The Trump administration now claims Kilmar Abrego Garcia wasn’t deported by mistake, as the Justice Department said, but was “the right person sent to the right place.”
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El Salvador President Nayib Bukele told reporters during a meeting with President Donald Trump on Monday that he wouldn’t return a man the Justice Department said it had mistakenly deported to his country.
“How can I return him to the United States? Like if I smuggle him into the United States?” Bukele said, sitting beside Trump in the Oval Office, when he was asked whether he’d return Kilmar Abrego Garcia. “Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”
Asked whether he’d be released in his own country, he said, “We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists.”
Trump then turned to Bukele and said of the assembled reporters: “They’d love to have a criminal released into our country. These are sick people.”
Trump also said he wants Bukele to take in as many criminals “as possible.”
Abrego Garcia has never been charged criminally in the United States or El Salvador, according to court filings.
Justice Department officials have acknowledged that Abrego Garcia shouldn’t have been sent to El Salvador because of an immigration judge’s 2019 order barring him from being sent there, and the Supreme Court has called his removal illegal and directed the administration to “facilitate” his return while being respectful of the president’s authority.
In a court filing later Monday, the administration, which has maintained it doesn’t believe the United States has the authority to get Abrego Garcia back, cited Bukele’s comments at the White House.
“DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation,” Joseph Mazzara, acting general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in a sworn declaration.
In the Oval Office meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he didn’t understand “the confusion” over the Supreme Court’s order. He argued that “the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court, and no court in the United States has a right to conduct a foreign policy of the United States.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “If they want to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane. That’s up for El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us.”
Top White House adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News on Monday morning that Abrego Garcia was “sent to the right place.”
“He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,” Miller said, pushing back on the Justice Department’s repeated assertions in numerous court filings that Abrego Garcia was sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison last month because of “an administrative error.”
“This was the right person sent to the right place,” Miller said, despite the Supreme Court’s criticism of the removal in a ruling last week.
“The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal,” the high court found, noting that the Justice Department acknowledged the removal was the result of an “administrative error.”
Miller said that if Bukele were to return Abrego Garcia, “he would be deported the second time to El Salvador.”