2025-04-14
President Donald Trump has again floated the idea of deporting some U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to El Salvador, pushing a proposal that legal scholars and immigration advocates say is plainly unconstitutional. The discussion came during a White House meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose government has agreed to receive people deported from the United States into a notorious prison.
Trump described the people he had in mind as “homegrown criminals” and said he wanted to include them among those sent abroad. He framed the idea as a response to violent offenders, mentioning people who attack strangers in the street or assault elderly victims. But the central legal issue is not the rhetoric. It is whether the federal government has any authority at all to remove citizens from the country and confine them in a foreign prison.
Experts quoted in the report say the answer is no. Immigration law, they note, applies to non-citizens, not Americans. A professor at George Mason University called the proposal “pretty obviously illegal and unconstitutional,” while a lawyer at the American Immigration Council said the deportation framework simply does not apply to U.S. citizens. The article also quotes other legal scholars who compared the idea to exile and warned that it would violate the basic bundle of rights tied to citizenship.
The White House has not explained how the plan would work, and the Justice Department did not respond to the outlet's questions. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt had previously said Trump was interested in deporting “heinous, violent criminals” who are U.S. citizens if there were a legal pathway to do so. That caveat matters because it suggests the administration knows the law is unsettled at best and likely absent at worst.
The proposal is also linked to the administration's broader dispute over deportations to El Salvador. In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the government has admitted it mistakenly deported a man to El Salvador and now says the courts cannot force his return because foreign policy authority belongs to the president. The Supreme Court has already ruled that people facing such deportations have due process rights, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a separate opinion that the government's logic could extend even to U.S. citizens being taken off the streets and placed in foreign prisons with no chance to challenge the removal.
That is what makes Trump's latest comments so consequential. The issue is not only whether a president would want to send citizens abroad, but whether the administration is testing the outer edge of constitutional protections by speaking as if such a scheme might someday be feasible. In practical terms, the answer would affect not only sentencing and incarceration, but the meaning of citizenship itself.
The source material makes clear that the legal consensus is hostile to the idea, even if the White House continues to test the language around it. Trump may describe the target as violent offenders, but the constitutional problem is broader than any one category of prisoner. A U.S. citizen cannot simply be treated as removable property of the state. The proposal, as described, collides head-on with that principle.
