U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 14, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
A civil rights attorney sounded the alarm Monday afternoon, warning the Trump administration is essentially engaged in what he called "human trafficking."
Trump publicly said he would like to deport American citizens who are violent offenders to El Salvador, where they would then serve their prison sentences under a deal with the Salvadoran government. Trump made the remarks during a White House meeting with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.
"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 in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that."
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Trump praised the maximum security prisons, calling them "great facilities" and saying, "They don't play games."
The idea has been widely challenged by legal experts, including civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger, who took to X on Monday to blast the president.
"Pay attention: This is human trafficking. President Trump is already paying to ship humans to El Salvador & now wants to expand his slave trade. US military contractors like Eric Prince are salivating, now negotiating to privatize deportations/imprisonment to make billions," warned Hechinger.
In a separate post, he called the deportation effort a "clear assault on civil liberties and due process rights."
"It also represents an arguably darker milestone: 'The US government is now in the business of trafficking migrants on the global market.'"
The Trump administration told Newsweek earlier this month that it has deported 100,000 undocumented immigrants since Jan. 20 — a number that experts have expressed skepticism over.
"The Biden administration deported 271,000 people during the final year and that was the highest in about a decade. I suppose if the administration is claiming that they have done more than a third of that already in two months, I'm skeptical of the 100,000 number, but not impossible," Austin Kocher, immigration research professor at Syracuse University, told Newsweek.