What happened
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said Monday he would not send back Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran man unlawfully deported by the Trump administration. President Donald Trump, sitting beside Bukele in the Oval Office, made clear he would not push him to do so, despite a unanimous Supreme Court ordering the Trump administration to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return to the U.S.
Who said what
“Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele told reporters who asked if he would return the wrongly deported father of three. “The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” Ábrego García’s fate is “not up to us,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in Monday’s Oval Office event. If El Salvador “wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.” The Trump administration is paying Bukele at least $6 million to jail deportees in his notorious gang prison.
Trump’s “‘nothing I can do here’ stance is unusual for a president who prides himself on strong-arming other world leaders to do his bidding,” Politico said, but Bukele’s refusal to release Ábrego García “gives Trump cover” to dance around the court directives.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to spell out the remedy to Ábrego García’s erroneous deportation gave Trump a “millimeter-wide opening” and he has “driven a Mack truck through it,” Georgetown Law professor Stephen Vladeck told The New York Times. And that leaves us with a “rule-of-law crisis” where “the government can disappear people to a foreign country with no due process and no responsibility for what happens next,” and “if the government can do it to Ábrego García, they can do it to anybody.”
What next?
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis is holding a hearing Tuesday where she will consider a request by Ábrego García’s lawyers to “compel the government to explain why it should not be held in contempt,” The Associated Press said.