Military contractors pitch unprecedented prison plan for detained immigrants
Politico
04/11/2025
Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and a team of defense contractors are pitching the White House on a plan to vastly expand deportations to El Salvador — transporting thousands of immigrants from U.S. holding facilities to a sprawling maximum security prison in Central America.
The proposal, exclusively obtained by POLITICO, says it would target “criminal illegal aliens” and would attempt to avoid legal challenges by designating part of the prison — which has drawn accusations of violence and overcrowding from human rights groups — as American territory.
It’s unclear how seriously the White House is considering the plan by Prince, who has drawn scrutiny for his firm’s role in a deadly massacre in Iraq two decades ago. But it would give Prince’s group an unprecedented and potentially highly lucrative role in an expanded version of a transnational operation that has elicited its own web of controversies, in part because it has swept up immigrants who do not have criminal records in the United States.
Administration officials have already discussed the idea of the U.S. owning some of the prison complex, the administration official said, adding that the White House continues to weigh a number of options and that the plan would be in line with the goal of getting “dangerous people as far away from the continental U.S. as possible.”
The administration official also said they expect the proposal to be discussed during El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s visit to the White House on Monday, when he is planning to meet with President Donald Trump to hash out a variety of immigration issues.
The proposal would ultimately put Prince in charge of an extraordinary privatization effort that would use his company to handle logistics, including ferrying tens of thousands of detainees from American holding cells to El Salvador’s prison.
