It’s the second time in a week that the Trump administration has said it wants to forcibly disappear U.S. citizens abroad.
President Donald Trump doubled down Monday on his hope to illegally send U.S. citizens to a brutal prison in El Salvador, telling reporters he’s “all for it.”
“You mentioned that you’re open to deporting individuals that aren’t foreign aliens to El Salvador,” a reporter noted during a bilateral Oval Office meeting between Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
“Does that include, potentially, U.S. citizens?”
Trump didn’t shy away: “I’m all for it,” he said.
“If they’re criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over the head that happen to be 90 years old and if, uh, if they rape 87-year-old women in Brooklyn, yeah, yeah, that includes them,” he added.
“They’re as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones, too.”
Trump previously suggested that people who vandalize Teslas as a protest against the company’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk should also be sent to El Salvador.
The reporter asked the question after Trump encouraged Bukele to build several more detention facilities and even offered to help pay for them, praising them as “great facilities, very strong facilities.”
Conditions at the megaprison are notoriously brutal. Juanita Goebertus, the director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, testified last month under penalty of perjury that people there are denied communication with their relatives and lawyers, that people are tried en masse by the hundreds, and that some prisoners are held in solitary confinement cells that are completely dark.
(Watch the moment in the video above.)
A livestream of the full meeting on Bukele’s social media accounts appeared to capture the two leaders discussing the plan in more detail.
“The homegrowns are next,” Trump can be heard saying roughly seven minutes and 30 seconds into the stream. “You’ve gotta build about five more places.”
“Yeah, we have space,” Bukele responded as the room erupted in laughter.
The 43-year-old leader, who has proudly described himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,” thrust El Salvador into the center of a human rights crisis upon embarking on his aggressive crackdown against crime in 2022.
In the three years since his “War Against the Gangs” began, thousands of people have been detained without due process and thrown into El Salvador’s infamously austere Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.
Unfounded third-party accusations of gang affiliation, expressing political opposition to the president, having tattoos, and even just living in gang-controlled neighborhoods have all landed people in CECOT, where the government has admitted has no process or intention for prisoner’s release.
The alarming back-and-forth between Bukele and Trump is the second time the Trump administration has publicly mulled depriving American citizens of the rule of law in under a week.
Last Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is exploring legal pathways that would enable him to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador.
She attempted to temper the idea slightly, describing it as an “if” and not necessarily a “when.”
“The president has said, if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that. He’s not sure, [and] we are not sure if there is,” Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing. “It’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly in the effort of transparency.”
Source: Huff Post
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