Trump Press Secretary Admits Truth About Plan to Deport Citizens (2025)

The Trump administration admitted Tuesday that it is still exploring whether sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador is actually legal.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said as much during Tuesday’s press briefing after Fox News’s Steve Doocy asked her if deporting American citizens to central American prisons was legal, or if the law needed to be changed. Leavitt’s response was vague and left the door wide open.

“Well, it’s another question that the president has raised. It’s a legal question that the president is looking into, and he talked about this yesterday with his meeting [with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele] in the Oval Office,” Leavitt responded. “He would only consider this if legal for Americans who are the most violent, egregious repeat offenders of crime who nobody in this room wants living in their communities.”

It’s a disturbing response, because no elected official should be willing to sell out Americans to be imprisoned in a foreign country, even if they are convicted criminals. During Trump’s meeting with Bukele Monday, he kept repeating that “homegrown criminals are next,” which would certainly violate the Constitution and lead to a protracted legal fight in federal court.

The Trump administration has already deported more than 200 people, most of them without criminal records, to El Salvador with no due process, claiming that they are gang members without any proof. In a particularly egregious case, Maryland construction builder Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison notorious for human rights abuses, in what the U.S. government later called an “administrative error.”

Donald Trump’s administration is planning to shutter U.S. embassies around the world, continuing to dilute American soft power in its latest effort to shrink the federal workforce.

A memorandum that was part of a broader budget for 2026 that is due to the Office of Budget Management Tuesday outlined a plan to close 10 embassies and 17 consulates, according to Punchbowl News. This includes U.S. missions in Eritrea, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Scotland, and South Sudan, as well as five outposts in France and two in Germany.

In Canada, U.S. consulates in Halifax and Montreal would be significantly downsized, according to the document. The consolidation of U.S. embassies in Canada comes as relations have rapidly deteriorated after Trump announced steep tariffs on aluminum, steel, cars, and autoparts.

The memo stated that the targets for downsizing “were evaluated based on feedback from regional bureaus and the interagency, consular workload, cost per [U.S. direct hire] billet, condition of facilities, and security ratings.”

The State Department is also planning to “reduce or eliminate” its footprint in Mogadishu, Somalia, due to a “non-permissive environment,” according to the memo. Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social Monday that the U.S. would continue to “support the Somali People” against the Houthis attempting to “embed” there. The American mission in Mogadishu is the only U.S. outpost in the country.

State Department officials also pitched closing the America’s Diplomatic Support Center in Baghdad because it was “by far” the most expensive.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has yet to sign off on the reductions, but the recommendations were reportedly made by José Cunningham, who has served as the undersecretary for management at the State Department since April 5.

Last month, Politico reported that the Trump administration was planning to cut the State Department’s budget by nearly half, zeroing out the funding for programs to promote democratic processes and counter drug trafficking, and shuttering up to three dozen embassies. This proposal would shrink the department’s budget from $54.4 billion in 2025 to $28.4 billion in 2026.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has broadly claimed that students who participated in protests opposing the genocide of Palestinians aided in the spread of antisemitism on college campuses, as a justification for the Trump administration revoking their visa status.

But Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Monday at his citizenship interview in Vermont, strongly condemned antisemitism during an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in December 2023.

During the interview, Mahdawi was asked about his experience hearing someone say, “Death to Jews” at a pro-Palestine walk-out at Columbia a month after the massacre on October 7, which launched Israel’s catastrophic military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 50,000 people.

“I was shocked, and I walked directly to the person, and I told him, ‘You don’t represent us because this is not something that we agree with,’” Mahdawi recounted.

“And I took the megaphone and I gave a speech and I said, ‘We here, are conscious, educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong. What this guy has said is clearly antisemitic against Jews.… To be antisemitic is unjust, is unjust. And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” he said.

Mahdawi, a Palestinian from the West Bank who said he’d seen his best friend killed by Israeli soldiers, was also president of the Columbia Buddhist Club and founder of the Palestinian Student Union. Mahdawi is a green card holder, like Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia graduate student who was arrested by ICE last month. On Friday, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled that Khalil could be deported because he had endangered U.S. foreign policy.

Last week, in an op-ed for Fox News, Rubio invoked supposed antisemitism as a reason to crack down on student protesters.

“In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks against Israel, some of these foreign student visitors engaged in antisemitic activities and intimidation of Americans, many who happened to be of the Jewish faith,” Rubio wrote. “These foreigners shut down college campuses for American citizens, harassed Jewish students, blocked highways, and stormed buildings.”

Despite Rubio’s claim that visa revocations targeted students engaged in “antisemitic activities,” the State Department has already admitted that some of its targets don’t fit the bill.

Before Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was grabbed off the street by ICE agents, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had no evidence linking her to antisemitic activity.

At a rally in Nampa, Idaho, on Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a message for her colleague, Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

“How can anyone possibly make an objective vote on health care, energy, or war when their own money is tied up in pharmaceutical, oil and gas, or defense company stocks? You can’t. And we saw it just happen with Trump’s corrupt and disastrous and rushed tariff scheme, Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd at the Fighting Oligarchy rally with Senator Bernie Sanders.

“We saw Marjorie Taylor Greene buy that dip,” Ocasio-Cortez added to boos from the audience. “I got one question for her: How much did you make? How much did you make off of people’s despair? How much did you make off that panic? How much did you make off of that suffering?”

According to a public disclosure Monday, Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in stocks last Tuesday and Wednesday in 17 companies including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and Palantir, just hours before President Trump announced he was partially pausing some of his tariffs and deepening a possible ethics violation. Trump later bragged about how much money his friends made off of the pause, blatantly admitting to market manipulation.

“I hope we see now that it was all about manipulating the markets so that he could quietly enrich his friends who bought the dip before reversing it all in the morning,” Ocasio-Cortez said.