President Donald Trump told El Salvador President Nayib Bukele that “homegrown” criminals are next on the list of people he plans to deport to the country’s supermax prison.
The president discussed the proposal during a conversation with Bukele—an ally in his agenda to expel undocumented immigrants without due process—about his mass immigration crackdown. Trump has deported about 250 individuals in the last month alone under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime statute that targets anyone seen as an enemy of the American people.
“Homegrown criminals next,” he whispered to Bukele as he entered the Oval Office.
“I said homegrown’s the next,” he added, raising his voice. “The homegrowns. You got to build about five more places.”
In mid-March, Trump shipped off nearly 240 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s maximum security prison, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). The rural facility can hold up to 40,000 people, and organizations like Human Rights Watch have condemned it for its human rights violations. It prohibits any visitation, recreation, or education. It is surrounded by multiple electric fences and watchtowers and is designed to hold up to 70 prisoners per cell. The prison is so hellish that El Salvador’s justice minister once said that the only way out is in a coffin.
Trump’s Monday comments were met with laughter when he claimed CECOT should be expanded.
“It’s not big enough,” he told his staff moments before the White House press pool was allowed to enter. He also told Bukele that people “love what you do” and raved about the photos of officials unloading immigrants from deportation flights and forcing them to enter CECOT.
“That’s what people want to see,” Trump said. “Respect. They want to see respect.”
His suggestion comes only hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the government had expelled 10 more people to breathe, sleep, and potentially die in CECOT’s cramped chambers. The Trump administration will pay El Salvador’s government $6 million for one year of services through an alliance that Rubio called “an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.”
Bukele is infamous in El Salvador for his takedown of gangs but has also been accused by U.S. prosecutors of secretly negotiating with them.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify the incessant deportations—a law that permits the president to target immigrants without a hearing and deport them during times of “declared war” or when a foreign government undertakes an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.”
Trump says that the deported individuals are terrorists and gang members associated with the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang or MS-13. But the alleged gang members are often identified by little other than their clothes or tattoos and are prohibited from a fair trial before they’re banished from American soil. Some of those expelled included a makeup artist, a soccer player, and a food delivery driver.
Federal judges have tried to stop the mass deportations. Obama appointee Judge James Boasberg in March ordered Trump to turn around deportation flights and moved to temporarily bar the administration from further deporting anyone to the hellish facility. Judge Paula Xinis, another Obama appointee, faced off against Trump last Friday by ordering the administration to take “all available steps to facilitate the return” of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador due to a “grievous error” after living in Maryland for 15 years.
In El Salvador, Xinis added, prisoners are “stripped” and “shackled” to join those “held in some of the most inhumane and squalid conditions known in any carceral system.”
But on Monday, Bukele said he would not return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. and said that the suggestion was “preposterous.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Trump administration for comment.
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