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AMERICANS MUST PREPARE TO FIGHT FOR THE CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS OF U.S.
PRISONERS  
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Sherrilyn Ifill
April 12, 2025
Sherrilyn’s Newsletter
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_ 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,
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the purchase property in El Salvador
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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.
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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.
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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.
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fact many states in the U.S. have a prison rate higher than most
countries.
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El Salvador has the highest rate. A disproportionate number of those
prisoners are Black and Latino.
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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,
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having been sued repeatedly by the Department of Justice.
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in the last 10 years the Department of Justice found unconstitutional
conditions of confinement in Georgia prisons,
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Louisiana prisons,
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Mississippi prisons and in jails in Texas, Baltimore, California,
Harris County, Oklahoma County, and many others.
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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.
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U.S. prisoners are routinely subjected to life-threatening extremes of
heat.
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are forgotten when hurricanes and other natural disasters strike.
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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.
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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.
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spent decades on death row before being exonerated.
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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,
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some evidence even showing that face-to-face visits are more effective
than video visits.
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the children of incarcerated parents often benefit tremendously from
the ability to visit with their absent parents.
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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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_Sherrilyn Ifill: Civil rights atty/democracy warrior. Vernon Jordan,
Jr. Distinguished Professor of Civil Rights, Howard Law School; Fmr
Pres. & Dir-Counsel, NAACP LDF. Posts are my own. Photo: Tina
Leu. [email protected]._

_Sherrilyn’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To
receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or
paid subscriber._

* Prisons
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* Habeas Corpus
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* prisoner rights
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* El Salvador
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* Venezuela
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* Alabama
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