Americans Must Prepare to Fight for the Citizenship Rights of U.S. Prisoners

Trump's Plan to Render U.S. Citizens to Foreign Jails Seeks to Exploit Americans' Disinterest in the Rights of Prisoners

If there is something you can do, even one thing, to ensure humanity exists behind bars, do it.

-Albert Woodfox (2019)

Over the past three weeks Trump’s monstrous reign has shaken this country to its core. He has upended every fairy story Americans have ever told themselves, every myth we have indulged about who we are, about merit, the rule of law, about the unshakeable strength of our Constitution, and about American exceptionalism. He has smashed through every norm, every basis for deference and good faith, every presumption of good will, and every rational approach to policy. He has identified and taken advantage of our every weakness. And in so doing he has revealed America to itself.

Brutal as it has been, we are left now to see our strengths and to confront our weaknesses with clear eyes.

The coming weeks will challenge us like never before, as Trump prepares plans to move U.S. citizen prisoners to El Salvador. This plan will involve either engaging in the mass denaturalization of naturalized American prisoners,[i] or the purchase property in El Salvador[ii] (I’m also hearing about other countries) with the intention of declaring that property U.S. territory with the consent of the government of those foreign nations. It is a brazen effort to turn U.S. prisoners into virtually stateless persons, to disappear them, and put them beyond the reach of our view.

Why? This is the ultimate intimidation move by Trump. As he prepares to have his Attorney General to investigate those who disagree with him and as Trump seeks ways to undermine the potential for mass protest, holding the threat of not only arrest and potential incarceration, but disappearance to a foreign gulag is a monstrous, yet effective means of stifling dissent.

According to reports this week, it may also be a scheme that allows military contractors like the notorious villain Erik Prince, to step up once again to feed at the public trough.[iii]

What does this have to do with confronting our weaknesses? Trump’s plan to disappear people began quite deliberately with his removal of 250 migrants who he called Venezuelan gang members after activating the Alien Enemies Act. It matters that the AEA has only been activated three times in our history and the last time to conduct the horrifying internment of Japanese Americans – a stain that will never be erased from the annals of our history.

And so Trump began by targeting a group whose demonization has been a feature of his xenophobic rhetoric: migrants. Playing to the fear of migrant crime - a fear he has stoked and disseminated - and to racial discrimination is a deliberate predicate to Trump’s AEA proclamation.

Trump has regularly described migrants as criminals, as killers, and as gang members. It is not as though there are not actual gang members among some migrant groups. It is that in Trump world, all migrants are violent gang members. Actual evidence of gang membership is beside the point for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security – as we have seen as we learn more about the initial 250 migrants taken to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. A tattoo of the Spanish football club Real Madrid may have been sufficient to deem a Venezuelan soccer player a member of the gang Tren de Aragua.[iv] Tattoos honoring his parents may have resulted in the deportation to CECOT of a gay, make-up artist. Fortunately the ACLU was immediately on top of this horrifying move, but it remains unclear whether any of these migrants will ever be returned to U.S. soil.

But Trump’s next move – in fact the primary focus of his thinking – has been how to remove American citizens to foreign prisons. And the group upon which he will workshop the next stage of his plan is another population that most Americans – long before Trump’s rise – have despised and dismissed: incarcerated citizens.

It is now well-known that U.S. prisons and jails house almost 2 million people.[v] In fact many states in the U.S. have a prison rate higher than most countries.[vi] Ironically, El Salvador has the highest rate. A disproportionate number of those prisoners are Black and Latino.[vii] America has long abandoned the concept of rehabilitation in prison and instead has fully embraced the retributive rationale for holding people in prison. The conditions of incarceration throughout our country are unconscionable. Alabama prisons are among the most horrifying,[viii] despite having been sued repeatedly by the Department of Justice.[ix] Just in the last 10 years the Department of Justice found unconstitutional conditions of confinement in Georgia prisons,[x] in Louisiana prisons,[xi] in Mississippi prisons and in jails in Texas, Baltimore, California, Harris County, Oklahoma County, and many others.[xii]

In the Fulton County (Georgia) jail three years ago a man held in the jail’s dire conditions for four months was so neglected by prison officials that he became severely dehydrated, malnourished, and infested with bugs that he died alone in his cell.[xiii]

U.S. prisoners are routinely subjected to life-threatening extremes of heat.[xiv] They are forgotten when hurricanes and other natural disasters strike.[xv]

Americans are so inured to the humanity of those held in our prisons, that a guaranteed laugh in any comedy club is a joke about prison rape.

In other words, we have done much of the work for Trump already. His plan to turn U.S. prisoners into stateless persons and to disappear them from our country will challenge every American to revisit and reject the standard disdain and disregard for citizens who live behind the walls of our prisons.

As horrifying as the conditions are in many U.S. prisons, the conditions in CECOT are reportedly much, much worse, with torture, life-threatening overcrowding, beatings, and holding prisoners without access to lawyers or family visits as the norm.

Now Trump plans to turn U.S. citizen prisoners over to this facility - those Trump insists are “the worst of the worst.”

