WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump stepped up his extraordinary threats to send Americans to foreign jails, saying Tuesday he would love to deport “homegrown” US citizens who commit violent crimes to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.
Trump raised the idea in talks on Monday with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele -- the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” who has already taken detained migrants from the United States into his country’s jails.
But the 78-year-old Republican doubled down on the idea of sending US citizens to El Salvador too, amid fundamental questions about whether it would actually be legal.
“I call them homegrown criminals,“ Trump said according to excerpts of an interview with Fox Noticias, a Spanish-language program being broadcast later Tuesday.
“The ones that grew up and something went wrong and they hit people over the head with a baseball bat and push people into subways,“ he added.
“We are looking into it and we want to do it. I would love to do it.”
On Monday, Trump said during his meeting with Bukele in the Oval Office that he had asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine the possibility of sending Americans to El Salvador.
The White House said Tuesday it was still exploring whether such a move would be within the law.
“It’s a legal question that the president is looking into,“ Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told journalists at a briefing.
“He would only consider this, if legal, for Americans who are the most violent egregious repeat offenders of crime who nobody in this room wants living in their communities.”
The iron-fisted Bukele made the extraordinary offer to take in prisoners from the United States shortly after Trump’s inauguration for a second term.
Trump has already sent more than 250 migrants there, mostly under a centuries-old wartime law that deprives them of due process -- in exchange for a fee of $6 million paid to El Salvador.
But he has increasingly started talking about sending US citizens to foreign jails too.
Trump’s administration already faces pressure over the case of a migrant who was mistakenly deported from the United States to El Salvador under the Bukele deal.
Bukele on Monday dismissed the “preposterous” idea of returning the man -- Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father who was living in the US state of Maryland -- to the United States.
The US Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return from the notorious jail after the White House said he was deported after an “administrative error.”
Trump officials insist he is an illegal migrant and a member of El Salvador’s notorious MS-13 gang, despite never having been convicted.
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