WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump stepped up his extraordinary threats to send Americans to foreign jails, saying Tuesday he would love to deport \u201chomegrown\u201d US citizens who commit violent crimes to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.
\nTrump raised the idea in talks on Monday with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele \u2014 the self-proclaimed \u201cworld\u2019s coolest dictator\u201d who has already taken detained migrants from the United States into his country\u2019s jails.
\nBut 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.
\n\u201cI call them homegrown criminals,\u201d Trump said according to excerpts of an interview with Fox Noticias, a Spanish-language program being broadcast later Tuesday.
\n\u201cThe ones that grew up and something went wrong and they hit people over the head with a baseball bat and push people into subways,\u201d he added.
\n\u201cWe are looking into it and we want to do it. I would love to do it.\u201d
\nOn 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.
\nThe White House said Tuesday it was still exploring whether such a move would be within the law.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a legal question that the president is looking into,\u201d Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told journalists at a briefing.
\n\u201cHe 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.\u201d
\nThe iron-fisted Bukele made the extraordinary offer to take in prisoners from the United States shortly after Trump\u2019s inauguration for a second term.
\nTrump has already sent more than 250 migrants there, mostly under a centuries-old wartime law that deprives them of due process \u2014 in exchange for a fee of $6 million paid to El Salvador.
\nBut he has increasingly started talking about sending US citizens to foreign jails too.
\nTrump\u2019s 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.
\nBukele on Monday dismissed the \u201cpreposterous\u201d idea of returning the man \u2014 Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father who was living in the US state of Maryland \u2014 to the United States.
\nThe 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 \u201cadministrative error.\u201d
\nTrump officials insist he is an illegal migrant and a member of El Salvador\u2019s notorious MS-13 gang, despite never having been convicted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump stepped up his extraordinary threats to send Americans to foreign jails, saying Tuesday he would love to deport \u201chomegrown\u201d 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 \u2014 the self-proclaimed \u201cworld\u2019s coolest dictator\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77292,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79735,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79717\/revisions\/79735"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}