President Donald Trump said on Saturday that it was not his decision to bring Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, back to the United States to face federal positions, saying that the “Department of Justice decided to do it that way, and that’s fine.”
“That was not my decision,” Trump said about Abrego García’s return in a phone call with NBC News on Saturday.
“It should be a very easy case” for federal prosecutors, the president added.
Trump added that he did not talk to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele about the return of Abrego García, despite the fact that the two men talked about Abrego García during an April meeting at the Oval office.
His comments arrived after Abrego García returned to the United States on Friday and was accused of an accusation claiming that he transported people who were not legally in the country.
The accusation came in the middle of a long legal battle on whether to bring it from El Salvador that intensified to the Supreme Court.
Abrego García’s family and lawyers have called him a family man, while Trump and his administration have alleged that he is a member of the MS-13 gang.
The case attracted national attention amid the broader impulse of the Trump administration for mass deportations.
After the deportation of Abrego García, the Trump administration lawyers said he was deported in an “administrative error”, since Abrego García had prior legal protection against deportation to El Salvador.
Even so, the Trump administration did not try to bring Abrego García back, even when the Supreme Court ruled that it had to “facilitate” its return to the United States.
The Democrats, including Senator Chris van Hollen, D-Md., For weeks they said that Abrego García was denied due process when he was arrested and deported, arguing that he should be allowed to defend himself from deportation before being sent to El Salvador.
Trump called Van Hollen on Saturday, who went to visit Abrego García in jail in El Salvador in April, a “loser” for defending the right of man to due process.
“It is a loser. The guy is a loser. They will lose for that. That is not what people want to hear,” said the president about Van Hollen. “He is trying to defend a man who has a horrible record of abuse, abuse of women in particular. No, it is a total loser, this guy.”
On Friday, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that Abrego García “was a smuggler of humans, children and women. He made more than 100 trips, the Grand Jury found, smuggling people throughout our country.”
In a statement on Friday, Abrego García’s lawyer described the move of Bondi “an abuse of power, not justice.”
