Border czar Tom Homan has joined Attorney General Pam Bondi in refusing to say whether President Donald Trump’s idea to deport Americans to foreign jails is legal.
“I asked you about this the other day [and] you said you had just gotten back, you had not heard about it yet. Just to follow up, do you believe it would be legal to send American prisoners to foreign prisons?” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Homan on Thursday.
“I’m in the deportation business, so I don’t think you’re talking about deportation. I think you’re talking about prisoner transfer or extradition,” he said. “That’s a question for Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice, U.S. Marshals.”
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But Bondi also dodged the question earlier this week when asked by Fox News host Jesse Watters if Trump’s musings about sending Americans to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran prison complex where inmates sleep on bare metal racks and are kept in their cells 23 and a half hours per day, is legal.
Legal experts say the idea is “obviously illegal,” but Homan continued to punt.
“I think the thing they’re talking about is either extradition or prisoner transfer, and that’s a question for the DOJ,” he repeated.
Housing Americans who are accused or convicted of committing crimes in the U.S. in foreign jails would not be a form “extradition.” That’s what happens when someone has been accused of breaking the laws of a foreign country and is sent back to that country to stand trial, according to Black’s Law Dictionary.
Meanwhile, Homan is correct that “deportation” is a process that only applies to foreign nationals.
But legally it’s a civil process “without any implication of punishment or penalty,” according to Black’s Law Dictionary and the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. By that definition, jailing migrants in a Salvadoran mega prison is not “deportation” either.
And yet the U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million per year to indefinitely jail about 240 Venezuelans and a handful of Salvadorans, the vast majority of whom do not have criminal records.
On Monday, Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and suggested they expand the deal to include Americans.
“Homegrown criminals next,” Trump whispered to Bukele as they entered the Oval Office.
“I said homegrowns the next,” he added, raising his voice. “The homegrowns. You got to build about five more places.”
Later during their meeting, Trump told reporters that Bondi was “studying the law” to figure out how to deport Americans accused of crimes.
“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,” Trump told reporters. “I’d like to include them.”
That night, Bondi refused to say whether the plan was legal.
“Jesse, these are Americans he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country,” she told Watters. “Crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us a directive to make America safe again.”
Deporting Americans clearly violates their fundamental rights as U.S. citizens, according to legal experts. In fact, Americans who were wrongly deported have successfully sued the government for damages.
During her interview with Homan, Collins pressed him on the issue.
“You personally would not be involved in sending American prisoners to foreign prisoners, including in El Salvador?” she asked.
“As the border czar, I would not remove U.S. citizens, no,” he said. “Department of Justice can either do that through a prisoner transfer or extradition. That’s out of my lane.”
