President Donald Trump backed the idea of sending violent U.S. criminals to be held in foreign prisons as opposed to U.S. jails Tuesday afternoon.
The president’s comments came as he was signing two executive orders in the Oval Office regarding the Middle East, including one expanding his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.
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Earlier in the day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had “offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of U.S. citizenship and legal residents.”
Rubio called Bukele’s offer “an act of extraordinary friendship for our country.”
Trump himself appeared not to be aware that Rubio had announced the proposal but quickly threw his support behind the idea, arguing that it would be cheaper to pay other countries to jail violent criminals rather than house them in the United States.
“These are sick people,” the president told reporters. “If we could get them out of our country, we have other countries that would take them. They could. It’s no different than a prison system, except it would be a lot less expensive and it would be a great deterrent to send them to other countries.”
Trump did concede that he was not sure if, legally, he could jail U.S. criminals abroad.
“If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” he said. “I don’t know if we do or not. We’re looking at that right now, but we could make deals where we’d get these animals out of our country.”
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Rubio is in the middle of a tour across Latin America to discuss the Trump administration’s immigration policies with foreign leaders, some of whom have resisted Trump’s press to deport illegal immigrants back to their home countries.
The secretary of state noted that, in addition to offering to house U.S. criminals, Bukele said El Salvador would not only continue to receive deported Salvadorans but “also any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal from any nationality, be they MS-13 or Tren de Aragua and house them in his jails.”
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