President Trump confirmed he wants to send American citizens to jail in El Salvador as he and President Bukele said they were not planning to return a man wrongly deported there last month.
Trump’s refusal is at odds with the US Supreme Court, which called for his administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a migrant who had a court order against deportation to his native country over fears of gang persecution.
Bukele, sitting alongside Trump in the Oval Office, said he had no intention of releasing Garcia, who was living with his wife and five-year-old child in Maryland. US officials insist Garcia was designated as a gang member, which he denies.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia and, right, an image thought to show him in an El Salvador “terrorism confinement centre”
Trump praised Bukele’s “fantastic job” for restoring order in El Salvador by arresting more than 84,000 people for gang membership and locking them up in mega prisons. Bukele tweeted video clips of harsh prison conditions for 238 Venezuelan men accused of gang membership who were expelled by Trump last month, including two planes that were ordered to return by a US district judge.
Alleged gang members escorted to jail, where conditions are cramped, below
REUTERS
MARVIN RECINOS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, toured a prison in March
ALEX BRANDON/REUTERS
“They’re great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games,” Trump said. “I’d like to go a step further. I said it to Pam [Bondi, the attorney-general], I don’t know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws.
“But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters. I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country. But you’ll have to be looking at the laws on that.”
The US has paid El Salvador $6 million to take the Venezuelans it deported last month. “We’re very eager to help,” Bukele said. “We know that you have a crime problem, a terrorism problem, that you need help with. We actually turned the murder capital of the world … into the safest country in the western hemisphere.”
Should El Salvador want to return Garcia — who came to the US illegally in 2011, married an American citizen in 2019 and was granted a work permit — the US would “facilitate it, meaning provide a plane”, Bondi said.
When asked about the case on Monday, Bukele said: “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.”
Asked if he could simply release him inside El Salvador, Bukele added: “Yeah, but I’m not releasing … I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”
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