El Salvador’s emergency and U.S. raids grew through sequenced measures
A Guardian feature published Oct. 25, 2026 by freelance journalist William Wheeler compares the sequence through which El Salvador President Nayib Bukele assembled expansive security power with Trump administration actions in the United States. Wheeler says the comparison turns on the accumulation and order of legal, policing, immigration and military measures rather than a single decree. He considers comparisons with Turkey and Hungary, where institutions were captured over decades, less relevant than looking to Bukele’s country.
After four years reporting on El Salvador and Trump’s ties to Bukele, Wheeler believes Trump may be trying to take the United States down the same path. He notes that Trump’s crime and immigration crackdowns no longer attract the headlines they once did, while Trump has refused to rule out declaring a national emergency as the midterm elections approach.
Shared emergency powers and detention mechanisms
At an April 14, 2025 Oval Office meeting, Donald Trump welcomed Bukele as “a friend” and said, “I knew him as a very young man” and “He’s done a fantastic job. Mr President, it’s an honor to have you.” Bukele told Trump, “We know that you have a crime problem and a terrorism problem that you need help with,” and said, “And we actually turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the western hemisphere. Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we actually liberated millions.” Trump asked his assembled advisers, “Who gave him that line?” and “Do you think I can use that?”
The Guardian feature described Bukele as “the world’s most popular authoritarian.” It said the narrative of “the Bukele miracle”—that he swiftly dismantled gangs and restored order—made him an icon across Latin America, where rightwing leaders sought to replicate his tactics, and a hero of the American right.
The feature described Bukele as a rich playboy and college dropout who had run his family’s PR firm before entering politics at 30. His flair for marketing and command of social media propelled him from small-town mayor to the presidency. He broke with his leftist party in 2017 and ran as a reform candidate, was elected in 2019 as the youngest leader in Latin America and immediately sought closeness with Trump.
From his first days in office, Bukele promoted himself as a crimefighter and announced plans to fight gangs that Salvadoran law designated as “terrorists.” He deployed police and soldiers to gang neighborhoods and began “Doge-style layoffs” that removed older officials and replaced institutional leaders with allies. Wheeler said those deployments and personnel changes normalized the military and police presence long before the March 2022 killings.
Wheeler’s account said Bukele did not declare a dictatorship on day one but built toward it incrementally, framing each step in the language of anti-corruption, public safety or efficiency. Before the emergency came what the feature called a “training exercise”: troops in the streets and military and police forces rehearsing siege, detention and incarceration tactics. When the emergency arrived, due process was gone under a legal regime in which domestic opponents could “disappear into the gulags” and be treated as “terrorists.” Bukele then swept past constitutional term limits to what Wheeler described as unchecked, seemingly limitless power.
The pandemic provided Bukele with an opportunity to scale up those powers. In March 2020, he asked El Salvador’s congress to authorize a state of emergency and used it to impose what the feature described as a draconian quarantine. Security forces encircled entire cities, detained about 16,000 people in a matter of months and funneled them into “containment centers” that functioned as de facto jails. El Salvador’s supreme court issued rulings three times to end the practice, and Bukele publicly defied the orders. A Guardian photograph from March 27, 2022, showed heavily armed police guarding streets in downtown San Salvador.
Police and soldiers detained people for trivial violations to meet exacting quotas, used excessive force and beatings, and incarcerated people in degrading conditions without adequate food, water or medical treatment. Security forces conducted simultaneous sieges across the country and practiced tactics that had not been used since El Salvador’s 1979-92 civil war. Two former Salvadoran security officials familiar with the operation told Wheeler that the Covid-era detentions were a training exercise for much larger-scale mass repression. One described the quarantine as “territorial control tests” to gauge how the population would respond to repression and its capacity for resistance. The other called it “a laboratory of instilling fear.”
Bukele also sought a $109 million loan for surveillance technology. When the opposition-controlled legislature refused the request in February 2020, he summoned thousands of supporters around Congress and then sent armed troops into the building, threatening to disband it. After Bukele’s party won a legislative supermajority in the spring 2021 elections, he fired the attorney general investigating his inner circle for corruption and removed constitutional-chamber judges who had opposed the pandemic detentions, replacing them with allies. Critics denounced the sequence as a “self-coup.” The supermajority dismissed all judges over 60 years old, while the reshuffled court unconstitutionally appointed 168 new judges. The government then began amending the constitution and gerrymandering the country.
