Trump said it out loud: He wants to deport Americans to El Salvador’s CECOT

 https://thehill.com/opinion/5251941-trump-administration-exporting-americans/?tbref=hp

To be clear, there is no legal pathway for any president to deport native-born U.S. citizens. Sending Americans to El Salvador would be illegal under existing U.S. and international law. Such a move would not only be unconstitutional, it could amount to an improper overreach by the executive branch into the judicial system.  

When the president said last week that he would “love” to send imprisoned Americans to El Salvador, he added, “I don’t know what the law says on that, but I can’t imagine the law would say anything different.”  

In fact, U.S. law does say something different. 

One statute says that any person in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons must be able to be transported to court. This would probably not be possible if a person were in El Salvador, where the government is currently maintaining that it cannot bring back a migrant wrongfully deported there. 

Another law states that incarcerated people can only be transferred out of the U.S. to the country where they are a citizen, which would rule out Americans being sent to El Salvador. The U.S. is also a signatory to the Convention Against Torture, which forbids sending people to a country where they could be at risk for torture.  

Then there’s the matter of the Constitution. Sending Americans to El Salvador would likely run afoul of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”