El Salvador President Bukele says he won’t be releasing man who was wrongly deported back to US

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump ‘s top advisers and Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, said Monday that they had no basis for the small Central American nation to return a Maryland man who was wrongly deported there last month.

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.

It is also holding Abrego Garcia, who has not been returned to the US, despite court orders to do so.

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.

Asked whether he has any concerns about the prison there where deportees are being held, Trump told reporters early Sunday that Bukele was doing a “fantastic job.”

“He’s taking care of a lot of problems that we have that we really wouldn’t be able to take care of from cost standpoint,” Trump said. “And he’s doing really, he’s been amazing. We have some very bad people in that prison. People that should have never been allowed into our country.”

Since Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit in February, Bukele — whose government has arrested more than 84,000 people as part of his three-year crackdown on gangs — has made it clear he’s ready to help the Trump administration with its deportation ambitions.

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