PHOTOS: GOP delegation provides inside look at controversial El Salvador prison housing U.S. deportees

After visiting the controversial Salvadoran mega-prison known as the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT), freshman Congressman Riley Moore, R-W.Va., says he is “even more determined” to support the president’s efforts to secure the U.S. from criminal illegal aliens.

This comes as the Trump administration’s scheme of sending the “worst of the worst” migrant gang members to CECOT has caused national controversy, with some outraged Democrats accusing President Donald Trump of “kidnapping” people for deportation.

Moore said that while at CECOT he came face to face with some of the country’s “most brutal criminals, including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and terrorists,” and “extremely violent criminals recently deported from the U.S.”

After his visit to El Salvador, he said: “I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland.”

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Moore told Fox News Digital he visited the prison with a congressional delegation led by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith, R-Mo. The delegation toured the prison this week and spoke with several inmates.

“These are dangerous individuals,” he said. “We had several of them tell us, and they were not afraid to share it, [that] they are killers and committed homicides.”  

“It’s not something that it seems that they regret one way or the other, from what I could glean from it,” he explained.

While touring the prison, Moore said he spoke with two deportees from the U.S., both of whom were originally from El Salvador and had been deported from Virginia and California. He said one had been in the U.S. for 20 years and was a high-ranking member of the brutal gang MS-13. According to Moore, both deportees “were not afraid to admit” that they had killed people.

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He said there is a lot of misinformation about the prison, leading the American public to believe that it is a kind of “death camp” for deportees.

“That is not true,” he said, pointing out that of approximately 14,000 inmates in CECOT, only a few hundred were deported from the United States.

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“They are in austere conditions in that prison, there’s no doubt about that,” he explained, adding, “to be clear, they don’t have the death penalty in El Salvador.”

That being said, Moore said the impact of CECOT and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gang crime has been “miraculous” for the people of El Salvador.

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He said he spoke with ordinary people on the streets of El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, who told him that “they were living in a terror state, being terrorized by these gangs and controlling their lives and taking their lives many times.”

Now, he said, “they have their lives back.”

That is why Moore’s resolve to support the Trump administration’s crackdown on gang terrorism is stronger than ever.

“It is very tragic that all of these young people have just thrown their lives away because they decided to basically not only destroy themselves, to destroy their own country and community and people’s lives… It’s hard to really wrap your mind around,” he said. “[But] the fundamental building block of any nation state is security. If you don’t have security, you can’t have economic opportunities, civil society, justice, any of those things. The bedrock of it is security. That has to be provided.”