But any attempt to deport US citizens or people lawfully resident in the US to a foreign jail is bound to face legal challenges.

US citizens who were born in the United States enjoy legal protection from deportation.

There are some cases, however, in which naturalised citizens – those who were not born in the US and who obtained US citizenship after birth through a legal process – can have their citizenship revoked.

This tends to occur when the person in question used fraud to obtain the citizenship in the first place.

Alex Cuic, an immigration lawyer and professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, told the BBC that naturalised US citizens suspected of ties to criminal gangs or terrorist organisations – such as the Tren de Aragua criminal gang or the Mara Salvatrucha, known as MS-13 – could also, in theory, be stripped of US citizenship.

“If they find out you were a member of any group that persecuted or threatened to persecute others, they can try to denaturalise you,” Mr Cuic added.

“So, if you had gang ties and never disclosed them, they could use that as a reason to denaturalise you.”

Once a person has been “denaturalised”, they are at risk of deportation.

Mr Cuic pointed out that any such move would have to be preceded by a “formal court process” conducted in a federal court.

But the lawyer warned that “citizenship is not something that is definitively forever if you are naturalised”.

He stressed, though, that he had “never heard” of cases of natural-born US citizens being sent abroad for imprisonment for crimes committed and prosecuted in the US.

Shev Dalal-Dheini, the director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, similarly said that she had “never heard of such a suggestion” as sending American citizens to serve US prison sentences overseas.

While she acknowledged that there were various scenarios in which naturalised US citizens could lose their citizenship, she said that “you can’t denaturalise a natural-born citizen”.