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.

An American university is finally standing up to Donald Trump’s egregious demands, amid a flurry of schools spinelessly bending to the president’s will in recent weeks.

Harvard University announced Monday it will not comply with the White House’s demands that it dismantle diversity programming and limit student protests, putting $9 billion in federal funding at risk.

“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” University President Alan Garber said in a statement.

On Friday, the university received a letter from the Department of Education detailing changes it deemed necessary to foster an “environment that produces intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor,” worthy of maintaining a “financial relationship with the federal government.” The demands included discontinuing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, reforming its admissions process for international students, and dismantling programs with “egregious records of antisemitism,” among others. The letter came two weeks after three federal agencies announced a review of $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard.

“The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge,” Garber said in his statement.

Harvard’s audit is part of Trump’s larger crackdown on postsecondary institutions and academic freedom, from funding cuts to deporting international students and banning DEI initiatives.

A number of universities have crumbled under Trump’s pressure, and fast. Columbia University unfairly expelled students involved in pro-Palestine protests and agreed to policy changes in an attempt to regain about $400 million in funding. Ohio State University closed its DEI programs, the University of Iowa eliminated housing specifically designated for Black students, Latinx students, and LGBTQ students, and the University of Pennsylvania has erased any reference to DEI or affirmative action from its websites.

But the country’s oldest postsecondary institution, which has long been criticized for its questionable endowment investments and lack of diversity, is refusing to crumble—hopefully a catalyst for other universities to grow a spine and do the same.

The Trump administration used a citizenship interview as a pretext to arrest a Columbia University student of Palestinian descent.

Mohsen K. Mahdawi, a U.S. permanent resident who has lived in the country for 10 years, showed up to what he thought was his citizenship interview Monday at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vermont. Instead, he was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has begun deportation proceedings.

The Columbia University student was a leader in the school’s protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Mahdawi was fearful of being deported, even before his friend, Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested last month by federal immigration agents.

Mahdawi was included on a list of students the far-right pro-Israel organization Betar gave to the Trump administration in the hopes that they would be deported. Betar and the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at ColumbiaU also posted on social media multiple times about Mahdawi, tagging law enforcement agencies on each post.

After asking university officials to find him a safe place to live where he wouldn’t be detained by ICE, and receiving no response, Mahdawi went into hiding before receiving an email notifying him of a citizenship interview at the UCSIS office earlier this month. Mahdawi worried that it was a trap, and contacted his elected representatives in Vermont: Representative Becca Balint and Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch.

All three promised to remain on standby pending Mahdawi’s status after the interview, with Welch speaking to Mahdawi directly. In the end, it was a trap, and Mahdawi was detained with the same obscure immigration law used to detain Khalil and several other international students, including permanent residents: that their presence in the U.S. is a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests.

“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi told The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.”

It’s particularly cruel to claim to offer citizenship to an immigrant, only to use it as a ruse to deport them over free speech issues. Mahdawi has not been charged with a crime, and pending his attorneys’ habeas corpus petition, is now in ICE custody. For this administration, his crime appears to be being a Palestinian student who used his right to free speech.

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.