President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed an offer by El Salvador to take in prisoners -- including US citizens -- despite clear legal problems with such an outsourcing under American law.
"If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
"It's no different than our prison system, except it would be a lot less expensive, and it would be a great deterrent," Trump said.
El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, who has carried out a sweeping crackdown on crime, offered the use of a maximum-security prison, Latin America's largest, when he met Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday.
Rubio said Tuesday that the Trump administration would review the proposal but acknowledged legal issues.
"We'll have to study it on our end. There are obviously legalities involved," Rubio told reporters a day afterward in Costa Rica, where he headed after El Salvador.
"We have a constitution, we have all sorts of things, but it's a very generous offer," Rubio said.
The US Constitution forbids "cruel and unusual punishment" and promises due process.
There is little precedent in modern times for a democratic country to send its own citizens to foreign prisons.
Rubio again welcomed the offer by Bukele, saying, "No one's ever made an offer like that."
Bukele said that El Salvador wanted to give the United States a chance to "outsource part of its prison system."
He said he would negotiate payment, which would decrease costs for the United States but help fund El Salvador's own mass incarceration.
Trump said that shipping criminals to El Salvador would be "a very small fee compared to what we pay to private prisons."
"Frankly, they could keep them, because these people are never going to be any good," Trump said.
It would be a sharp break with historical practice for the United States not to take back its own citizens.
With AFP
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