Trump Wants to Send Undocumented Aliens to the Salvadoran Gulag Without a Hearing

Apr 24, 2025

The right to due process and a trial is guaranteed in the Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments to our Constitution. But its roots go back a thousand years, even before the Magna Carta. Yet Donald Trump now says it has to be thrown out because he wants to deport a lot of people.

ABC News reports:

Amid a tense legal battle over deportations, President Donald Trump is now arguing undocumented migrants should not be given a trial where they could challenge being removed from the country.
“We’re getting them out, and I hope we get cooperation from the courts because you know, we have thousands of people that are ready to go out, and you can't have a trial for all of these people,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
“It wasn’t meant, the system wasn’t meant—and we don’t think there is anything that says—Look, we are getting some very bad people, killers, murderers, drug dealers, really bad people, the mentally ill, the mentally insane, they emptied out insane asylums into our country, we’re getting them out,” Trump continued. “And a judge can't say, ‘No, you have to have a trial.’” …
Immigration matters are routinely dealt with in a limited hearing or other proceeding before an immigration judge—not a full-blown trial as Trump suggests.
His comments came after the Supreme Court, in a brief order issued early Saturday morning, temporarily blocked the administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants alleged to be gang members under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. …
Also front and center of Trump’s deportation effort is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a migrant living in Maryland who was erroneously deported to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT mega-prison.

It is true that deportations are often done with less procedure than a full jury trial, though the constitutional basis for this is doubtful. But the Trump administration is not just deporting people. It is sending them to a foreign prison—and Trump wants to do it with no process at all.

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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