Kristi Noem claims DHS is only removing "criminals" to El Salvador despite allegations of due process breaches

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said she is confident that people sent to the mega-prison for terrorists in El Salvador, known as the CECOT, are proven criminals by U.S. intelligence officials and her agency's analysts.

Noem's remarks come at a sensitive and controversial time, with the White House acknowledging in a court filing that it made an "administrative error" in sending a Maryland father with protected legal status to a Salvadoran jail, prompting harsh criticism of the Trump administration. It also comes after several deportation planes carrying suspected Venezuelan and Salvadoran criminals arrived in El Salvador from the United States.

After the first planes of deportees were sent to El Salvador, various immigrant advocacy groups and family members of several of those sent to Salvadoran prisons denounced that their clients and/or relatives were mistakenly deported as criminals, accusing the Trump Administration of wrongly linking them to terrorist gangs Tren de Aragua (TdA) or MS-13 solely because of their tattoos.

Despite the allegations, however, Noem, like other White House officials, assured that he "trusts" that the deportees are where they need to be.

"I trust our intelligence agencies and the intelligence individuals that are within the Department of Homeland Security, that the individuals who are there are members and a part of this organization and have worked with them," Noem said Monday in an interview on Special Report with host Bret Baier, referring to the criminal organizations TdA and MS-13.

"And while we were there at that prison, we not only talked about how to identify these members of these terrorist organizations, but what they did, [the] actions they took, the case files we built on them — and how we verified that those individuals should be there in that prison" the DHS secretary added.

Noem also responded to criticism from Democrats, who accused the Trump administration of skipping due process to carry out its campaign of mass deportations and its promise to expel criminals from the US.

"We are doing due diligence to make sure that we're going after these criminals [who] have perpetuated violence on American citizens, and we're removing them from our country," Noem assured, dismissing the Democrats' criticism.

The DHS secretary further assured that she has deported more than 120 individuals on the terrorist watch list and more than 800 suspected TdA gang members since President Trump took office again.