Donald Trump has once again floated the idea of jailing U.S. citizens in El Salvador’s brutal prisons — this time from inside the White House in front of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele.
Bukele has already agreed to continue to jail dozens of immigrants summarily removed from the United States inside a notorious prison complex human rights groups have labeled a “tropical gulag” with reports of abuse, torture, and lack of medical attention for inmates in densely packed cells. Inmates there face the prospect of indefinite detention.
Moments before entering the Oval Office on Monday, Trump told Bukele that “home growns” should be next.
“The home growns. You gotta build about five more places,” he said. “It’s not big enough.”
“I just asked the president — it’s this massive complex that he built, jail complex — I said, 'Can you build some more of them please?’ As many as we can get out of our country,” Trump told reporters.
Pressed on whether that means incarcerating American citizens in El Salvador, Trump said “I’m all for it.”
“If they’re criminals, and if they hit people with baseball bats over the head that happen to be 90 years old, if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn, yeah, yeah that includes them,” he said.
“What, you think there’s a special category of person? They’re as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones too,” he said. “I’m all for it. Because we can do things with the president for less money and have great security. And we have a huge prison population, we have a huge number of prisons, and then we have the private prisons, and some are operated as well I guess and some aren’t.”
Trump said his administration is similarly “negotiating” with other nations.
“They’re great facilities. Very strong facilities. They don’t play games,” Trump said of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where more than 14,000 people are jailed.
He said he spoke with Attorney General Pam Bondi to determine how to legally deport and incarcerate American citizens out of the country.
“I’d like to go a step further. I said to Pam — I don’t know what the laws are, 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 said. “I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country. But you’ll have to be looking at the laws.”
Following a proposal from Bukele, Trump administration officials have been publicly mulling whether to send Americans to El Savadpor’s prisons since at least February.
“There are obviously legalities involved. We have a Constitution,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the time. “But it’s a very generous offer. No one’s ever made an offer like that — and to outsource, at a fraction of the cost, at least some of the most dangerous and violent criminals that we have in the United States … But obviously, the administration will have to make a decision.”
The State Department arranged a $6 million deal to house hundreds of immigrants inside CECOT, despite U.S. law barring financial support in the form of “units of foreign security forces” that face credible accusations of human rights abuses.
Trump later said he would be “fine” and “very happy” with sending incarcerated Americans to El Salvador’s jails, which Elon Musk also called a “great idea.” Last week, Trump told reporters he “loves” the idea of jailing American “wise guys” in El Salvador.
"I love that," Trump said. "If we could take some of our 20-time wiseguys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and then purposely run people over in cars — if he would take them, I would be honored to give them.”
Legal experts say the idea has no basis in law.
“I know of nothing that would give the president the authority to force U.S. citizens serving federal prison sentences to serve their time in a different country's prisons,” law professor M. Isabel Medina with Loyola University New Orleans College of Law told The Independent earlier this year.
There is no statutory provision that could give the Bureau of Prisons discretion to send citizens to a facility outside of the federal corrections system, which would also likely violate Eighth Amendment rights, due process, First Amendment rights and other constitutional protections to which federal inmates are entitled, she said.
The Constitution is also not enforceable in other countries, and “because the constitutional authority to create federal crimes lies with Congress, not the Executive, and because U.S. citizens may not be deported, even if imprisoned, it would appear to be illegal for the president to do this particularly without any statutory authority.”
Both Bukele and the Trump administration are refusing to retrieve a wrongfully deported Maryland man from CECOT despite the Supreme Court ordering officials to “facilitate” his return after an “illegal” ordeal and the administration’s own “administrative error” that sent him there.
“Are you suggesting I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? How can I return him to the United States, like I smuggle him into the United States? Of course, I'm not going to do it,” Bukele told reporters at the White House on Monday.
The judge overseeing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia will hold a status conference April 15.
The Supreme Court has separately determined that the administration cannot summarily deport alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua under the president’s use of the Alien Enemies Act without a court hearing on allegations against them.
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