Ranking Members Gerry Connolly, Jamie Raskin, and Bennie Thompson Demand Trump Administration Provide the Contract They Crafted With El Salvador to House Hundreds of Migrants in Brutal Mega-Prison

Ranking Members Seek Urgent Answers on Removal of Migrants to Salvadoran Torture Prison as Administration Plots Deportations of Americans

“Congress has the right and the obligation to conduct oversight over the executive branch and determine what deals our government has struck with a foreign dictator to imprison individuals—non-citizens but perhaps soon U.S. citizens too—seized in the United States, shackled, and shipped off on planes in the dead of night in an effort to place them beyond the reaches of our courts,” wrote Ranking Members Raskin, Thompson, and Connolly in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Last month, the Trump Administration removed planeloads of migrants from the U.S. to El Salvador, claiming that all of the individuals removed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and attempting to justify these removals under the 1789 wartime Alien Enemies Act.

In the midst of these removals, Chief Judge Boasberg of the District Court for the District of Columbia issued a temporary restraining order preventing further deportations and ordered that any planes in the air at the time of the ruling be turned around. The government failed to comply with the order and denied these individuals an opportunity to exercise their constitutional right to due process.

Disproving the government’s claims, studies indicate that approximately 90 percent of the 200-plus people sent to CECOT lack any criminal record in the U.S. And yet, the Administration removed hundreds of migrants without evidence of criminality and without providing the constitutionally obligated right to due process before removing them to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran mega-prison. Now the Administration is seriously discussing sending American citizens for imprisonment in El Salvador as well.

The Ranking Members demanded the Administration provide the transfer agreement between the U.S. and El Salvador to accept and hold non-Salvadoran nationals; the number of individuals with withholding of removal or protection under the Convention Against Torture who have been removed to El Salvador since the start of the Trump Administration; and a detailed briefing regarding how immigrants are screened for protection claims prior to being removed or transferred out of the U.S.

Click here to read the letter.