Bukele Says Deported Maryland Man Won’t Be Returned to US (2)

El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said a Maryland man deported to the Central American country by President Donald Trump’s administration would not be returned, even as the Supreme Court has called for the US to facilitate his release.

Asked whether he would secure the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Bukele on Monday said he didn’t “have the power to return him to the United States.”

“How can I smuggle? How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States? I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said during a White House meeting with Trump.

The stand-off is certain to heighten tensions between Trump and the federal judiciary over the case of Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in a legal fight that has attracted national attention.

Trump has asserted US courts don’t have any authority over foreign policy. When asked about the Supreme Court ruling on Monday he deferred to officials at the meeting, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who suggested that Abrego Garcia’s fate was up to El Salvador and no longer an issue for the administration.

“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him, that’s not up to us,” Bondi said. “If, as El Salvador, wants to return him — this is international matters, foreign affairs — if they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.”

Miller called it “very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point.”

Bukele has been aiding Trump’s efforts to ramp up deportations of migrants by taking in alleged gang members and housing them in a mega-jail where human-rights advocates say guards brutalize inmates. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant, was lawfully living in Maryland before he was sent last month with 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.

Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump

Photographer: Ken Cedeno/UPI/Bloomberg

Read more: US Disputes Basis for Returning Man Wrongly Sent to El Salvador

An immigration judge had ruled in 2019 that Abrego Garcia couldn’t be sent to his native El Salvador because he faced gang-based extortion. The Trump administration conceded the 2019 ruling meant he was wrongly deported through an “administrative error.”

The US Supreme Court ruled April 10 that the Trump administration must take steps to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the US, setting a limit on the president’s deportation powers as he pushes for sweeping authority with minimal judicial review.

While Trump has defended the deportations to the Salvadoran prison, he said after the high court ruled that “if the Supreme Court said ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that.”

But in a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump suggested the fate of detainees is up to Bukele. The two countries are “working closely together to eradicate terrorist organizations,” Trump wrote.

In a court filing Sunday, the Justice Department said District Judge Paula Xinis has little power to seek Abrego Garcia’s return.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant, was lawfully living in Maryland before he was sent last month with 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.

Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” according to the filing. “A federal court cannot compel the executive branch to engage in any mandated act of diplomacy or incursion upon the sovereignty of another nation.”

Trump officials have said that Abrego Garcia, 29, is a member of the MS-13 criminal gang, which his lawyers and Xinis rejected.

Bukele on Monday said he was “not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country,” touting his hardline policing and mass incarceration policies as making his country safer.

“We just turned the murder capital of the world to the safest country in the western hemisphere and you want us to go back into releasing criminals?,” Bukele said.

Trump said he had asked Bukele if El Salvador could build more prisons and added that his administration was looking into deporting US citizens who are criminals.

“If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem,” Trump said. “We’re studying the laws.”

“We have bad ones too, and I’m all for it, because we can do things with the president for less money and have great security,” he added, referring to the El Salvadoran leader.

(Updates with additional remarks from meeting, background throughout)

To contact the reporters on this story:
David Voreacos in New York at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net;
Catherine Lucey in Washington at clucey8@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Jordan Fabian at jfabian6@bloomberg.net

Meghashyam Mali, Laura Davison

© 2025 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Used with permission.