Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is a wannabe tyrant, and Americans are painfully aware that President Donald Trump looks up to this type. That makes me nervous.
El Salvador’s president Bukele says he won’t return Maryland man
In a meeting at the White House, Nayib Bukele told President Trump he would not return the mistakenly deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
President Donald Trump spent April 14 praising the character of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president who has made news for helping Trump flaunt a court order demanding the return of a man mistakenly deported.
Trump and Bukele met at the White House, and in the portion open to the news media, the pair had nothing but praise for each other.
Bukele is a wannabe tyrant, and Americans are painfully aware that Trump looks up to this type. Trump looks to authoritarians for inspiration, and that makes me nervous. But the budding bromance between Trump and Bukele should worry Americans, given how much our president seems willing to ignore laws.
Trump envies the power Bukele has over El Salvador
Under Bukele, El Salvador has been under a state of emergency since 2022, which grants him extraordinary powers to combat the country’s gang violence. The result has been the mass imprisonment of Salvadorans – often with minimal evidence against them.
Part of the drop in gang violence is often attributed to secret deals between the Salvadoran government and MS-13, as well as undercounting murders by the government.
Bukele and his allies will claim it is due to the mass detentions. Based on Trump’s conversation with Bukele at the White House, it seems Trump is inclined to agree with this view.
“Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we actually liberated millions,” Bukele said in the Oval Office.
Trump followed up by asking, “Who gave him that line? Do you think I can use that?”
One thing that Bukele and Trump share is their contempt for due process. For both men, rather than a guardrail that prevents the innocent from being wrongly imprisoned or otherwise penalized, due process exists only as a barrier from them imposing their tough concept of justice on their respective nations.
In El Salvador, Bukele’s government has released more than 8,000 people who were revealed to be innocent, nearly 10% of the 84,000 people imprisoned under their state of emergency.
Bukele insists that “no police anywhere in the world are perfect.” But when you are throwing due process to the wind and treating those detained with the minimal humanity possible, such a high false imprisonment rate is unacceptable, and these numbers are only based on the numbers that have been released due to a complete lack of evidence.
Advocacy groups estimate the U.S. rate to be between 4 and 6%, a much lower percentage thanks to our rigorous due process standards.
Nor are these cases to be taken lightly. The conditions of El Salvador’s prisons are vile. Any innocent person sent there is being housed with some of the worst criminals and is given minimal support from the justice system.
Trump clearly envies the ability to flaunt the principles of due process. Bukele’s actions in El Salvador are similar to what Trump is trying to do with illegal immigrants here. He’s even suggested deporting “homegrown” criminals to El Salvador, exploring the possibility of sending U.S. citizens to Bukele’s hellish prisons.
Trump is working with Bukele to defy wishes of US courts
On April 10, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling ordering the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia − a suspected MS-13 member who was under a court order not to be deported to El Salvador − who was sent to prison in El Salvador in March due to an “administrative error.”
Rather than comply with the courts’ ruling, the Trump administration is pretending as if Bukele, a man Trump apparently has a wonderful relationship with, would refuse to return Abrego Garcia if Trump actually wanted him to.
Bukele has already returned at least nine people at the administration’s request since these deportations began a month ago. The administration is lying with Bukele’s help to flaunt the Supreme Court’s order.
Trump is hiding behind the fact that he has no authority to compel El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia to explain why he is flaunting the order for him to be returned. While technically true, it’s obvious that if Trump actually sought the return of Abrego Garcia, El Salvador would comply.
The most frustrating part of it all is that it may actually work. There is no enforcement mechanism in the law for the Supreme Court or Trump to compel Bukele to return a man deported from America into his custody. And don’t expect Congress to do anything to control Trump.
These events are just another step in Trump’s disdain for the courts’ authority. Trump dreams of America being a nation like the one Bukele occupies, in which no court can hinder his will.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.
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