Trump, Bukele dig in against efforts to return Maryland father to US from El Salvador

WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump escalated his standoff with the judiciary on Monday in a chummy Oval Office meeting with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, where both rebuffed a court order demanding the return of a Maryland father illegally deported to Bukele’s country.

“Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said of releasing Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s infamous terrorism confinement center and returning him to the U.S.  “The question is preposterous.”

Abrego Garcia was mistakenly sent to the megaprison in March. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to correct its error after the Supreme Court said the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

But the Trump administration said it had no duty to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. On Sunday, the Justice Department told a Maryland judge that the administration had to admit Abrego Garcia into the country if he was released from El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT.

“That’s not up to us,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said of whether El Salvador would return Abrego Garcia. Bondi was among the administration officials in the Oval with Trump and Bukele on Monday, as was senior adviser Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Bondi said if Bukele wanted to return Abrego Garcia, “We would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.”

The Trump administration hasn’t publicly asked Bukele to return Abrego Garcia. Katherine Hawkins, senior legal analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, said the lack of action itself defied the court’s order.

“You can imagine a situation where the U.S. was formally requesting his return in writing, and El Salvador was publicly saying no,” Hawkins said. “And in that case, it would create a tricky situation for the courts. But that’s not actually the situation we’re in. The administration is just sort of blowing off the court’s order.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to deliver daily updates about their efforts to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S., but the Justice Department resisted sharing details about his status.

By Saturday, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys asked Xinis to order the government to prove it shouldn’t be held in contempt. The Justice Department said the request was inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s instructions to respect the president’s authority to manage foreign policy.

Eventually, a State Department employee declared under penalty of perjury that Abrego Garcia was alive and secure in CECOT. The employee said Abrego Garcia was being detained under the sovereign domestic authority of El Salvador.

Contradicting legal filings from the Justice Department, Trump told reporters that if the Supreme Court said “bring somebody back, I would do that.” The remark suggested to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys that the administration has the authority to return Abrego Garcia and is choosing not to.

Under a deal with El Salvador’s president, the Trump administration is paying $6 million to hold U.S. deportees. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem toured the prison last month, calling CECOT one of the tools in the U.S. toolkit.

An immigration judge ruled that Abrego Garcia could not be sent back to El Salvador due to fear of persecution by gangs. The administration has repeatedly stated it deported Abrego due to administrative error.

On Monday, however, Miller told Fox News that Abrego Garcia “was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador."

“This was the right person sent to the right place,” Miller said, going on to disparage the Justice Department attorney who said an administrative error had occurred.

“A DOJ lawyer, who has since been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat, put into a filing incorrectly that this was a mistaken removal. It was not,” Miller said during an extended tirade.

The Trump administration maintains Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 — a point which Abrego Garcia’s attorneys strongly dispute.

The intense criticism over the government mistakenly sending a man to prison in another country hasn’t dampened Trump’s desire to utilize CECOT. Instead, Trump has repeatedly suggested expanding the program.

“Home-growns are next. The home-growns,” Trump told Bukele during their Oval Office meeting. “You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”

The administration’s resistance to return Abrego Garcia adds to Trump’s simmering confrontation with the judiciary. Xinis will hold a hearing on Tuesday to consider contempt charges.

Hawkins, however, said that any contempt finding would only formalize what has already been clear over the last few weeks.

“We’re already in a constitutional crisis,” Hawkins said. “They’ve disappeared people to El Salvador — the conditions of confinement such that it’s more likely than not they’re being tortured. They’re in violation of the Convention Against Torture. They’re in violation of the due process clause of the Constitution.”

A potential constitutional crisis has been framed as a confrontation, Hawkins said, but the Trump administration succeeded in violating the Constitution because no one had stopped it.

“What’s completely gone is any attempt by the executive branch to take care that the laws be basically executed, which is sort of one of the main duties of the executive and the Constitution,” Hawkins said. “So that’s that’s gone, and the question is, what other branches do about it?”

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