El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said Monday it's "preposterous" to suggest he return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly deported there last month.
Bukele called Abrego Garcia “a terrorist” and insisted he had no power to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
Trump referred questions about Garcia to Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said he was illegally in the US and that courts have ruled that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13.
“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Bondi said.
She called the issue “international matters” and “foreign affairs” and said the US would facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return of El Salvador wanted to send him back by providing an airplane.
Trump administration officials emphasized that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to a notorious gang prison in El Salvador, was a citizen of that country and that US has no say in his future. And Bukele, who has been a vital partner for the Trump administration in its deportation efforts, said “of course I'm not going to” release him back to US soil.
“The question is preposterous,” Bukele said. “I don't have the power to return him to the United States.”
Should El Salvador want to return Abrego Garcia, the US would “facilitate it, meaning provide a plane,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said.
But she added: “He was illegally in our country."
The meeting came as El Salvador has been a critical linchpin of the US administration’s mass deportation operation.
Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the US more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants — whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes — and placed them inside the country's notorious maximum-security gang prison just outside of the capital, San Salvador.
That has made Bukele, who remains extremely popular in El Salvador due in part to the crackdown on the country’s powerful street gangs, a vital ally for the Trump administration, which has offered little evidence for its claims that the Venezuelan immigrants were in fact gang members, nor has it released names of those deported.
(Associated Press)
