The Chilling Implications of Stripping U.S. Citizenship and Deporting Americans to El Salvador

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Washington, DC — Last week, in the first installment of the America’s Voice “This is What Mass Deportation Looks Like,” we highlighted why the Trump administration’s efforts to purge international students should be thought of through this larger mass deportation lens and objective.

This week, we have more reminders of how the administration is going for broke in its push to turbocharge mass deportations, including: IRS information-sharing to enable immigration enforcement; misuse of a Social Security Administration database to crack down on immigrants; internal White House goals of a minimum 1 million deportations this year; and more egregious examples of immigration detentions, including of another Columbia University political protestor.

Yet the dangerous scale and scope of Trump’s mass deportation agenda is perhaps best captured by the shocking news that Rolling Stone reported this weekend, “Team Trump Is Gaming Out How To Ship U.S. Citizens To El Salvador.” The reporting was then confirmed by Presidents Trump and Bukele during their Oval Office meeting yesterday.

According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice: 

“This is what mass deportation looks like. The concept of stripping citizenship from U.S. citizens and sending them to El Salvador prisons without due process is the stuff of nightmares and undemocratic regimes, yet here we are. It’s hard to overstate what the stakes are for our democracy and core American principles given what we’re seeing and what the administration is now floating as the next steps in their larger deportation agenda. And it’s time Americans of all political perspectives stand up and speak out in opposition.”

Key voices were quick to condemn the details and larger anti-democratic implications of the notion of stripping citizenship and deporting U.S. citizens, including:

• One unnamed Democratic lawmaker told Adrian Carrasquillo in The Bulwark, “‘If this guy keeps ignoring court rulings or deports U.S. citizens,’ the Democratic member of the House told me, ‘that’s a trigger for impeachment.’” As Carrasquillo noted, “Will a sufficient number of the lawmaker’s Republican colleagues, though, be capable of recognizing a constitutional crisis at that point and join hands to enact such an urgent constitutional remedy?”

• Lawrence Hurley of NBC News noted, “If an immigrant who the government claims is a gang member can be deported to El Salvador without any due process rights, then why not a U.S. citizen? That was the nightmarish scenario immigration advocates and constitutional law experts were considering on Monday after President Donald Trump again pushed a provocative plan to deport U.S. citizens.”

• As constitutional expert and law professor Steve Vladeck stated on CNN, “There’s no legal authority to send a U.S. citizen to serve a U.S. criminal sentence in a foreign prison … it would be pretty striking if there was, because that would mean any of us could be effectively ‘disappeared’ into a prison with no U.S. legal constraints, with no potential human rights limits.” (Also read political commentator Dan Pfeiffer’s Substack post, “This Is How Democracy Collapses: Trump Wants to Send Americans to Foreign Gulags”).

• And in her powerful dissent in the Supreme Court ruling about the Alien Enemies Act, Justice Sonia Sotomayor captured the proper stakes: “The implications of the government’s position [are] that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”