Trump Zeroes in on Country to Dump Migrants From All Over

President Donald Trump seems to have finally found a country that won’t rebuff his plan to send it hordes of undocumented immigrants who don’t hail from that nation.

The Trump administration is working on a plan with El Salvador that would allow the Latin American country to accept immigrants from the U.S. even if they are not El Salvadorian, according to CBS News. The plan would designate El Salvador as a “Safe Third Country” as part of the agreement, pushing the migrants to seek asylum there instead of the U.S.

The move would reinstate an agreement the two countries brokered during Trump’s first term, which never went into effect and was terminated by President Joe Biden. It would be the first such agreement struck under Trump’s second term, coming weeks after multiple countries rebuffed his attempt to negotiate similar deals. The U.S. currently has a “Safe Third Country” agreement with Canada.

The deal stems from a close relationship between Trump and Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, who spoke last week about their quest to “stop together to stop illegal immigration and crack down on transnational gangs like Tren de Aragua,” a group Trump moved to declare a terrorist organization last week.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also set to visit El Salvador next month as part of a trip through Latin America. The Trump administration has vowed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants across the U.S., and Trump signed multiple executive orders to that effect last week.

NBC News reported last month that Mexico and the Bahamas had rejected Trump’s request for the nations to accept migrants who didn’t come from there. “The Bahamas simply does not have the resources to accommodate such a request,” a spokesperson for its prime minister told NBC News. Mexico rejected a U.S. deportation flight last week.

The report said the Trump transition team had also reached out to Panama, Grenada, and Turks and Caicos to gauge their interests.

During the first Trump administration, the government instituted a policy where migrants would be deported to Guatemala without knowing where they were going. Multiple pro-immigrant rights groups sued the administration over the policy, though the lawsuits have not progressed.