The president of El Salvador said in a meeting with Donald Trump in the White House on Monday that he would not order the return of a Maryland man who was deported in error to a Salvadorian mega-prison.
“The question is preposterous,” Nayib Bukele said in the Oval Office on Monday, where he was welcomed by Trump and spoke with the president and members of his cabinet. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.”
He added: “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” and said he would not release the man, Kilmar Ábrego García, into El Salvador either. “I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists into the country.”
The comments came a day after the Trump administration claimed it was not legally obligated to secure the return of Ábrego García, despite the US supreme court ruling that the administration should “facilitate” bringing him back.
Lawyers for the justice department argued in court filings on Sunday that asking El Salvador to return Ábrego García from a notorious mega-prison should be considered “foreign relations”, and was therefore outside the scope of the courts.
The filing said “the federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” adding: “That is the exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.”
Earlier this month, the Trump administration acknowledged that Ábrego García, an immigrant from El Salvador who was living in Maryland with protected status, was deported to a prison in El Salvador on 15 March as a result of an “administrative error”. In 2019 an immigration judge had prohibited the federal government from deporting him.
When he was deported anyway, swept up in Trump’s effort to send hundreds of supposed gang members to El Salvador without due process, Ábrego García’s wife and relatives filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
On 4 April a district judge, Paula Xinis, directed the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” his return. The supreme court upheld the directive on Thursday, and also instructed Xinis to clarify the order “with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs”.
On Friday, Xinis said in a hearing that it was “extremely troubling” that the administration had failed to comply with a court order to provide details about Ábrego García’s whereabouts and status. She ordered that it provide daily updates on efforts to facilitate his return.
On Saturday, the Trump administration confirmed Ábrego García was alive and confined in El Salvador’s mega-prison, Cecot.
Then, on Sunday, the justice department said it interpreted the court’s order to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return as only requiring them to “remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here”.
It added: “No other reading of ‘facilitate’ is tenable – or constitutional – here.”
In a separate court filing on Sunday, an official from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said that the 2019 order preventing Ábrego García’s removal to El Salvador was no longer valid, as a result of the administration’s allegation that he was a member of the MS-13 gang, “which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization”, the court filing states.
On Monday, during the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Bukele, Stephen Miller, White House homeland security adviser, repeated the claim that the 2019 order was no longer valid when Ábrego García was deported, and said that bringing him back to the US would be “to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here”.
The attorney general, Pam Bondi, echoed that it was up to El Salvador “whether they want to return him”, not the US. Bondi also claimed the supreme court ruling meant that “if El Salvador wants to return him, we would ‘facilitate’ it, meaning provide a plane”.
But Miller also said: “No version of this ends with him living here.”
• The headline of this article was amended on 15 April 2025. An earlier version referred to Ábrego García as a “US man”. This has been changed to “man with US protected status”.
