Trump Attorney General Dodges Crucial Question on Deporting Citizens

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ignoring the obvious illegality of President Donald Trump’s outrageous request to exile U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.

During an interview Monday night, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked the attorney general whether Trump’s pitch to outsource the imprisonment of U.S. citizens was even legal.

“Now, the president was musing about sending some of the most horrible people in this country down to that megaprison, you know, people that push ladies into subways and hit old ladies with baseball bats to the head. Is that legal to do, is that something you’re allowed to do?” Watters asked.

“Well, Jesse, these are Americans who he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country, and crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us the directive to make America safe again,” Bondi replied. “These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows, we’re not gonna let ’em go anywhere. And if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it!”

Bondi’s answer is lacking, well, an actual answer—probably because deporting U.S. citizens is not legal. Trump’s plan to exile Americans who are incarcerated to foreign countries not only violates multiple federal codes on the keeping of U.S. prisoners, it would also potentially violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Bondi’s canned answer came just hours after Trump said during a press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that he had specifically asked her to look into the legality of sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador to be imprisoned. Trump made no mention of building additional prisons in the U.S., but said that the U.S. would be willing to financially support the construction of more prisons abroad.

Clearly, Bondi is waging a political battle as much as a legal one, despite her promises that she would not act merely as an operative for Trump. Bondi must know that committing a “most heinous” crime does not actually disqualify citizens from their legal rights—but when faced with Trump’s despotic plot, the attorney general declined to offer an answer in accordance with U.S. law.

A Department of Homeland Security official on Monday compared Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant whom the Trump administration admitted it deported in error, to Osama bin Laden.

Speaking to Fox News, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Monday that “this illegal alien is exactly where he belongs, home in El Salvador,” referring to Abrego Garcia’s detention in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses.

“He was in our country illegally, he’s from El Salvador, was born in El Salvador, and oh, the media forgot to mention, he is an MS-13 gang member,” McLaughlin said. “The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, he’s just some Maryland father. Well, Osama bin Laden was also a father, and yet he wasn’t a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists.”

Abrego Garcia is neither a terrorist nor a member of MS-13. In fact, an immigration judge ruled in 2019 that his life would be in danger if he were to return to El Salvador. In contrast, bin Laden co-founded Al Qaeda, responsible for several terrorist attacks around the world and thousands of deaths, including 2,996 people in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The fact that the Trump administration continues to lie and call Abrego Garcia a gang member and terrorist with no evidence to justify its defiance of a Supreme Court ruling to facilitate his return, is an egregious miscarriage of justice and slander of an innocent man. Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, is married to a U.S. citizen, and is the father of an autistic child. He deserves to return to the U.S., but the Trump administration doesn’t want to admit that it’s wrong.

Next on Donald Trump’s deportation list: “homegrown” criminals.

In a meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele Monday, Trump praised Bukele’s willingness to imprison the more than 200 immigrants the United States deported to El Salvador, the majority of whom have no criminal record.

The president then gave a terrifying glimpse at the next step in his plans for mass deportation.

“Homegrown criminals are next. Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns,” Trump told Bukele, confirming that he wants to deport American citizens, a move that would violate the Constitution and test the courts more than ever before.

Trump and Bukele’s meeting comes just weeks after the U.S. deported more than 200 people to El Salvador who the administration claimed were criminals or members of Salvadoran gang MS-13.* In reality, most of them do not have criminal records, nor do they have any proven gang affiliation. They are now being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a megaprison notorious for human rights abuses.

As he joked with the man who is notorious for the mass imprisonment of his own people, Trump told Bukele CECOT isn’t big enough to hold everyone he plans to deport.

“You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough,” Trump told Bukele as the Oval Office erupted in laughter. On the same day, the president told reporters he plans to deport as many people as possible to El Salvador, where Bukele will welcome them with open arms.

*  This sentence has been updated with the correct origins of MS-13.

An immigration attorney was surprised to receive a notice from the Department of Homeland Security instructing an immediate departure from the United States that was addressed to her—not one of her clients—especially considering the fact that she is a U.S. citizen.

Nicole Micheroni received a notice, which appeared to be delivered by email from a Customs and Border Protection DHS account, alerting her that the “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole.”

Micheroni, who was born in Newton, Massachusetts, is not in the United States on parole.

“If you do not depart the country immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States,” the notice warned.

Micheroni told NBC10 Boston that “at first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine.”

She noted that while the language was “very threatening” and the email looked “kind of like a sketchy spam email,” it was the real thing.

“It doesn’t look like an official government notice, but it is,” she said.

Micheroni told The Boston Globe that in the 12 years she’d been an immigration attorney, she had never seen immigration parole terminated by email.

Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic at Boston University, told the Globe that the DHS had recently put out a wave of parole termination notices via email, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to get immigrants to self-deport.

In a statement to NBC10 Boston, the DHS said that “CBP used the known email addresses of the alien to send notifications. If a non-personal email—such as an American citizen contact—was provided by the alien, notices may have been sent to unintended recipients. CBP is monitoring communications and will address any issues on a case-by-case basis.”

A senior DHS official said that it was possible that one of her clients had entered Micheroni’s information by mistake.

“I think it’s really scary this is going on,” Micheroni said. “I think it says they’re not being careful.”

Micheroni’s fears aren’t unfounded: It’s clear that the Trump administration is not being careful. The Trump administration is attempting to abandon a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month, due to an “administrative error.” And on Monday, Donald Trump revealed that he’d asked his attorney general to look into implementing his threat to banish U.S. citizens to foreign gulags—which is entirely illegal.

Despite a court order, Donald Trump is still refusing to allow journalists from the Associated Press into the White House press pool.

On Monday, the AP was barred from the White House to cover Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s meeting with Trump, and issued a statement saying, “Our journalists were blocked from the Oval Office today. We expect the White House to restore AP’s participation in the pool as of today, as provided in the injunction order.”

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the president couldn’t bar the AP from presidential events, saying, “Under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”

Trump barred the AP in February from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the news agency refused to adopt Trump’s unilateral name change of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” The AP responded by suing three administration officials on the grounds that the White House was violating the Constitution’s free press protections by trying to dictate the AP’s language.

The president’s refusal to allow the AP access to the White House on Monday escalates the matter further, as the organization would have to seek further redress in court. It’s the latest example of Trump’s attempts to intimidate and force media organizations to bend to his will, be it threatening legal action through the FCC or defamation lawsuits, or taking the unprecedented move of wresting control of the press pool away from the White House Correspondents’ Association.

The administration is already defying larger court orders, such as those against its immigration practices, with nothing seemingly compelling it to follow the law, creating a constitutional crisis. This move against the AP is a direct assault on the First Amendment, and, barring any sort of penalty against the Trump administration, is a major blow to free speech and freedom of the press in America.