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In what may be one of the Trump administration’s most controversial proposals yet, officials have floated the idea of sending certain U.S. citizens, particularly those convicted of violent crimes, to be imprisoned in El Salvador. The notion, reportedly offered by El Salvador’s Trump-aligned President Nayib Bukele, was confirmed by Trump himself during a press conference in the Oval Office. “I don’t know what the law says on that,” Trump admitted, though White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later insisted the plan was “under serious consideration.”
“The president has said if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that, he’s not sure,” Leavitt said during a press briefing. “We are not sure if there is. It’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly as in the effort of transparency.” According to her, the idea would apply only to “heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly.”
But even this unusual candor about the plan’s legality hasn’t silenced growing outrage from legal experts. That level of doubt is “highly telling,” critics argue, especially since the administration often insists its actions are fully legal, no matter how extreme. In this case, as per constitutional scholars, the concept would be flatly illegal and “spectacularly unconstitutional.”
There is no legal authority allowing the federal government to sentence a U.S. citizen to serve time in a foreign prison. The Supreme Court has previously ruled against similar overreaches of executive power. In Valentine v. United States (1936), the Court made it clear that the president cannot extradite an American citizen without clear approval from a treaty or an act of Congress.
