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The El Salvadoran president has said he will not return a man wrongly deported to his country from the US, setting up an escalation in tensions between Donald Trump and the American judiciary.
President Nayib Bukele, the US president Trump and top American officials claimed in the Oval Office on Monday there was no basis for repatriating Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom they accuse of being a member of the MS-13 gang, which has been designated a foreign terrorist organisation by Trump.
The US Supreme Court last week upheld a lower court’s order that the federal government should “facilitate and effectuate the return of” Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was sent to a notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador last month as a result of what Trump officials have called “an administrative error”.
Abrego Garcia has denied accusations that he is a member of MS-13, and a US immigration judge in 2019 said there was a “probability of future persecution” should he be sent back to El Salvador.
But when he was asked in the Oval Office whether he would return Abrego Garcia to the US, Bukele replied: “Of course I’m not going to do it.”
“I mean, the question is preposterous, how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” the Salvadoran leader said.
He added that he would not free Abrego Garcia in El Salvador either. “We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”
El Salvador has been a key partner in Trump’s drive to deport undocumented migrants from the US. Washington paid San Salvador $6mn in March to take more than 260 migrants into custody.
Bukele said he was eager to continue helping the US president with deportations, while Trump said his counterpart was doing “a fantastic job” and that the partnership between the two countries was “very, very effective”. He added that he had asked Bukele to build more jails in El Salvador.
US attorney-general Pam Bondi and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller said Abrego Garcia’s fate was El Salvador’s to determine.
“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Bondi said. She claimed the Supreme Court had ruled that if El Salvador “wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane”.
Miller said: “He’s a citizen of El Salvador. It’s very arrogant . . . to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens.” He argued that the Supreme Court “stat[ed] clearly that neither secretary of state, nor the president, could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador”.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio added: “The foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court. And no court in the United States has a right to conduct a foreign policy the United States”.
His comments echoed arguments made by the justice department, which said in a court filing on Sunday that “the federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way”. The court has yet to rule on the matter.
Trump reiterated that his team, including Bondi, was also looking into the possibility of deporting American criminals. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem. Now we’re studying the laws,” he said.
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