Trump Says He’s Deporting “Homegrown Criminals” to El Salvador Next

Next on Donald Trump’s deportation list: “homegrown” criminals.

In a meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele Monday, Trump praised Bukele’s willingness to imprison the more than 200 immigrants the United States deported to El Salvador, the majority of whom have no criminal record.

The president then gave a terrifying glimpse at the next step in his plans for mass deportation.

“Homegrown criminals are next. Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns,” Trump told Bukele, confirming that he wants to deport American citizens, a move that would violate the Constitution and test the courts more than ever before.

Trump and Bukele’s meeting comes just weeks after the U.S. deported more than 200 people to El Salvador who the administration claimed were criminals or members of Salvadoran gang MS-13.* In reality, most of them do not have criminal records, nor do they have any proven gang affiliation. They are now being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a megaprison notorious for human rights abuses.

As he joked with the man who is notorious for the mass imprisonment of his own people, Trump told Bukele CECOT isn’t big enough to hold everyone he plans to deport.

“You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough,” Trump told Bukele as the Oval Office erupted in laughter. On the same day, the president told reporters he plans to deport as many people as possible to El Salvador, where Bukele will welcome them with open arms.

*  This sentence has been updated with the correct origins of MS-13.

An immigration attorney was surprised to receive a notice from the Department of Homeland Security instructing an immediate departure from the United States that was addressed to her—not one of her clients—especially considering the fact that she is a U.S. citizen.

Nicole Micheroni received a notice, which appeared to be delivered by email from a Customs and Border Protection DHS account, alerting her that the “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole.”

Micheroni, who was born in Newton, Massachusetts, is not in the United States on parole.

“If you do not depart the country immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States,” the notice warned.

Micheroni told NBC10 Boston that “at first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine.”

She noted that while the language was “very threatening” and the email looked “kind of like a sketchy spam email,” it was the real thing.

“It doesn’t look like an official government notice, but it is,” she said.

Micheroni told The Boston Globe that in the 12 years she’d been an immigration attorney, she had never seen immigration parole terminated by email.

Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic at Boston University, told the Globe that the DHS had recently put out a wave of parole termination notices via email, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to get immigrants to self-deport.

In a statement to NBC10 Boston, the DHS said that “CBP used the known email addresses of the alien to send notifications. If a non-personal email—such as an American citizen contact—was provided by the alien, notices may have been sent to unintended recipients. CBP is monitoring communications and will address any issues on a case-by-case basis.”

A senior DHS official said that it was possible that one of her clients had entered Micheroni’s information by mistake.

“I think it’s really scary this is going on,” Micheroni said. “I think it says they’re not being careful.”

Micheroni’s fears aren’t unfounded: It’s clear that the Trump administration is not being careful. The Trump administration is attempting to abandon a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month, due to an “administrative error.” And on Monday, Donald Trump revealed that he’d asked his attorney general to look into implementing his threat to banish U.S. citizens to foreign gulags—which is entirely illegal.

Despite a court order, Donald Trump is still refusing to allow journalists from the Associated Press into the White House press pool.

On Monday, the AP was barred from the White House to cover Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s meeting with Trump, and issued a statement saying, “Our journalists were blocked from the Oval Office today. We expect the White House to restore AP’s participation in the pool as of today, as provided in the injunction order.”

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the president couldn’t bar the AP from presidential events, saying, “Under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”

Trump barred the AP in February from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the news agency refused to adopt Trump’s unilateral name change of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” The AP responded by suing three administration officials on the grounds that the White House was violating the Constitution’s free press protections by trying to dictate the AP’s language.

The president’s refusal to allow the AP access to the White House on Monday escalates the matter further, as the organization would have to seek further redress in court. It’s the latest example of Trump’s attempts to intimidate and force media organizations to bend to his will, be it threatening legal action through the FCC or defamation lawsuits, or taking the unprecedented move of wresting control of the press pool away from the White House Correspondents’ Association.

The administration is already defying larger court orders, such as those against its immigration practices, with nothing seemingly compelling it to follow the law, creating a constitutional crisis. This move against the AP is a direct assault on the First Amendment, and, barring any sort of penalty against the Trump administration, is a major blow to free speech and freedom of the press in America.

An American university is finally standing up to Donald Trump’s egregious demands, amid a flurry of schools spinelessly bending to the president’s will in recent weeks.

Harvard University announced Monday it will not comply with the White House’s demands that it dismantle diversity programming and limit student protests, putting $9 billion in federal funding at risk.

“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” University President Alan Garber said in a statement.

On Friday, the university received a letter from the Department of Education detailing changes it deemed necessary to foster an “environment that produces intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor,” worthy of maintaining a “financial relationship with the federal government.” The demands included discontinuing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, reforming its admissions process for international students, and dismantling programs with “egregious records of antisemitism,” among others. The letter came two weeks after three federal agencies announced a review of $9 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard.

“The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge,” Garber said in his statement.

Harvard’s audit is part of Trump’s larger crackdown on postsecondary institutions and academic freedom, from funding cuts to deporting international students and banning DEI initiatives.

A number of universities have crumbled under Trump’s pressure, and fast. Columbia University unfairly expelled students involved in pro-Palestine protests and agreed to policy changes in an attempt to regain about $400 million in funding. Ohio State University closed its DEI programs, the University of Iowa eliminated housing specifically designated for Black students, Latinx students, and LGBTQ students, and the University of Pennsylvania has erased any reference to DEI or affirmative action from its websites.

But the country’s oldest postsecondary institution, which has long been criticized for its questionable endowment investments and lack of diversity, is refusing to crumble—hopefully a catalyst for other universities to grow a spine and do the same.

The Trump administration used a citizenship interview as a pretext to arrest a Columbia University student of Palestinian descent.

Mohsen K. Mahdawi, a U.S. permanent resident who has lived in the country for 10 years, showed up to what he thought was his citizenship interview Monday at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, Vermont. Instead, he was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has begun deportation proceedings.

The Columbia University student was a leader in the school’s protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Mahdawi was fearful of being deported, even before his friend, Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested last month by federal immigration agents.

Mahdawi was included on a list of students the far-right pro-Israel organization Betar gave to the Trump administration in the hopes that they would be deported. Betar and the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at ColumbiaU also posted on social media multiple times about Mahdawi, tagging law enforcement agencies on each post.

After asking university officials to find him a safe place to live where he wouldn’t be detained by ICE, and receiving no response, Mahdawi went into hiding before receiving an email notifying him of a citizenship interview at the UCSIS office earlier this month. Mahdawi worried that it was a trap, and contacted his elected representatives in Vermont: Representative Becca Balint and Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch.

All three promised to remain on standby pending Mahdawi’s status after the interview, with Welch speaking to Mahdawi directly. In the end, it was a trap, and Mahdawi was detained with the same obscure immigration law used to detain Khalil and several other international students, including permanent residents: that their presence in the U.S. is a threat to the country’s foreign policy interests.

“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi told The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.”

It’s particularly cruel to claim to offer citizenship to an immigrant, only to use it as a ruse to deport them over free speech issues. Mahdawi has not been charged with a crime, and pending his attorneys’ habeas corpus petition, is now in ICE custody. For this administration, his crime appears to be being a Palestinian student who used his right to free speech.