But we cannot forget that the U.S. justice system is notoriously riddled with racial discrimination in policing, prosecution, conviction and sentencing. And as Bryan Stevenson has said, “it is often better to be guilty and rich, than innocent and poor,” in our criminal justice system. If it were up to President Trump, the five teenagers convicted of raping a woman in Central Park in 1989 would still be in prison, or worse executed, despite their innocence, and those who criticize decisions by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court should be put in jail. https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2024/user-clip-trump-ignores-the-first-amendment-and-says-those-who-criticize-the-supreme-court-should-be-tossed-in-jail/5138377

We know that every month – sometimes multiple times a month – we learn about a man, most often a Black man, who has been released from prison after serving 20, 30, 40 years for a crime he didn’t commit.[xxi] Some spent decades on death row before being exonerated.[xxii]

But even those who are guilty of the crimes for which they are convicted - those who did commit robbery, assault or even murder - are still human beings. For millions of Americans, the incarcerated are brothers, uncles, fathers, mothers. Their lives have meaning and value to their families. And even those who have committed the worst crimes have the possibility of redemption – even if their lives will be lived behind bars.

It matters where prisoners are incarcerated in ways great and small. The best evidence demonstrates that family visits and contacts reduce recidivism among prisoners,[xxiii] with some evidence even showing that face-to-face visits are more effective than video visits.[xxiv] And the children of incarcerated parents often benefit tremendously from the ability to visit with their absent parents.[xxv]

But this is all beside the central point. American prisoners are American citizens. Their citizenship is not shed at the jailhouse door. They are not pawns to be shuffled about the world to far-flung prisons as part of Stephen Miller’s latest fever dream. They have rights under our Constitution – rights that cannot be stripped away at the whim of an authoritarian president. And we should remember that how a nation treats its prisoners is as powerful an indicator of its democratic health as any election.

So you have work to do this week. Decide today that you will recognize the ways in which we have been groomed in this country to de-humanize those who are incarcerated. If you have ever read or repeated the poem “First they came for….,” know that the incarcerated are among the earliest citizens who are subjected to the cruelty of authoritarians. They are low-hanging fruit, because so many of us have sanctioned violence against them.

Many of us have been working on how to legally head off this nightmare. But public outcry and support will be essential. Are you ready to march for the most despised members of our society? Will you call your representatives about those who are imprisoned?

If you can’t feel for them or their families, remember that this is just a stage in a plan that will land ultimately at our own doorsteps. Every one of us deemed inconvenient by this Administration will be under threat. And every time Trump is successful, he grows more emboldened and more convinced that nothing can stop him.

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[i] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-el-salvador-us-citizens-denaturalization-1235315975/

[ii] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/11/military-contractors-prison-plan-detained-immigrants-erik-prince-00287208

[iii] Id.

[iv] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/27/nx-s1-5341544/ice-el-salvador-jerce-reyes-barrios

[v] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2025.html

[vi] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2024.html

[vii] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2021-10-13/report-highlights-staggering-racial-disparities-in-us-incarceration-rates

[viii] https://apnews.com/article/alabama-prison-conditions-5bb3ec1d2a58c2f7aeef1220398ab682

[ix] https://www.al.com/news/2024/07/doj-files-brief-in-long-running-alabama-prison-lawsuit-warns-against-violating-constitution.html.

[x] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-unconstitutional-conditions-georgia-prisons

[xi] https://mississippitoday.org/2024/02/28/justice-department-slams-unconstitutional-conditions-at-mississippi-prisons/

[xii] https://www.justice.gov/crt/special-litigation-section-case-summaries

[xiii]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-died-severe-neglect-fulton-county-jail-bed-bug-infestation-autopsy-rcna85676

[xiv] https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2024/09/19/what-extreme-heat-is-like-in-u-s-prisons/

[xv] https://www.hrw.org/news/2005/09/21/new-orleans-prisoners-abandoned-floodwaters ; https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/after-harvey-texas-inmates-were-left-in-flooded-prisons-without-adequate-water-or-food/

[xvi] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/health/solitary-confinement-mental-illness.html ; https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/12/08/solitary_symposium/

[xvii] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/18/nx-s1-5196555/prisoners-abuse-violence-federal-prison-lee-virginia; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/29/womens-prison-guards-sexual-abuse; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/nyregion/ny-prison-guards-brutality-fired.html

[xviii] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/tapley-supermax-torture-in-america/ ; https://www.npr.org/2012/06/21/155513749/the-grim-realities-of-life-in-supermax-prisons

[xix] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/02/03/food-prison-labor-walmart-target; https://fortune.com/2024/05/16/prison-labor-inmates-face-injury-lost-limbs-corporation-supply-chain/ ; https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers .

[xx] https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in-the-united-states/

[xxi] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/local/man-released-from-prison-wrongful-conviction-innocence-project; https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/boston-james-watson-wrongful-murder-conviction/ ; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/28/sentenced-to-die-innocent-man-spent-48-years-in-prison-for-murder-glynn-simmons; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/florida-man-receiving-14m-37-year-imprisonment-murder-didnt-commit-rcna139173 ; https://www.npr.org/2018/01/05/575603052/he-went-to-prison-for-a-murder-he-didnt-commit-then-met-the-man-who-put-him-ther; https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/11/us/marvin-haynes-minnesota-freed-murder-conviction-overturned/index.html

[xxii] See e.g., https://eji.org/cases/anthony-ray-hinton/

[xxiii] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6625803/.

[xxiv] A review of some of the studies is discussed in this blogpost. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2016/04/11/eye-contact/

[xxv] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/50461/310882-Families-Left-Behind.PDF