Trump Threatens to Send U.S. Citizens to El Salvador's Gulag

Apr 15, 2025

Since he has gotten away (so far) with disappearing immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, Donald Trump is taking the next logical step: making plans to send U.S. citizens there. What part of the Constitution does this violate? Basically, all of them.

CBS News offers an analysis:

President Trump’s administration is studying current laws to see if they are able to send U.S. citizens who commit violent crimes to prisons in foreign countries, the president said this week in his Oval Office meeting with El Salvador’s tough-on-crime President Nayib Bukele. …
“Sending American citizens to serve their sentences in a prison outside of the United States would violate the U.S. Constitution,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. And sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador specifically “would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution” prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment, she said.
Mr. Trump said the U.S. can send criminals abroad for “less money” than housing them in the U.S. The president told Bukele he'll need to build “about five” more facilities to house “homegrown” criminals—meaning American citizens—in El Salvador. The Trump administration has sent hundreds of migrants whom they allege without concrete evidence are gang members, although some of those cases are playing out in court. …
Incarcerating U.S. citizens abroad would be almost certainly unconstitutional because “they wouldn't be able to, presumably, get habeas corpus, or be able to file petitions for habeas corpus,” said Stanford Law professor Bernadette Meyler.
Habeas corpus means recourse for challenging one’s conditions of or reasons for confinement.
Further, under Article One of the Constitution, only Congress can write the statutes that determine punishment for federal crimes.

The tally: This violates the 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendments, plus Article I. At the least.

On the one hand, Trump has only talked about doing this but hasn’t done it yet. On the other hand, maybe it’s a good idea to raise a ruckus before he does it.

Trump claims he is only going to do this with prisoners convicted of heinous violent crimes—but given that he has already lied repeatedly about the immigrants he has sent to El Salvador, we should not believe that he will stop with only one group of people.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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