Pam Bondi Hops on Board Trump’s Alcatraz Delusion Train

The president’s Make Alcatraz Great Again pitch just got more fuel from one of his subordinates.

Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested Tuesday that alleged international drug traffickers, “if convicted,” should stay in American prisons—“maybe Alcatraz,” she added with a smile.

Other Republicans have similarly scrambled to make Trump’s bizarre Sunday evening order to “rebuild, and reopen Alcatraz” sound like a bright idea. Senator Eric Schmitt vaunted the plan as “very smart,” and Senator Markwayne Mullin endorsed it on X, while Representative Mary E. Miller got to work itemizing the most important Alcatraz inductees: “The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci,” she wrote, referring to the pandemic-era director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In reality, there is practically zero possibility that the famed prison would reopen to house more prisoners. Alcatraz—which operated for just 29 years—was shut down in 1963, in part due to how expensive it was to operate. Data from the federal Bureau of Prisons shows that housing inmates at Alcatraz was three times more expensive than at other jails thanks to the fact that it was located on a remote island, requiring all of its resources, such as water, food, and fuel, to be shipped from the mainland.

“An estimated $3-5 million was needed just for restoration and maintenance work to keep the prison open. That figure did not include daily operating costs,” according to the Bureau of Prisons.

John Martini, an expert on Alcatraz history who previously served as an Alcatraz park ranger, told the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday that the building is “totally inoperable” and has no running water or sewage.

“It was falling apart and needed huge amounts of reconstruction, and that would have only brought it up to 1963 code,” Martini told the paper, noting that the building would need to be torn down and completely rebuilt to house prisoners again. “It was always an extremely expensive place to run.”

Meanwhile, the tourism centering around the former island prison rakes in $60 million in annual revenue, hosting 1.6 million annual visitors, according to the National Park Service.

Bondi must not have known this before throwing her weight behind Trump’s idea. Speaking with Fox Business Monday, the attorney general said she was “all for” putting prisoners back in Alcatraz, claiming that it would provide “cost savings.”

But Trump’s rationale for keeping the prison open apparently has nothing to do with nickels and dimes. Speaking with reporters at the White House Monday, Trump claimed an uncharacteristically picturesque attachment to the facility.

“It sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. It’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting,” he sentimentalized.

Speaking of pictures, Trump’s mysterious sudden fascination with the prison suspiciously coincided with weekend reruns of a 46-year-old Clint Eastwood movie, Escape From Alcatraz, on WLRN—a PBS affiliate that services the area around Mar-a-Lago. Go figure.

The Trump administration isn’t rushing to bring home Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident whom the White House mistakenly shipped to El Salvador on the basis of his alleged involvement with the transnational Salvadoran gang MS-13. Instead, they seem intent on finding enough evidence to keep him out of the country for good.

The Justice Department has been quietly investigating a 2022 Tennessee traffic stop involving Abrego Garcia, and recently spoke with an Alabama inmate—Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes—who it believed had potential connections to the 29-year-old, ABC News reported Tuesday.

At the time of the traffic violation, Abrego Garcia was driving Hernandez-Reyes’s car. Abrego Garcia was ticketed for speeding. He had eight passengers in the vehicle and told officers that they had been working construction in Missouri, according to ABC.

Hernandez-Reyes reportedly told investigators that he operated a “taxi service” in Baltimore. Sources familiar with the conversation told ABC that Hernandez-Reyes said he met Abrego Garcia in 2015 and sometimes hired Abrego Garcia to transport undocumented immigrants from Texas to other areas of the country.

It’s not clear if Hernandez-Reyes’s testimony is enough to charge Abrego Garcia, but what is plain is that the White House is not prioritizing his return home.

“The interview of Hernandez-Reyes, however, appears to be a new and aggressive step in the government’s efforts to gather potentially incriminating information about Abrego Garcia’s background–even as it resists calls for him to be provided typical protections to respond to such accusations through the American legal system,” according to ABC News.

Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally more than a decade ago but was allowed to remain in the U.S. and evade deportation back to El Salvador when an immigration judge ruled in October 2019 that a return to his home country could expose him to violence or persecution from a local gang, Barrio 18. Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime, and the only alleged tie between the construction worker and MS-13 stemmed from a 2019 report of a since-fired Maryland police officer. The report also did not definitively link Abrego-Garcia to the gang.

Donald Trump himself appears confused about Abrego Garcia’s connection to Latin American gangs. The president entered into a terse exchange with ABC News last week when he insisted that a doctored photo of supposed gang tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s knuckles was real. Experts say the photo was obviously photoshopped.

Trump administration officials acknowledged in court filings last month that Abrego Garcia’s forced exit from the country was an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court has ordered the executive branch to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., but the White House has since contested that ruling, arguing that Abrego Garcia “will never live” in America again.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has derided the idea that he would return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. as “preposterous,” protesting that he does not have the authority to remove “terrorists” from prisons.

