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On Monday, a month after the US government shipped more than 230 Venezuelans and other migrants to a megaprison in El Salvador with seemingly no chance of return, President Donald Trump extended the red carpet to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
It was a brazen show of solidarity between the two leaders. The White House meeting with Bukele happened as the Trump administration continues to stonewall court orders to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran-born Maryland father wrongfully sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in mid-March.
During the friendly meeting celebrating the partnership, Bukele said he didn’t have the power to “smuggle” what he called a “terrorist” into the United States. “Of course, I’m not going to do it,” he told the press from the Oval Office. “The question is preposterous.” The Salvadoran president also indicated that he wouldn’t release Abrego Garcia from CECOT, saying, “We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”
Those statements from the very men in a position to do something add to an already terrifying reality for Abrego Garcia and his family. Bukele is falsely stating that he cannot return Abrego Garcia to the United States. The Trump administration is falsely claiming that it cannot force Bukele’s hand to release Abrego Garcia. The end result is that a man sent to one of the world’s worst prisons by mistake, along with hundreds of Venezuelans also stuck there, have no clear path to getting out.
The Trump administration has loudly claimed that the men sent to El Salvador are terrorists and criminals. But it has refused to provide evidence to support the summary deportations of the migrants it accuses of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. As we previously reported, many of the Venezuelans now being held incommunicado in El Salvador have no proven ties to the gang or criminal records in the United States or Venezuela. In many cases, their families suspect they were targeted because of their tattoos—including one of an autism awareness ribbon.
When Mother Jones sought comment from the Department of Homeland Security, a senior official said that it stood by “law enforcement’s intelligence” and that sharing evidence of the men’s ties to Tren de Aragua “would be insane.”
Monday’s meeting also marks a shift in tone from Trump, who just last year had far less amicable words for El Salvador and its leader. At the Republican National Convention, the then-presidential candidate bashed Bukele, accusing him of sending “his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails” to the United States. Now, the two strongmen are shaking hands over the unjustified, indefinite imprisonment of people convicted of nothing.
When asked how many more people he was willing to send to El Salvador, Trump responded “as many as possible.” Trump said, once again, that he would like to imprison US citizens abroad if it is deemed permissible under US law. And he mentioned that he’d asked Bukele whether El Salvador could build additional prison capacity, presumably to hold more people sent from the United States.
“We have bad ones, too. I’m all for it,” Trump said of US citizens after describing violent crimes. “Because we can do things with the [Salvadoran] president for less money and have great security.” As part of an agreement with El Salvador, the US government is disbursing $6 million to hold the Venezuelans now at CECOT for at least a year.
Kerri Talbot, co-executive director of the Immigration Hub, said in a statement: “Trump’s proposal to deport and jail American citizens in a foreign gulag and his open defiance of a Supreme Court ruling lay bare the authoritarian ideology that underpins his alliance with Bukele.”
Before being sent to El Salvador in what the administration concedes was an “administrative error,” Abrego Garcia had been granted protection from deportation to El Salvador by an immigration judge who determined that he was more likely than not to face persecution there. Abrego Garcia has no criminal record in the United States. He and his wife, who is a US citizen, were raising three children, including a 5-year-old who has autism.
Last week, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that required the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody and to “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The justices added that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
District Court Judge Paula Xinis, who initially ordered Abrego Garcia be brought back, then required the Trump administration to provide information about where Abrego Garcia is now and what they are doing to comply with the Supreme Court decision. The administration responded by defying Xinis. It confirmed that Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in El Salvador but provided no information about what it was doing to bring him back.
That led to Xinis ruling on Friday that the administration had violated a court order. She is now requiring the government to report on a daily basis about what it is doing to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. The administration has mostly defied that order, too. The updates provided to the court on Saturday and Sunday are largely nonresponsive.
The government has chosen to interpret “facilitate” as narrowly as possible to mean the removal of “domestic” obstacles that would prevent Abrego Garcia’s return. It is using that to effectively argue that it cannot be forced by Xinis to do anything to bring Abrego Garcia back. The administration has tried to justify that by seizing on a part of the ruling that directs the district court to show “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
In a Monday appearance on Fox News, Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, doubled down on the federal government’s defiance of the court orders and rhetorical gymnastics to deflect any responsibility for rectifying its mistake. The anti-immigrant hardliner claimed bringing back Abrego Garcia to the United States would require the US government to “kidnap a Salvadoran citizen against the will of his government and fly him back to America, which would be an unimaginable act and an invasion of El Salvador’s sovereignty.” He went on to say Abrego Garcia “was the right person sent to the right place.”
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