Donald Trump wants to deport ‘home-grown’ criminals. Can American citizens be deported?

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has floated the idea of deporting American citizens. Aides say he’s serious. Legal experts say it’s unthinkable and illegal – though they’re not sure that would stop him from trying, given his willingness to ignore the courts.

“It is flagrantly unconstitutional,” said Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer who served as an associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. “You can’t deport a U.S. citizen, period.”

That’s the overwhelming consensus of legal scholars, though Trump and his aides say they’re looking for a way around that.

“The homegrowns are next,” Trump said Monday during a meeting with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”

The U.S. has sent more than 200 migrants to El Salvador in recent weeks and is paying for their detention at a notoriously dangerous high security prison.

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Among them is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a longtime Maryland resident flown to El Salvador on March 15 despite a 2019 order protecting him from deportation. Federal authorities ignored a judge’s order to turn the plane around well before it landed with Abrego Garcia and other deportees.

Trump officials have also refused to comply with a judge’s order to seek his return.

“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 with Bukele at his side. “I’d like to include them.”

U.S. authorities have acknowledged that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake but say he has gang ties and would be deported again immediately if he were returned.

Abrego Garcia, his American wife, the local Maryland prosecutor and others dispute the gang allegation. Federal authorities have provided no evidence. He has not been charged or convicted of any crime.

Bukele said he cannot return Abrego Garcia without a request from U.S. officials. Attorney General Pam Bondi says the U.S. won’t make that request.

“If this can happen to Mr. Garcia, it can happen to any of us,” Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Phoenix, said in a statement. Trump has “already said that he’s ready and willing to illegally deport ‘home-growns’ and American citizens.”

Ansari is one of numerous Democratic lawmakers traveling to El Salvador this month to spotlight the case.

She and other Trump critics say the president’s willingness to defy court orders and to flagrantly violate Abrego Garcia’s due process rights indicates he might even exile American citizens in defiance of the courts.

On Thursday, the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals refused the administration’s request to shield officials involved in the deportation from giving depositions ordered by a lower court.

In a scathing opinion written by a Reagan-appointed judge, the court raised the specter of American citizens being sent into exile.

“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson. “And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?”

Trump aides have affirmed that Trump is serious about wanting to send American-born criminals out of the country.

That is a “legal question that the president is looking into,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at her Tuesday briefing.

Trump wants to protect families by deporting “Americans who are the most violent, egregious offenders of crime, who nobody in this room wants living in their communities,” she said.

Trump has promised to deport every immigrant in the country without proper documentation, a population estimated at 11 million or more. He also wants to end birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil, unless at least one parent is a U.S. citizen; the Supreme Court will hear arguments May 15 on the issue.

Immigration attorney Juan Rocha, who teaches at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said Trump is trying to deter new immigrants and encourage anyone vulnerable to deportation to leave the country voluntarily.

“It’s part of a propaganda machine, to create an environment of fear,” he said.

Customs and Border Protection has reported a 14% decline in illegal border crossings since Oct. 1.

Legal experts say it’s possible for a naturalized citizen to be deported – but only if their citizenship is revoked. The government can seek to denaturalize a citizen who commits treason or certain other crimes, runs for office in a foreign country, or is found to have obtained citizenship through fraud.

But there is no constitutional provision or law that allows a natural-born citizen to be stripped of citizenship. And citizenship comes with the right to be in the U.S.

Even if an American fights against the U.S. on behalf of an enemy government or terrorist group, that individual can’t be barred from returning to the country – though of course they can face criminal charges and prison.

Rocha, among others, worries that Trump no longer cares about obeying the courts, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling last year that presidents – and former presidents – are immune from prosecution for official acts.

The dissenting justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, warned that such broad immunity would put presidents above the law and incentivize abuse of power.

“There’s no such thing as unthinkable in this administration anymore,” said David Bier, an immigration scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. “If the courts can’t stop him, no one can.”

Bier and other scholars have seen Trump’s defiance and fear that it will continue with no consequences.

Stuart Streichler, a professor of constitutional law and politics at the University of Washington, said Trump has shown a disregard for due process and constitutional rights.

“This is a clear test of how far that power goes,” Streichler said.

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