Trump Says He’d “Love” to Deport US Citizens to El Salvador Gulags if It’s Legal

The Trump administration has already admitted in court that it deported a Maryland father to El Salvador in “error” and is currently fighting a court order to bring him back. Now, President Donald Trump is openly flirting with the prospect of deporting American citizens to the same explicitly cruel and dehumanizing mega-prison, too.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Tuesday that the president has “simply floated” the idea of deporting US citizens and could pursue that strategy “if there is a legal pathway to do that.” Her remarks came in response to Trump’s own suggestion that he would “love” to deport citizens to El Salvador. “If they can house these horrible criminals for a lot less money than it costs us, I’m all for it,” he told reporters this week. Such a punishment, Leavitt clarified during a White House briefing, would apply only to “heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly.”

Hm, where have we heard that one before?

Over the last month, the Trump administration has repeatedly sought to cast the 238 men it deported to El Salvador as terrorists and gang members affiliated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Agua. But it’s presented little to no public evidence to back most of those accusations up. Meanwhile, a recent investigation by 60 Minutes found that 75% of the men appear to have no criminal records. Instead, the investigation found the Trump administration has presented evidence in court as flimsy as an old Facebook photo showing one man flashing a “rock on” hand symbol to justify his deportation.

Now, the same administration would have us believe it would take great care before sending American citizens to an El Salvadoran gulag, too.

Then there’s the whole “if it’s legal” thing. In the absolute most generous interpretation of recent events, this is an administration that is at least totally unafraid to test the limits of the law (More than a few courts have charged the White House with flouting the law entirely). To deport the Venezuelan men, for example, it relied on a 1798 statute known as the Alien Enemies Act that has only been invoked three times in history and never outside the context of a declared war.

But even if the president does have the power to invoke a wartime law in peacetime—a question that has very much not been resolved in court, despite MAGA world’s claims—the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that people being targeted for deportation are still “entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”

Yet the 238 Venezuelan men who were deported to El Salvador last month had no such notice, and they received no such opportunity. And now that the White House says it can’t correct its own errors, those men may never get one. So, did the Trump administration, in that case, follow a “legal pathway”? Or did it do what it could get away with before anyone could act to enforce the law as written?

In her opinion Tuesday in the case surrounding the Venezuelan deportations, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the Trump administration was laying the groundwork for a far more expansive approach to deporting citizens and non-citizens alike. “The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal,” she wrote.

Already reports of US citizens being detained by immigration are mounting. An attorney representing a University of Michigan student protester was recently questioned for 90 minutes at Detroit Metro Airport, where he was asked to give up his cell phone and contact list. A Chicago native was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for 10 hours in January, during which he had his phone and wallet confiscated. And, a 10-year-old US citizen with brain cancer was sent to detention with her undocumented parents, who were rushing her to the hospital when they were stopped by immigration officials.

“The administration talks a lot about targeting criminals, but they’re just not,” Danny Woodward, a policy attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing the family, told The Washington Post. “This is what happens when you scale up immigration enforcement with no guardrails.”

According to the Post, Woodward filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties regarding the 10-year-old’s case. The following week, that office was shut down.