President Donald Trump said on April 14 that he wants to deport some violent criminals who are U.S. citizens to Salvadoran prisons, a move that experts said would violate U.S. law.
The president’s comments marked the clearest signal yet that he is seriously considering deporting naturalized and U.S.-born citizens, a proposal that has alarmed civil rights advocates and is viewed by many legal scholars as unconstitutional.
“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 told reporters during Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s visit to the White House.
Trump went on to tell Bukele that “homegrown criminals are next” and urged him to build more prisons to house the U.S. citizens he intends to deport. In response to Trump’s assertion, Bukele replied, “Yeah, we’ve got space.”
More: Kilmar Abrego Garcia live updates: Van Hollen presses for return of Maryland father
Can the U.S. government forcibly remove citizens from the country for any reason?
The short answer is no, although in rare cases, foreign-born citizens can be stripped of citizenship and deported if they commit terrorism or treason, or are found to have lied about their background during the naturalization process.
“There is no provision under U.S. law that would allow the government to kick citizens out of the country,” University of Notre Dame professor Erin Corcoran, an immigration law expert, told Reuters.
Why are people concerned? What triggered this?
The case involves Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had been living in Maryland with a permit to work in the U.S., where he had lived since 2011. In March, he was mistakenly deported after the U.S. government accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang, which is classified as a terrorist group. According to his lawyers, no credible evidence was provided to support the claim.
When Trump declared the El Salvador crime ring a foreign terrorist organization, Garcia’s U.S. immigration protection went away, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said, per Poynter. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller echoed the same reasoning for the father’s deportation, according to the nonprofit.
What are the pushbacks against Trump’s proposal?
The Trump administration has already deported hundreds of migrants accused of criminal affiliations to MS-13 and other gangs to El Salvador’s mega-prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, under often-contested legal authorities. The U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million to detain the migrants.
While the U.S. government is alleging that the people sent to the El Salvadorian prison are violent gang members, many, including Abrego Garcia, have not been determined by the courts to be what the Trump administration has labeled them as.
“The U.S. government has already deported someone to this prison illegally and claimed no recourse to get them back, so the courts must shut down this unconstitutional train wreck before U.S. citizens are unlawfully caught up in it,” David Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, told NBC News.
Contributors: USA TODAY’s Francesca Chambers, Bart Jansen, Joey Garrison and Reuters
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is Trump sending Americans to foreign prisons legal?