El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is refusing to return Kilmar Abrego García — a Maryland man with protected status who the Trump administration deported to El Salvador — to the U.S.
In a White House press conference on Monday, Bukele, who was sitting next to Donald Trump, claimed that he lacks the power to return Abrego García — a claim immigration experts and advocates have said is an outright lie. Bukele also likened Abrego García to a terrorist, despite zero credible evidence of any such wrongdoing.
“The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele said. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
Bukele said this as, in the same press conference, Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested that the decision to return Abrego García is in Bukele’s hands, and that the U.S. would provide a plane for his return. “That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him,” Bondi said, after wrongfully saying that Abrego García is in the country “illegally.”
Bukele’s claim “is obviously a lie,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) on social media. “Kilmar must be returned home to the U.S. immediately. Absolutely no one should be sent to Bukele’s torture camp. Trump ignoring a 9-0 Supreme Court order to bring Kilmar home is an unprecedented constitutional crisis.”
“What an absolute joke. Everyone here is pretending,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnik, a senior fellow for the American Immigration Council. “Bukele is pretending that he’s incapable of releasing someone his own jail is holding at U.S. expense, and Trump is pretending he can’t just ask Bukele to release the guy.”
The press conference comes after the Trump administration has doubled down on keeping Abrego García imprisoned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a facility known for its abuses from which no one has ever been released.
On Sunday, lawyers in the Department of Justice said in a court filing that the administration does not believe it has to comply with the Supreme Court’s unanimous order on Thursday for the U.S. to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego García’s return from El Salvador.
“This is openly defiant of the Supreme Court, which specifically upheld in a 9-0 decision an order that ‘requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,’” wrote Reichlin-Melnik.
Abrego García is one of at least 278 people in the U.S. who the Trump administration has sent to CECOT with little to no justification, amid the administration’s indiscriminate roundup of immigrants, including numerous legal residents.
Ahead of the press conference, Trump expressed a desire to expand his countrywide raids to American citizens, as he has been threatening to do. “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places,” Trump said, to Bukele. “It’s not big enough.”
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