April 17, 2025
On Monday, El Salvado president Nayib Bukele said his country is prepared to house convicted U.S. citizens in its prisons
U.S. citizens are on President Donald Trump’s agenda as the administration considers a proposal to deport convicted Americans to prisons in El Salvador.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump said to El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, ahead of a press briefing on Monday.
According to NPR, Trump’s statement alluded to the concept of incarcerating convicted U.S. citizens in prison spaces abroad, an idea Bukele suggested El Salvador is prepared to carry out.
“Yeah, we’ve got space,” he said.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is actively exploring whether American deportations to other countries would be legally sound and economical. “We have others we’re negotiating with, too,” Trump said. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem. Now, we’re studying the laws right now—Pam is studying. If we can do that, it’s good.”
While Trump ally Elon Musk and other conservatives agree with the concept of detaining U.S. citizens abroad, some legal scholars believe the concept is “unconstitutional” and “illegal.”
“There’s no authority in any U.S. law to deport U.S. citizens and certainly not to imprison them in a foreign country,” said David Bier of the Cato Institute. “The problem of course is [Trump] already has illegally deported hundreds of people by just not giving the courts an opportunity to stop him.”
In February, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) urged the administration discard the proposal’s ideas in a letter addressed to the U.S. State Department.
“It would be a moral and legal travesty for the U.S. government to subject anyone” to the living conditions of Salvadoran prisons, Ossoff wrote, noting that they fail to provide proper sanitation, temperature control, and clean water.
According to Bukele’s February post on X, in exchange for a “relatively low” fee, El Salvador offered to take in convicted U.S. criminals into its Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison located in Tecoluca.
Trump’s response: “I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
El Salvador is already reportedly housing hundreds of people who were transported from the United States to its maximum-security prison in the past weeks due to legal status and gang affiliations.
The United States has challenged legal and constitutional barriers in the past, imprisoning around 80,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Although the American Civil Liberties Union claimed “you may not deport a U.S. citizen, period,” a White House spokeswoman indicated in an April 8 press briefing that Trump is fully considering the idea.
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