A plan to use Massachusetts inmates to build a wall at the border of the United States and Mexico is drawing criticism.

"The proposal is perverse," Laura Rotolo, staff counsel with the ACLU, told The Boston Globe. "It's inhumane, and it's most likely unconstitutional. It's also likely an attempt by Sheriff Hodgson just to ride this wave and become famous nationally. . . . I hope we don't have to take this proposal seriously."

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson said during his swearing-in ceremony Wednesday that, should President-elect Donald Trump follow through on a campaign promise to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, he'd like to send inmates from the Bristol County House of Correction work on such a project.

"Today, I'm making a formal offer to President-elect Trump, if inmates from Bristol County and others from across the nation through Project N.I.C.E will help build that wall. I can think of no other project that would have such a positive impact on our inmates and our country than building this wall," Hodgson said in recorded remarks.

Rotolo called the plan a "gimmick" and said the ACLU will "use every tool in our toolbox, including litigation, to stop him" if he seeks to implement it.

Following the swearing-in ceremony, Hodges told reporters he had yet to figure out logistics of the plan, from the cost of transporting thousands of inmates to the Mexican border to where they would be housed while working on such a project.

While Hodgson pitches the idea as a way of providing cheap labor for the government project and means for inmates to learn a new trade, the ACLU calls it a form of slavery.

"The idea of using modern-day slave labor to send people thousands of miles away from their Massachusetts home to build a wall to keep out other vulnerable populations, it's just preposterous," Rotolo told the Globe.