The more than 200 migrants sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador by U.S. immigration agents should stay there “for the rest of their lives,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Wednesday.

These people have been arrested and deported  to a foreign, maximum-security prison without giving them a court hearing.

“Nothing in U.S. immigration law, nothing in U.S. criminal law would permit” the detainees to be imprisoned indefinitely without court decisions, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

“To see Secretary Noem’s suggestion that people never convicted of any crime, who have received no process whatsoever [but will be] imprisoned for life at U.S. expense, is something that should make every American who believes in civil liberties angry.”