Sitting alongside President Donald Trump in the Oval office, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, told journalists that he would not return to a man that the Department of Justice said he deported by mistake to his country.
“How can I return it to the United States? As if introducing it to smuggling in the United States? Of course I am not going to do it. The question is absurd,” Bikele said when asked if he would return to Kilmar Abrego García. “We don’t like to release terrorists,” he added.
Trump then turned to Bukele and said that the reporters gathered: “They would love that a criminal will free our country. These are sick people.”
He also said he wants Bukele to enjoy as many criminals “as possible.”
Garcia has never been criminally accused in the United States or El Salvador, according to judicial documents.
Officials of the Department of Justice have recognized that Garcia should not have been sent to El Salvador due to the 2019 order of an immigration judge that prevents him from sending him there, and the Supreme Court has described his illegal removal and ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return to being respectful of the president’s authority.
At the Oval Office meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he did not understand “the confusion” about the order, arguing that “the United States foreign policy is held by the president of the United States, not by a court, and no court in the United States has the right to carry out a foreign policy of the United States.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said: “If you want to return it, we would facilitate it, which means providing a plane. That depends on El Salvador if you want to return it. That does not depend on us.”
The exchanges arrived shortly after the White House advisor, Stephen Miller, told Fox News that Garcia was “sent to the right place.”
“He was not sent by mistake to El Salvador,” Miller said, retreating the repeated statements of the Department of Justice in numerous judicial presentations that Garcia was sent to a notorious saving prison last month due to “an administrative error.”
“This was the right person sent to the right place,” said Miller, despite the criticisms of the Supreme Court to the elimination in a ruling last week.
“The United States recognizes that Abrego García was subject to a retention order that prohibits his removal from El Salvador, and that the removal of El Salvador was, therefore, illegal,” according to the Superior Court, and pointed out that the Department of Justice acknowledged that the elimination was the result of an “administrative error.”
He said that if Bukele returned to Garcia, “he would be deported for the second time to El Salvador.”
The Trump administration reached an agreement of $ 6 million with El Salvador to imprison the deportees who say they are members of the Venezuelan Train of Aragua gang and the members of the MS-13 street gang. The administration has labeled both gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.
An immigration judge in 2019 found that Garcia was affiliated with MS-13, an accusation he denies.
The federal judge who presided over the case in search of his return to the United States, Paula Xinis, said that Garcia has no criminal record in the United States or in El Salvador, and said that the office of gang membership came from “a unique singular accusation.”
“The ‘Evidence’ against Abrego García consisted of nothing more than his hat and hoodie of Chicago Bulls, and a vague and not corroborated accusation of a confidential informant claiming that he belonged to the ‘Western’ Camarilla of MS-13 in New York, a place he has never lived,” the judge found.
In his interview with Fox, Miller said that García’s membership in MS-13 meant that the order that caused him to be returned to El Salvador was void and without effect, a position that the government has not taken in court.
Xinis, in a ruling backed by the Supreme Court, ordered the Administration to “facilitate” the return of Garcia, which Miller said that it means that the United States would allow him to return to El Salvador decided to send him back.
He also said that the recognition of the Government who made an error came from “a lawyer from the Department of Justice who has since been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat”, but the lawyer he referred to was not the only one to make that representation. The United States Attorney D. John Sauer referred to elimination as an “administrative error” in a presentation before the Supreme Court last week.
