‘Any of Us Could Be Effectively Disappeared’: Trump Doubles Down on Sending Americans to El Salvador
Trump wants Americans to follow migrants to detention at brutal prison
US citizens would be under threat of potential permanent incarceration in the same brutal prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent nearly 250 migrants if Donald Trump follows through on the plan he’s been talking about in recent days.
Trump reiterated his desire to send who he calls “homegrown criminals” to join the migrants he condemned to an indefinite detention at El Salvador’s cruel Terrorism Detention Center, or CECOT, under El Salvador’s autocratic leader, Nayib Bukele.
One of the largest prisons in Latin America, CECOT has been dubbed a “black hole of human rights” that does not adhere to Red Cross international standards for prisoner treatment.
Now that he has been apparently successful in imprisoning migrants to CECOT — including the Maryland man wrongfully detained there — without any due process, Trump’s now turning his attention to consigning US citizens to the same ghastly fate.
“I call them homegrown criminals —“ Trump said in an interview with Fox News.
Such a development would be a frightening move forward in Trump’s authoritarianism, experts said.
“So, the president is talking about sending American citizens to essentially a foreign penal colony, where the president, President Bukele, has said the current people there, he doesn’t know when he will release them,” said David Rohde, an author, investigative journalist and senior executive editor on national security for NBC News. “So this is a startling change, a huge step forward just in this administration, that he’s even talking about this idea.
“And then it’s remarkably different from the first term. In that first term, you saw that the administration went out of its way to make sure the Supreme Court, with the travel ban, which was, you know, a huge issue, there were five, I think, 4 to 5 versions of it to get it up to snuff so that the Supreme Court would say this was legal,” Rohde added. “Here, it’s ignore the Supreme Court, it’s dismiss the Supreme Court, and to bring up these more and more, again, I guess, frankly, radically — legally radical ideas.
“It is illegal and unconstitutional to send an American to a foreign prison, period, full stop,” he said. “And I was alarmed and surprised by what was said.”
The legal grounds for Trump to start condemning US citizens to a foreign prison are “nonexistent,” said Steve Vladeck, an American legal scholar. He is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
“I think it‘s worth reminding, folks, you know, one of the complaints that we had in the Declaration of Independence at the beginning of the American revolution was that King George was sending criminals to faraway prisons,” Vladeck said. “It‘s almost like history doesn‘t repeat, but it rhymes. There‘s no legal authority to send a U.S. citizen to serve a U.S. criminal sentence in a foreign prison and, you know, Kate, it would be pretty striking if there was, because that would mean any of us could be effectively disappeared into a prison with no U.S. legal constraints, with no potential human rights limits, you know, no matter what.
“And that‘s a pretty scary proposition just arising out of this one immigration case.”
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