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Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of El Salvador, Apr. 14, 2025

April 14, 2025 · The White House · 0:42:58

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump hosted Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office on Apr. 14, 2025, carried on the White House channel. The President called Bukele a friend - “we went through this together” - and thanked him for the job he is doing, telling the people of El Salvador “they have one hell of a president,” as he put it.

Bukele said his country had turned “the murder capital of the world” into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere, and offered help: “We know that you have a crime problem, a terrorism problem that you need help with, and we’re a small country but if we can help we will do it.” On the imprisonment at the center of his model, Bukele said: “They say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we actually liberated millions” - and told the President that to liberate 350 million people, “you have to imprison some.”

The President described the border record the partnership sits inside: crossings down, as Bukele put it, 95 percent, corrected by the President to “99.1%, to be exact,” as of that morning, as both men stated it. The President also ranged across police and military recruiting records, trade and the tariff pause he had granted two weeks earlier, and NATO payments, which he put at over $600 billion taken in since he got involved.

Why it matters

The Bukele meeting is the public centerpiece of the administration’s deportation partnership with El Salvador - the arrangement under which removed gang members are held in Salvadoran custody - and both presidents stated its logic on camera: El Salvador’s imprisonment model offered as the template, and the border numbers offered as the proof.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the border-crossings figure stated in the meeting (down 99.1%, as the President stated it on Apr. 14, 2025) and the El Salvador deportation partnership itself - flagged for the scoreboard editors; the entry itself remains review-gated.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of El Salvador” (YouTube, Apr. 14, 2025) - official description and broadcast transcript as aired.