Last week, President Donald Trump said his administration was looking into the deportation of “homegrown criminals” being sent to prisons overseas.
“We always have to obey the law,” he said, “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.
“I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.”
Since his comments, legal experts have questioned the legality of his proposition, suggesting the rights guaranteed to American citizens mean they must be jailed in the U.S.
Hundreds of migrants who were in the U.S. illegally have been deported to El Salvador in the last two months as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants who were allegedly part of gangs that the administration has designated as terrorist organizations, like MS-13 and Tren de Aragua.
The administration says they were responding to the “unprecedented flood” of immigration into the country permitted by the Biden administration.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked in an April 15 press briefing whether the administration believes it would be legal to send U.S. citizens to prisons in other countries, or if the Trump administration would look to change laws to make it legal.
“It’s a legal question that the president is looking into,” Leavitt said. “He would only consider this if legal for Americans who are the most violent, egregious repeat offenders of crime, who nobody in this room wants living in their communities.”
What are legal experts saying?
As the White House doubles down on looking at sending violent criminals overseas, legal experts are warning the Trump administration over its efforts to twist the law to get the outcomes it wants.
According to former 10th Circuit Appeals Court Judge Michael W. McConnell, the Trump administration’s kind of “political overreach” will harm Trump’s popularity.
The administration’s “insulting (of) individual judges and threatening impeachment, and even floating the bizarre notion of imprisoning American citizens, along with aliens, in foreign jails” will likely “produce the opposite result from what the administration hopes for,” he told The Free Press.
But administration officials argue he is doing what he promised he would do during his presidential campaign.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News’ Jesse Watters that Trump was referring to the most “heinous” of criminals when openly musing about the idea of sending Americans to prisons abroad.
“These are Americans who he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country. And crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us a directive to make America safe again.”
However, she mentioned constructing additional prisons within the U.S., not deporting inmates to international facilities.
“These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows. We’re not going to let them go anywhere. And if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it.”
Legal experts: Trump can’t send U.S. criminals out of the country
Many legal experts have argued that Trump’s advisers won’t be able to find a loophole to ship American prisoners out of the country, saying it would violate the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.
“Of course, we have the right as a government to incarcerate people who are a danger to society, even to execute people who are danger to society, but they’re Americans, they remain here. That’s the baseline right of citizenship, and always has been,” Amanda Frost, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, told ABC News.
She added that sending Americans to a prison like El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, which is known for its harsh treatment of inmates, would violate the Eighth Amendment’s laws against cruel and unusual punishment. Trump sent three planeloads of Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees accused of being members of Latin American gangs to the Salvadoran prison in March.
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