It is difficult to find a term more fitting for the fate of the Maryland father Kilmar Ábrego García than Kafkaesque.
Ábrego García is one of hundreds of foreign-born men deported under the Trump administration to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador as part of a macabre partnership with the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele.
The US government has admitted it deported Ábrego García by mistake. But instead of “facilitating” his return as ordered by the supreme court, the administration has trapped Ábrego García in a catch-22 by offshoring his fate to a jurisdiction beyond the reach of legality – or, it would seem, basic logic or common decency.
The paradox is this: the Trump administration says it cannot facilitate the return of Ábrego García because he is in a prison in El Salvador. El Salvador says it cannot return him because that would be tantamount to “smuggling” him into the US.
The absurdity of the position played out on Monday during an Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Bukele where the two men appeared to enjoy mocking the powerlessness of the US courts to intervene in the fate of anyone caught in the maws of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said when asked about whether he would help to return Ábrego García.
There is no evidence that Ábrego García is a terrorist or a member of the gang MS-13 as the Trump administration has claimed. But that is not really important here.
“I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said during a meeting with the US president on Monday. “They’d love to have a criminal released into our country,” Trump added.
Trump’s lieutenants also jumped in on Monday, arguing that they could not intervene in the case because Ábrego García is a foreign citizen and outside of their control.
“He is a citizen of El Salvador,” said Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide who regularly advises the president on immigration issues. “It’s very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens.”
A district court injunction to halt the deportation was in effect, he added, an order to “kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here”.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, repeated one of the Trump administration’s mantras: that US courts cannot determine Trump’s foreign policy. Increasingly, the administration is including questions of immigration in that foreign policy in order to defy the courts.
Monday’s presentation was in effect a pantomime. Both sides could quickly intervene if they wanted to. But this was a means to an end. Miller said this case would not end with Ábrego García living in the US.
More broadly, it indicates the Trump administration’s modus operandi: to move quickly before the courts can react to its transgressions and, when they do, to deflect and defy until the damage done cannot be reversed.
• This article was amended on 15 April to correct a mistaken reference to Kilmar Ábrego García as “Bukele”.
