President Donald Trump has joined the chorus of threats from his administration against anyone found guilty of vandalizing Teslas.
âPeople that get caught sabotaging Teslas will stand a very good chance of going to jail for up to 20 years, and that includes the funders,â Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. âWE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!â
Hours later, he followed up with a second post musing that anyone who damages a Tesla could be deported to El Salvador.
âI look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,â he wrote. âPerhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!â
Deporting U.S. citizens is unconstitutional, the American Civil Liberties Union told NPR. Even deporting non-citizens to Salvadoran jails, as the administrative has already done, is legally suspect, given the documented human rights abuses that take place there, experts told the outlet.
A 2023 State Department report found that inmates in El Salvador have been electrocuted, tortured, and beaten to death.
The message came after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that three defendants who had allegedly tried to use Molotov cocktails to light Teslas and charging stations on fire in Oregon, Colorado, and South Carolina were being charged with crimes that carried sentences of five to 20 years in prison.
Those arrests were actually made weeks ago, The New York Times reported, but Bondi appeared to time the announcements in response to a fresh wave of attacks this week. Arsonists in Las Vegas set a row of Teslas ablaze at a service center on Tuesday, and two Cybertrucks went up in flames at a dealership in Kansas City, Missouri, on Monday.
âLet this be a warning: If you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars,â Bondi said during a press conference about the charges.
The defendants were charged with arson or attempted arson that affects interstate commerce.
The electric vehicle company has emerged as an outlet for votersâ anger at CEO Elon Musk, who heads a secretive government cost-cutting force called DOGE while still leading Tesla and the private rocket company SpaceX.
As Musk has led the effort to dismantle federal agencies, purge the civil service, and cancel billions of dollars in government contracts, Tesla sales have tanked in Europe and China, the companyâs stock has plummeted, and protests have broken out at dealerships across the country. Vandalism and arson have also been reported.
On Thursday, Bondi said the attacks werenât isolated incidents and were instead part of a bigger conspiracy with people âoperating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimesââa theory that Trump echoed in his social media post.
It wasnât immediately clear why the government didnât think the widespread anger against Musk was organic.
In just the past two months, the worldâs richest man has given what some said appeared to be two fascist salutes on Inauguration Day, been rebuked for making Nazi jokes, told Germans to stop feeling bad about the Holocaust, called for federal judges to be impeached, and led DOGE as it has fired nuclear safety experts and blocked federal funding for cancer and Alzheimerâs research.
To show his support for the his megadonor and righthand man, Trump turned the White House lawn into a Telsa showroom, and his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, advised Americans to buy Tesla stock.
Dan Shapiro, a former National Security Council and State Department official who served as President Barack Obamaâs ambassador to Israel, called the spectacle of a Cabinet official promoting an individual stock belonging to a senior government employee a âthrough the looking glassâ-level ethics violation.