U.S. prosecutors and journalistic investigations cited by Wheeler reported that Bukele’s government secretly agreed with gang leaders to reduce homicides and turn out voters for Bukele’s party in the midterms in exchange for money and power. Bukele denied the arrangement. Between July 2021 and February 2022, the government secretly released several prominent gang leaders. Wheeler said such pacts tend to produce more bloodshed because they give gangs an incentive to escalate violence. He said the resulting March 2022 killings supplied the government with a pretext for the crackdown.
In March 2022, gangs killed 87 people over a weekend, mostly civilians. As those killings continued, lawmakers met to approve the first of more than a dozen decrees that overhauled El Salvador’s security architecture and civil-rights laws. The measures made it easier to arrest broad sections of the population and hold people in legal limbo; anyone accused of “association” with a gang member in effect became a “terrorist.” The state of emergency was initially authorized for one month. More than four years later, it remains in effect, suspending key civil liberties.
Wheeler reports that about 2% of El Salvador’s adult population—about 100,000 people—has been jailed under the emergency. Local rights groups say at least half probably are not gang members. Wheeler wrote that Bukele’s crackdown had claimed union leaders, students, activists and journalists, and a leaked police report showed that about 43,000 gang members remained at large. Zaira Navas, a former police inspector general now with the human-rights organization Cristosal, said gang members accounted for less than 30% of those captured. She described the policy as a deliberate “policy of terror” targeting poor neighborhoods and opposition strongholds as the “internal enemy.” Wheeler said the cumulative effect was a population too frightened to dissent, and he cited extensively documented reports of torture in police custody, including waterboarding, electric shock and strangulation. A Guardian photograph from Aug. 16, 2022, showed an officer checking a man’s documents during a preventive patrol in search of gang members in Soyapango.
Mass trials accelerated sharply in 2026. For hundreds of defendants, their fate often rested on one or two anonymous cooperating witnesses who had struck deals with prosecutors. Navas said authorities found some witnesses by coercing imprisoned gang members. Prosecutors then gave them lists of names to memorize, whether or not they knew the people listed.
Violence has fallen, making Bukele popular in many quarters, although Wheeler said the actual murder rate may be closer to twice what the official figures purport. El Salvador is now the world’s most incarcerated country. Wheeler said it is difficult to distinguish genuine approval from self-censorship: a majority of survey respondents said they approved of the state of exception, a majority also said they had become more careful about what they said about it, and 48% believed they could end up in jail for criticizing the president or government.
Throughout Trump’s time outside office, Bukele stayed close to Maga, spending more than $1.5 million to lobby Maga figures including Donald Trump Jr., Sen. Ted Cruz, then-Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Lauren Boebert and former Rep. Matt Gaetz, according to Mother Jones. Wheeler said Bukele emerged as a Maga luminary and “the poster boy for strongman solutions.” Tucker Carlson, after one of several interviews with Bukele, posted that “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador” and “He may have the blueprint for saving the world.”
Wheeler compared that sequence with the sequential architecture for consolidating power outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report, which he said would become Trump’s second administration’s policy roadmap. He said it was impossible to know whether the report took inspiration from El Salvador. The Heritage Foundation praised Bukele as early as 2019, and Project 2025 was drafted over the first year of his state of emergency. Wheeler said much of what the report proposed had already been accomplished under Bukele: tens of thousands of civil-service positions had been turned into political appointments, the president had increased his control over the levers of justice, the military had been deployed domestically, unions had been crippled and media had been targeted.
Bukele’s February 2024 election was marred by irregularities, Wheeler reported. Weeks later, Wheeler described Bukele as receiving a hero’s welcome as a keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., where he echoed Trump’s rhetoric about carnage in Democratic-run cities and called on the next U.S. president to do “whatever it takes” to defeat “dark forces” already taking over the country. A Guardian photograph showed Bukele at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland, on Feb. 22, 2024.
At Bukele’s June 2024 inauguration, Wheeler said the Biden administration—concerned that a wave of Central American migrants could wreck his campaign—sent a rare high-level delegation. Critics viewed the visit as an echo of Washington’s Cold War support for Central American strongmen.
Wheeler also wrote that Bukele rolled out the red carpet at CPAC for Maga figures, while Biden administration representatives were snubbed. Tucker Carlson and six members of Congress shared the red carpet. Representative Matt Gaetz called Bukele “an inspiration to the western world” and soon founded an El Salvador caucus in Congress to “vindicate the choices President Bukele has made” and import his “good ideas.” In February 2025, Bukele cut public funding to political parties, leaving the opposition in disarray. That July, his legislature in effect moved up elections and abolished term limits altogether. El País wrote that Bukele was “virtually guaranteed another term,” which would bring his total time in power to 14 years.
