The US attorney general Pam Bondi declined on Tuesday to say whether Donald Trump’s suggestion of removing US citizens to El Salvador was legal, in alarming remarks about what experts think is an obviously illegal idea.
Trump proposed the idea on Monday in the Oval Office during a visit with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who has been accepting people deported from the US and imprisoning them in a gigantic facility notorious for human rights abuses.
The US president said “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” could be sent to El Salvador and imprisoned.
Asked by the Fox News host Jesse Watters if the idea was legal, Bondi demurred.
“These are Americans who he is saying 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,” she said.
“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.”
Trump has previously said he “loved” the idea of deporting US citizens to El Salvador. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, has said Trump “simply floated” the idea.
During a White House briefing on Tuesday, Leavitt was asked whether it was legal to deport US citizens to Central American prisons. “It’s a legal question that the president is looking into,” she said, adding that Trump was only considering the action for those Americans “who are the most violent, egregious repeat offenders of crime”.
Lawyers and other experts say the idea is clearly illegal.
“There is no provision under US law that would allow the government to kick citizens out of the country,” the University of Notre Dame professor Erin Corcoran, an immigration law expert, told Reuters.
“It is pretty obviously illegal and unconstitutional,” said Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, told NBC News.
The US is currently paying El Salvador $6m to house people whom it alleges are members of the Tren de Aragua gang for a year.
