Nigel Farage Opens Talks with El Salvador to Deport All Foreign Criminals from UK Prisons
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has initiated discussions with the government of El Salvador about deporting every foreign national currently held in British prisons to serve their sentences in the Central American country’s facilities, according to an exclusive report.
A Reform UK delegation, led by party chairman Lee Anderson, is scheduled to travel to El Salvador in the coming months to advance the negotiations. The talks centre on renting prison capacity so that foreign offenders can complete their sentences abroad rather than in the UK.
Reform’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf framed the proposal as a direct response to prison overcrowding: “We will deport all 10,000 foreign nationals from our prisons, sending them to serve their sentences in countries like El Salvador. We will use the space created to ensure that serious criminals stay where they belong: behind bars.”
Official figures show roughly 10,000–10,500 foreign national offenders in custody in England and Wales in mid-2026, accounting for about 12% of the total prison population.
Building on Earlier Crime Policies
The move expands on Reform’s 2025 law-and-order platform. At that time Farage proposed renting thousands of prison places overseas for the most serious British offenders—naming El Salvador as one possible partner alongside countries such as Kosovo or Estonia—and returning foreign prisoners to their countries of origin. He famously said of child murderer Ian Huntley: “If that means Ian Huntley goes to El Salvador… our attitude is so be it.”
The current plan shifts the focus firmly onto the roughly 10,000 foreign nationals already in UK jails, treating El Salvador as a potential third-country destination for their entire sentences. It also sits alongside Reform’s wider pledges to build temporary “Nightingale” prisons, end early release for serious offenders, and recruit tens of thousands of extra police officers.
El Salvador’s Mega-Prisons and the US Precedent
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has made mass incarceration and the Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT) central to his security strategy. The vast facility, designed for tens of thousands of inmates, has been used under a US agreement to house deportees—including alleged gang members—sent by the Trump administration. Bukele has also publicly offered to take convicted criminals of any nationality, including US citizens, in exchange for fees.
Supporters credit Bukele’s policies with dramatically cutting homicide rates in El Salvador. Critics, including human-rights organisations, describe conditions inside CECOT and other Salvadoran prisons as extremely harsh: prolonged confinement, limited outdoor time, overcrowding relative to international standards, and allegations of ill-treatment, inadequate medical care and other abuses raised by some former detainees.
Practical and Political Questions
Any deal would raise significant legal, logistical and diplomatic issues. Sending sentenced prisoners to a third country to complete UK-imposed terms would likely require new bilateral agreements, careful consideration of human-rights obligations, and possibly changes to UK law. Cost estimates from Reform’s earlier overseas-prison proposals put the annual price of renting 10,000 places in the low hundreds of millions of pounds—far below the current UK average of roughly £50,000 per prisoner per year.
Lee Anderson, the former Conservative MP who defected to Reform and now serves as party chairman, will head the forthcoming visit. His selection underscores the priority Reform is attaching to the initiative.
The proposal arrives against the backdrop of persistent pressure on the UK prison system. Successive governments have struggled with capacity constraints, early-release schemes, and the slow removal of foreign national offenders at the end of their sentences. Farage’s team presents the El Salvador talks as a practical way to free space quickly for domestic offenders while signalling a tougher overall stance on crime and immigration.
Whether the negotiations produce a concrete agreement remains to be seen. What is clear is that Reform is moving from policy announcement to active diplomacy, using El Salvador’s hardline prison model as a potential template for handling the foreign-offender caseload that has long occupied a substantial share of Britain’s jails.
