A Key Ally In Trump's Migrant Crackdown Is Coming For A Visit. What Might El Salvador's Bukele Get?

President Donald Trump is hosting Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador , at the White House on Monday as the small Central American nation becomes a critical lynchpin of the U.S. administration's mass deportation operation.

Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the U.S. more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants - whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes - and placed them inside the country's notorious maximum-security gang prison just outside of the capital, San Salvador. It is also holding a Maryland man who the administration admits was wrongly deported but has not been returned to the U.S., despite court orders to do so.

That has made Bukele, who remains extremely popular in El Salvador due in part to the crackdown on the country's powerful street gangs , a vital ally for the Trump administration, which has offered little evidence for its claims that the Venezuelan immigrants were in fact gang members, nor has it released names of those deported.

Asked whether he has any concerns about the prison there where deportees are being held, Trump told reporters early Sunday that Bukele was doing a "fantastic job."

"He's taking care of a lot of problems that we have that we really wouldn't be able to take care of from cost standpoint," Trump said. "And he's doing really, he's been amazing. We have some very bad people in that prison. People that should have never been allowed into our country."