We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS SENT TO EL SALVADOR – ARE AMERICAN PRISONERS GOING NEXT?
While meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office last week, President Trump said what he was thinking: “Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places [like El Salvador’s terrorist prison, CECOT]. It’s not big enough. 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.”
“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.” Obviously, the only “really bad people” he could send – the only people over whom he could obtain custody to deport – are federal prisoners.
Attorney General Pam Bondi is reportedly considering legal mechanisms by which Trump could send American citizens to CECOT.
“It is pretty obviously illegal and unconstitutional,” Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University Law School, told NBC News.
Emma Winger, a lawyer at the nonprofit advocacy group American Immigration Council, said last week that the law that imbues the government with authority to deport people does not apply to US citizens. In fact, the British policy of removing people it alleged to be criminal from the colonies to be put on trial elsewhere was one of the grievances that led to the Revolutionary War 250 years ago.
“I can’t see how exiling someone is permissible as part of the bundle of rights that are fundamental to citizenship,” Anthony Kreis, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, told NBC. “doubly so if the effort to house American citizens overseas means turning a person over to a foreign authority,” he added.
“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,” David Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, told NBC News.
Very early on Saturday morning, the Supreme Court issued an extraordinary order even as more immigrant detainees were being bussed to waiting aircraft for a flight to a Salvadorean prison, directing the Government in terse language “not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.” This came after a government lawyer told a lower court that while no flights were planned for Good Friday, he couldn’t make any assurances about the weekend. NBC News later aired video of immigrants loaded on buses headed for a flight to El Salvador at o-dark-thirty on Saturday morning, providing ICE with a fig leaf (in that the departure did not happen on Friday, as the lower court had been assured).
In other Administration criminal justice news, 21 federal prisoners whose death sentences were commuted to life without parole by President Biden filed a lawsuit last Wednesday arguing that a Trump executive order that they be imprisoned in harsh conditions “consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose” violates the 8th Amendment.
In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the prisoners said that as a result of Trump’s order, “in defiance of the controlling statutes, regulations, and policies governing the BOP redesignation process,” Attorney General Pam Bondi “ordered BOP staff to engage in a new sham process that categorically predetermined that all Plaintiffs—regardless of what the statutory BOP redesignation process had determined—will be incarcerated indefinitely in the most oppressive conditions in the entire federal prison system…”
The President likes that “hopeless bondage” stuff.
Would Trump try to contract federal prisoners to overseas prisons? He has stated that he would like to. Would he try it? Judge for yourself from the Administration’s handling of the El Salvador deportations and deliberate attempts to make life imprisonment for former death-row prisoners especially punitive.
Reason, Homegrowns Are Next (April 15, 2025)
NBC News, ‘Obviously illegal’: Experts pan Trump’s plan to deport ‘homegrown criminals’ (April 14, 2025)
Slate, Alito’s Emergency Deportation Dissent Misrepresents the Most Crucial Fact in the Case (April 21, 2025)
Washington Post, They were on federal death row. Now they may go to a supermax prison. (April 18, 2025)
Complaint (ECF 1), Taylor v. Trump, Case No. 1:25-cv-01161 (USDC District of Columbia, April 16, 2025)
– Thomas L. Root