Don’t let the White House (or the media!) get away with calling trafficking people they don’t like to foreign slave labor camps “deportation.” As we’ve noted, deportation involves due process. It also (by definition) means removing a foreigner from a country.

As we’ve covered lately, the government’s belief that it can engage in human trafficking to El Salvadoran slave labor camps with no due process was unlikely to stop at just those who were not citizens. After all, it has already involved tons of people who could not be shown to have been convicted of crimes, and in many cases with no actual affiliation with the “gangs” the administration insists they’re members of.

And, when you don’t believe in due process, then there’s no way to prove you’re a US citizen in the first place. The administration’s hatred and mocking of due process already meant that they believed they could disappear US citizens to a slave labor camp without any chance at review.

But now they’ve come out and said it. On Sunday, Donald Trump hinted at it, and on Tuesday, White House chief propagandist Karoline Leavitt said the quiet part out loud, admitting that the White House would like to traffic US citizens to El Salvadoran slave labor camps (where they now claim they have no ability to get someone out, even if they shipped someone by mistake).

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses….

Leavitt suggested the effort would be limited to people who have committed major crimes, but Trump has also mentioned the possibility of sending people who commit lesser offenses abroad.

Let’s be absolutely clear: This isn’t deportation — it’s extra-judicial rendition of American citizens, precisely the kind of authoritarian practice that the Constitution’s due process protections were designed to prevent. The administration’s deliberate misuse of immigration terminology attempts to normalize what would effectively be government kidnapping.

Combined with Trump’s head of human trafficking, Tom Homan admitting that ICE is the main decider in who gets renditioned this way (rather than a judge), and we have a lawless, sociopathic administration that is set to disappear US citizens without due process.

This is something many of us have been warning about for months, and Trump and his minions are now admitting it.

Hopefully, by now, more and more people are realizing that when Trump says stuff like this, he’s serious. He’s not joking. He’s not playing 10-dimensional chess. He’s not trying to make “the woke” upset. He legitimately thinks that people he doesn’t like deserve no rights, no due process, no dignity, and has no qualms at all with shipping them to foreign slave labor camps.

And that’s why people need to speak out and make it clear that this is not just unacceptable and unconstitutional. It is pure sociopathic evil. This is crazed dictatorial “disappear people who annoy me” bullshit.

Yes, many people will try to hide and cower in silence, and that’s what the MAGA crew want. But it’s why we need to be speaking up and calling out what’s happening. The history books will record the unfathomable evil of Donald Trump and his loyalist minions, agreeing to push pure evil in pursuit of power. But those of us living it need to speak out about it now while we still have the chance.

The gravity of this moment cannot be overstated. The administration is not floating trial balloons or engaging in political theater — they are explicitly stating their intent to create an extra-judicial system for disappearing US citizens. With ICE empowered as judge, jury, and executioner, and El Salvador’s prisons serving as black sites beyond US jurisdiction, we’re watching the blueprint for an American gulag take shape.

This represents something beyond a constitutional crisis that transcends typical partisan divisions. When a presidential administration openly advocates for the power to extra-judicially rendition citizens, silence becomes complicity. The time for “wait and see” or “they don’t really mean it” has long passed.

We’ve already seen how quickly “exceptional” measures against non-citizens became normalized. Now, as predicted, those same mechanisms are being turned against citizens. If we don’t forcefully reject this assault on fundamental constitutional rights now, we may soon lose the ability to reject it at all.

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