ISTANBUL 

Days before deporting hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious El Salvadoran prison, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly assured El Salvador President Nayib Bukele that he would return nine MS-13 gang leaders in US custody, some of whom were protected as "informants."

Rubio told Bukele that deporting the gang members to El Salvador would require Attorney General Pam Bondi to end the Justice Department’s protections for them, and he assured the president that Bondi would carry out the process so the MS-13 leaders could be handed over, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The agreement between Rubio and Bukele gave the administration access to the massive Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a foreign prison set to play a central role in Trump’s plan to carry out the “largest deportation in American history," the report added.

The deal would hand Bukele custody of individuals who threatened to reveal alleged agreements between his government and MS-13 that contributed to El Salvador’s historic decline in violence, the report cited officials as saying.

For the Salvadoran president, recovering these informants was seen as vital to maintaining his tough-on-crime image and as an important move to impede a US investigation into his administration’s ties with the notoriously violent gang.

However, by pledging to end the informant agreements, current and former Justice Department officials argue that Rubio risked undermining years of US law enforcement efforts to capture and gain the cooperation of top leaders of one of the world’s deadliest gangs.

“The deal is a deep betrayal of U.S. law enforcement, whose agents risked their lives to apprehend the gang members,” Douglas Farah, a US contractor who worked with federal authorities to investigate and dismantle MS-13, was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

Officials said at least three of the MS-13 leaders Bukele requested had provided incriminating information about government officials suspected of colluding with the gang.

One of them, Cesar Lopez Larios—charged last year by US prosecutors with directing MS-13’s operations in the US—was returned to El Salvador just two days after the Rubio-Bukele phone call.

The others remain in the US, awaiting word on whether they, too, will be handed over to the very government they had been cooperating against.

The State Department rejected criticism of Rubio’s dealmaking, asserting that his diplomatic efforts enabled Washington to deport hundreds of suspected Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members to El Salvador before their subsequent transfer to Venezuela, the gang’s birthplace.

“The Trump Administration’s results speak for themselves. Hardened TdA gang members are back in Venezuela … MS-13 gang members are being prosecuted in the U.S. and El Salvador. And Americans are safer as a result of these incredible efforts," remarked State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott.