Homegrowns Are Next
CECOT for citizens: President Donald Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office yesterday and said his innermost thoughts out loud: “Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places [like the CECOT prison]. It’s not big enough.”
“Yeah, we’ve got space,” Bukele responded. Administration officials chuckled in the background. “I’m talking about violent people,” Trump had said a few minutes earlier. “I’m talking about really bad people.”
“We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters,” said Trump.
Attorney General Pam Bondi is reportedly considering legal mechanisms by which Trump could send American citizens to El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo.
David Bier, a Cato Institute immigration expert, told NBC News that Trump’s comments show how “absolutely critical it is for the courts to put an immediate stop to this extrajudicial imprisonment by foreign proxy.”
“U.S. citizens may not be deported to imprisonment abroad. There is no authority for that in any U.S. law,” noted Bier. “The U.S. government has already deported someone to this prison illegally and claimed no recourse to get them back, so the courts must shut down this unconstitutional train wreck before U.S. citizens are unlawfully caught up in it.”
The Trump administration’s CECOT fetish is disturbing. Officials keep visiting it and using it for photo ops, like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s little press tour a few weeks ago (which generated lots of social media content for the administration). “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” said Noem in a video. “First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
CECOT keeps prisoners in brutal conditions, with basic medical care and hygiene denied; it faces severe overcrowding. Many of the people imprisoned are the most awful violent criminals, those responsible for El Salvador’s decades-long high murder rate, who have brutally ripped families apart and terrorized the communities from which they come. But it’s not just violent criminals Bukele has imprisoned: “Cecot houses both convicted criminals and those still going through El Salvador’s court system,” reports CNN. “With many constitutional rights suspended under El Salvador’s years-long state of emergency, some people have been detained by mistake, President Nayib Bukele has admitted; several thousand of them have already been released.”
Abrego Garcia still not returned: The Trump administration, having been ordered to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia by a Supreme Court ruling that upheld a federal district judge’s decision, is throwing its hands up in the air and claiming it can’t really do anything to free him from CECOT—despite the fact that Bukele was in the Oval Office yesterday. “The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele, seated next
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