Homegrowns Are Next

CECOT for citizens: President Donald Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office yesterday and said his innermost thoughts out loud: “Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places [like the CECOT prison]. It’s not big enough.”

“Yeah, we’ve got space,” Bukele responded. Administration officials chuckled in the background. “I’m talking about violent people,” Trump had said a few minutes earlier. “I’m talking about really bad people.”

“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,” said Trump.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is reportedly considering legal mechanisms by which Trump could send American citizens to El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo.

David Bier, a Cato Institute immigration expert, told NBC News that Trump’s comments show how “absolutely critical it is for the courts to put an immediate stop to this extrajudicial imprisonment by foreign proxy.”

“U.S. citizens may not be deported to imprisonment abroad. There is no authority for that in any U.S. law,” noted Bier. “The U.S. government has already deported someone to this prison illegally and claimed no recourse to get them back, so the courts must shut down this unconstitutional train wreck before U.S. citizens are unlawfully caught up in it.”

The Trump administration’s CECOT fetish is disturbing. Officials keep visiting it and using it for photo ops, like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s little press tour a few weeks ago (which generated lots of social media content for the administration). “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” said Noem in a video. “First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

CECOT keeps prisoners in brutal conditions, with basic medical care and hygiene denied; it faces severe overcrowding. Many of the people imprisoned are the most awful violent criminals, those responsible for El Salvador’s decades-long high murder rate, who have brutally ripped families apart and terrorized the communities from which they come. But it’s not just violent criminals Bukele has imprisoned: “Cecot houses both convicted criminals and those still going through El Salvador’s court system,” reports CNN. “With many constitutional rights suspended under El Salvador’s years-long state of emergency, some people have been detained by mistake, President Nayib Bukele has admitted; several thousand of them have already been released.”

Abrego Garcia still not returned: The Trump administration, having been ordered to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia by a Supreme Court ruling that upheld a federal district judge’s decision, is throwing its hands up in the air and claiming it can’t really do anything to free him from CECOT—despite the fact that Bukele was in the Oval Office yesterday. “The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele, seated next to Trump, told reporters yesterday. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” Bukele is referring to the fact that the Trump administration has designated the MS-13 gang a foreign terrorist organization; never mind the fact that the evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 has been extraordinarily light, originating from a slapdash police report that appears to rely on some dude in a Home Depot parking lot’s claim to cops, and the idea that he’s affiliated with the Brentwood, New York, “Western” clique—”a place he has never lived,” per the district judge overseeing his case. (Seriously.)

“In a court filing Monday evening, Joseph Mazzara, the acting general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, said it ‘does not have authority to forcibly extract’ Abrego Garcia from El Salvador because he is ‘in the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation,’” per the Associated Press.

It’s all pretty nauseating: the idea that the government can admit to “administrative error”—Abrego Garcia had “withholding of removal” status granted to him in 2019, which meant he was not allowed to be deported to his native country, El Salvador, for credible fear of persecution—but can just deport someone to CECOT, the prison full of actual, legitimately murderous gang members, and just choose not to rectify the mistake. Neither Bukele nor Trump seem to be worried by the possibility of a miscarriage of justice; the imprisonment of a seemingly nonviolent man who has a family waiting for him in the U.S., who fear they’ll never be able to see him again.

Look, imposing harsh consequences on those who terrorize society, who murder and rape and steal, is fine by me. But callous disregard for due process and for using the courts to actually suss out who is guilty and who is not (and what type of sentence they deserve based on their crimes) is unacceptable. If we choose to ignore our constitutional guarantees of due process, what do we have left?

Trump admin officials who have conceded that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was erroneously removed to El Salvador:

1. Solicitor General John Sauer, in a filing at SCOTUS

2. ICE official Robert Cerna, in a sworn declaration

3. DOJ lawyer Erez Reuveni, in court filings and at a hearing https://t.co/bBJSNXfPbo pic.twitter.com/68iRkVa14s

— Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) April 14, 2025

Bessent: a bright spot? “A lot of people say it and don’t really mean it, and I think he means it,” Sassan Ghahramani, founder and CEO of SGH Macro Advisers, who has known Scott Bessent for many years, told Politico of the Treasury secretary’s belief that federal spending and the debt must be gotten under control. “The primary motivation for Scott to want this job is I think he wants to have a legacy of having improved the debt dynamics of the United States,” said another friend.

Politico‘s Victoria Guida explains the Bessent theory as this: “You cut spending through Congress—meaningfully, which will help cool inflation, but gradually so as not to snuff out growth. You use tax cuts and deregulation to help offset the drag on the economy. And you use tariffs to raise revenue and diversify employment opportunities in the private sector that can be taken by people leaving government jobs.” It’s anyone’s guess as to whether something like this would work—and whether the rest of the Trump administration assents. But attempting to parse Bessent’s views, and understand the long game for him, seems worthwhile given the power he’s amassed (and the fact that the more I try to understand his counterparts, like trade adviser Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the more I want to pull my hair out).

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Scenes from New York: “Lawyers for Luigi Mangione asked a federal court on Friday to bar prosecutors from seeking the death penalty against him, arguing that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recently announced decision to do so was ‘explicitly and unapologetically political,’” reports The New York Times. Mangione has been charged with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside the New York Hilton Midtown, which happened this past December.

Mangione has become, disturbingly, a bit of a folk hero to broad swaths of the left, including journalist Taylor Lorenz—formerly of The Washington Post and The New York Times—who described the allure as “here’s this man who, who’s a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart—he’s a person that seems like a morally good man, which is hard to find.” He does not seem morally good to me.

More background here:

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QUICK HITS

• Colorado Gov. Jared Polis gets an awful lot of fanfare from some libertarians, but between his signing of “the toughest gun control regulations in state history” (CBS News) and his disallowing of the expansion of liquor sales to include grocery stores and big-box retailers (The Colorado Sun), he’s seeming a bit like a standard Democrat after all. I’ve never been much of a fan, truth be told, and he’s never struck me as the kind of politician who could get any play whatsoever on a national stage.
• Speaking of Democrats who sound a bit like libertarians at times, here’s our recent Just Asking Questions episode with Derek Thompson, which is worth your time if you care about whether Democrats can course-correct in any meaningful way:

• “Trump kept pushing buttons until something broke in a way that was obvious enough for even him to notice; hence the rapid-fire policy changes, which reflect panic as much as anything else,” writes Nate Silver (JAQ episode here) in a long piece on the four factions of Trump 2.0, and how their different interests are part of what’s creating tariff whiplash. “The job of the other factions is to persuade Trump that tariffs like these aren’t even in his own best interest, and they’re probably right about that: a Conservative Golden Age will be much less likely if Trump’s second term is primarily defined by economic turmoil. But good luck trying to persuade him after years of kissing his butt.”
• All about how fruitcake became big in space, from one of my favorite bakers, Bronwen Wyatt.
• Ha:

Bukele dresses like the manager of a Zara in the valley who asks 19 year olds at the food court if they’ve ever considered modeling pic.twitter.com/0UMrFUQo3W

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) April 14, 2025

• Wow:

Wow. Tariffs have moved ahead of immigration as a top concern to American voters, per a new survey from @EchelonInsights. pic.twitter.com/ZaR1D8rW4f

— John W Lettieri (@LettieriDC) April 14, 2025

The post Homegrowns Are Next appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2025/04/15/homegrowns-are-next/