocumented Salvadorans living in the US. Trump's massive deportation promise puts all of them at risk.
It is a logistical impossibility for the US to deport the quantity of immigrants Trump wants to expel in a short period of time. Still, El Salvador needs to prepare for the fact that the El Salvador Caucus is not going to stand in the way of Trump's deportation promise to his supporters.
Is El Salvador ready for the rate of deportations to increase by 300% or 500%? For jets to land at the international airport daily unloading hundreds of deported men, women and children with every flight? Is it ready for a possible reduction in the level of remittances which currently support more than 20% of the Salvadoran economy?
Donald Trump also promises to place steep tariffs on virtually everything being imported into the US. For El Salvador, the tariffs could mean a reduction in its exports to its largest trading partner and a loss of jobs and investment.
So a Trump administration might be good for Bukele's standing in the world of populist authoritarians, but it would not be so good for the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans living without full legal status in the US and for the families in El Salvador who rely on their remittances or rely on jobs in the export sector.
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