Migration and deportation linked the two security systems
After taking office in 2025, Trump’s second call to a foreign leader as president was to Bukele. Weeks later, Marco Rubio traveled to El Salvador to broker a migration agreement under which Bukele offered to accept deportees of any nationality and even imprison U.S. citizens. Bukele asked for the MS-13 leaders in U.S. custody. Weeks later, Rubio promised to hand over the gang leaders, some of whom were protected U.S. informants who had told investigators about the gang’s secret dealings with Bukele’s government.
In March 2025, Trump secretly deported the first MS-13 leader, who was expected to testify in U.S. court about those dealings. Prosecutors later sought to drop narcoterrorism charges and deport other gang leaders. One warned a judge in a handwritten note that he “will be tortured and desposed of as it happen’d to another who was deported.” More than 200 alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were deported along with the first gang leader and incarcerated in Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as Cecot, where they were allegedly tortured and sexually abused.
Among them was Salvadoran Kilmar Ábrego García, the husband of a U.S. citizen and father of three. A Guardian photograph showed Ábrego García and his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, at a prayer vigil before an ICE field office in Baltimore on Aug. 25, 2025. A court had explicitly ordered that he not be deported, and Wheeler described the evidence that he was a gang member as thin to nonexistent. The White House resisted a subsequent Supreme Court ruling that would facilitate his return, which Wheeler said threatened a constitutional crisis. Ezra Klein called the deportation “a test of their ability to do this to anyone” and said, “If they can get you on a plane, they can hustle you beyond our laws and leave you in the grips of the kind of gulags they wish they had here.” At the April 2025 Oval Office meeting, where Bukele was a guest of honor, he told Trump, “you have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some.”
ICE and CBP had $183 billion available
In June 2025, Trump began launching federal raids in Democratic-leaning cities led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, ICE and CBP had $118 billion left unspent from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act as of April 2026. The Secure America Act added $65 billion, bringing their available funds to $183 billion. The $70 billion package alone exceeded the budgets of all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined, while Trump’s 2026 budget proposed cuts to the FBI, ATF and DEA.
Journalist Radley Balko argued that the money was flowing to agencies Trump saw as most loyal and concluded that he was “attempting to build his own paramilitary force.” In response to ICE increasing its spending on weapons by 700%, Wisconsin state Sen. Chris Larson warned that “The President is building an army to attack his own country.”
In the months after the April 2025 meeting, Wheeler said federal enforcement used tactics reminiscent of those Bukele had pioneered. Rep. Jim McGovern told the Guardian that stories from families he had met in El Salvador reminded him of masked agents in unmarked vans and the removal of people into an opaque and growing detention network. “We’ve seen this movie before,” he said. Wheeler said the structure of raids in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Memphis, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere mirrored Salvadoran practices: arrests for trivial offenses to meet quotas, deployments or attempted deployments of parts of the military on domestic soil, and degrading treatment of detainees publicized on social media.
At one of the largest ICE camps in the country, in Texas, human-rights groups collected accounts from detainees describing officers who crushed men’s testicles, stomped on them and beat them while handcuffed. Three men died there in six weeks; one death ICE attributed first to “medical distress,” then to a suicide attempt, before the medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Thirty-six Texas state House Democrats cited “numerous credible reports of torture, killing, and inhumane treatment” and demanded an investigation. Historian Andrea Pitzer said in The New York Times, “the point isn’t that they hide it. The point is to instill terror on the society as a whole.” The feature said brutality on the streets and secrecy in the camps work together: “the goal is always to use one group as an example of what can happen to everybody.” A separate Guardian photograph showed National Guard soldiers near an entrance to the Federal building in Los Angeles during a demonstration in response to a series of ICE raids on June 10, 2025.
Domestic military planning and terrorism measures expanded federal power
The campaign also reached beyond immigrants. In late September 2025, Trump summoned hundreds of top military officers from around the world to an unprecedented gathering at a Virginia military base. Wheeler reported that Trump suggested he would soon deploy the troops to use U.S. cities as “training grounds” for the “war from within.”
That same month, Trump signed an order designating “antifa,” described in the feature as a loose constellation of leftwing groups without central leadership, as a domestic-terror threat. Days later, he signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, ordering federal authorities to develop a strategy to disrupt groups purportedly engaged in “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” The memorandum asserted that common threads included “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
A former senior U.S. official who worked in Central America under Biden called NSPM-7 “the signature policy document of this administration.” Wheeler described it as a powerful echo of Bukele’s use of gangs as terrorists, and the official said, “It’s exactly the same road map, down to the language of war used against his own people.” The Brennan Center for Justice said the orders treated “an imagined leftwing conspiracy” as grounds to “criminalize opposition.” It said, “Buying a sandwich for an activist, allowing a protester to crash on your couch, or briefly lending a computer to print pamphlets critical of government policy could all potentially be considered material support” for terrorism. Soon afterward, the FBI organized a 10-agency Joint Mission Center to prosecute the order’s targets.
