Trump Makes Dark Promise on Deportations to El Salvador

Donald Trump plans to send as many people as he can to megaprisons in El Salvador.

In a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele Monday, Trump was asked how many “illegal criminals” he plans to export to El Salvador.

“As many as possible,” the president responded. “As many as we can get out of our country that were allowed in here by incompetent Joe Biden, through open borders.… We have millions of people that should not be in this country that are dangerous.… We have millions of people that are murderers, drug dealers.”

But the majority of the more than 200 immigrants he’s already sent to El Salvador were not murderers or drug dealers. They were ordinary people without criminal records, victim to the Trump administration’s baseless lies about their pasts.

Andry Hernandez Romero was a makeup artist who loved to do theater, Jerce Reyes Barrios was a soccer player whose innocent tattoo was flagged as a Tren de Aragua gang symbol by the Department of Homeland Security, Alirio Guillermo was a food delivery driver in Utah without a criminal record. They are now being held at the  Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a megaprison notorious for human rights abuses.

Trump and Bukele’s meeting comes as the White House claims it is not obligated to return Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was illegally deported to El Salvador, despite the Supreme Court ordering it facilitate his return.

The Supreme Court also ruled that the government must give enough notice to immigrant detainees to dispute their deportation, but the Trump administration clearly doesn’t care.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that another 10 migrants had been deported to El Salvador. Meanwhile, the president continues his threats to deport U.S. citizens to the megaprison.

“The alliance between @POTUS and President @nayibbukele has become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere,” Rubio wrote in a post on X. It’s a terrifying indication that the president plans to deport as many people as he can, and Bukele, who has jailed 1 percent of his own people, will happily do the same to anybody Trump sends his way.

Donald Trump doubled down Monday on his unconstitutional threat to deport U.S. citizens to foreign gulags.

During a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has already struck a $6 million deal to detain noncitizens the U.S. government alleges are gang members, Trump once again raised his desire to deport anyone, regardless of citizenship.

“I’d like to go a step further, I mean, I say, I said it to Pam [Bondi]—I don’t know what the laws are, we always have to obey the laws—but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies in the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters. I’d like to include them in the group of people, to get ’em out of the country, but you’ll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steph—” Trump said, referring to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who was standing just feet away.

Is Trump’s plot to exile U.S. citizens legal? Of course it isn’t.

“No law allows a federal court to sentence a defendant to serve their sentence overseas. Nor is there any statute that allows the president to unilaterally remove a U.S. citizen to another country at a whim,” wrote Matt Ford for The New Republic Monday.

But the Trump administration has confirmed that it is looking into the legality of the president’s idea, a question that has apparently landed on the desk of his attorney general.

While Trump has claimed that it would be cheaper to incarcerate individuals abroad, the president also asked Bukele to “please” begin construction on new facilities and even offered to help foot the bill.

“I’d do something; yeah we’d help ’em out,” Trump said. “They’re great facilities, very strong facilities. They don’t play games.”

During Trump’s meeting with Bukele, the Salvadoran president balked at requests to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador’s notorious prison, after the Supreme Court ordered that the Trump administration comply with a request to “facilitate” his return to the U.S.

Miller chimed in with his own completely made-up story about the ruling and claimed that the high court had unanimously ruled in favor of Trump—it hadn’t, and there was no indication that the ruling was unanimous. The Supreme Court simply asked a lower court to clarify its order, “with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

In a filing Sunday, the Department of Justice argued that the federal courts could not compel the executive branch to conduct foreign affairs, and therefore any responsibility to help Abrego Garcia was limited to removing “any domestic obstacles.”

Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, is flippantly refusing to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States after the Maryland resident was mistakenly deported.

During a press conference with Donald Trump in the White House Monday, a reporter asked Bukele if he planned to return Garcia, who is being held in the country’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison accused of human rights abuses. Bukele responded by calling Abrego Garcia a terrorist.

“How can I return him today? I smuggle him into the United States, or what do I do? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said.

Another reporter suggested that Bukele could release Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador, inside the country, to which the Salvadoran leader was incredulous.

