In an Oval Office meeting with President Trump on Monday, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said that he would not return a Maryland man who was wrongly deported from the United States and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
“Of course I’m not going to do it,” Mr. Bukele said when reporters asked if he was willing to help return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whose case is at the heart of a legal battle that has gone to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Bukele said returning Mr. Abrego Garcia would be akin to smuggling “a terrorist into the United States.” As the Salvadoran president talked, Mr. Trump smiled in approval, surrounded by cabinet members who spoke in support of the president on cue.
The Trump administration has said in court that the deportation of Mr. Abrego Garcia was an “administrative error.” In 2019, an immigration judge had barred the United States from deporting him, saying he might face violence or torture if sent to El Salvador. He came to the United States illegally in 2011.
The Supreme Court last week ordered the administration to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return. But in a legal filing on Sunday, the Justice Department argued that the courts lacked the ability to dictate steps the White House should take to return Mr. Abrego Garcia, because only the president had the power to handle U.S. foreign policy.
The meeting in the Oval Office on Monday was a blunt example of Mr. Trump’s defiance of the courts. The president and his top White House officials said the decision over Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, would have to be made by Mr. Bukele.
The Trump administration has justified its use of a wartime authority to deport migrants to El Salvador by alleging that they are members of violent gangs like MS-13, which originated in the United States and operates in South America, and the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua.
While some of the deportees had criminal convictions, court papers have shown that the evidence the government has relied on to label some of them gang members was often little more than whether they had tattoos or had worn clothing associated with a criminal organization.
The Trump administration doubled down on its incarceration agreement with Mr. Bukele on Sunday when it announced that it had sent 10 more people alleged to be members of the two gangs to El Salvador over the weekend.
In announcing those deportations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the alliance between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele had “become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.”
Mr. Bukele has also found an opening on the global stage in opening the doors of his prison system to Mr. Trump.
While the Biden administration accused Mr. Bukele and the Salvadoran government of secretly negotiating a pact with certain gang leaders, the Trump administration has fully embraced his tough-on-crime persona.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele have paired their aggressive enforcement tactics with a highly sensationalized public relations campaign on social media. Both leaders have faced accusations of undermining democratic institutions.
After a surge of gang violence in El Salvador, Mr. Bukele imposed a state of emergency that has yet to be lifted, in addition to directing the police and military forces to carry out mass arrests. Many of the 85,000 Salvadorans who were arrested disappeared into the prison system without trial and without their families knowing whether they were alive.
“Human rights, democratic norms and the rule of law have all but disappeared in El Salvador,” said Amanda Strayer, the senior counsel for accountability at the advocacy group Human Rights First. “The United States should be holding Bukele’s government accountable for these serious violations, but instead the Trump administration is cozying up to and copying Bukele’s authoritarian playbook — rounding up people with no evidence, denying them any due process and disappearing them in abusive Salvadoran prisons indefinitely.”
Still, Mr. Bukele’s popularity has soared, and he was re-elected in a landslide last year. The Trump administration just last week changed a travel advisory for El Salvador, grouping it with some of the least dangerous countries for Americans to visit.
Mr. Bukele described the decision on social media as akin to receiving a “gold star.”
