Printer-friendly version
By G. A. McNeeley
Photo: Prisoners at the El Salvador prison criticized for human rights violations and inhumane conditions, where Trump gas sent deported immigrants and now wants to send U.S. citizens. CC BY-SA via Bing
April 23 2025 (Washington D.C.) — President Donald Trump says his administration is actively exploring a proposal to detain U.S. citizens and send them to prisons in El Salvador, according to NPR. The proposal has raised alarm bells among legal scholars and civil libertarians who contend such action would be unconstitutional. Moreover, the admnistration's defiance of court orders over immigrants deported to El Salvador without due process heighten concerns over the potential for U.S. citizens to be disappeared into El Salvador's infamous prison system.
"It is pretty obviously illegal and unconstitutional," Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, said of the proposal.
Trump discussed this with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who agreed to deposit people deported from the U.S. into the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, which has gained notoriety for human rights violations.
"Yeah, we've got space," Bukele reportedly told Trump, during their White House meeting, suggesting his country is prepared to incarcerate U.S. citizens.
El Salvador is already holding hundreds of people in CECOT who were flown in from the U.S. for allegedly lacking legal status or having gang affiliations, according to NPR. But the administration has failed to provide proof of gang affiliations for many, and some had legal status as green card or special visa holders.
The Supreme Court has ruled that deporting immigrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act which Trump invoked violated due process; the high court has ordered a halt to future deportations. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will comply.
Now, his effort to deport citizens to the infamous prison system in El Salvador raises a whole new level of concerns.
What’s The Administration Trying To Do?
“We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters,” Trump told reporters.
Trump confirmed that he ordered Pam Bondi (Attorney General) to explore whether it might be a legal and cost-effective way to send American prisoners in El Salvador and other countries, according to NPR.
"We have others we're negotiating with, too," Trump told reporters. "If it's a homegrown criminal, I have no problem. Now, we're studying the laws right now — Pam is studying. If we can do that, it's good."
Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, said Trump was interested in deporting "heinous, violent criminals" who are U.S. citizens to El Salvador "if there's a legal pathway to do that."
But the Trump administration initially said it would deport only violent immigrants, then had Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) round up even many undocumented immigrants with no record of violence.
Critics fear deportation of citizens, if allowed, could lead to exiling Americans with no violent record, a tool that could potentially be used to silence political dissidents, for example.
Administration refuses to seek return of man deported in error
The U.S. government alleges that people sent to El Salvador are violent gang members (some of whom were sent without the courts determining if they were correctly identified), which raises serious constitutional issues, according to NBC News.
The legal dispute over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an immigrant living in Maryland whom the Justice Department admitted was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, has bearing on any proposal to deport U.S. citizens.
Abrego Garcia wasn’t convicted of any crimes in the United States or El Salvador, and was sent to El Salvador before courts could allow him to vindicate his due process rights. The U.S. government alleges he’s a member of the MS-13 gang, according to NBC News. But Garcia’s lawyers maintain that he doesn’t have ties to MS-13, according to CNN, and in multiple court filings so far, the Trump administration has failed to provide any documentation to back up its allegations of gang affiliation.
The Trump Administration claims he is outside their jurisdiction, and that the decision on whether he’ll be returned is up to El Salvador. Bukele said he wouldn’t return Bukele, according to NBC News.
The Supreme Court weighed in on the case, saying that although the government is obliged to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return, the courts couldn’t infringe on the president's authority to conduct foreign policy.
If that logic is applied to U.S. citizens, they could potentially be deported without being able to challenge it. Trump said he’d only want to target criminals, but there’s no reason the government could treat those who haven’t been convicted of crimes the same way.
Senator visits El Salvador and meets with deported Maryland man
Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador to get answers about Abrego Garcia’s deportation, ABC news reports. Van Hollen also called on the government of El Salvador to provide evidence that Abrego Garcia was involved in MS-13 -- they could not.
"So this is not about MS-13. I know President Trump wants to make this about gang violence. I have been fighting MS-13, probably longer than Donald Trump even knew about MS- 13. I care about every victim of crime. That's why we have a court system to hold people accountable when they commit crimes, to make sure they get the punishment they deserve," Van Hollen told reporters.
Bondi declined to answer a reporter's question about why the DOJ hasn't presented direct evidence of this, according to ABC News.
After initially being denied access to the prison, Van Hollen detailed his meeting with Abrego Garcia outside of the facility.
“He said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell but that he was traumatized by being at CECOT and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cell blocks who called out to him and taunted him in various ways,” Van Hollen told reporters at Dulles Airport near Washington, DC, after landing back in the US.
Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who was in the U.S. legally, told him he had been moved from the maximum-security prison to another detention center, according to CNN.
“He’s no longer at CECOT,” Van Hollen told reporters. “He’s at a different prison which is pretty far outside of San Salvador.” He added that the new facility is in Santa Ana where “conditions are better.”
Van Hollen added that Abrego Garcia missed his family, and that his loved ones keep him going.
“He said that thinking of you, members of his family, is what gave him the strength to persevere, to keep going day to day even under these awful circumstances,” Van Hollen told reporters. He added that Abrego Garcia spoke “several times” about his five-year-old son who has autism and was in the car when he was pulled over by immigration agents.
Recalling his first phone call with Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer, following the meeting, Van Hollen added that he conveyed to her that her husband told him “first and foremost, that he missed her and his family.”
“This case is not just about one man, it’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States of America,” Van Hollen told reporters. “If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America.”
Trump officials first admitted that Garcia was mistakenly deported, but later backtracked that statement. They have argued that because Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran national, he belongs in El Salvador.
“He’s a citizen of El Salvador, he’s in El Salvador, he’s home,” Tom Homan (Border Czar) told CNN. “He’s an MS-13 member, which is now classified as a terrorist, so we removed the illegal alien MS-13 member who has a final order removal issued by an immigration judge to his homeland.”
The White House said on social media that Abrego Garcia will “never” return to the United States, and Bukele said on X, “Now that [Abrego Garcia has] been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”
What Are The Experts Saying?
Trump's plan is "an additional reason why courts must force Trump to return Abrego Garcia and others illegally deported to imprisonment in El Salvador," Ilya Somin (Professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School) told NBC News.
"I can’t see how exiling someone is permissible as part of the bundle of rights that are fundamental to citizenship — doubly so if the effort to house American citizens overseas means turning a person over to a foreign authority," Anthony Kreis (Professor at Georgia State University College of Law) told NBC News.
"There are profound ethical questions that this move would signal about how we treat human beings who are U.S. citizens,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Senior Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center at New York University, told NPR.
"The U.S. government has already deported someone to this prison illegally and claimed no recourse to get them back, so the courts must shut down this unconstitutional train wreck before U.S. citizens are unlawfully caught up in it," David Bier, immigration expert at the Cato Institute, told NBC News.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a statement that the Trump Administration's legal arguments around deportation cases suggest the U.S. government already believes it "could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene."
Sources:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna201183
'Obviously illegal': Experts pan Trump's plan to deport ‘homegrown criminals’
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-jail-u-s-citizens-homegrowns-el-salvador
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/04/18/politics/chris-van-hollen-kilmar-abrego-garcia-cecot-el-salvador
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
https://www.yahoo.com/news/van-hollen-does-full-ginsburg-083052857.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall
Comments
when