In a propaganda video released by the government of El Salvador, shackled detainees are forcefully led off planes as drones film overhead.
The music builds and the men are pushed into armored vehicles and taken to a large prison.
Their heads are shaved and they are moved in organized lines into large cells — all while the camera rolls.
The video features Venezuelan migrants recently deported from the United States, whom U.S. officials accuse of being gang members, according to Salvadoran officials. The clip also shows suspected members of the MS-13 gang, they said. The deportation flights landed in El Salvador despite a federal judge ordering that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States.
The three-minute clip, released on Sunday morning by El Salvador’s president, was viewed almost 39 million times in three days across social media, and was repeatedly played on cable news.
While the United States didn’t release the video, it is an extraordinary depiction of detained migrants subject to American deportation proceedings, which are rarely so openly broadcast.
But the style of video is not new in El Salvador.
President Nayib Bukele, a former publicist who was elected the country’s leader in 2019, has made prosecuting and incarcerating El Salvador’s gangs a key part of his tenure.
He has highlighted his hard-line approach against longstanding gang violence with polished videos of arrests and imprisonments, like this heavily produced video from 2023 showing detainees being moved into a new prison facility.
“These are videos that typically humiliate and try to dehumanize the people who are detained there, and in this case deported,” said Juanita Goebertus Estrada, the director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch.
The Trump administration has disclosed little about the men, including any evidence that they are gang members. It says videos like this show how President Trump is making good on his promises to stop illegal immigration and conduct mass deportations.
Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited El Salvador. He announced that the country’s president had offered to take in deportees of any nationality, including U.S. citizens, and house them for a fee at a new megaprison called the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a hulking site that can house up to 40,000 inmates.
Opened in 2023 to detain people accused of being gang members, the facility was introduced with highly produced videos by Mr. Bukele’s team, showcasing the transfer of detainees.
“It’s the shock value,” Ricardo Valencia, a press officer at the Salvadoran Embassy in Washington from 2010 and 2014, and a public relations professor at California State University, Fullerton, said of the videos. “But this tells you about how little rule of law there is in El Salvador. The cruelty is the point.”
Over the weekend, the Trump administration said that El Salvador would receive $6 million for taking in hundreds of deportees, most of whom the U.S. government said were members of the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua, without offering evidence or the detainees’ names. Officials said the deal also included the transfer of about two dozen suspected members of MS-13 who were being held in the United States awaiting charges.
Normally, official U.S. depictions of deportations or detention centers are more circumspect, not showing migrants’ faces, if there is video at all.
But under Mr. Trump, who campaigned on a hard-line anti-immigration stance and the promise of mass deportations, U.S. officials have presented a new, more visceral propaganda campaign.
Mr. Rubio and Elon Musk shared Mr. Bukele’s video online. Mr. Trump thanked him, saying, “We will not forget!”
In recent weeks, the White House has released videos celebrating their deportation efforts.
The White House also released photos styled as Old West “wanted” posters, featuring men “ARRESTED” by immigration officials, who they say have been accused of crimes like rape, murder and kidnapping.
These images, stamped with a White House logo, were promoted to demonstrate what the White House says is a determination to follow the nation’s immigration laws. But they also served to publicly shame immigrants, some of whom had not been convicted.
On Monday, the White House posted a clip on X of a shackled migrant being searched set to Semisonic’s 1998 rock hit “Closing Time.”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the video was meant to encourage “illegal immigrants to actively self-deport, to maybe to save themselves from being in one of these fun videos.”
These types of videos first became common in El Salvador in 2022, after a surge in gang violence in the Central American country led the government to impose a state of emergency — one that remains in place three years later. The military and the police began a campaign of mass arrests, with many people imprisoned without due process.
Although the crackdown significantly reduced gang violence, it simultaneously eroded civil liberties and centralized power under Mr. Bukele.
Human rights groups raised alarms about the lack of due process for tens of thousands of detainees (some people with no gang ties were ensnared), and the conditions in which they were held. More than 300 people have died in government custody in the last three years, according to Human Rights Watch.
When Mr. Bukele’s administration opened the new detention facility in 2023, it posted a 30-minute guided tour. Since then they have brought international media and social media influencers in for tours that have garnered huge view counts on YouTube.
Mr. Bukele’s new partnership with the United States is likely to further embolden his government’s production of such propaganda videos.
“We continue advancing in the fight against organized crime,” Mr. Bukele wrote alongside the video over the weekend. “But this time, we are also helping our allies.”
Axel Boada contributed video production.