Despite that, Trump has claimed that he does actually have the power to bring Abrego Garcia home—but that he won’t do so.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was brutally called out Tuesday after she claimed the United States was not deporting its own citizens.

During a hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois asked Noem if she believed that the U.S. government had the authority to deport American citizens.

“No, and we are not deporting U.S. citizens,” Noem said.

“OK great, I’m so happy to hear that you do not believe that the law gives you that authority, because the federal government has no authority under U.S. laws to deport any American citizen,” Underwood said. “And as I know everyone viewing this hearing today knows that several American citizens have been deported to date.”

“No, they haven’t. That is not true,” Noem replied.

“Secretary Noem, that was not a question,” Underwood said.

Last month, the Trump administration deported three American children to Honduras, alongside their immigrant mothers. Attorneys for the mothers have said that they wanted their children to remain in the U.S., but authorities have said the opposite. Border czar Tom Homan insisted that the children hadn’t technically been deported, and that the mothers had made a “parental decision” to remain with their children.

“If we didn’t do it the story today would be, ‘Trump administration separating families again,’” Homan said. “No, we’re keeping families together.”

While the official number of deportees who are actually American citizens is unknown, The Washington Post documented at least 12 instances in which U.S. citizens had been swept up in Trump’s immigration crackdown. A DHS spokesperson told the outlet, “We don’t have data to provide you on the deportation of U.S. citizens because we don’t deport U.S. citizens.”

Crucially, as the Trump administration continues to conduct deportations while denying due process to detainees, it’s likely the number of U.S. citizens wrongly removed will only continue to rise.

Underwood also asked Noem if she believed that the Constitution guaranteed due process to everyone in America. Noem repeatedly refused to give a “yes” or “no” answer.

“Ma’m, I am trying to ascertain your understanding of the law as it applies to your department, and you as its leader should be able to give us a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, because judge after judge has ruled that the law is not being followed,” Underwood said.

The Trump administration has continued to fight judges, flouting a Supreme Court ruling requiring the government to allow detainees “to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” As a result of Donald Trump’s mounting threats against the judiciary, at least 11 federal judges and their families have been threatened and harassed since they ruled against Trump on issues of deportations, federal funding, and his war on “wokeness.”

Trump has instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into the legality of deporting prisoners who are U.S. citizens to foreign prisons, as he did with 238 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador in March. He even said he’d help fund the construction of new prisons overseas. Even though Trump’s scheme to outsource the incarceration of American prisoners has absolutely no basis in U.S. law, Bondi refused to give answers about the (il)legality of the idea.

The Supreme Court is allowing Trump to temporarily move forward with his ban on transgender people serving in the military. The court’s three liberal Justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—all dissented, according to the brief order.

Trump’s ban “generally disqualifies from military service individuals who have gender dysphoria or have undergone medical interventions for gender dysphoria,” according to Solicitor General D. John Sauer.

Trans people are a hindrance to “military effectiveness and lethality,” Sauer wrote in a filing to the high court’s justices.

Litigation over the constitutionality of the ban is still ongoing. A Bush-appointed judge in a lower court blocked Trump’s executive order banning transgender troops in the military, which he signed on his first day in office.

Judge Benjamin Settle in Washington issued a nationwide injunction in March, ruling there’s “no claim and no evidence that [plaintiff] is now, or ever was, a detriment to her unit’s cohesion, or to the military’s lethality or readiness, or that she is mentally or physically unable to continue her service.”

Trump’s ban—and the claims that trans people are worse at operating lethal machinery simply because they are trans—is nonsensical. This is purely a culture-war item, a bone to throw at a base that’s been obsessed with transgender people for years now.

This story has been updated.

Senator Thom Tillis is likely just tanked Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney to the District of Columbia.

Tillis is opposing Trump’s pick, Ed Martin—who has been described as a “far-right election denier” and a “conspiracy theorist”—on the grounds of his legal and political support for January 6 insurrectionists.

“Mr. Martin did a good job of explaining the one area that I think he’s probably right, that there were some people that were over-prosecuted, but there were some [200 to 300 of them] that should have never gotten a pardon,” Tillis told reporters Tuesday, adding that he met Martin the night before.

“If Mr. Martin were being put forth as a U.S. attorney for any district except the district where January 6 happened, the protest happened, I’d probably support him, but not in this district.… Whether it’s 30 days or three years is debatable, but I have no tolerance for anybody who entered the building on January 6.”

Martin did his part to spread misinformation to help Trump on January 6, writing on X: “I’m at the Capitol right now. Abd [sic] I was at the POTUS speech earlier. Rowdy crowd but nothing out of hand. Ignore the #FakeNews.” Now this is coming back to bite him.

Tillis’s lone “no” vote among Republicans is likely enough to cause Martin’s nomination to die in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The U.S. attorney to D.C. serves as both the legal representative of the federal government and the local district attorney.