When the president of El Salvador came to the White House this week, he rejected a US Supreme Court order to “facilitate” the return of a man locked inside one of his country’s notorious detention facilities.
“How can I smuggle the terrorist into the United States?” Nayib Bukele said at the meeting, echoing a White House position that has led a federal judge to rule the Trump administration in possible contempt of court. “We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”
Bukele’s allegation of terrorism was presented without evidence; the Trump administration has admitted in court that the man in question, Maryland resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was deported by mistake. Yet at the meeting, Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, and Attorney General Pam Bondi both claimed Abrego Garcia was a member of the violent gang MS-13.
For Jews with a passing familiarity with Bukele, his conflating of gang activity and terrorism had a familiar ring. After the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Bukele — who himself is Palestinian — compared Hamas to MS-13.
“As a Salvadoran with Palestinian ancestry, I’m sure the best thing that could happen to the Palestinian people is for Hamas to completely disappear… Anyone who supports the Palestinian cause would make a great mistake siding with those criminals,” he wrote on social media at the time. “It would be like if Salvadorans would have sided with MS-13 terrorists, just because we share ancestors or nationality.”
'World’s coolest dictator'
Coming from a head of state with Palestinian grandparents, whose country is home to an estimated 100,000 Palestinians and a history of electing Palestinians to higher office, this stance would seem unusual.
But the 43-year-old Bukele, who has called himself the “world’s coolest dictator” and embraced authoritarianism since his 2019 election and whose deportation deals with Trump have thrust him onto the US media scene, is himself an unusual figure, particularly on Israel and Jewish issues.
The young Salvadoran leader is descended from Palestinian Christians on his father’s side. According to Israeli media, his paternal grandfather was born in Jerusalem and his grandmother was from Bethlehem; the two migrated to El Salvador amid a wave of Palestinian immigration to Latin America. His father, born in El Salvador, converted to Islam in adulthood and became a well-known imam, one whom Nayib has claimed had warm relationships with Jews and Israel.
Nayib himself, whose mother is Roman Catholic but who was targeted by anti-Islam messaging during his campaign, has said he is “not a person who believes much in the liturgy of religions.” But, he added, “I believe in God, in Jesus Christ. I believe in his word, I believe in his word revealed in the Holy Bible. And I know that God does not reject anyone because of their origins.”
While primarily building his political identity around combatting gang violence, he has been vocally pro-Israel. Mishpacha, an Orthodox Jewish magazine, detailed his brutal roundups of suspected gang members in his large prisons while calling him “a study in intriguing contrasts.”
Some analysts believe El Salvador’s heavily Evangelical electorate may be receptive to pro-Israel messaging despite the country’s near-total absence of Jews. Following the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, two scholars of Central America who deemed the war in Gaza a “genocide” speculated that Bukele’s support of Israel may be influenced by Christian Zionist theology.
Still, El Salvador has a large Palestinian diaspora community, dating back to the late 19th century — around 100,000, according to some estimates, out of a total population of 6.3 million. The country’s Jewish community, by contrast, numbers around 200.
“The Jewish community in El Salvador is small; we maintain an extremely low profile and have no relationship with the government or political leaders,” Juah Pablo Ossandon, director of Comunidad Israelita de El Salvador, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an email. He declined to comment further on the community’s relationship with Bukele. Online, his Jewish community arm has advocated for the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas.
One very prominent Salvadoran may also be Jewish, according to Bukele: his wife Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, the country’s first lady.
In 2018, on a state-sponsored visit to Israel, the president told Jerusalem’s then-mayor that Gabriela “has Jewish-Sephardic blood” on her grandfather’s side. (The couple have two daughters, Layla and Aminah.) The visit occurred while Bukele was serving as mayor of the capital San Salvador, as part of a delegation of international mayors. The trip was sponsored by the Israeli government and the American Jewish Committee.
Bukele was happy to promote his visit back home, posting an Instagram photo of himself praying at the Western Wall and video of himself visiting Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He reshared an image of himself at the Western Wall after his presidential victory, in 2019, and that year also announced a $3 million donation to the Jerusalem Foundation, which promotes development in Israel’s capital.
While Bukele fosters such pro-Israel ties, a growing number of Americans are seeing some uncomfortable echoes in Trump’s deportation scheme. Bukele’s prisons, known for allegations of torture, have absorbed many migrants without going through due process or — in a reported 90% of cases — without any evidence of a criminal record. In recent days Trump has threatened to ship US citizens to Bukele’s prison as well.
“A word exists for a prison that ‘functions outside a judicial system’ and where ‘prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process,’” Democratic strategist Max Burns wrote in a column for The Hill. “According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the word for that kind of place is a concentration camp.”