Since 2024, at least five YouTube content creators have been granted access to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, the megaprison to
Jack Winstanley at MMFA:
Since 2024, at least five YouTube content creators have been granted access to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, the megaprison to which the Trump administration began sending immigrants last month. The resulting YouTube videos have been viewed over 200 million times, and at least one creator has appeared on Fox News four times to discuss what he saw while filming. He suggested during one appearance that “if the United States was smart, they would do something just like this as well.” Both President Donald Trump’s administration and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s government have used social media to push propaganda films celebrating the megaprison as well, despite concerns of potential human rights abuses at the site, and right-wing media have also praised the facility.
The Trump administration is deporting immigrants to El Salvador's CECOT prison without due process
Bukele opened CECOT in 2023, earning praise from right-wing media figures
In early 2023, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele opened the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, as part of his campaign against criminal gangs operating within the country. Since then, experts have raised concerns about the prison’s harsh conditions and “massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty,” including the extreme levels of isolation experienced by the prisoners. One visiting filmmaker called it a “tropical gulag” and an expert described it as “the Salvadoran version of going to Siberia.” But right-wing media figures have celebrated the facility and suggested that the United States should create similar infrastructure within the country, praising Bukele’s authoritarianism (“This is my kind of authority, baby”) and suggesting that a megaprison would help with America’s “serious crime problem.”
In March 2025, the Trump administration began deporting individuals to CECOT
During an official visit in February 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Bukele had offered to accept deportees from the U.S., including “dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentence in the United States even though they're U.S. citizens or legal residents.” The following month, President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador to be imprisoned at CECOT. Despite ongoing legal challenges to the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting individuals to El Salvador with little to no due process, Trump stated during a press briefing alongside Bukele that he is exploring detaining U.S. citizens and imprisoning them in El Salvador as well.
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In March, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the megaprison and posted a video thanking Bukele In the video, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the facility “one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.” While several GOP lawmakers have traveled to the megaprison, congressional Republicans and Salvadoran officials have denied requests from Democratic lawmakers to visit the facility. Bukele’s government has also made ample use of social media to promote CECOT and its wider crackdown on criminal gangs Dramatically shot videos showing detainees being marched off planes by armed military and police units, having their heads shaved, and being hurried into cells have been posted to Bukele’s social media accounts in an effort to promote his “no-tolerance policy on crime,” according to The Washington Post.
5 YouTube content creators have earned more than 200M views on videos of their visits to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador.
