President Donald Trump thinks he’s hit on a winning issue with threatening to lock up American citizens in a foreign torture prison, but legal experts say he’s got “zero authority” to do it.
Two White House officials who are familiar with the matter told CNN that the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office are both discussing whether Trump has any legal justification to send “homegrown” criminals to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, and one of those sources say the president views it as an “80-20″ issue, meaning that he believes 80 percent of Americans agree with his proposal.
“Legally, it is a non-starter,” said David Cole, who was the American Civil Liberties Union’s longtime national legal director. “There’s just zero authority for it. He may think it’s 80-20 as a political issue, but it’s 100-0 as legal matter. He has no authority.”
“The rights of citizenship include the rights to remain in this country – period,” Cole added, “and you cannot be expelled from this country, even temporarily, for any offense.”
Trump raised the idea of deporting Americans who committed certain types of violent crimes during an Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who has agreed to house migrants to his countries harsh CECOT mega-prison in exchange for $6 million from the U.S., but experts say federal officials have no legal authority to remove citizens from American soil.
“The whole purpose of the El Salvadoran prison is to house prisoners in an inhuman way,” Cole said. “That prison in the United States would be closed down in a second by any federal court.”
Trump signed a federal law during his first term that requires federal prisoners to be incarcerated no further than 500 miles from their homes, which law professor and libertarian scholar Ilya Somin said would invalidate the president’s proposal.
“If you look at the map, El Salvador is not within 500 miles of the U.S.,” said Somin, who teaches at George Mason University and works with the Cato Institute. “[It] would be pretty obviously illegal for a bunch of reasons.”
However, Somin said the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month, exposes a potential loophole the administration could use to carry out Trump’s plan, because federal courts have limited power to compel the government to bring individuals back into the U.S. once they’re out of the country.
“Even though it’s illegal, they could potentially get away with it by saying, ‘Well, we just whisked these people out of the country. We put them in El Salvador, and then after that, nobody can do anything about it,” Somin said.
Civil rights activists are already planning for the possibility of filing a swift legal challenge if the administration tries to send any citizens to a foreign prison.
“I think we’re going to see lawsuits that say some version of: The threat of potentially deporting a convicted criminal who’s a US citizen is enough to bring a case,” said Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School, “and then it will really be a question as to whether or not a federal judge thinks that this is right for review and kind of how many steps we’re going to require of the Trump administration before we say somebody has (the legal right) to sue.”
Source: Raw Story / Digpu NewsTex