Wheeler reported that prosecutions under the administration’s “Antifa as domestic terrorists” classification had already begun. In June and July 2026, nine people were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison over a July 4, 2025 protest at a Texas ICE detention center where one participant shot and wounded a police officer. Six defendants who never fired a weapon received 50-year sentences. A man who was never at the protest received 30 years for moving a box of zines.
Federal enforcement spread to Minnesota last winter. Federal agents outnumbering the state’s two largest police forces combined faced protesters armed with snowballs. A photograph from a Jan. 13, 2026 raid in south Minneapolis shows demonstrators walking through tear gas after confronting federal law enforcement agents. In January, immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, identified in the feature as a poet and mother of three and an ICU nurse for veterans. Outcry peaked in Minneapolis, but the administration did not appear to have abandoned its plans, according to recent New York Times reporting; it appeared only to have delayed them. Behind the scenes, Trump’s team debated suspending habeas corpus for unauthorized immigrants—a fundamental check on state power—while Vance and Stephen Miller continued pressing to invoke the Insurrection Act on U.S. streets.
Institutional and election checks faced the combined sequence
Former House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt and former Sen. Timothy Wirth argue that the United States is in the middle of a “rolling coup” designed to ensure Trump never loses an election. They acknowledge that many individual actions “may each appear legal or at least arguably so,” but argue that the danger lies in the pattern. “The first job of any coup is to make the recognition of it seem premature,” they said. “That is the trap. By the time recognition is no longer premature, the moment to resist has already passed.”
Wheeler cautioned that this did not make El Salvador an inevitable American future. U.S. institutions and political opposition are stronger than El Salvador’s, and Trump lacks a credible public-security threat comparable to the gangs Bukele faced. Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor of government and co-author of How Democracies Die, said the crises the administration had tried to invoke, including the supposed threat from Antifa and the Charlie Kirk killing, “so far, they haven’t worked.”
Wheeler described Gephardt, the former Democratic House majority leader, as a founder of Keep Our Republic, a bipartisan coalition formed to protect the U.S. electoral process and rule of law. Gephardt said 2020 proved that Trump and his team were unwilling to accept losing an election. He called that effort a “clown car” but said the president’s allies were better prepared.
A new 45-day ICE surge in California prompted local leaders to warn that the raids would be used to suppress voter turnout. Gephardt worried that Trump had set the stage to claim China or Iran had interfered with election integrity, seize voting machines and ballots in targeted states or cities, and invoke secret executive orders that long predated his administration. He called those older orders “a loaded revolver that’s been on the table for 70 years” and said Stephen Miller was leading efforts to adapt them. A government document said the orders were designed “to implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations.”
Two months before publication, conservative host Wayne Allyn Root told Trump he had the right to declare a national-security emergency for elections. Trump replied, “Let me just say stranger things have happened. I’ll leave it at that.” Trump had also refused to rule out declaring a national emergency as the midterm elections approached.
Gephardt said Trump might call on a red-state governor such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, as he put pressure on Georgia in 2020, and insist that Democratic House winners had been elected through fraud and that Abbott must intervene. In a close midterm, flipping five or 10 seats could decide control of the House, and Keep Our Republic was prepared to file lawsuits in every state if Trump launched such an effort.
If Democrats retook the House, Speaker Mike Johnson would remain speaker until the new House convened at noon on Jan. 3, Gephardt said. Johnson could then fire the nonpartisan clerk of the House and install a loyalist who would refuse to accept certifications of Democratic winners. Wheeler said most experts believed the move was not legally viable, though Gephardt worried that uncertainty over whether a court could resolve the dispute made the scenario especially concerning.
Gephardt argued that an alliance of ideologues and the technology industry was working against democracy, and that Trump was less the architect than a salesman fronting for people who wanted authoritarian rule and regarded citizens with contempt. He said the administration had cowed the House and made gains with the Supreme Court, but lower federal and state courts remained independent. He believed the combination of courts and ordinary citizens was democracy’s only hope.
Gephardt warned that protests could give the administration a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act. “Authoritarians rule through fear,” he said, and “they’ve got the guns.” He described the United States as a fragile test of self-government: “We are in the test of whether or not the institutions and ultimately the people can maintain self-governance,” he said. “We are still working with this experiment, but it’s fragile … And we are on the brink of losing it.”
William Wheeler, a freelance journalist, is the author of State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence. His reporting in El Salvador was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Freelance Investigative Reporters and Editors (Fire).