“We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere, and you want us to go back into releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? That’s not going to happen,” Bukele replied.

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and the father of a disabled child, has not been found by any court to be a “terrorist” or member of any criminal gang like MS-13, despite the accusations of the Trump administration and Bukele’s assertions. Even the government has admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error.”

But even though the Supreme Court has ordered Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., the Trump administration has stalled and refused, hiding behind semantics and technicalities. And with the backing of a dictator like Bukele, the White House seems content to let an innocent immigrant languish in a gulag.

Donald Trump went back to blaming basics Monday to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin, less than a day after Russia’s deadliest attack on Ukraine this year: He’s blaming the leader of the country that got bombed—and Joe Biden!

A Russian double-tap missile strike on Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, Sunday reportedly killed 34 people, including two children, and injured 117 others.

In a post on Truth Social Monday morning, Trump presented his own spin on the deadly attack, and seemed particularly anxious to deflect blame from himself and Putin.

“The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine,” Trump wrote. “I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening. President Putin, and everyone else, respected your President! I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR, BUT AM WORKING DILIGENTLY TO GET THE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO STOP.”

Trump has repeatedly attempted to wash his hands of his unwavering support for Putin during his first term in the White House and his lack of assistance for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, which emboldened Moscow and weakened Kyiv, making way for Russia to launch its deadly multiyear ground offensive in Ukraine in 2022.

Trump’s continued rhetoric now serves to normalize Russian aggression and put the onus on anyone else for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In his post Monday, Trump blamed the president of the country that was attacked and his old standby, Biden.

“If the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible War would never have happened,” Trump continued. “President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to STOP, AND FAST. SO SAD!”

Trump continues to harp on the past, despite claiming to have actively seized the helm on negotiations on behalf of Russia and Ukraine. When asked about the deadly attack on civilians, on Air Force One Sunday, Trump claimed that he’d been told it was “a mistake.” Notably, Putin’s name did not appear in his post about the attack.

Crucially, Trump isn’t actually working to get the war to stop—he’s simply trying to make a buck. Trump’s so-called peace talks have splintered into a range of tangents in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Belgium. Meanwhile, in Washington, Ukrainian and U.S. officials have been working on a dense rare-earth minerals contract, which Trump has made clear is a necessary feature of any U.S.-brokered peace talks as a way of paying the U.S. back for military aid that he didn’t even approve.

Some critics posit that running multiple channels of negotiations is a tactic Moscow hopes will buy it more time—which they seem to believe is on their side, according to CNN.

The Department of Homeland Security had no evidence linking a Tufts University international student to terrorism or antisemitism—but ICE agents kidnapped her anyway.

A few days before Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student attending Tufts University, was detained by masked immigrations and customs enforcement agents last month, a memo from the State Department concluded that she had not engaged in antisemitic activities or made any statements in support of terrorism, The Washington Post reported Monday. 

Along with the lack of evidence against the 30-year-old Ph.D. student, the State Department noted that Öztürk’s name was not associated with any terrorism-related information across U.S. databases. The department recommended that her F-1 student visa not be revoked.

Öztürk was originally targeted by the Department of Homeland Security because she co-authored an op-ed last spring urging Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel. A memo from a DHS official obtained by the Post claims that Öztürk engaged in “anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.”

The DHS justified her detainment under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows for the deportation of any noncitizen who engages in activities that could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” like writing for the school paper, apparently.  

A video of Öztürk’s kidnapping outside her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, showed her being taken away by masked ICE agents and escorted into a gray SUV, a disturbing visual representative of Trump’s crackdown on legal immigrants’ civil liberties. Her arrest sparked outrage and criticism across the country, and is part of a larger assault from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the rights of international students. Since Trump took office in January, more than 600 international students have had their visas revoked.

Öztürk has since been detained at a Louisiana detention facility, where she’s described the conditions as “unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane.” Despite the lack of evidence against her, she could still be deported solely under Rubio’s discretion, without the need for justification, under a different section of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Her federal court hearing is scheduled for Monday in Vermont.